that the conceptual distinction between conceptual and empirical questions is ‘simply empirical’. Likewise, when textbooks on the philosophy of social science correctly insist that social scientists themselves are both its subjects and its objects, who wants to say otherwise? The question is: what follows? And the answer is that although social scientists are on that account exposed to the risk of making mistakes of a kind which doesn’t arise at all in the study of inanimate nature, it doesn’t prevent them from formulating explanatory hypotheses about their own and other people’s behaviour which can be tested by the same criteria of validity. Empirical sociologists talking about facts and their causes are apt to be denounced by their more philosophically minded colleagues as ‘positivists’. By this, the anti-positivists usually mean to imply a nefarious commitment to an ideology of science which denies the truism that the practice of science raises some genuinely philosophical issues. But when they come to attack the empiricists’ specific conclusions, you can bet that they will tacitly acknowledge the existence of empirical criteria by which observations of, and hypotheses about, patterns of human social behaviour stand and fall. Or if they persist in maintaining that all ‘social facts’ are ‘ideological constructions’, you need merely ask them whether, if charged by a court of law with a murder committed by somebody else, they would accept that their innocence was only an ideological construction (which the concept of ‘murder’ as an act of intentional, wrongful killing self-evidently is), and not in any sense a ‘fact’.
There is, to be sure, nothing self-contradictory in doing both. All students of human social behaviour, whatever label they attach to themselves, are free to draw on whatever empirical observations they like in order to persuade their readers to share their personal convictions about the human condition, the meaning of history, the phenomenology of the life-world, the postmodern experience, the contradictions of rationality, the dualism of knowledge and action, the existential dilemma, the ontology of social life, the paradox of reflexive subjectivity, and so on and so forth. The sociologists of the kind whom their opponents denounce as ‘positivists’ are apt to be no less contemptuous of those whom they in their turn denounce as practitioners of ‘substitute religion’. But each is as legitimate an intellectual activity as the other. The two are not in competition except in the trivial sense that professors giving lectures of the one kind may be competing for student audiences with professors giving lectures of the other. One of the most influential contemporary practitioners of ‘substitute religion’ is the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whose ambition (if I understand him correctly) is to formulate the ideal conditions under which rational human beings could communicate with each other free of the constraints imposed by ‘positivist’ social theory and the social institutions which it reflects. It is, in my judgement, a heroic but ultimately self-defeating intellectual enterprise. But whether my judgement is right or wrong, it’s an enterprise as fundamentally different as Nietzsche’s is from seeking first to distinguish and then to explain the different patterns of human social behaviour to be found in the historical and ethnographic record and then, if the researcher is so minded, to describe what they have been like, subjectively speaking, for the people whose patterns of behaviour they are. The only kind of philosophical argument to which this book stands categorically opposed is one which seeks to deny that empirical sociology is possible at all. But that sort of argument is best countered simply by doing what the sceptic says can’t be done; and, as I’ve hinted already, you will find even the most anti-positivist practitioners of substitute religion doing it too, where and when it bolsters their arguments of the other kind.
IF SOCIOLOGY IS AS OLD as Herodotus and Aristotle – to say nothing of Herodotus’s Chinese contemporary K’ung Fu Tzu, otherwise known as Confucius – you may well wonder why it has taken so long to get as far as it has. But the same could be said about many other branches of science. Although mankind’s attempts to make sense of both the natural and the social world go back for many thousands of years, it’s remarkable how recent is the dramatic increase in knowledge which has transformed the world and the way we live in it. How and why it has happened is itself a controversial question. But the fact remains that physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and sociology as they are now understood and practised are all a product of the past couple of centuries or less.
This isn’t to say that earlier ideas about the workings of the social as well as the natural world were all mistaken. Aristotle had some good ones, not least about the relationship within a society between political stability and the relative size of its middle class – a hypothesis lent additional support as recently as 1996 by evidence set out in an article published in the Journal of Economic Growth.1 So did the fourteenth-century Islamic political theorist Ibn Kaldun, who detected in the societies which he studied a recurrent tendency for them to oscillate between government by egalitarian warriors from the desert and hierarchical bureaucrats in the towns. So did Machiavelli, whose insights into the pursuit of power and the means of its retention by the rulers of the city-states of late Renaissance Italy have made his name a part of our everyday vocabulary. But all such ideas were, and were bound to be, relatively parochial in their scope and imprecise in their formulation by the standards of late twentieth-century sociology. The term ‘sociology’ was itself only coined in the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte, who to that extent has to be acknowledged as its founder. But Comte’s writings, for all that he was remarkably prescient about the global impact of industrialization, are nowadays studied closely only by those whose interests lie on the wilder shores of defunct ideas. The sociologists who did most to make the subject into what it still, for the time being, is are Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. It would, I think, be fair to say that there is no serious sociologist now writing who has been untouched by any trace of their influence. But there is something rather odd here. In all sciences the advances made in one generation are likely to be superseded in the next, usually through their absorption into a deeper or more wide-ranging theory. What is striking about these three founding fathers of sociology is how far they all went astray in their quest for the Big Idea.
With Marx, much of the difficulty (but at the same time, much of the reason for his influence) is his fusion of sociological with philosophical argument in precisely the way I had in mind in the concluding paragraphs of Chapter II. Literally thousands of books and articles have been written about the relationship between the ‘scientific’ and the ‘humanistic’ Marx. Nor is that surprising, given the enormous appeal of a doctrine combining a messianic prophecy of a better world with a hypothesis both supporting the prophecy and at the same time endorsing a revolutionary programme to make it come true. But he didn’t get it right. Marx’s belief that the course of human history is determined by conflict between a dominant class and a subordinate class which in due course replaces it led him to predict that the ‘proletariat’ would shortly displace the ‘bourgeoisie’ and usher in a utopian social order about whose details he was notoriously vague. But as a Polish joke was later to put it, ‘Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism it’s the other way round.’ Marx’s sociology was mistaken in three ways. First, he was wrong in supposing that in capitalist industrial societies the progressive immiseration of an expanding proletariat would lead to a revolutionary transfer of power. Second, he was wrong in supposing that where socialist revolutions did come about, they would do so in industrial rather than still predominantly agricultural societies. Third, he was wrong in supposing that in socialist societies class conflict would come to an end. So why, you may well ask, is he still taken so seriously? The short answer is that he has made it impossible for any subsequent sociologist to look at the world and the human societies in it without conceding a more prominent part to class conflict and what he called the ‘social relations of production’ than had been admitted in pre-Marxist sociology. In that sense, and to that extent, ‘we are all Marxists now’.
Max Weber, who was born nearly half a century after Marx, disagreed with the Marxists not because he didn’t recognize the importance of class conflict in human history but because he denied that all other forms of conflict could be reduced to it. Not only did he see political as opposed to economic interests as having their own independent part to play, but he also gave to ideas, and particularly religious ideas,