C 2005) Sociological Forum, Vol. 20, No. 1, March 2005 ( DOI: 10.1007/s11206-005-1901-8
Review Essay
Insight Lost Lee Clarke1
Insight and Social Betterment: A Preface to Applied Social Science. James B. Rule. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Books do not become hits just because of their content. If they did, there would be no lousy “classics,” and good books would not gather dust on shelves. A best-seller has to find its audience, and that depends on things that are independent of content. If you Google James Rule’s Insight and Social Betterment, only a few hits come up, none with substantive discussions. There are no Amazon reviews. If you Google The Sociological Imagination, the list goes on and on and not just for sales on Amazon but real, substantive argument. Yet Insight and Social Betterment is in the same genre as The Sociological Imagination, is just as well written as The Sociological Imagination (in some ways Mills’ pomposity often interfered with clarity), is more closely reasoned, and is just as passionate. Like The Sociological Imagination, its central messages are built around critiques of central intellectual tendencies in social theory and their political implications. Insight and Social Betterment even has some punchy criticisms of the pretensions of Famous Authors. The chapters are freestanding in the sense that each could be profitably read as a separate paper. So, too, with The Sociological Imagination. I do not know why Insight and Social Betterment did not find a larger audience. It should have. It was published in 1978, past the time, perhaps, when the modal sociologist was politically engaged with much passion. Maybe the subtitle threw people off—“A Preface to Applied Social Science”—lending the false impression that the book is a narrow treatise on how to fix things. For graduate students and a lot of professors who are politically, practically, engaged, Insight and Social Betterment throws into sharp relief the 1 Department
of Sociology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903; e-mail:
[email protected]. 167 C 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 0884-8971/05/0300-0167/0
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key intellectual dilemmas posed by such engagement. It is also a book for everyone who thinks they are not politically engaged, because such denial simply means the dilemmas are not confronted. Rule’s central theme, which the title reflects, is about the utility of knowledge. “Does better understanding of social conditions,” he wonders, “lead to their improvement?” There is no more searching question about the value of our craft. Rule does not simply mean something like “Can we fix poverty if we know what causes it?” although he does critically examine such questions. He means something bigger, for his effort goes to the very idea of the value of knowledge. There is value in knowledge, of course, but it is not absolute. Celebration of it is appropriate, but not exaltation. Rule tells us to be more humble about that value, and to confront the obdurate realities of power and inequality. Failure to do so leads to bad social science and unwise policy recommendations. A forceful, and sociological, message of Insight and Social Betterment, if only it would be heard, is about prominent ideas that are insufficiently scrutinized. Some examples follow, not all of which he mentions: “international community,” “the public interest,” “the department,” and “social problem.” Such notions blur conflicts of interest, hide power, and justify unfairness. When powerful professors gratuitously attack those with whom they have basic disagreements, they do so in the name of “the department” and insofar as such rhetoric finds an audience, it masks power-plays, personalistic devotions, and dubious motives. Similarly, there is no such thing as “public interest,” as if poverty, corruption, and disease damaged the whole of society. Such things exist, Rule says, because they benefit some at the expense of others. Social problems are also solutions. This is a basic lesson for sociologists, and it takes a sociological imagination to have the insight to begin with. The main consequence of not remembering it is that social scientists end up presuming that their own values are ones that everyone, properly enlightened, would share. Rule’s procedure, for most of the book, is to analyze critically some major scholars and schools of thought of the day: Popper, Myrdal, Critical Theory, Banfield, Moore, Merton, and the like. The specific treatments of those theorists and theories are important, but mainly for exegetical reasons, so I will not go into them. (But behold the lovely judgment, on page 125, that Habermas’s “writing gives one the feeling of flying at very high elevations over a fog-bound landscape.”) He examines the scholarship’s political implications, and he examines the sociological presumptions behind the theories. Rule thereby creates his own sociology of social theory, and that is the contribution I most like. Insight and Social Betterment is a collection of essays with some common themes. If the book has a heart, it is in a chapter called “Models of
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Relevance.” Such models are “notions of how social inquiry can and should redound to some benefit” (p. 27). He says they are potential “sociological models in their own right,” which is confusing to me, and that they are (or were) “extremely influential . . . in shaping sociological work” (pp. 27–28). Perhaps this is true, although I think it is just as likely that a lot of professional sociologists just learn some methods, theories, and topics that they like and continue working in the traditions that they know without ever explicitly considering a model of relevance. Like nonprofessionals, we just try to get through the day. Rule analyzes how a handful of models of relevance conceive the relationships between knowledge and consumers of knowledge. He relentlessly holds models of relevance up against a standard of being explicit about the relationship between one’s work and prerogative and privilege. Unless a conception of how society works explicitly incorporates prerogatives and privileges, an analyst’s model of relevance will fail to point out how those who would oppose social change could be made to behave differently. If you leave that out of your theory, you have a bad theory. If you put it in, then you are adopting an explicitly political position. Some authors do that, self-consciously, but then it becomes hard to say why their vision should prevail over others. Insight and Social Betterment does not decisively sort all of this out, but it does pose the important issues. At the least, Rule’s conceptualization frames for us ways to clarify connections between intellectual choices and political values. Rule does not like lofty talk of a single, rational way forward. That vision of the relation of knowledge to betterment is that if we can know and prove exploitation, or pollution, or some other putatively undesirable condition, then the path to follow becomes clear. That notion has no more content than “false consciousness,” “emancipatory interest,” “function,” or “social cognition.” One response to these ambiguities is to throw up your hands altogether, proclaiming to love only the interesting thing while condemning all else as ideology, but that merely obscures the ideological commitments of that position. The problem with all of that, Rule argues, is that it ignores power, conflicts of interest, and variable definitions of interest. The great conundrum is that to effect a “‘more satisfactory’ social situation,” we either have to ignore “the interests of some participants or [encourage] some or all to redefine their interests” (p. 184). Those things can not be done neutrally. What Rule would really like to find is “an intellectual viewpoint that transcends the status of the thinker’s own partisan values and predilections” (p. 153). He finds one, but it is small, consisting chiefly in the clarification of positions: the Weberian solution to the problem of political commitment in scholarship, but no less wise for Weber having said it. We cannot tell people
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what their interests are, but we can “suggest how people might come to prefer an interest” (p. 186). We can not pronounce the one, rational solution to some problem, but we can proffer a “concrete scenario as to how the newly defined interest will be pursued in specific social arrangements” (p. 186). There is no overriding solution to the problems Rule identifies. His counsel is one of humility. Insight and Social Betterment is erudite and carefully reasoned and as such stands as a fine example of the sociological approach to social scientific knowledge. It is, furthermore, most likely right. Too bad it was not a hit.
