Lasch—"Social Science" as "Elaborate Apology" for "Interdependence"

Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)

[xv] Anyone who insists on the historical importance of human actions, and who sees history not as an abstract social "process" but as the product of concrete struggles for power, finds himself at odds with the main tradition of the social sciences, which affirms the contrary principle that society runs according to laws of its own. The claim to have discovered these laws is the overriding mystification of social science, which bears the same relation to later stages of the industrial revolution that the science of political economy bore to the earlier stages. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the classical economists interpreted industrial capitalism but also provided it with an elaborate apology, which disguised the social relations peculiar to capitalism as universal principles of economics. Whereas these social relations represented the end product of a particular line of historical development in western Europe, political economy mistook them for natural laws, disguised exploitation as the natural order of things, and thus gave class rule an aura of inevitability. Both
[xvi]
in capitalist practice and in the theory in which it was mirrored, the relations between men now assumed "the fantastic shape," as Marx put it, "of relations between things."

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the expansion of the managerial function and the growth of bureaucracy brought into being a new branch of knowledge, social science, which attempted to explain the increasingly dense, opaque network of interpersonal relations so characteristic of advanced societies. Although the social sciences' attack on the commonplace illusion of individual autonomy represented an intellectual advance, their insistence that man is wholly the product of society vitiated this advance and led to new forms of confusion. According to social science,

It's hard not to be suspicious of sentences that start with,
"According to [ENTIRE BRANCH OF KNOWLEDGE]",
but sure...

the principle of "interdependence" governs all of modern society. Every part of society is connected to every other part; each part must be understood in relation to the others; the relations among men form a seamless web that defies "monocausal" explanations and sometimes seems to defy explanation of any kind. If political economy failed to see modern market relations as the outcome of a specific historical process...social science equally fails to see that "interdependence" merely reflects changing modes of class rule: the extension and solidification of capitalist control through the agency of management, bureaucracy and professionalization.

Well sure, but what about the old Principle of Competence? The particular rejection of social science enumerated here would seem to depend, ultimately, on the new professionalized, bureaucratized class being not just no better than the plebes but actually incompetent, not just less than they purport to be but in fact the opposite of it. There is plenty of room for skepticism of bureaucracy without going quite that far.

The momentum of postindustrial development, in any case, certainly has demonstrated an insatiable, maniacal drive toward creating interdependence (and with it "fragility") where there was none previously; this entirely aside from the question of whether one or another social science regime should or should not assume a priori any given degree of interdependence. Hence the appearance, concurrently, of various detractors arguing against global interdependence on any number of rational and/or empirical grounds, only to meet the response that no rationally- or empirically-grounded person could possibly feel this way.

...

[23] Social science owed its very existence to the rise of new modes of social control. In former times, power surrounded itself with elaborate apologetics, philosophical defenses of the status quo. As religion gave way to law as the principle source of social cohesion, and law to social therapy, the governing classes no longer attempted to mediate their pretensions with appeals to legitimacy. They appealed only to the unmediated authority of the fact. They asked not that the citizen or worker submit to legitimate authority but that he submit to reality itself. Those who wielded power now discouraged inquiries into the principle of its origins. Hence the decay of philosophy and the rise of social science.

If philosophy did decay and social science rise, still this part seems tenuous. Do they not serve different functions?

I would find nothing to object to, though, in a "consilient" scheme of knowledge which located philosophy in a lower order (meaning a more central/fundamental place) and social science in a higher order (more peripheral, because built upon/dependent upon the lower orders).

The new forms of control sought to ground themselves not in the superego—the internalized compulsion to obey—but in the ego's sense of reality. As religion and politics gave way to a new antireligion of mental health, authority identified itself not with what ought to be but with what is. Not the superego's harsh command but the "reality-testing" routintely conducted by the ego was to assure the individual that resistance had become, not unprincipled, but "unrealistic."

The science of society did not fully establish itself as the successor to philosophy and the humanities, in the American university, until the 1940s and 1950s. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, it had already formulated its overriding assumptions: that man is wholly the product of society and culture; that society consists of a network of interpersonal relationships; that social development creates more and more intricate patterns of interdependence; and that this interdependence reveals itself above all in the division and subdivision of labor and the "differentiation" of social functions. In rejecting the idealist illusion that man is the autonomous creator of his own destiny, social science also rejected the truth precariously preserved within the idealist tradition of philosophy—that society represents the collective creation of human intelligence and will, and that for this very reason men retain the collective capacity to understand their own work and even to rise above its historical limitations. Men are both the products of society (more accurately, of the conflict between instinctual drives and the social pressures that seek to repress them) and the creators of society. Men's increasing alien-
[24]
ation from their own works, however, obscures the second of these conditions and creates the illusion that society obeys laws of its own and acts like an autonomous organism, totally independent of human will.

Well, this does seem to be the case, at least the part about being independent of human will. Many have remarked upon this loss of control. But if there are things we can do to regain control, perhaps they are worth doing.

The obvious example (obvious in that it comes immediately to mind, not in that there is any obvious course of remedy) is population. Are such archetypal postmodern maladies as

Men's increasing alienation from their own works

and

the illusion that society obeys laws of its own...totally independent of human will,

are these problems not pretty clearly exacerbated by a billions-with-a-bee population level, even if they are ultimately attributable to many other factors also? Are these not two good examples of population externalities which are totally oblique to economics and economists?

I would think that the smaller the population, the further we move AWAY from the problem of

society as

opaque,

society as

defying "monocausal" explanations and sometimes seeming to defy explanation of any kind,

society as seemingly

obeying laws of its own,

and TOWARDS

the collective capacity to understand our own work.

But I would think that, wouldn't I?

[24, cont.] Social science intellectualized this popular illusion. Just as political economy described capitalism as the product not of historical development but of natural laws, social science described the surface of modern society without penetrating its inner, historical principles.

In modern society, relations among men appear to form a seamless web existing independent not only of human volition but of any recognizable principle of causality. In reality, this "interdependence" merely reflects changing modes of domination. Whereas the lord's domination of the serf was direct and unmediated...in modern society, where labor is "free," a complex network of civil institutions mediates the domination of one class by the other. Indeed, it was the emergence of a "civil society" as something distinct from the state, and the need to understand how it operates, that gave rise to modern social thought in the first place. As the rule of force gave way to the rule of law, social relations became increasingly mysterious and opaque. Political economy and later social science claimed to have unlocked the secret principle of modern society; but the sociological theory of the social order as an organism with a life of its own and as something more than the sum of its parts, in Durkheim's phrase, merely gave scientific standing to an illusion more insidious, in its way, than the commonsense perception of individual autonomy—a perception which, in any case, could not survive the substitution of abstract relations for face-to-face relations of dominance and submission.

...

[32] The positivist conception of society, it has rightly been said, tends to minimize the importance of conflict in human affairs. In the interpretation of Spencer's "moving equilibrium," the "stress in practice seems regularly to fall on the equilibrium and not on the movement." By giving so much weight to sympathy, positivist sociology correspondingly diminishes the importance of interest. By defining
[33]
the individual as almost entirely a product of socialization, it rules out in advance the possibility of irreconcilable conflicts between the individual and society. Finally, the proposition that mind is largely social has the interesting corollary that society is largely mental. Society consists of interpersonal relations, but "persons" are merely the ideas associated with their roles, conveyed to others and then reflected by others back to the self. Society is a mirror, and the "images" it projects, as an early exponent of role theory insisted, are the images "of the social suggestion that has surrounded" a given set of roles. Such a conception of society is completely at variance not only with materialist conceptions but with dialectical views of human growth and development, according to which growth results from conflict; but American sociology has modeled itself, for better or worse, on positivist rather than dialectical theories of society. Even Talcott Parsons, who rejected much of positivism, stressed the importance of sentiment and sympathy—of shared beliefs and the interplay of roles—in holding society together.

...

[60] Another group of studies attacked [Willard] Waller for relying on his own observations instead of on those of the participants. According to this line of argument, dating, like any other social arrangement, has to be seen as it appears to those directly concerned with it, not as it appears to an outsider. The participants themselves, it seems, do not see dating as Waller sees it. They do not see themselves, when asked, as engaged in a form of controlled competition, status-seeking, and exploitation. Instead, their answers to certain leading questions place "small emphasis on reasons which are . . . of the competitive-prestige type." It is not difficult to see that this type of reasoning can be used to refute almost any critical judgment on human actions. Only if the participants themselves agree that they are engaged in exploitation can the sociologist describe their actions as such! But in any case, Waller did make use of student informants, and the charge that he was indifferent to student perceptions of the rating and dating complex is absurd on its face. Some of the most scathing commentaries on the dating system came not from Waller but from his students. Here, as in his other work, Waller showed that he understood the value of carefully conducted interviews in probing beneath the bland surface of American sociability.
[61]
He had no confidence, however, in statistical surveys, believing that "intensive study of a few cases" usually proves more enlightening than "collecting facts about many,"

W. Stephenson says same, and claimed to have worked out some formal justifications too.

and that "no generalization can be so clearly buttressed by facts as one which is definitely supported by one or two well-understood cases." When Waller's critics accused him of ignoring student opinion, what they really found unforgivable was his refusal to submit the whole question of rating and dating to a majority vote.

In many ways, the most interesting feature of the literature on dating is what it says about the issue of free choice. In itself, Waller's attack on the illusion of individual choice was not acceptable to other sociologists. Sociology, after all, contains a built-in determinism; it hesitates to regard any social phenomenon as arbitrary. Most sociologists did not object to a search for the hidden determinants underlying the "choice" of marriage partners, but they never advanced beyond the most generalized and banal characterization of those determinants: racial, religious, and class endogamy; homogamy in general (similarity of habits and temperaments); and psychological determinants such as "the influence of parent-images on martial choice." The commonplace criticism of sociology—that it tells us in bad English things that we knew already—applies with particular force to the study of mate selection. Waller's studies, on the other hand, laid bare the specific mechanisms through which abstract determinants like class, race, and ethnicity translate themselves into social action, in a system that has banished the direct intervention of parents. They showed that activities ostensibly undertaken for pure pleasure had been invaded by the same machinery of organized domination from which pleasure and "fun" were intended to provide relief.

...

[149] revisionist sociology has finally got rid of the "oversocialized concept of man," according to Mrs. [Arlene] Skolnick ["The Family Revisited" (1975) (??)]. The accusation that Parsonian sociology adhered to such a concept, unlike her other accusations, is fair enough; indeed, the "oversocialized concept of man" runs through almost all modern sociology. But why is it objectionable? Because it minimizes the human potential for creativity and "innovation," or because, on the contrary, it obscures the ever-present danger of a return of the repressed? What should have been the occasion for reasserting one of the most important psychoanalytic insights—the fragility of any form of socialization in the face of the determinism of unconscious mental life—becomes in the hands of "radical" sociologists an occasion for celebrating the new awareness of "mind, consciousness, and thought." The Freudian theory of socialization, according to Mrs. Skolnick, leaves "no room for autonomy, innovation, legitimate dissent, or even the exercise of competence." Fortunately, the work of
[150]
Piaget and Chomsky has "granted the individual some autonomy from the determining grasp of family and society." These and other writers have shown that the child learns to walk and talk "without explicit adult instruction" and that socialization, moreover, does not necessarily make the child a conformist. In this way they challenge "traditional over-pessimism.

Mrs. Skolnick's language betrays the impulse behind revisionist sociology: to refute pessimism and the "grant" individuals the autonomy that social conditions make it increasingly difficult for them to achieve. In this respect, recent sociology harks back to the culture and personality theorists, much of whose work grew out of the same need to confer autonomy on the individual, to abrogate the conflict between nature and culture, to repudiate Freudian determinism, and to make room for human "creativity." Like their predecessors, the new critics of Freud, claiming to have revised him, have regressed to a prepsychoanalytic view of human nature, one that tries to restore the illusion of psychic freedom and choice.

Well, okay. But didn't we start out by reasserting

the historical importance of human actions

against

the overriding mystification of social science

per which

man is wholly the product of society

?

[169] Bourgeois domesticity did not simply evolve. It was imposed on society by the forces of organized virtue, led by feminists, temperance advocates, educational reformers, liberal ministers, penologists, doctors, and bureaucrats.

Not really convincing, especially not if we are believers in the determinism of unconscious mental life. Generally it just isn't possible to impose such things if people don't already want them; also generally (he just made this point too, a mere coupla chapters ago), there is an observable tendency for these types of professional squeaky wheels to take up causes only/especially after their success is assured by already-visible bottom-up trends.

What is nonetheless striking here is that, yes, there certainly have been made efforts to this end, one of the present conundrums therein being that this type of imposition does seem the product of a very particular (i.e. bourgie-quietist/faux-center-left) area of the political spectrum, for which the above-named groups are fair enough proxies, at least regarding the early twentieth century.

The really scary question for this contingent,
then,
is,

What tf is feminism, e.g., without the top-down streak?

It is not really a political or activist program anymore, because there is no basis for action beyond the strictly individual choice of individual feminists to put certain ideal conduct into practice in their own lives.

Or,
to turn all of this around,
an equally terrifying question
is,

What tf does a "producerism" or a "populism" or an "evangelicalism" or a "racialism" look like that is not bottom-up but top-down, i.e. that instrumentalizes political power (of whatever origin or nature) in order to make impositions?