A Prescription for the Malaise
of Social ‘Science’
IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY, the French visionary Auguste Comte proposed a scientific chain of being, ranging from the physical sciences at the bottom up
through biology to the “queen” of sciences,
sociologie, at the top. A science of human so-
cial behavior, Comte contended, could help
humanity make moral and political decisions
and construct more efficient, just governments.
Comte, who spent time in a sanitarium for
mental illness, had admirers—notably John
Stuart Mill—but he was viewed by many con-
temporary thinkers as a crank. He died in 1857
without ever landing a full-time university
post—or indeed any steady employment.
EYE ON SCIENCE
By JOHN HORGAN
I LOVE TELLING OTHERS what’s wrong with them, and the anthropology brou- haha gives me a great excuse to offer a diagnosis of, and prescription for, social
science’s malaise. Clearly, social science has a
split personality. On the one hand you have
social scientists—let’s call them “softies”—
who identify less with physicists and chemists
than with scholars in the humanities. Stevens
Institute of Technology, where I teach, is a
case in point: Social science and psychology
fall within the purview of the College of Arts
and Letters, which also encompasses philosophy, history, literature, music, and my own
humble discipline, journalism.
As far as I can tell, none of my social-
science colleagues seethe with resentment
at being lumped together with the humani-
ties folks, who are, after all, a fun bunch. But
other social scientists, “hardies,” are desper-
ately trying to sidle up to the harder sciences.
Softies and hardies have been fighting for
as long as I can remember. In 1975, for ex-
ample, the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson
contended in his blockbuster Sociobiology that
social science would only become truly sci-
entific by embracing evolutionary theory and
genetics. Horrified softies denounced socio-
biology as a throwback to social Darwinism
and eugenics, two of the most noxious social
applications of science.
GEOFFREY MOSS FOR THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
tems—people—are all different from each
other; each person who has ever lived is
unique in ways that are not trivial but essential to our humanity. Each individual
mind also keeps changing in response to new
experiences—reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
watching Apocalypse Now, banging your head
on the ice while playing pond hockey, eating
mushrooms in Central Park, kissing a co-worker at the office Christmas party, having a
baby, losing a job. Imagine how hard physics
would be if every electron were the unique
product of its entire history.
Societies also vary markedly across space
and time. France in 2011 is radically different
than it was in Comte’s era. The United States
today is quite different than it was a century,
a decade, a year, or even a month ago. Just
think of how President Obama’s election,
the Tea Party uprising, and the WikiLeaks
revelations have altered our society. Social
scientists are chasing a moving target, one
they can never catch. As the anthropologist
Clifford Geertz, the archetypal softy, wrote,
social scientists can construct only “hindsight
accounts of the connectedness of things that
B4 THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
FEBRUARY 18, 2011
