Sociology and Political Philosophy

Kieran,

First, as usual, you’ve got some great writing in this piece. I love the sometimes sly tone you take in discussing interdisciplinary interactions (“we are spoiled for shared topics…)–good stuff.

Second, a nit to pick (perhaps big, perhaps small): I’m a little perplexed by your comment in your final paragraph that “the structural and cultural lines of research in sociology are at odds with the basic assumptions of much contemporary political philosophy.” This may be true, depending on what you have in mind as constituting that “much.” But just a couple of pages earlier you write about how “the willingness of sociologists to take structural and cultural concepts seriously means that the sovereign, rights-bearing decision-making of liberal thought is jettisoned,” and that seems to me the perfect opening to discuss one (I think very important) recent point of exchange between sociology and political theory, and that is the communitarian critique of liberalism. “Communitarianism” can, of course, mean a hundred different things in different historical and philosophical contexts, but if we just want to look at what’s been published in academic journals over the last thirty years, then the shape of the post-Rawlsian communitarian critique would be radically different if not for the contributions of sociologists and social theorists like Robert Bellah, Amitai Etzioni, Roberto Unger, Philip Selznick, and others. Moreover, to the extent that some of the major contemporary communitarian thinkers (like Walzer and Taylor) formulated their critique of individualism at least in part through figures like Marx and various theorists of civil society and community which were part of his intellectual milieu (Hegel, etc.), then you have right there a large dose of proto-sociology right at the beginning of the response to Rawls.

Maybe, as your essay or the volume as a whole defines “political philosophy,” this is a peripheral issue. Still, it might be worth trying to work in some reference to it. From a communitarian perspective, I think it is actually good to be reminded at how much argument over liberalism is also an argument over how one defines the subject of political thought. I like Sandel and Pettit as much as the next fellow-traveler, but there is something to be said for recognizing that the communitarian project has much to do with the arguments of scholars like Anderson and Coleman over our “capacity to study a social system as a system,” and thus not become overpreoccupied with allocative questions, as it does with any particular historical justification for such.

Russell makes excellent points about communitarianism. I have a few more pedestrian notes.

First, any discussion of liberal political philosophy that invokes Weber needs to make at least some reference to:

1) the place of Nietzsche in Weber’s thought, particularly Nietzsche’s influence in Weber’s concerns about modern society, his category of charisma, and his engagement with epistemological relativism;
2) the related place of Hegelian theory–or, more properly, Weber’s relentness rejection of it–in his social thought. The engagement with Hegel is right there in Weber’s titles, e.g., the Protestant ethic and the ‘spirit’ (geist) of Capitalism.

It would be ironic if, in an excellent and exceedingly well-written account of the relationship between sociology and political philosophy, we lost sight of the fact that figures like Weber were active in an environment that did not distinguish between the two pursuits in the way we do now. The fact that Weber’s been shuffled (via Parsons?) into the sociological canon often obscures how profodundly he was engaged with political philosophers and political philosophy.

Second, in a somewhat similar vein: you don’t address pragamatism at all. Surely it deserves a footnote?

If I have time, I’ll try to post more thoughtful comments.

It seems very odd to me for a piece on sociology and political philosophy to make no mention whatsoever of Habermas. I don’t think you can find a more direct application of a Parsonian framework to problems in political philosophy than Habermas’s *Legitimation Crisis* — which is probably his most widely read work among political theorists. His work on discourse ethics (again, hugely influential in political philosophy, e.g. the current vogue for “deliberative democracy”), is explicitly Durkheimian in inspiration. The influence of Weber is enormous (and again, explicit) in his move away from Marxism (and break with the Lukacs/Frankfurt School tradition) towards a theory of rationalization in *The Theory of Communicative Action*. He dedicates an entire chapter of *Between Facts and Norms* to reconciling the normative theory of rights and democracy that he developed with “sociological” realism about political power… (of course, you might not want to credit Luhmann with being a “sociologist”, but that was his official disciplinary affiliation).

Odd, I posted a comment yesterday but it’s gone. My two points related to the omissions of communitarianism and Habermas, which have been well covered by Russell and Joseph, so nothing has been lost. I’d have to disagree that political theorists read _Legitimation Crisis_ more than other Habermas. As a group, we’re far more inclined to pay attention to the recent stuff, and if we dip into his back-catalogue I’d venture to guess there’s a bit more interest in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (which seems far less dated than Legitimation Crisis, at least to me).

Kieran, I really enjoy your writing. This article is especially interesting because it dives right into the core grand-theoretical concerns of sociology which I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to figure out, and which my own professors have been only been of negligible help with. So thanks for diving right into structural functionalism and its relative strengths and weaknesses.

I should make some comments though. I find the pairing of “interdisciplinary” and “sociology” to be sort of weird because it seems redundant. Sociology (along with anthropology and philosophy) really are just interdisciplines; they can’t even pretend to be closed intellectual systems without burning away the intuitions that inspire the studies in the first place. Sociology is nothing more or less than “social science” at large, compacted and beaten into a disciplinary frame.

If sociologists took their jobs seriously, they would stop mumbling about rational choice theory, Adam Smith, and game theory, and recognize the value of each by incorporating them into their program. It’s only by engaging with these half-truths that any serious progress in the domain can be made.

But what’s even more bizarre is the idea that figures like Marx, Durkheim, and Weber are the deities of the discipline, when (as you indicate) there is a whole host of literature which leaps and bounds beyond their works (and likely, in many cases, doesn’t even need to pay lip service to them). A comprehensive survey would be good, but ideally, members of the sociological community should tighten their belt buckles.