{"id":146718,"date":"2023-01-04T20:22:40","date_gmt":"2023-01-05T04:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=146718"},"modified":"2023-01-04T20:34:36","modified_gmt":"2023-01-05T04:34:36","slug":"a-hazard-called-sociology-review-of-stephen-turners-mad-hazard-a-life-in-social-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=146718","title":{"rendered":"A Hazard Called Sociology: Review of Stephen Turner\u2019s Mad Hazard: A Life in Social Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"

Raphael Sassower writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* Years ago, I traveled on a sabbatical to South America and returned with what I thought was a derivative of my companion book on the trip, Jacques Derrida\u2019s The Post Card (1987), thinking my thoughts and feelings deserved to be published. After a couple of rejections, a kind editor wrote back to say that if I were famous enough, they\u2019d consider it \u2026 Steve Turner is, and that\u2019s how we have his autobiography\/memoir at the end of his long career, suffering, as he is, from stage four breast cancer.<\/p>\n

* Among the issues that have consumed Turner\u2019s professional career has been the statistical turn in sociology, which, according to him, exemplifies \u201cphysics envy\u201d as a way to claim \u201crigor\u201d in the training of graduate students and the presentation of data for public policy. As he says: \u201cThe elite professors warned, correctly, that it was impossible to get into the top journals, and therefore to get and keep a good job, without high-level statistical analysis, which at the time meant path analysis and structural equation models\u201d (59).<\/p>\n

* \u201cThe first illusion was that sociology was an important discipline, that the internal issues and conflicts within sociology were worth fighting over, and that one could actually influence the discipline from below, the position I was in\u201d (64). The big gun he brings to the fight, the \u201cleverage on sociology,\u201d is the philosophy of science, because sociologists, \u201cespecially those in power, pretended to believe that sociology was a science, and this pretense left them open to arguments about the nature of science, or so I thought. That made the positivism dispute important [as] another huge illusion\u201d (64-65). Moving away from the technical debates in sociology to the theoretical margins and challenging the scientific status not only of this or that hypothesis and its testing apparatus but entire theoretical frameworks required familiarity with and convincing expertise in the philosophy of science writ large.<\/p>\n

The illusion about science (or physics) envy or the pretense that sociology is a bona fide science is accompanied by another illusion, namely, \u201cthat theory did matter.\u201d Oddly, the main culprit here is Thomas Kuhn\u2019s classic: \u201csociology may not have had any real \u2018theories\u2019 in the sense of physics, but it certainly had \u2018paradigms,\u2019 and that was [for them] the mark of science\u201d (65-66). Paradigms displace statistics as the markers of scientific legitimacy and all the privileges associated with them, from logical rigor and empirical testing to professional credibility and funding opportunities. Weaponizing the \u201cPopperian model\u201d which \u201crequired respect,\u201d was the \u201cleverage\u201d Turner was looking for in establishing the fact that \u201cthe scientization model implied that most of the discipline was undeserving of respect\u201d (70).<\/p>\n

* “[Y]ou can\u2019t invoke logic to people who don\u2019t understand logic. But people who understood logic wouldn\u2019t have said the things one is trying to correct. So there is never an occasion in which it is possible to correct someone by appeal to logic. This was to prove to be the Achilles\u2019 heel of all of my subsequent attempts to write on these topics, and there were many (77).”<\/p>\n

* Turner\u2019s \u201cpivot\u201d from the liberal left to the \u201cOakeshottian\u201d right was not exclusively attributable to his upbringing or his affinity with Popperians, even though one reads Turner\u2019s explicit homage to Popper, \u201cwith whom I felt a strong affinity\u201d (168), calling himself \u201ca good Popperian\u201d (181). The book repeats an anti-elitist instinct at work, perhaps the kind we commonly observe in populist leaders. Whether the disdain for elites has to do with his professional trajectory or his difficulties with his university administrators is beside the point. Being a sociologist first and foremost and a philosophically minded critic, he gives the following explanation:<\/p>\n

“My instinct was to find ways to constrain elite power, but to grant that the rule of the few was a given in politics and organizational life. The perennial political problem was to control the few. \u2018Progressivism,\u2019 as I had experienced it, was a moralistic mask for this power, not a corrective. Indeed, the very means by which progress was supposed to be achieved concentrated this power and made it more remote.” <\/p>\n

* Struggling with coming up with a \u201cbig theory,\u201d Turner says, he did have an \u201cAha moment,\u201d one that \u201cwas as close to general theory as [he] got. He \u201cpointed out that trust came from a kind of inference from the parts of the persona of the expert that people could trust to the parts that they could not understand\u201d (124). <\/p>\n

* he liked \u201cto understand thinkers in terms of the problems they understood themselves to be solving, and this required understanding who they were responding to and why. <\/p>\n

* “it was not the cognitive conditions of action and thought that produced the uniformity, but the uniformities of action and such things as training or actions in common that produced the uniformities (147-148).”<\/p>\n

* “One was better off dealing with the dead. Secondary literature and understandings of the past changed, but the players didn\u2019t change their minds…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Raphael Sassower writes: * Years ago, I traveled on a sabbatical to South America and returned with what I thought was a derivative of my companion book on the trip, Jacques Derrida\u2019s The Post Card (1987), thinking my thoughts and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42905],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stephen-turner"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=146718"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":146727,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146718\/revisions\/146727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}