Sociology as Imagination

For a discipline that is a regular target for bad jokes about its jargon, the superficiality of its concepts, and the pseudo-scientific quality of its research techniques, sociology has an astonishingly prominent position in the culture. “Anomie,” “power structure,” “Protestant Ethic,” are a regular part of cocktail-party babble while in San Francisco there is a singing group called “Max Weber and the Charismatics”; the President busily peruses the latest public opinion surveys; and, at a more profound level, any work on the problems of modernization in underdeveloped countries shows the influence of sociological thought on other disciplines.

Some of this is mere faddism, but in large measure it is an indication of a feeling that somehow sociology has something relevant to say. This is not a wholly irrational feeling, for the fundamental ideas at the heart of the best of contemporary sociological thinking “are refractions ...