Is Sociology Salvageable?

Anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to academic sociology these days knows there are serious problems. I have been writing about this phenomenon now for a number of years, pointing out, e.g., sociology’s drift from its origins and how its journals and conferences clearly illustrate its biases. The discipline has become captured by an ideology and has given up on its earlier scientific promise.

A glance at the titles of conference papers and journal articles, or indeed at the course offerings in sociology at any institution of higher learning, reveals the transformation. Even some Marxist professors have come to recognize how skewed the discipline of sociology has become.

Sociology has become captured by an ideology and has given up on its earlier scientific promise. For example, Professor Joshua Murray of Vanderbilt University has written, “At present, sociology is organized around the assumption that social forces are the primary, and often exclusive drivers of social outcomes. […] If one asks what the dominant conclusions of a given [sociological] subfield are, the answer is almost always that the phenomenon in question is socially constructed, shaped by power relations, and maintained through inequality.”

From that perspective, all human social organization must be understood based on invisible but inescapable structural relations of domination. The discipline is now dominated by one intellectual framework, which I call Contemporary Critical Sociology, or CCS. From that perspective, all human social organization must be understood based on invisible but inescapable structural relations of domination among social groups, which are always divided into two categories: the dominant/advantaged/privileged and the dominated/disadvantaged/unprivileged.

We might take the example of racial groups and identities as an illustration. CCS produces a great deal of “research” on these topics, and the framework of understanding always begins with assertions that race is fundamentally an axis of dominance and repression, with some groups operating as oppressors and others as hapless victims. All aspects of racial identity and racial-group outcomes and inequalities are to be understood as connected to and caused by racism. The category of race itself is typically understood as a fiction invented by powerful groups to more effectively dominate other groups. Other possible explanations are not allowed.

CCS does not constitute an objective and scientific effort to understand human nature, behavior, and social organization. It is instead a project to assert that various partisan and ideological beliefs about those topics are true in the effort to move social and cultural policy in a politically progressive direction. Any vision of society or social policy that is oriented toward individualism rather than the collectivism of CCS is rejected in advance.

Sociology was not always like this.

For nearly two decades in my career, I used a book by a colossal figure in American sociology, Robert Nisbet. Published in 1966, The Sociological Tradition described the birth of sociology as centered on five key themes—and the crises within them as caused by the rise of modern industrialized democratic societies beginning in the late 18th century.

Nisbet’s insights into the historical evolution of ideas in the West are unparalleled. He begins with the social and political backdrop against which sociological thinking was born. The two revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Industrial and French, fundamentally altered social and cultural order in Europe and, subsequently, the entire world. We are still living in the wake of those revolutions and their consequences today.

What Nisbet provides is a historical and philosophical introduction to each of the five themes and a reflection on what important founding figures in sociology had to say about them.

Community expresses the kind of rooted social relationship that was typical of European life before modernity, in which kinship bonds, a shared physical space, or a common trade or religious practice served as mechanisms for establishing deeply morally obligating bonds with others not reducible to market relationships.

The first generation of sociologists were concerned not simply with ideological reflections on the world. Authority and status are intertwined aspects of human social structure, eternal features of the delegation of power and the organization of social hierarchies found in all societies—until the French Revolution attempted to demolish both by attacking traditional authority as unjust and theorizing the moral requirement of a social order with no hierarchy.

For contemporary sociology, inequality is always and everywhere evidence of a social injustice. Alienation, the distancing of the human person from essential aspects of his or her nature and the social order from which he or she organically springs, has been an omnipresent product of the democratic and technological revolutions of the past several centuries. It produces psychological and sociological malaise and anxiety, and it makes individuals incapable of forming proper social relations.

The sacred, which is perhaps the most fundamental mechanism by which human social orders and systems of meaning are legitimated and maintained, also came under sustained attack by the revolutionary spirit.

Nisbet showed how the first generation of sociologists—men such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim—postulated the centrality of these topics in the context of the crisis of the modern world.

This generation of thinkers ranged in their political views from Marx’s communism and Durkheim’s socialism to Tocqueville’s conservatism. But they were concerned not simply with ideological reflections on the world but, rather, with the conducting of meticulous analyses of what had happened with respect to all five of these themes. They agreed, their ideological diversity notwithstanding, that human societies require community, authority, status, and the sacred and need methods for reducing and countering alienation.

They did not reject modernity, but they did recognize that the older forms of social structure that had been dismantled would need to be replaced by effective substitutes. They set about exploring whether such substitutes had been constructed and how they were functioning.

The combined effect those two revolutions had—and are still having—on human existence was and is stunning. The factory system removed both the place and the pace of work from the control of the individual. Factories are largely gone now in the West, but still newer and more revolutionary technologies of work now threaten to eliminate the meaning-making of labor from the lives of many.

Cities grew enormously as the factories drew in masses from the countryside and created new labor markets. Today, even without the factories, the cities continue to grow, with all the associated pathologies growing, as well. The reign of the machine began, and we are more deeply in its power now. The first truly ideological revolution, designed to remake society in a utopian vision, triumphed in one of Europe’s greatest powers and was spread abroad.

Traditional institutions were razed, and new polities directed toward increasingly radical democratic claims emerged. The structure of the family and marriage was revolutionized, as well. The state assumed control of social processes—the economy and education chief among them—that were previously more locally controlled. Religion was vigorously attacked. All of these processes continue apace.

A proper sociology in 2026 would continue the investigative work of the founding generation into the unfolding of this unprecedented social and cultural transformation.

Far from asking questions about how social structures have been dissolved, contemporary sociology celebrates that dissolution. Inequality, for example, has long been a topic of concern for the discipline, but, in CCS, the only way one can discuss it is through the moralizing lens of radical egalitarianism. That is, for contemporary sociology, inequality is always and everywhere evidence of a social injustice, some malevolent effort on the part of wicked entities to illegitimately hold others down.

Nisbet’s vision—and that which emerges from the work of the founders—is that inequality can indeed be a product of such efforts, but it also results from basic facts of human and social differentiation. Indeed, functional imperatives in any society, even the most technologically primitive, produce inequalities. The more highly skilled and motivated members will take places in the division of labor that are of particular importance; they’ll be rewarded for providing those services and endeavor as a matter of human nature to preserve their advantages for their offspring.

Instead, we get endless blathering about how this group is oppressing that group and what needs to be done to address that until all hierarchy dissipates and the perfect egalitarian world emerges.

Far from asking questions about the ways in which social structures have been dissolved, contemporary sociology celebrates that dissolution as a wonderful invention of human freedom to endlessly destabilize and reinvent ourselves.

Marriage, for example, was analyzed by Émile Durkheim as an essential institutional mechanism for socially integrating and morally regulating participants. He saw efforts to liberalize or even demolish marital bonds as a threat to social order, not as a result of adherence to any particular political ideology but because the evidence was so great that marriage contributed significantly to collective goods.

One looks largely in vain in contemporary sociology for any such careful study of the institutional work of marriage. What is called the sociology of the family today openly embraces pluralism in familial structure, or even the fleeing of individuals from family bonds altogether, as inherent advances. It makes no effort to comparatively evaluate the different outcomes of different family forms.

A return to substantive sociology would entail a reassertion of the need for social structure, social solidarity, the sacred, and social hierarchy. It could be just as promising an intellectual project as it was when Nisbet’s book was published.

Alexander Riley is a professor of sociology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Scholars. All views expressed are his own and do not represent the views of his employer. Follow him on Substack here.