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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 5 No. 2, 11 January 1941, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The war is the supreme expression of the total bankruptcy of the capitalist world. It is the avowal that capitalism can no longer function without insane slaughter of peoples and the complete dislocation of the planet.
War tears away many fig leaves. Few are discovered to be more contemptible in their nakedness than the bourgeois intellectuals, the professors, the writers, the “theorists” of the capitalist order. And among these the most pitiable are the “sociologists” – the pundits who have purported to reduce the study of society to a science, a safe, secure, and sound capitalist science.
Last week the sociological fig leaf fluttered to the ground. The occasion, appropriately enough, was the conference of the American Sociological Society. Before this body came Dr. Pitirim A. Sorokin, chaiman of the Department of Sociology of Harvard University. Said Dr. Sorokin:
“Social science has become increasingly more uninspired more uncreative, and more incapable of foreseeing future trends or of serving efficiently the practical needs of our society and our culture.
“The more economists have tampered with economic conditions (he continued), the worse they have become; the more political scientists have reformed governments, the more are- governments in need of reform; the more sociologists have tampered with the family, thee more the family has disintegrated.
“Likewise all the social sciences have tailed correctly to foresee the trends of important socio-cultural processes. On the eve of war they were forecasting peace; on the eve of economic crash and impoverishment, they were predicting bigger and better prosperity.”
Our learned confessing professor speaks broadly or “social science” in this sorrowing avowal of impotence. He means bourgeois social science. One wonders whether it would be a surprise to him to pick up the works of Marx and Engels and to line! m them predictions of “socio-cultural processes” which have come true with startling accuracy although the predictions were made sixty and seventy years ago. One wonders what Surprises might await him in the writings of Lenin and Trotsky. We might even be permitted to wonder whether the professor might not learn of matters to his benefit if he should pick up a file of the humble Socialist Appeal, and before it of the Militant and the New Militant.
Perhaps research along these lines might soften his indictment of the social sciences and only leave exposed the “social scientists” hired out to the capitalist order.
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Last updated: 16 November 2020