Why We All Need Sociology

Last month, the Wall Street Journal published an article asking whether it is now time to “liquidate” sociology, the academic study of human societies. As many readers know, charges of this sort have become common recently. Conspicuous in this regard are the actions of the governor and legislature of Florida, which removed sociology as a core curriculum requirement in its state university system.

Sociology, some argue, has been the primary source for public commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It has championed rights for historically mistreated groups like racial and ethnic minorities, women, and gay people. According to detractors, sociologists are overly sensitive to the challenges faced by immigrants, the poor, people accused of crimes, and the disabled. The broader public, critics conclude, does not wish to be morally aroused in this way.

At a time like this, it’s important to explain why sociology remains important, not just as a legitimate focus of scientific investigation but as a key part of people’s general education. This is especially critical in a country like the United States, which tends to champion individual, even psychological, accounts of the human condition.

Many readers have taken sociology courses in school and have their own understandings of that discipline. The rest should know that sociology is the study of the patterns, problems, and prospects of human relationships. If sociology has a credo, it is that people are profoundly influenced, even defined, by their involvement with other people. Those social connections are of different kinds and exist at different levels of “social structure.” To be human is to be set amidst these contexts.

Although sociology is mostly a descriptive and explanatory science—What causes crime rates to go up and down? How do population movements affect city services? Why do so many of us get divorced?—I restate here that sociologists also are interested in the problems of societies and in the possibilities for better ways of addressing these. Nearly 200 years ago, French philosopher Auguste Comte envisioned sociology as a “queen of the sciences” which comprehended and coordinated more specialized ways of studying human behavior. Might there be “laws” of social functioning? Can the good society be “engineered”?

Few sociologists today support Comte’s grand vision. However, most take their responsibilities seriously and do more than describe social patterns. In the U.S., sociology departments arose during the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, and sociology has always been more popular during liberal decades like the 1960s. To be sure, there have been conservative sociologists, including some who advocated Social Darwinism. But Progressivism remains a dominant commitment for most who practice that discipline.

Whatever one’s political or moral inclinations, why should any of us study sociology, or at least think in sociological terms? Consider below some of the levels of social structure I mentioned above.

Self or identity

Fundamental to sociology is the idea that people are comprehended in terms of socially recognized designations or “labels.” Many of these identity tags we ourselves accept as key features of who we are. Pointedly, those designations—being tall, from New Jersey, good at pickleball, employed at a grocery store, and so forth—only have meaning because they locate us in a specific universe of people. Some people share our trait; others don’t. At any rate, we operate socially and experience the world as collections of these identity referents.

Psychologists focus more on personality traits, our individual tendencies to think, feel, and behave in certain ways. Sociologists stress the impact of public descriptions and the fact that people commonly reject the labels others give them.

Interpersonal relationships

However important our individual thoughts and behaviors may be, we do not create our lives through private assertions. We live “in company” with others. Such people check our more unusual impulses; they give us our values; they protect us and grant us status; they provide places to work and rest. At best, they love and nurture us.

Psychologists emphasize our own experiences in these relationships—perhaps with friends, family members, or work colleagues. Sociologists stress the character of those relationships instead. To what extent are current difficulties the result of patterns that other people shape as much as we do?

Groups and organizations

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Families are not collections of one-on-one relationships. Neither is that book club nor Thursday poker game we belong to. Instead, groups are entities of their own sorts. They have histories, membership criteria, and rules for operation. They have ranking systems and procedures for disciplining their members. Like individuals, they begin, grow, dwindle, and die.

Ordinarily larger and more abstract, organizations are formal frameworks for human participation. Some exist as vast, transpersonal (even transnational) bureaucracies with sharply defined goals, rules, roles, and chains of command. Commonly, sociologists are thought of as people who study these schools, churches, military units, hospitals, businesses, labor unions, and the like. Inevitably, such inquiries lead to ideas about how such units might be organized differently.

Social institutions

Every society confronts basic issues pertinent to human survival and establishes ways of responding to these. In that light, economies provide needed goods and services, governments regulate issues of social protection and coordination, families manage domestic life and child development. There are systems addressing healthcare, education, religion, and recreation as well. Commonly, these patterns exist as society-wide frameworks. They are enforced by laws and customs and given stability by thousands of organizations that operate on those terms.

Pointedly, the task of sociology is to study these vast, historically shifting arrangements, to point out problematic elements, and to suggest modifications to those lifeways. Not surprisingly, sociology’s detractors see these recommendations as disruptive and impertinent.

Community and society

Historically, people have lived together geographically, in physically situated places where they conduct their rounds of existence. Each day features hundreds of encounters with similarly located others, as we travel to schools, jobs, stores, medical centers, and the like. We think of ourselves as living in neighborhoods, communities, cities, and countries; and those identities may be reinforced by governmental regulations.

In such circumstances of shared living, all the above levels of social structure come into play. Other local people—perhaps the hardware store clerk or dentist—make our accustomed way of life possible. The sociologist’s task is to describe these communities, with their distinctive mixes of occupations, social classes, ethnic identities, religions, and beliefs.

It is said that our online, highly traveled world is destroying those old confinements of “place.” New communities—featuring new interests and loyalties—are emerging. Understanding those new alignments is also sociology’s task.

Sociology will and should have its critics, particularly if the historic commitments of the discipline become too narrowly focused and moral philosophizing overwhelms patient analysis. But all of us should be clear that an absence of sociology means a society without far-reaching institutional analysis, where the deeper meanings of our collective life go unexamined. In a worst-case scenario, poorly informed individuals stand naked before hugely configured, powerful organizations of government and business. Populations retreat into the forms of privatism these organizations permit. In counterpoint, sociology’s purpose is to educate people about better possibilities for living.