The New Sociology

THE public image of the sociologist --if there is a public image--is that of a fusty pedant who writes books that nobody understands. He is esoteric, obfuscatory, exclusive and elusive. The stereotype is not too far from reality. There are such men, and they preside jealously over an academic fiefdom whose efforts to be recognized as a science are barely a century old.

But the image is no longer adequate. Sociology is changing, perhaps more rapidly than any other discipline. The field is generating a highly visible, adventurous and activist new type of scholar who respects no scientific boundaries, least of all his own, and who rejects the traditionalist's antiseptic analyses of how society works in favor of passionate prescriptions for its betterment.

Premeditated Effort. No one more vividly personifies the new practitioner than Irving Louis Horowitz, 40, a shaggy, disarmingly unprofessorial professor who lectures without a tie, lambastes most of his colleagues, and delivers endless sotto voce manifestos. "I'm making a conscious, premeditated effort to radicalize sociology," says Horowitz. In pursuit of this goal, he passed up more lucrative offers last summer to accept the chairmanship of the sociology department of the Livingston campus of New Jersey's Rutgers University.

The youngest of Rutgers' four colleges, Livingston is itself a living experiment in the new sociology. Housed since last fall in what was once a U.S. Army barracks at deactivated Camp Kilmer (named for the arboreal poet), it attracts the young from the very constituency that Horowitz has staked out as his own: "The poor and the blacks, society's deviants of all kinds." More than half of Livingston's 750 students are black or Puerto Rican, and nearly all of them are poor. Horowitz can rap with them--and they with him. As one of his Negro students said recently: "Irv is the blackest of any white man around here."

In company with most of the new sociologists, Horowitz is bent on redefining the traditionally accepted symptoms of social deviance: divorce, homosexuality, crime and revolution. In a white-dominated society, for that matter, a man can be labeled deviant just because he is black. "But how do we know what is and is not deviant?" asks Horowitz. "When 41% of all marriages end in divorce, for example, must we still regard divorce as a social problem?" Instead of asking the question, "What went wrong with the marriage?" he suggests, the sociologist should ask: "What's wrong with the institution?"

Not Stasis but Change. This approach owes much to the late C. Wright Mills, the contentious Columbia University sociologist who died at 46 in 1962. Mills hurled his books like Molotov cocktails at the sociological myths of the time: that order prevailed, that the national institutions evolved by civilized societies remain forever faithful to their designers. An impetuous and often outrageous writer, Mills dismissed the classic image of American democracy as a "fairy tale."

Horowitz has become executor of Mills' literary estate and the most fervent advocate of Mills' central thesis: that human society is characterized not by stasis but by radical change. Born and raised in Harlem, the son of an illiterate immigrant Russian-Jewish locksmith, Horowitz rubbed elbows with his constituency before he recognized it. In sociological field trips to South America, where social fissures are far more visible than in the U.S., he developed the humanist approach that places responsibility to mankind before the obligations of science. He helped found and still edits Transaction, an excellent magazine and one so remote in spirit from the old sociology that only 10% of its 70,000 circulation goes to social scientists.

The World as Laboratory. One trouble with the traditional discipline was that it was--and in many respects still is --a private club with rigid rules. These have been summarized by Bennett M. Berger, a sociologist at the University of California at Davis. As he sees it, the traditionalists demand "ethical detachment as the appropriate posture of the sociologist toward his work, the selection of research problems not primarily for their importance but for their scientific manageability, and the maintenance of a strict separation between the sociologist's responsibilities as a scientist and his moral and political responsibilities as a citizen."

Horowitz and the new sociologists, in contrast, regard the world as their laboratory, not the laboratory as their world. They show little respect for either the old rules or the interdisciplinary fences that once divided the life sciences. By their definition, a sociologist is anyone who studies man. When Psychologist Hans Toch of the State University of New York at Albany wanted to study prisons as breeding places for violence, he recruited as his research assistants six inmates of California's San Quentin prison with a total of 83 years behind bars. To these investigators, other convicts opened up with a candor that the old methods could never have prompted. In New York City, Richard A. Cloward of Columbia University's School of Social Work has been dramatically successful in organizing one of the most unorganizable of all social subcultures, the welfare recipients.

Another of the new activists, David Gottlieb of Michigan State, played an influential role in the formation of the Job Corps. When, earlier this month, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence proposed an annual report on the social state of the nation, the commission was only endorsing a suggestion that has been repeatedly urged by such men as Horowitz and Herbert J. Gans, professor of sociology and planning at M.I.T., who was also one of the first to blow the whistle on the bulldozing school of urban redevelopment. In Boston, Gans has played a sociological role by calling attention to the demolition of old but otherwise structurally sound tenements by landlords who no longer found them profitable. Cans' critique spread to other cities and helped rescue from condemnation many a building whose destruction might have served everyone's purpose but the tenants'.

The new men are less concerned with what is right in the world than with what is wrong. Since they are not afraid to be wrong themselves, they have naturally attracted criticism. "What we've really learned," Horowitz told TIME'S Steve Englund, "is that the doctors are as sick as the society." With considerable validity, the traditionalists have faulted the innovating physicians for romanticism and for shoddiness of method --for the ease with which they advance outrageous and sometimes unsupportable hypotheses. Princeton University's Marion J. Levy Jr. typically accuses Horowitz of "making a virtue of thinking with his heart, not with his head." Of his own approach, Levy says: "I do not regard myself as being concerned with helping my fellow man."

Partly as a result of Horowitz and his colleagues, who are indeed concerned with helping their fellow men, many colleges and universities are enjoying a boom in sociology. Enrollment of sociology students at Princeton is up 200% (to 1,500 students) in four years. At San Jose State College, it has risen 350% in three years. What is sociology's new appeal?

In an age of mass democracy and vast, impersonal institutions, it promises the individual a way to regain self-determination. "History," says University of Michigan's Anatol Rapoport, "is determined by forces over which man has no control, so long as he is unaware of those forces. When he becomes aware of them, he can determine his future history. This is also similar to the Freudian view: man is a slave to his compulsions when their roots are repressed; exposing the roots makes man free."

Whether the new approach will make man free any more than Freudian analysis did remains to be seen. In the meantime, it is certainly and excitingly freeing sociology.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.