Sociology Quotes
More Sociology Quotes
Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant ra~onale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables.
Anatol Rapoport— Anatol Rapoport, "Outline of a probabilistic approach to animal sociology: I." The Bulletin of mathematical biophysics 11.3 (1949): p 183
Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness... It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful.
kenneth boulding— Boulding (1948) "Samuelson's Foundations: The Role of Mathematics in Economics," In: Journal of Political Economy, Vol 56 (June). as cited in: Peter J. Boettke (1998) "James M. Buchanan and the Rebirth of Political Economy". Boettke further explains "Boulding's words are even more telling today than they were then as we have seen the fruits of the formalist revolution in economic theory and how it has cut economics off from the social theoretic discourse on the human condition."
Good sociology is sociological work that produces meaningful descriptions of organizations and events, valid explanations of how they come about and persist, and realistic proposals for their improvement or removal.
— Howard S. Becker (1972) "'Radical politics and sociological research"
I often say that sociology is a martial art, a means of self-defense. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use it for unfair attacks.
pierre bourdieu— La Sociologie est un sport de combat (2000); Cited in: John Horne, Wolfram Manzenreiter (2004) Football Goes East. p. xii
Biochemists and biologists who adhere blindly to the Darwinism theory search for results that will be in agreement with their theories and consequently orient their research in a given direction, whether it be in the field of ecology, ethology, sociology, demography (dynamics of populations), genetics (so-called evolutionary genetics), or paleontology. This intrusion of theories has unfortunate results: it deprives observations and experiments of their objectivity, makes them biased, and, moreover, creates false problems.
— Pierre-Paul Grassé, Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation (Academic Press, 1977) p. 7
— (Note that in this book Grassé supports evolution, attributing it to Lamarckian rather than Darwinian mechanisms.)
To customs and beliefs, the very ones we hold sacred, sociology ruthlessly attaches the adjective 'arbitrary'.
Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron— Politics and History (1971)
For insight into human affairs I turn to stories and poems rather than to sociology. This is the result of my upbringing and background.Iamnot abletomakeuse of the wisdom of the sociologists because I do not speak their language.
— 1979 Disturbing the Universe, ch.1.
With all allowance made for Marx's erudition and his historic impact upon the social sciences, especially sociology, it is as an art united with prophecy, virtually religious prophecy, that Marxism survives.
Robert Nisbet— 1976 Sociology as an Art Form, ch.5.
Myth does not set out to give lessons in natural science any more than in morals or sociology.
françois-bernard mâche— Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion
The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.
russell baker— "Come Back, Dizzy" (p.187)
Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.
kenneth boulding— p. 252, quoted in Leonard Silk (1976) The Economists. New York: Basic Books. p. 208
I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science).
lloyd demause— Ch. 2, ibid.
There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.
Émile durkheim— Debate on Explanation in History and Sociology (1908)
Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.
Harold Rosenberg— "Olitski, Kelly, Hamliton: Dogma and Talent" (p. 62)
For Jews, the Messiah has never come; for Christians, He has come but once; for modern man, He appears and disappears with increasing rapidity. The saviors of modern man, the "scientists" who promise salvation through the "discoveries" of ethology and sociology, psychology and psychiatry, and all the other bogus religions, issue forth periodically, as if selected by some Messiah-of-the-Month Club.
thomas szasz— "Science and Scientism", p. 116
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a distinguished biologist, occupies an important position in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. His contributions went beyond biology, and extended to psychology, psychiatry, sociology, cybernetics , history and philosophy. Some of his admirers even believe that von Bertalanffy's general systems theory could provide a conceptual framework for all these disciplines.
— p. 2 (Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) (1989))
The fear that seeing naked people in some way harms children is not supported, however, by academic research. The small handful of studies on this topic in psychology and sociology have shown, instead, that children reared in an atmosphere containing family social nudity may benefit from the practice. If this is true, then proposed laws outlawing either social nudity in the home or children's participation at naturist (or nudist) settings are unjustified.
— Mark Storey in Children, Social Nudity and Scholarly Study
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a distinguished biologist, occupies an important position in the intellectual history of the twentieth century. His contributions went beyond biology, and extended to psychology, psychiatry, sociology, cybernetics , history and philosophy. Some of his admirers even believe that von Bertalanffy's general systems theory could provide a conceptual framework for all these disciplines.
— Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1989). Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972): A Pioneer of General Systems Theory. Working paper Feb 1989. p.2
Political science is governed by five myths: (1) that it studies politics ; (2) that it is scientific; (3) that it is possible to study politics separated off from economics , sociology , psychology and history ; (4) that the state in our democratic capitalist society is politically neutral, i.e. available as a set of institutions and mechanisms to whatever group wins the election ; and (5) that political science, as a discipline , advances the cause of democracy .
— Bertell Ollman, in What Is Political Science? What Should It Be?, New York University (NYU)
Biology is not physics , because organisms are such complex physical objects, and sociology is not biology because human societies are made by self-conscious organisms. By pretending to a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only engender the scorn of natural scientists and the cynicism of the humanists.
— Richard Lewontin (1995) "Sex, Lies, and Social Science" in New York Review of Books (4/20/95)
During the 1950s and 1960s most of the work which was called cybernetics tended to focus on control systems in engineering or on applications of the concept of feedback in fields ranging from mathematics to sociology. At the 1970 meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics in Philadelphia Heinz von Foerster sought to redirect attention to the original interests which had led to the founding of the field of cybernetics. In a paper titled "Cybernetics of Cybernetics" he made a distinction between first order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observed systems, and second order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observing systems.
— Stuart A. Umpleby (1991) "Strategies for Winning Acceptance of Second Order Cybernetics." In George E. Lasker, et al. (eds.) Advances in Human Systems and Information Technologies. Windsor, Canada: International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, 1992. pp. 97-196. (paper)
sociology is a new science concerning itself not with esoteric matters outside the comprehension of the layman, as the older sciences do, but with the ordinary affairs of ordinary people. This seems to engender in those who write about it a feeling that the lack of anyabstruseness in their subject matter demands a compensatoryabstruseness in their language. 365
Sir Ernest Arthur Gowers— 1965 'Sociologese', in H F Fowler A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (2nd rev edn).
sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society.
AlbionW Small— 1894 An Introduction to the Study of Society (with George E Vincent,1894).
sociology seems to have missed every intellectually promising boat in the last half century.
Pierre L van den Berghe— 'From the Popocatepetl to the Limpopo', collected in Bennett Berger (ed), Authors of their Own Lives (1990).
After Montesquieu, the next great addition to sociology (which is the term I may be allowed to invent to designate Social Physics) was made by Condorcet, proceeding on the views suggested by his illustrious friend Turgot.
auguste comte— The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (1853), Book VI: Social Physics, Ch. II: Principle Philosophical Attempts to Constitute a Social System
sociology is the science which has the most methods and the least results.
— Henri Poincaré (1908) Science and Method Part I. Ch. 1 : The Selection of Facts, p. 19
