Thinking the Unthinkable by Charles C. Lemert

Author:Charles C. Lemert [Lemert, Charles C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317250449
Google: BhEeCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-03T02:51:18+00:00

You could say that Durkheim was old-fashioned compared to Marx and Weber. But you could also say that, in some ways, Durkheim deserves a greater measure of respect than either of them. They were the more openly critical of the scheme of modern social things, and thus refused to take surface appearances at face value. As history played itself out, they were closer to the truth, as it came to be. It is very much more difficult in the early years of the 2000s to say, as Marx would, that the exploitation of the poor is not the major global issue; or to deny that Weber’s dread of rational excess is not a global problem. Durkheim never could have imagined the dire straits to which the theories of the other two pointed. But, for a believer in the healing good of the social whole, he was, in his way, even more honest before the social facts. He should be respected for honoring what he saw at the time and for putting scholarly leather to the work of dealing with the conflicts that in his day, as in ours, were a grave threat to world peace and social harmony. What Durkheim saw, in contrast to what he believed, moved him in honorable ways. When the world is out of joint the backbone stiffens. He was determined to establish a social theory and science that would not just proclaim the good of the modern world but also diagnose its illness—and to do both in ways that led to a plan for recuperation. This was Durkheim’s vision of social science.

Functionalism, the social philosophy that holds that all living systems, including social ones, remain healthy only when all functions necessary to the structure are provided for; for example, in mammals, lungs provide the oxygen supply without which the organism dies; in social systems, religion (according to many Durkheimians) provides the moral bond that holds the system together by guiding individuals.

It is all too easy today to dismiss the value of good and hard science—especially because, in the social sciences in particular, the results of the work are so often proven wrong or incomplete. Social scientists want very much to be thought of as real scientists like the physicists, so much so that they defend their enterprise without noting that the real scientists are constantly proven wrong and consider this right. “Real” scientists may suffer if their work is shown to be wrong; but the better ones accept the failure as the way science works. That Durkheim’s contemporary, Albert Einstein, is today, a century later, still in vogue to a degree Durkheim is not does not prove the inadequacy of Durkheim’s social theory. In that century’s span, physicists have never stopped trying to prove Einstein wrong. The social scientist, unlike the physicist, is always more vulnerable. Everybody knows E = mc2, but few are they, not trained in physics, who can utter more than a coherent sentence as to what this truly means. By contrast,

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