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From International Socialism, No.67, March 1974, p.31.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today
Alvin Gouldner
Allen Lane, £5.
THE ESSAYS collected in this book are by the most prominent radical among contemporary academic sociologists, the author of a much-heralded volume foretelling a major crisis in Western sociology. Twenty years ago, Gouldner was attempting a sophisticated and in some ways critical revision of the dominant American sociological ‘theory’ (read ‘ideology’), known as ‘functionalism’; today he writes as a general cultural critic, and dabbles in the philosophical debates between different brands of Marxists.
Both these phases of Gouldner’s work are represented in this volume, and students of academic sociology will no doubt find in his criticisms of more conservative schools of sociology, as they found in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, some useful points. But Gouldner’s basic commitment is still, as the pretentious title of this book bears witness, to an academic discipline whose intellectual content is unsound and whose claims to act as a guide to real change are therefore fraudulent.
I put forward the full case for this view in an article entitled The Coming Crisis of Radical Sociology in New Left Review 70, which Gouldner is kind enough to call ‘by far the most intellectually rigorous critique from the left’. But despite, or perhaps because, of this compliment, Gouldner’s reply to my critique – in striking contrast to his closely argued and well-documented reply to conservative critics – is of an extremely emotional and rhetorical nature and fails to answer the specific criticisms of his work which I made from a Marxist standpoint.
In fact the most basic point – that academic sociology is incapable, because of its historical role within bourgeois ideology, of providing an analysis of modern capitalism -is allowed to stand by default. Gouldner does not seem to think it matters that what he considers to be the ‘rational core’ of sociology, its concept of society as being maintained harmoniously rather than by exploitation or force, is ‘conservative’ or ‘irrelevant’ in the context of Western capitalism. His new, ‘socialist’ defence of sociology is that this view ‘suggests theoretical guidelines for the creation ... of a free community of men under socialism’ and is highly relevant to the situation of the bureaucratic (but presumably ‘socialist’) countries of Eastern Europe.
This ‘key’ argument, only trundled out when faced with a socialist critic, is of course entirely specious. Those suffering and fighting under the bureaucracies of the East do not need a turgid utopian pipedream from the mind of a Western sociologist, but a theory which produces an analysis of the economy, class relations, state and ideology of their countries and shows how the workers can change them. It is no accident that socialists like Kuron and Modzelewski in Poland derive their revolutionary programme for a state of workers’ councils from a Marxist analysis – not from a futuristic reading of academic sociology.
Gouldner talks about a ‘critique of Marxism’ which he seems to think can be based on sociological theories of bureaucracy. In fact sociology does not have a ‘critique’ of bureaucracy (a theory of bureaucracy linked to the historical possibility of overcoming it, as in Marxism). Sociologists have generally presented bureaucracy as increasingly inevitable in modern society. The ‘critique of Marxism’ thus amounts to saying that bureaucracy is the unavoidable fate of attempts to create a new society by revolutionary means, or by means of a party, etc.
Gouldner’s special twist to this tale is to see Stalinism as the outcome of Leninist organisational theory, and to link this with the sociologist Max Weber’s belief that German social democracy would lead to bureaucratic rule, by referring to Lenin’s initial use of the organisational ideas of the German social democrats. This loosely presented argument is completely ahistorical (Lenin’s attitude to organisation was vastly different from Kautsky’s however much he may have quoted him in 1903) – but that is the besetting sin of all sociological ‘theory’.
Gouldner justifies academic sociology by its links with liberal reform movements, when he is not pressing its contribution to socialism. And he adopts a voyeur’s attitude to Marxism, except when it impinges on his own role of the ‘critical’, self-conscious academic. His extravagant rhetorical response to Marxist criticism only confirms our rejection of the claims of ‘radical’ sociology.
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