The Unscientific Nature of Modern Sociology

In one respect, however, modem sociology is not classical: It is less scientific than classical sociology. Nearly all classical sociologists were explicitly and militantly scientific. Apart from Karl Marx (who never called himself a sociologist), they advocated a sociology free of politics and morality. They endorsed what Max Weber called "ethical neutrality" in sociology ([1917] 1949), and embraced what he called "science as a vocation" ([1919] 1946). Georg Simmel, for example, argued against anyone who might question the scientific status of sociology, and called the field "a science with its own subject matter that is differentiated, by division of labor, from the subject matters of all other sciences" ([1917] 1950: 13; see also [1908] 1965). Vilfredo Pareto began his four-volume treatise The Mind and Society with a chapter called "The Scientific Approach" ([1923] 1935), and described his work as an effort to extend Einstein's theory of relativity to sociology (Feuer 1973: 49-50). The scientific possibilities of sociology seemed limitless. But modern sociology has had a scientific devolution. Many sociologists now reject and express contempt for the idea of a value-neutral and otherwise scientific sociology. Some totally dismiss the distinction between facts and values-central to all science. Some confuse value-- neutrality (a lack of value judgments) with objectivity (a lack of bias), and argue that because no one is objective no one is value-neutral (e.g., Wallerstein 2000: 307-08)-as if the human origins of science make all science evaluative and none of it factual. Others act as if value judgments derive from facts alone-a logical impossibility. And still others openly pursue an ideological agenda in the name of sociology itself. Here modem sociologists are not classical at all. They are pre-classical.