very true
Ok, so would I be wrong in saying that the field of sociology - is kind of like international law?
In that - it only exists due to false assumptions / errors? (e.g states)
*Haven’t made the analogy particularly clear but I hope someone gets what I mean.
Say, in a libertarian world - there would be no nation states, no lines drawn in the sand - and as such there is no reason for international law at all… much like the gold standard would probably come to dominate, there goes all the fiat money… (with no guns to back it up).
So essentially, the field of sociology, is a by product of statism / collectivism etc, and is unnecessary, as much as international law, or fiat currency would be in a stateless society.
?
Mises discusses Weber several times throughout Memoirs (and Notes and Recollections). Also check out the entirety of Chapter 1 for his analysis of Historicism and the German Historical School.
Conza,
For the most part that appears to be true. Most of sociology is about exploitation and how to fix it. It defines gender and the workplace inequalities, etc… One thing sociology implements are survey’s that sometimes end up in polls and some of the social research institutions are national polls like Gallup, etc… Institutions like Acorn, etc… are sociological in nature. Remember Obama was a supposed community worker in Chicago, again, that’s also known as a social worker or case worker but they have different labels depending on what exactly he was doing.
Sociology tries to deal with large societies and works with samples to get it’s data. In anthropology there is a field called applied anthropology which has some of the same hang-ups that sociology does which is it starts with the assumption that there is something wrong with the society so how can it be fixed? That’s their starting point. In applied anthropology this tends to mean the culture is not as advanced as other cultures so the researchers ask themselves how they can get the culture to use advanced technologies without messing up the underlying already pre-existing behavior. The researches don’t want to have the technology intervened straight into the society and cause exploitation, etc… That’s the mind-set. The culture has habits so the new technologies can only enhance the so-called ‘bad habits’ that pre-exist and only make things worse. So the applied anthropologists has to know the behaviors of the people first and then figure out how to give them the new technology. It’s a type of command and control economy still in which the outsiders come in and think they can best implement the new technologies and change their ways. I wouldn’t doubt the U.S. uses them when they are nation-building in other countries.
Another field in anthropology is where future CIA agents and others of that type go to learn. I can’t remember the field name at the moment. One would take it in graduate school. I’ve looked over it’s courses before and it is mainly courses that teaches the student how to intellectually digest massive amounts of information and interweaves this with differing cultural understandings.
One of the few upsides to anthropology is when it takes a descriptive approach, which it is very difficult to do in sociology because sociology deals with large populations and tries to use samples to identify what the whole population ‘thinks’ which has it’s obvious flaws. But the anthropology that is descriptive (outside all of the efforts anthropology with the fields that it has such as archaeology or physical anthropology, ie. forensics, or dealing with ancient humankind fossils, etc…) it does go to extant cultures and live with them and write about them. This is how tourist agencies at times (I don’t know how they fully get all their information but this is one way) get their information on the various cultures around the world. There are anthropologists that focus just on this and I don’t see a problem with this approach. So aside from working with tourist mechanism, archaeology, forensics, ancient fossils, primatology, and other natural science approaches like these latter three within anthropology, I don’t know much else that would potentially stick around as fields unto themselves. But as for sociology I don’t see how any of it would stick around. Cause I’ve only described anthropological fields that potentially would. Anything sociology potentially could do, anthropology already does. Sociology has taken a more pro-active approach, an interventionalist approach whereas some of anthropology is scientific, ie. descriptive, except that one field I mentioned in called applied anthropology which appears to be a spill over from sociology in trying to engineer a culture to what outsiders think would be best for them.
That’s my somewhat short opinion.
Edit: I found the name of the field in which if you have an undergraduate degree in anthropology then some students having this degree having the interest to be future CIA, National Security, and other intelligent analysts and practitioners take this program in graduate school. Here’s a universities web page to explain it. It’s called Applied Intelligence.
I think comparing sociology to fiat money is accurate. Fiat money exists because of compulsory monopoly of the mint, Sociology(or most of it anyway) exists because of state monopoly over intellectuals.
The biggest problem with sociology is that it is essentially trying to be psychology, but from a collectivist point of view. I think for any one of these people to be remotely successful in finding truth, they need to understand psychology first, and probably economics afterward. Then they can try to make sense of studying cultural/social relations. Not before.
The other problem of sociology is that it seems like a field in which the participants try to find justification to support conclusions, rather than create conclusions to support studies. This becomes more and more evident judging by the kind of ideologues who enter it (often Marxists). Because of this, it is not a proper science. It will be at best half-ass until it reverses course.
The Frankfurt School is very interesting case in my opinion, and its influence in the post World War II culture has been noticed by many of its critics such as paleolibertarian Paul Gottfried (“Strange death of Marxism”), paleoconservatives Ralph de Toledano (“Cry Havoc”) and Pat Buchanan (“Death of the West”) and finally the infamous psychologist Kevin MacDonald (“Culture of Critique”).
It seems that members of Frankfurt school were disillusioned because the communists were unable to take power in Germany in the 1920s or 1930s and began to find alternative theories about false consciousness that proletarians could adopt. In this theorizing they synthesised Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxism to find more explanatory theory about this phenomenom.
The synthesis of psychonalysis and marxism (so called neofreudianism) really has had many devastating effects into our modern culture because the managerial class can characterise every deviation from the “politically correct” line as a some form of psychopathology and take more and more re-educational tasks into its own hands. Sometimes it feels like the whole field of sociology is only a job to find faults in our society that we need government to interfere and fix.
This article by Rothbard about psychohistory and the misuse of Freudian theory is worth of looking at.
http://mises.org/daily/2330
To be honest, there is much divergence within the Frankfurt School itself. Althought it was affiliated with known comintern agents, such as Franz Neumann, it seems that most of its members were honestly critical about the Soviet Union, althought strangely left-wing authoritarianism wasn’t analysed in the magnum opus *Authoritarian Personality(*1950), coordinated by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Habermas has recently been against comparing the crimes of Stalin and Hitler. And while everyone remembers the quotation by Horkheimer that “'whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism”, but even some of the schools members claimed that private property was essentially dead in Nazi Germany and that bureaucratic ruling class had taken control in that country.
Max Weber (a famous sociologist) might have been of the German Historical school, but he was pretty free market (or at least strongly anti-socialist). He came up with an argument against socialism which was similar to Mises’s. So I wouldn’t say that sociology is completely worthless. Furthermore, I’d say there could be some interesting fields of study that a praxeologist could engage in when it comes to sociology.
One of course shouldn’t dismiss a science or school of thought outrightly, just because one doesn’t like the outcomes many of their proponents or students propose.
What you point to is however perfectly right. Many fathers of sociology were not really in line with todays Neomarxist professors, there. And even among them you may here and there find something that has truth value.
Left-wing Hegemony in sociology is a serious problem tough. Consider that they do train tomorrows teachers and journalists. This hegemony may also have an impact on method and/or theory produced there (I’d say it most certainly has). This of course keeps that hegemony alive as well. I’d say their method is holistically inclined. That’s not completely false, but will lead to fallacies, if done one-sided. A praxeological approach to sociology may be very helpful and I think Mises and von Wieser did do some work in this field already. Shall we pick up the ball again?