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Critical Sociology
Critical sociology is an approach to studying society, informed by historical materialism,
which seeks to make problematic existing social relations in order to uncover the underlying
structural explanations for those relations. As such, it can be applied to all areas of
sociological inquiry and is not the study of any subfields within sociology. In each of these
areas, we can identify a critical sociology, one that takes to task the underlying assumption of
the corresponding mainstream sociology. Advocates of a critical sociology argue that
mainstream sociology is, broadly stated, a catalog of what is expected and an explanation for
how individuals act when functioning outside those expectations. For critical sociologists, the
key is how the norms are defined and what constitutes actions by individuals who violate
norms. Where mainstream sociology would see a plane flying out of formation, critical
sociology asks whether or not the formation is flying on course, and who or what determines
the shape and course of that formation in the first place.
There are two very important areas of sociological research taken for granted at present, but
which can easily be identified as the product of a critical sociological lens. The first is the
emergence of class as a research concept, and while still contentious on some level a classbased analysis of society is as important as one rooted in an understanding of social
stratification. In the class model of society, individuals find themselves in structural positions,
and the consequent ability to improve one's social and economic standing is constrained by
the limitations of that structure. Whereas social stratification literature situates each individual
along a continuum within society, the class-based literature is more concerned with how
structural barriers impede progress regardless of individual efforts. This has led to the social
and political activism directed at those political and social institutions reproducing the
inequities within society.
The second major contribution of critical sociology is how we understand economic
development and the relationship between advanced industrial nations and the rest of the
developing world. Theories of modernization were rooted in an understanding of development
based on a premise that all nations must undergo stages of economic and social development
much like that experienced by advanced capitalist nations. Scholars focused on the lack of
efficient bureaucratic structures, incentive mechanisms, rational markets, and labor mobility
as the basis for failed or lagging national development. But critical sociologists posited a set
of theories about the relationship between developing nonindustrial nations and the capitalist
core, challenged the notion of a teleological path to progress, and pointed out that developing
nations were harmed by (and not lagging) the more developed nations. This research gave rise
to discussions of imperialism, the nature of democracy and development, and explorations
into the means by which advanced nations impose bureaucratic solutions (via agencies like
the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund) or intervene politically and militarily to
ensure regimes and economies favorable to advanced capitalist countries rather than
promoting independent economic and social development.
In general, critical sociology can be characterized in two ways. First, those writing in the
critical sociology tradition are generally opposed to functional explanations of how society
works. The second form of critical sociology is more parochial, and emerges out of the
tradition of radical political economy, a tradition that looks more carefully at why society is
designed to generate bad outcomes for many people rather than understanding how bad
outcomes occur in society. While early critical sociology was rooted in the traditions
characterized as Marxism, critical sociology more generally extends beyond the material
concerns of scholars writing in that tradition and embraces questions of power writ large, the
importance of culture, and the nature of social relationships that are not rooted in its material
conditions (e.g., racism and sexism).
Both strands of critical sociology emerge out of the intellectual agenda of critical theory,
although sociologists have expanded the range and scope of inquiry beyond that which is
most commonly associated with critical theorists. The remainder of this chapter briefly
reviews the origins and current directions of critical sociology. In the next section, I explore
the historical roots of the discipline with respect to mainstream sociology. This is followed by
a discussion of the emergence of critical theory and its role in defining the nature of critical
sociology. In the second section, I identify some research within the critical sociology
tradition, the importance of this research, and its impact on the theory and practice of
sociology. In the final section, I offer some insight into the areas of inquiry that will serve as
the focal point of future critical sociology research.
rational action, and order help us understand how economic rationality must follow the
political rationality reflected in the form of the nation-state. Rules of political action give way
to rules of economic actionindeed, the former paves the way for the latter in the forms of
commercial law, reliable enforcement of contracts, predictable outcomes of the interaction of
individuals in society as they seek economic prosperity. While capitalism represented great
wealth and prosperity, economic advances occur only when a society has developed the social
and political conditions necessary for the orderly and free exchange of the factors of
production.
The sociology that took hold by the end of the nineteenth century was related to the
emergence of capitalism. Weber's work on religion, rationalization, and bureaucracy helped
shape the discipline. Talcott Parsons's translation of Weber's work ([1904] 1930) added a
dimension of functionalism in outcomesthat is, the social reality reflects social needs as
observed. Inequality and inequities arising in capitalism have as much if not more to do with
individual failing rather than structural impediments to the rational order of events or
actions. While Weber gave us a model of society that worked toward efficient operation,
Parsons helped define this operation as a natural state of events and identified the capitalist
system of social relations as the natural evolution of society.
Thus, capitalist society was the natural condition, and sociology represented the science for
understanding how society operated (and implicitly within the perspective that problems in
society were the result of individual failure), which in turn gave rise to a critical and
oppositional voice within sociology. Critical sociology emerged to challenge that view
(Quinney 1979) and to demonstrate that social inequality was not an aberration but itself the
normal outcome of a system predicated on power relationships and competing visions of
social organization, though, as Luhmann (1994) reminds us, we must be ever mindful of how
theory structures the way we examine the world. Levine (2004) outlines some of the political
challenges faced by oppositional voices as they emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and the
intellectual developments leading to a critical sociological agenda. A discussion of the
intellectual tradition that underpins this critical analysis follows.
theory was to situate knowledge within the set of social realities and values of society for the
purpose of challenging and negating the status quo.
The motivation of the philosophical impulse we have come to understand as critical theory
was, in large part, the result of scholars working in what has collectively been called the
Frankfurt School (see, e.g., Bauman 1976) who argued that science and technology had
become the new religion of capitalist society (see Rockwell 2004 for the Hegelian roots of
Marx's thinking and its role in the development of critical theory). Much as Marx wrote about
the reification of commodities, that is, the commodity became divorced from its producer and
thereby gained value in its own right, so too have knowledge and culture become objects
with their own standing rather than part of the society that created them.
The process of reification of culture created a new form of culture that undermined the
potential for revolutionary action. Moreover, according to Marx, this process of reification
applies to all human experience. As a result, advances of capitalism into the twentieth century
closed off the possibility of critical thought as intellectual work became dominated by a
fetishism of facts. This positivism accorded facts an illusionary objectivity and
independence from the social relations in which they were produced (see Ray 1990). The
resulting agenda in the period between the two world wars and the development and
emergence of European fascism (preceded as it were by the proletarian revolution in Russia,
but the defeat of all other revolutionary worker movements in Europe), was one of unpacking
the relationship between the development of the capitalist system and the potential for
enlightened and emancipatory social change. As Ray (1990) points out, The project of
Critical Theory has been to develop ways of thinking so subversive of dominant legitimations,
that to understand them is to resist them (p. xviii). Critical theory built on Marx's material
analysis and made important inroads into the role of culture and science in the reproduction of
these reactionary ideologies (Scott 1978).
relationship of those events to current behavior and sows the seeds of missing the critical
dimensions of contemporary social relations. As he writes about Adam Smith, What Adam
Smith, in the true eighteenth-century manner, puts in the prehistoric period, the period
preceding history, is rather a product of history (Marx 1973:156). Simply put, Marx argues
that in Smith's search for the essence of the modern economy he sets aside the social
relationships that gave rise to that modern economy.
Smith focuses on explaining the particular operation of capitalism, production, and the
creation of wealth, but for Marx that analysis is doomed by Smith's failure to understand the
ties to precapitalist production. Differentiating use value from exchange value, Marx argues
that both always existed so long as humanity exerted itself with regard to nature (i.e., trying to
change nature through production) but the particular aspect of contemporary (i.e., capitalist)
social relations is precisely the history of how exchange values become appropriated by some,
and through that appropriation some members of society exert control and power over others
in society. Marx (1973) goes on to explain the connection between history and material
reality:
Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social
forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated
points. Personal independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second
great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of allround needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on
the universal development of individual and on their subordination of their communal, social
productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage. The second stage creates the conditions
for the third. Patriarchal as well as ancient conditions (feudal also) thus disintegrate with the
development of commerce, of luxury, of money, of exchange value, while modern society
arises and grows in the same measure. (P. 158)
Out of this development, according to Marx, all other social, political, and ideological
institutions and perspectives emerge, each subject to the requirement of the material
conditions dominant in any era and each subject to transformation as those material conditions
change. It is a mistake, as many have done, to reduce Marx to an economic determinist
analysis of society even as Marx focuses on the material relationships extant within society.
Rather, critical sociologists, following Marx and critical theorists, argue that one cannot
understand the complex relationship between what Marx calls the base and superstructure
the material reality of how society organizes production and the complex set of social,
political, and ideological institutions that govern and maintain that social organization of
productionunless one also understands the historically specific forces that drive the
emergence of contemporary society.
Unlike mainstream sociology, which takes society as given, tries to catalog its various
activities and relationships (albeit an important task in its own right), and measures progress
toward some naturally determined ideal, critical sociologists take society's existing
relationships as both the product of its past and the source of its futureand it is only through
proper understanding of how society came to be will we be able to address how to influence
change toward a more progressive and positive vision for the future. To paraphrase Marx,
mainstream sociologists have only to interpret the world; the point for critical sociologists is
to change it. It is through the historical materialism of critical sociology that an understanding
of how society operates is possible, leading to a program for change.
Why, she then asks, does critical theory (represented in the writing of Habermas) fail to
examine or even acknowledge the domination of females by males? Following what might
broadly be called a critical sociology, Fraser explores the problem of capitalist exploitation
and offers us the distinction between public and private spheres as a way of grasping the
nature of gender inequality. Gender-based workplace inequality persists and takes on new
forms (see Roberts 2004 and the other essays in Gottfried and Reese 2004). In a similar vein,
scholars brought questions of race as well as gender to bear (HillCollins 1990) as they took
radical and mainstream scholarship to task for its primary focus on material conditions, class
structure, and capitalism as an economic system.
The importance of a class versus status approach to the problems of the day can be seen in the
ongoing discussion of the importance and impact of race in our society. In this important work
on the consequence of racial inequality, Wilson (1978) articulates an argument that African
Americans suffer because they are trapped in the lowest strata of our society. A history of past
oppression and unequal treatment due to the scourge of racism and slavery may explain the
underlying basis for their status, but it is not an explanation for the continued poverty they
face. Wilson looks instead to a failure of African Americans to secure the necessary attributes
that accounts for their lower status. The legacy of racism is economic distress and persistent
poverty, but the solution cannot lie simply with legislation outlawing racism. For Wilson,
there is a declining significance of race, and it is the creation of an emergent middle class
(more accurately, a middle-income strata) that will alleviate the plight of African Americans.
In response, Marable (1983) offers a class-based analysis of the African American experience,
and much as Gunder Frank did with developing countries Marable posits a competing theory
of failed economic growth and persistent poverty as the result of capitalist social
development. It is the lack of control over the means of production and their class position
that relegates African Americans to the bottom layers of society. Race helps explain why
African Americans fill the ranks of society's poor, but it is the fundamental relationships
within capitalism that keep working people poor. No significant change will occur as the
result of the creation of an African American middle class in much the same way that the
emergence of a middle class writ large cannot alleviate the struggles of working people
everywhere.
The debate continues, and much the same way that Hartmann raised concerns about whether a
purely Marxist analysis can get to the roots of gender-based social inequality, critics look at
the problem of race in the U.S. society. A recent example is Leonardo's (2004) inquiry about
whether there may well be an unhappy marriage of Marxism and race theory, in this case as it
pertains to our understanding of why educational policy seems to regularly fail inner-city
minority children. Leonardo posits that discussions looking mainly at the way education
reproduce class positions (Davies 1995) fail to take into account the decidedly racial pattern
of low performance, but race-based explanations are not enough when one considers rural
poverty and low educational attainment in the society as a whole.
Although Marxist analysis remains important, critical sociology has moved well past its roots
as primarily a critique of the social order in the exploration of extant power relationships
existing within a society organized under the principles of capitalist social relations. The state
of contemporary critical sociology is strong; the topics explored are increasing broad as
scholars revisit old themes of colonialism and the origins of European capitalism (von der
Heydt-Coca 2005), education under a changing capitalist system (Monahan 2005), the role of
investigation and analysis, uncover the mechanisms that perpetuate these differences, and
expose the social order that give license to some segment of society to benefit at the expense
of the rest of society, there will always be a critical sociology.
The important work of Ulrich Beck (1992) has pointed out that even as economic growth of
the economy overall reaches record levels (true throughout the 1990s), individuals were
increasingly uncertain and uncomfortable with their status in society. Firms gradually moved
away from models of employee loyalty leading to lifetime employment and toward a pattern
of fluid labor forces laid off and hired back as the market and product cycles demanded. As
the national economy was increasingly enmeshed in a global economy, workers are pressed to
be more flexible in order for the firm to be more competitive. Young people especially look
for new models for their work lives, coming under increasing pressure as a result of the
absence of a path for their future (Powell and Edwards 2003). For most workers that means
less pay, loss of benefits, and greater insecurity. Critical sociology will provide a window into
how to understand these changes and how to mobilize for greater security and economic
stability.
Entry Citation:
"Critical Sociology." 21st Century Sociology. 2006. SAGE Publications. 16 Mar. 2009.
<http://www.sage-ereference.com/sociology/Article_n60.html>.
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