The Oversocialized Conception of Man

The Oversocialized Conception of Man The Oversocia lized Conception of Man Dennis H. Wrong with a new introduction by the author First edition published in 1976 by Columbia University Press. Published 1999 by Transaction Publishers Published 201 7 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business New material this edition copyright© 1999 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 98-28944 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wrong, Dennis Hume, 1923- [Skeptical sociology] The oversocialized conception of man / Dennis H. Wrong with a new introduction by the author. p. cm. Originally published : Skeptical sociology. New York Columbia University Press, 1976. With new introd. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7658-0445-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sociology-History. I. Title. HM19.W76 1998 301'.09-dc21 98-28944 CIP ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0445-7 (pbk) Contents INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION vii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii PROLOGUE. On Skeptical Sociology 1 PART ONE. Human Nature and the Perspective of Sociology Introduction 17 ONE. C. Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination 21 TWO. The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modem Sociology 31 Postscript 1975 47 THREE. Human Nature and the Perspective of Sociology 55 FOUR. The Idea of “Community”: A Critique 71 FIVE. Identity: Problem and Catchword 81 PART TWO. Social Stratification and Inequality Introduction 97 SIX. The Functional Theory of Stratification: Some Neglected Considerations 103 SEVEN. Social Inequality without Social Stratification 121 EIGHT. Jews, Gentiles, and the New Establishment 135 NINE. How Important Is Social Class? 144 PART THREE. Power and Politics Introduction 159 TEN. Problems in Defining Power 163 ELEVEN. Force and the Threat of Force as Distinct Forms of Power 183 vi CONTENTS TWELVE. Competent Authority: Reality and Legitimating Model 196 THIRTEEN. Economic Development and Democracy209 A Reply to Heilbroner221 FOURTEEN. The Rhythm of Democratic Politics226 FIFTEEN. Max Weber: The Scholar as Hero242 SIXTEEN. Ends and Means in Politics 265 SEVENTEEN. On Thinking about the Future 277 NOTES 287 INDEX 315 Introduction to the Transaction Edition A ll the essays collected here were written between 1959 and 1975. After I had reached agreement with my editor at Colum bia University Press, John Moore, on which essays from a pe riod of roughly twenty years should be included in the original 1976 edition of this book, the need to choose a title arose. The early 1970s were a time when the neo-Marxism of the Frank furt School had achieved its maximum influence among soci ologists and American intellectuals on the left (overlapping categories, of course). Although I shared the Frankfurt critical perspective on the science-building aspirations and emphasis on social consensus of major trends in postwar sociology, I was far from sympathetic to its largely rhetorical political radical ism, which had by the middle of the 1970s with the decline of the various New Left protest movements of the previous de cade become the dominant point of view among political intel lectuals and social critics. I therefore hit upon “Skeptical Sociology” as a title hinting at a kind of counterpoint to the Frankurt School. At Moore’s suggestion, I wrote the long “pro logue” justifying the title and defining my past and present relation to the cultural, political, and intellectual currents that had inspired most of the chapters in the book, often as an oc casion for critically challenging them. The title therefore may well possess a time-bound character exceeding that of many of the individual chapters. Moore had sternly opposed my wish to include several pieces he thought outdated. He also urged me to include as much unpublished viii INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION material as possible with the result that part 3 on “Power and Politics” included two selections from a work I was then writ ing on the concept of power1 and a conference paper on the same topic. The title “Skeptical Sociology” seems less appro priate in the 1990s than it did in 1976. Moreover, I now believe that “sociology” in the title restricted sales to academic soci ologists, although I had hoped for a wider readership since six of the seventeen essays had appeared in Dissent and Commen tary and one more had been written for The New York Times Magazine (though rejected as “too advanced” for its readers). “The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociol ogy” remains the publication for which I am best known, justi fying its choice as a new title for the reissued volume. I did belatedly after thirty years write an entire book enlarging upon its major themes, but, alas, The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society2 is not nearly as widely known as the origi nal article. The oversocialization thesis has nevertheless gained sufficient acceptance to become enshrined in textbooks as part of the conventional wisdom of the discipline. I even received recently, along with a copy of his new book,3 a most generous note from Hans L. Zetterberg, whom I had sharply criticized in the article, expressing his gratitude for my having “set [him] right at one point.” Young people still often introduce them selves to me at sociology conferences to tell me how impressed they were on reading it for course assignments. I am embar rassed when they sometimes mention their admiration for the phrase the “darkness of the human heart” in the final sen tence, evidently under the impression that it was my original coinage. I was, of course, echoing not only Conrad’s master piece, but also the passage at the end of William Golding’s great novel Lord of the Flies: “ . Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.” “The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociol- ogy” was widely regarded at the time and is still often remem bered today primarily as an attack on the “structural-functional” theory of Talcott Parsons, who had been the leading American Introduction to the Transaction Edition IX sociological theorist since at least the late 1940s. I was indeed one of the few of his critics whom Parsons honored with a rebut tal.4 Benjamin Nelson had solicited my article for the lay psycho- analyticjournal he edited after hearing me present it at the 1960 meetings of the American Sociological Association. It had al ready been accepted for publication by theAmerican Sociological Review, but Nelson reprinted it over a year later and not only invited Parsons to respond but added his own brief criticism of me and defense of Parsons. I was annoyed that he denied me a counter-rebuttal in the pages of his journal. Since Parsons had not been the sole target of my criticism, I decided to extend my argument more fully to other sociological theories such as Marx ism and symbolic interactionism and only briefly considered Parsons’s rebuttal at the very end of what became a new article, the third in the present collection. I submitted it to the American Sociological Review, but the new editor, Neil Smelser, rejected it on the grounds that it contained nothing that had not been in the earlier article; my guess is that he was also reluctant to pub lish what he saw as yet another assault on the theorizing of his own teacher and coauthor, Talcott Parsons. So I ended up print ing the article in Social Research, the journal of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research of which I myself was editor-in-chief at the time. I had first used the term “oversocialized” specifically with reference to Parsons in Commentary when summarizing the fa mous opposition between Parsons and my own teacher C. Wright Mills over power in American society. This was in the long assessment of Mills’s The Sociological Imagination that I chose for the opening essay of the present collection. The Mills- Parsons difference also inspired my original interest in the con cept of power that led to my later book on the subject and the selections from it in this collection, for I disagreed with both of them. I remember first seeing “oversocialized” in print in the very last sentence of an article by Walter Weisskopf criticiz ing the Americanization of Freud.5 I had previously heard the term, however, from an old friend and later colleague, Jim Giffen, who had in the early 1940s influenced me to major in X INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION sociology when we were undergraduates at the University of Toronto. Some ten years later we were both teaching sociology there and I mentioned one morning over coffee that I had the night before seen the movie “Whatever Happened to Harry?” starring Shirley MacLaine. He asked how I had liked it and I responded that the plot about the disappearance of a corpse had offended me for treating death so lightly. “How oversocialized can you get?” Jim exclaimed. So, paraphrasing Flaubert on Emma Bovary, I can truly say “the oversocialized man, c’est moi." My 1961 article undoubtedly contributed to the growing wave of criticism of Parsonsian theorizing in the 1960s and 1970s.

Load more