who can claim to have said in advance that, say, the economy of the Soviet Union would collapse sooner or later, or the British Labour Party would be out of power for several general elections after 1979, or a resurgent Islam would pose an increasing threat to the political stability of the Arab states. But for a guess to be turned into a prediction, the conditions which, if they hold good, will produce the predicted outcome at the predicted time and place have to be specified. And if you think that’s easy to do, just give it a try. An article in the journal Contention in the issue for the winter of 1993 by Jack B. Goldstone is called ‘Predicting Revolutions: why we could (and should) have foreseen the Revolutions of 1989–91 in the USSR and Eastern Europe’.7 So maybe you could, Jack. And if you could, you should. But you didn’t.
Nobody is going to pretend that the most brilliant economist who ever lived could predict what the prices are going to be on the New York Stock Exchange a year ahead. Just imagine what would be happening on the traders’ screens if a consortium of investors somewhere had a software package that could do that for them! But economists may be able to predict the conditions under which commodity prices will rise or the marginal cost of a product’s entry into a new market will fall, and even (maybe) the conditions under which the stock market will move up or down in the short term. Similarly, not even the most brilliant political scientist who ever lived could predict what the distribution of seats will be in the British House of Commons or the American Congress in fifty years’ time. But political scientists armed with the results of sample surveys are quite good at predicting the outcome of a general election to within one or two per cent of the popular vote at the start of the campaign. Even sociologists may succeed in making some predictions which aren’t just guesses. But could any sociologist have predicted when and how the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of Islam, the Spanish conquest of what thereby came to be known as ‘Hispanic’ America, or the evolution of industrial capitalism out of agricultural feudalism were going to happen? Of course not – no more than a biologist surveying the world five million years ago, when our ancestors were first diverging, genetically speaking, from the chimps, could have predicted when and how it would one day come to be dominated by Homo sapiens, i.e. us.
This may seem to imply that the more specialized social sciences gain their apparent ability to frame more accurate predictions at the price of increasing remoteness from the recalcitrant facts of actual social behaviour. What, for example, do economists have to say about buyers of luxury goods who knowingly pay more for less? What do political scientists have to say about voters who are motivated entirely by the candidate’s looks? But there is nothing inherently inexplicable about decisions like these, and nothing in the explanations of the resulting behaviour put forward by economists and political scientists which is incompatible with anything said in this chapter. This book will touch on the specialized social sciences only in passing. But that doesn’t mean that they have less interesting things to say about human social behaviour than sociology itself. What is ‘interesting’ is, to be sure, a subjective matter which we all have to settle for ourselves. But many practitioners of many different social sciences have produced explanations of patterns of human social behaviour which are much more than abstract constructions about idealized human beings and which have withstood attempted refutation just as well as anything sociologists have found out about groups, communities, institutions and societies as such. Besides, we sociologists need all the help we can get, from biologists, psychologists, historians and even philosophers no less than from practitioners of the specialized social sciences whose concerns overlap with our own.
One last preliminary point. I hope that no reader of this paragraph will dispute that explanations of why the world is as it is are logically independent of value-judgements about whether the state of the world is good or bad. If it’s true that the Normans conquered England in 1066 because King Harold was killed by an arrow in his eye at the Battle of Hastings, the conclusion stands whether or not you or anybody else thinks that the Norman Conquest was a good (or bad) thing. But readers of sociology books often find that they are being treated to both. Nor should this come as a surprise. Sociologists, like everybody else, have and can’t help having views of their own about the kinds of institutions, forms of social behaviour, and performances of individual roles which are to be admired or deplored, and their approaches to the study of them may well be influenced by those views. But that makes no difference to the validity of their competing explanations of why human groups, communities, institutions and societies are as they are, any more than the moral, political or aesthetic values of geologists make a difference to the validity (or not) of their competing explanations of why the continents and oceans of the earth are as they are. True, nineteenth-century geologists were influenced, among other things, by their different interpretations of the Book of Genesis. True, too, you can and probably do have a view about the morality of capitalism which you can hardly have about the morality of continental drift. But whether the causes and consequences of capitalism are what, according to your moral, political or religious views, you would wish them to be is something you must decide for yourself on other grounds. And if somebody says, ‘But look at how much sociological writing is blatantly biased against (or in favour of) capitalism (or socialism)!’, the answer is: ‘No doubt; but the fact that bias of this kind can be detected is itself a conclusive demonstration that the author’s values are logically distinct from the hypotheses of cause and effect of whose validity the same author is trying to persuade you as well.’
That being so, it comes as something of a surprise (at least to me) to find a distinguished British historian of medicine, Professor Roy Porter, quoted by the Times Higher Education Supplement in 1995 as saying that he can’t help feeling that the increasing recent success of evolutionary theory is ‘a political project’. But on reflection, I think I know what he means. It is undeniably true of science, both natural and social, that it can have political consequences and that its practitioners may themselves have political motives. Darwinian theory has been used, or rather misused, for political purposes, and if you are worried that the discoveries of either natural or social science may be invoked in furtherance of ends which you deplore you are fully entitled to wish that scientists would stop trying to make them. But that does nothing to undermine their claims to be doing science. On the contrary: it is when their findings do succeed in withstanding attempted refutation that their possible political uses become a threat to those with whose interests and purposes they conflict. When in the early seventeenth century the Vatican was getting uptight about Galileo and his telescope, the Pope’s advisers might very well have said to him: ‘Watch out, Your Holiness! This newfangled astronomy is a political project which could seriously damage the reputation of the Church!’ From his and their point of view, they would have been right to warn him. The Church’s traditional monopoly of the secrets of the universe was indeed under attack. But Jupiter’s moons were there to be seen through Galileo’s telescope whether the Vatican liked it or not. That was the trouble.
II What Exactly Do You Want to Know?
EVEN BEFORE OUR remote ancestors were in contact with the extinct people whom we now call ‘Neanderthals’, people of one kind, or in one group, or from one territory, have been curious about the behaviour of people other than themselves. Much of the curiosity is about their acquired behaviour: why do they wear such funny hats? how can they bear to eat that meat raw? what on earth are those pictures they’re painting all about? But questions about their imposed behaviour will occur no less readily to trained and untrained observers alike: how do they choose their leaders? what is the distribution of property among them? what are they either required or forbidden to do by the incumbents of roles with the power to see to it that they do?
Herodotus, the so-called ‘father of history’, can at least as plausibly be called the father of sociology. His famous book, written in the mid-fifth century BC, is primarily concerned to narrate the victory of the mainland Greeks over the invading Persians. But it is also a rich and fascinating repository of observations about other peoples, obtained by extensive travel and systematic analysis of oral traditions, eyewitness accounts and physical records. Although he does appear to have believed some things which he shouldn’t, such as that the walls of Babylon