The formation of sociological thought Editorial Amorrortu, Buenos Aires, 1976 Two points should be emphasized: first, the moral basis of modern sociology; and second, the intuitive or artistic framework in which the central ideas of sociology have been achieved.
The great ideas of the social sciences are invariably rooted in moral aspirations, however abstract the ideas may be at times, however neutral they may appear to theorists and researchers, they never really shed their moral origins.
This is particularly true of the ideas that we deal with in this book.
They did not arise from the simple and uncompromising reasoning of pure science.
It is not to detract from the scientific greatness of men like Weber and Durkheim to affirm that they worked with intellectual materials, values, concepts, and theories that they would never have possessed without the persistent moral conflicts of the nineteenth century.
Each of the ideas mentioned appears for the first time in the form of a moral statement, without ambiguity or disguise.
Community begins as a moral value, and the secularization of this concept only gradually becomes apparent in the sociological thought of the century.
The same can be said of alienation, authority, status, etc. These ideas never completely lose their moral texture.
Even in the scientific writings of Weber and Durkheim, a century after they made their appearance, the moral element is vividly preserved. The great sociologists never stopped being moral philosophers.
And they never stopped being artists! It is important to bear in mind, against a vulgar scientism, that none of the ideas that interest us - ideas that continue to be, I repeat, central in contemporary sociological thought - arose as a consequence of what today we are pleased to call "reasoning for the resolution of problems.".
Each one of them is, without exception, the result of thought processes -imagination, vision, intuition- that have as much relationship with the artist as with the scientific researcher.
If I insist on this point, it is only because in our time well-intentioned and eloquent teachers of sociology (and also of other social sciences), too assiduously emphasize that what is scientific (and therefore important!) In their Discipline is only a consequence of putting reason at the service of defining and solving problems.
Who dares to think that the Gemeinschaft and Gessellschaft of Tönnies' typology, the Weberian conception of rationalization, Simmel's image of the metropolis, and Durkheim's idea of anomie come from what we understand today by logical analysis- empirical? Asking the question implies already knowing the answer. These men did not work at all with finite and orderly problems before them.
They were by no means problem solvers. With shrewd intuition, with imaginative and deep grasp of things, they reacted to the world around them as an artist would have reacted, and also as an artist, objectifying intimate mental states, only partially conscious.
Take, as an example, the conception of society and man underlying Durkheim's great study of suicide. It is essentially the perspective of an artist, as much as that of a man of science.
The background, the details and the characterization are combined in a total image iconistic by its capture of a complete social order. How did Durkheim achieve this guiding idea?
Of one thing we can be sure: he did not find it by examining the vital statistics of Europe, as it would have happened if the fable of the stork were applied to science; Nor did Darwin extract the idea of natural selection from his observations during the voyage of the Beagle.
The idea, as well as the plot and conclusions of Suicide were already in his mind before he examined the statistics. Where, then, did he get it? One can only speculate about it.
It may have arrived at it in his readings from Tocqueville, who in turn perhaps deduced it from Lamennais, who may have taken it from Bonald or Chateaubriand.
Or maybe it came from personal experience; of some remembered fragment of the Talmud, of an intuition born of his own loneliness and marginality, a crumb of Parisian experience.
Who can know? But one thing is certain: the fruitful combination of ideas behind Suicide - from which we continue to profit in our scientific companies - was achieved in a way more akin to the procedures of an artist than to those of a data processor, the logician or the technologist.
The ideas and perspectives of Simmel, the most imaginative and intuitive of the great sociologists, are not very different, and in more ways than one.
His descriptions of fear, love, conventions, power, and friendship display the mindset of an artist-essayist. And it does not constitute any distortion of values to place him alongside masters like Plato or Montaigne.
If we eliminate his artistic vision from his analyzes of the strange, the dyad and the role of the secret, we will have eliminated everything that gives him life.
In Simmel there is that wonderful tension between the concrete aesthetic and the general philosophical characteristic of great works. AND
The aesthetic element is what makes the absorption of his sociological material by means of a systematic and anonymous theory impossible. One must go back to Simmel himself to find the real concept.
As with Darwin and Freud, it is always possible to deduce something important from man himself that no impersonal formulation of social theory allows us to glimpse.
Our relationship with these ideas and their creators is similar to that which links the artist to his predecessors.
In the same way that the novelist will always learn something new by studying and re-studying Dostoevsky or James - a sense of development and form, and how to draw inspiration from a fruitful source - sociologist also permanently learns by rereading men like Weber and Simmel.
This is the feature that differentiates sociology from some physical-natural sciences. What the young physicist can learn, even from a Newton, has a limit.
Once you understand the fundamental points of the Principia, its rereading is unlikely to offer you, as a physicist, much more (although you could draw new insights from them as a historian of science).
How different is the sociologist's relationship to a Simmel or a Durkheim! Direct reading will always be beneficial, it will always result in the acquisition of fruitful information, capable of broadening the reader's horizons.
A process similar to that of the contemporary artist who engages in the study of medieval architecture, the Elizabethan sonnet or Matisse's paintings.
Such is the essence of the history of art, and the reason why the history of sociology is so different from the history of science.
Contributed by: Work and Society Magazine, Inquiries about employment, culture and political practices in segmented societies.
