Abstract
In January 2024, Florida’s Board of Education eliminated the sociology course, ‘Principles of Sociology’ as one of its core requirements for obtaining a general social science education in its college and university system. Florida’s Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz, led the charge, claiming that sociology has been ‘hijacked by left wing activists’ and is a purveyor of ‘woke ideology’. Some within the profession would agree with Diaz, and certainly, many university administrators would as well. Of course, there are varying representations of sociology, and what Diaz and others are targeting is critical sociology and its commitment to the interrogation of power. However, these political dynamics are not new. The history of critical sociology has reflected a similar pattern that it is being played out currently. The ebbs and flows of critical sociology’s place within the discipline, the state and profession’s suppression of it, its resurgence linked to external social and political forces, and its precarious existence within the university have been true of critical sociology since its origins. This paper offers a historical context for better understanding the current attack on the field of sociology and raises the question, what should critical sociologists do about it?
Introduction
In January 2024, Florida’s Board of Governors eliminated the sociology course, ‘Principles of Sociology’, as one of six core requirements for obtaining a general social science education in its college and university system. Under a statutory review process, a committee from the social sciences had recommended adding a history course to the core requirements, and a standing academic and student affairs committee was poised to accept the recommendation and expedite the revision, when Florida’s first Latino Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz Jr. intervened. Diaz exploited the opportunity and recommended that instead of simply adding the new history course, it replace the sociology core requirement. A minion of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Diaz posted on social media his rationale, asserting that ‘sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists’. Further, he emphasized that the role of higher education is to prepare students for high-paying jobs, ‘not woke ideology’ (Hartocollis, 2024). The 17-member governor-appointed board accepted Diaz’s amendment within minutes, and the sociology course was removed as a core requirement for the general education of more than 430,000 students served by the state (Somasundarman and Natanson, 2024).
Two months prior to the vote, the American Sociological Association (ASA) submitted a formal response expressing its opposition to Diaz’s recommendation. The organization’s leadership pointed out that Diaz had violated the integrity of an internal process and that his conception of sociology was politically motivated and wrong. The ASA dusted off its scientific credentials and underscored that sociology ‘is the scientific study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior’. They also emphasized the contribution that sociology makes to general education by adding that the ‘[f]ailure to expose students to the scientific study of the range of issues faced by American citizens would be a failure of civics education’ (ASA, 2023).
National newspapers distributed the story widely. They included the ASA’s defense of the discipline but also picked up on a timely Op-Ed piece by Wayne State University sociologist, Jukka Savolainen, published in the Wall Street Journal on December 7, a month before the vote. Savolainen expressed sympathy with the Board’s decision and provided an internal critique of the field, asserting that it had become ‘brazenly political’ and ‘ideologically corrupt’. He concluded that Florida’s decision should be a wake-up call and that sociology ‘must return to its roots’ (Savolainen, 2023).
Living in the belly of the state educational system, Florida State University sociology professor, Anne Barrett, also penned an Op-Ed article in NEA Today. Barrett asserted that sociology departments were becoming ‘a new target in the culture war’ and, echoing the ASA statement, insisted that students need to ‘learn how to use empirical research and logic to assess the accuracy of claims made about the social world’. However, Barrett went further than the ASA, adding that students ‘also gain skills to critique how power is distributed’ and learn ‘to be engaged citizens, armed with the power to destabilize right-wing policy makers’ agendas’, the vary threats that ‘these regulations seek to neutralize’ (Barrett, 2024).
The opposing op-ed pieces represented an entrenched political polarization both outside and inside of the field of sociology, but this is not new. In fact, the history of sociology in the US has reflected a similar dynamic that it is being played out currently. The ebbs and flow of critical sociology’s place within the discipline, the state and profession’s suppression of it, its resurgence linked to external social and political forces, and its precarious existence within the university have been true of critical sociology since its origins. How could it be otherwise? How could the professed critical study of the organization of power exist within the confines of one of America’s most noble institutions, with its ivy hallmarks of social prestige and honor? Of course, the values and claims to academic freedom, along with hard-won protections of political speech through tenure, have provided opportunities for creating spaces for critical education and research within the university. But these are spaces within the academy that must be continually created, recreated, and defended. Herein lies the contradiction and the threat posed by critical sociology within the university, and it is this contradiction and threat that the discipline of sociology has been contending with for more than a century. The historical sketch provided here is intended to offer a context for better understanding the right-wing attack on the field of sociology and to raise the question, what should critical sociologists do about it?
The Origins of US Sociology
The first part of the 20th century was a period of chaos and crises, which provided sorely needed analyses of the organization and exercise of power and domination. Mass immigration, urbanization, racialization, industrialization, and patriarchy set the historical stage that exhibited labor radicalism and the brutal state repression of radical unions, Jim Crow and the Great Migration, lynching, white mob-initiated race riots, women’s suffrage, and anti-war pacifism. This social and political turbulence fostered critical thought and practice that was rigorously and systematically engaged by scholars like W.E.B. DuBois, Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rosa Luxemburg, Anna Julia Cooper, and others. At the time of the birth and institutionalization of the new discipline of sociology in the university, these ideas could have provided a foundation for critical sociology, but instead, they became, in the words of Aldon Morris, ‘the path not taken’ (Morris Aldon, 2015).
The center of early sociology at the University of Chicago illustrates the marginalization of critical sociology during this time. As a burgeoning field of study, sociology was anxious to find its place in the university as a science alongside the more established natural sciences. Further, with Standard Oil as the largest benefactor, the University of Chicago was launched by corporate elites who intended to create an academic establishment that competed with prominent colleges in the East and cultivated a more administratively efficient and profitable modern city. The board of directors of the university represented these interests and under the leadership of President Charles Judson (from 1906 to 1918) removed professors considered ‘threats to the community’, especially those opposed to the war and considered unpatriotic (Deegan, 1988). Free speech was not a revered ideal of the university at the time, and tenure was several years off in the future. The university fired professors at will and placed the new profession of sociology under scrutiny as it attempted to establish its legitimacy in the university.
With only a few exceptions, sociology stayed out of the corporate firing line by adopting a corporate-liberal form of sociology (Feagin and Vera, 2008). One important exception was the highly publicized Bemis Affair. Edward Bemis was a socialist who had trained as a political economist and sociologist under Richard Ely. A frequent visitor at Hull House, Bemis taught in the University Extension and Political Economy department at the University of Chicago. Bemis assigned readings from socialists in his class and spoke out in favor of the Pullman Strike of 1894. The director of the program had demanded his dismissal from the department as early as the summer of 1893, at the time that Bemis joined the sociology department. He was formally terminated in 1895 without the support of Department Chair Albion Small. According to Mary Jo Deegan (1988), Small had communicated support of Bemis publicly but had privately written a letter denouncing him as ‘incompetent’. In many ways, this represented the vulnerability of the newly established department at the university. Deegan (1988: 173) writes: ‘Repeatedly, Small appears as a liberal whose behavior was subverted by his conservative allegiance to the administration and his search for academic “legitimacy”’. The dismissal of Bemis and other professors whose politics ran afoul of university leadership around the turn of the century would lead to the origins of the American Association of University Professors in 1915 (Metzger, 1955).
The politics of sociology departments at the time, however, were not only about their vulnerability in the university but were also theoretically and politically derived. Greatly influenced by Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary ideas, early sociologists nonetheless rejected his free-market principles and instead advanced a liberal reformulation of Social Darwinism that provided a role for state intervention and sociological theory with the prospects for expediting evolutionary developments in a presumably enlightened manner (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1974). Many early sociologists heralded from small Protestant towns and were theologically educated, and their work reflected a moral engineering ethos. Albion Small (1925), who would become the fourth president of the ASA, asserted that the role of sociology in creating a better society would have to address the issues of ‘physical, mental and moral eugenics’ (p. 456, quoted in Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1974: 234). Lester Frank Ward (1914), the first ASA president, would express compassion for racially inferior groups by prescribing moral mitigation to curb ‘the severity of the laws of nature’ (pp. 150–154). He would qualify the outcome: ‘mitigation is all that can be hoped for . . . just as man has gained dominion over the animal world, so the highest type of man shall gain dominion over all the lower types of man’ (Ward, 1903: 238–239; quoted in Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1974: 100, 174). Meanwhile, Franklin H. Giddings (1900), the third ASA president, following the presidency of Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner, would defend American imperialism after the Spanish-American War, asserting that American expansion was necessary to the healthy expression of the ‘racial energies’ of Anglo-Saxon Americans (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1974: 100).
Whether on issues of race, gender, or labor, early sociologists regularly ignored or tempered the larger crises of their times and rejected radical challenges coming from socialists, communists, and anarchists. Instead, they argued for reform that emphasized the functional interdependence of racial, gendered, and class groups, advancing the theoretical contours of evolutionary Darwinism while legitimating the searing inequities of capitalism (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1974).
In short, the combination of patriarchy, white supremacy, and corporate-liberal control of the university prevented critical sociology from taking root and addressing the crises that characterized the era. Du Bois, Addams, and others remained outside the boundaries of the burgeoning profession. Instead, the ‘origins-story’ of sociology would acquire legitimacy in the university through what Mary Romero (2020) refers to as the ‘white founding father narrative’.
Post-World War US Sociology
After World War II, new social-historical forces generated the advancement of critical sociology in the United States, particularly the proliferation of decolonization movements across the globe as well as the relocation of German Jewish Marxist scholars and their analyses of the rise of fascism in Germany.
Oliver Cromwell Cox
Du Bois’ work on colonial and post-colonial thought, evident early in Darkwater, was more fully developed in the 1940s in Color and Democracy and The World and Africa, where he expanded his thinking on race and the capitalist world system (Itzigsohn and Brown, 2020). However, the marginalization of Du Bois in the early part of the 20th century would not be reversed in the post-war period despite his prolific writing and his longevity. Du Bois was not alone. Oliver Cromwell Cox, a Black sociologist in the post-war era, would also be ignored and marginalized in the discipline during the post-war era. Cox’s (1948) 600-page critical interrogation of the profession’s misdirected theorizing on race, class, and caste was published in 1948, or perhaps better said, spared by Monthly Review Press from the dogged refusal of mainstream academic publishers to publish the manuscript due to its Marxist orientation.
Despite receiving his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago and despite his prolific writing, including his trilogy of books on capitalism published between 1959 and 1964, Cox spent his career on the margins of the discipline. Cox’s research orientation was historical materialist and comparative, and he did not believe that America’s racial issues could be addressed without first confronting capitalism. When he was trying to get his magnum opus, Caste, Class and Race, published, it was repeatedly rejected for being ‘communist’. Prominent sociologist Howard Becker declined to write an introduction to the book because of its Marxist orientation. In a letter to Cox, Becker stated it would be ‘absolutely impossible’ for him to write the introduction because of its ‘undiluted’ Marxism, from which, Becker said, ‘I need to disassociate myself completely’ (Hunter, 2000). The book was published by Monthly Review Press under Marxist economist Paul Sweezy’s direction.
Of course, Cox was writing in a period of rabid anti-communism and cold war sociology. State investigations of university professors had occurred in all states prior to the McCarthy hearings in 1953–1954. The University of California was the first to ban faculty with Communist Party affiliations in 1940. The City University of New York (CCNY) followed in the same year by conducting the largest purge of faculty prior to McCarthy’s national initiative. In fact, the Rapp-Coudert committee that proceeded over the investigation at CCNY would provide the model for techniques later used at the national level. The jail sentencing of economist Paul Sweezy in New Hampshire in 1954 after he refused to comply with the investigation sent a clear message: Marxists need not apply (Schrecker, 1980, 1986).
In this context, Cox had claimed he was not a Marxist and was in fact critical of Marx’s views on the origins of capitalism as well as Marxist scholars whom he saw as more dogmatic than scientific (Hunter, 2000). But his methodological orientation was explicitly Marxist. Critical of liberal theorists on race, like Gunnar Myrdal, whose work Cox considered an evasion of a class analysis of race, Cox instead understood race as a social construction historically rooted in capital-labor relations (Reed, 2000). Like Du Bois, however, his analysis of race was not limited to the US. Cox’s analyses of the origins of capitalism and racial formations were grounded in global trade, the African slave trade, and colonialism. Further, he understood that European domination of underdeveloped countries was generated and expanded through uneven patterns of development. Herbert Hunter (2000) points out that Cox introduced a world-systems perspective at least a decade before Immanuel Wallerstein. Still, neither his work, nor his career would gain traction until the 1960s, stunting the development of critical sociology in the discipline.
The Frankfurt School
Even before Cox, critical theory was brought to the shores of the United States by the displacement of Jewish intellectuals in Germany. The Frankfurt School would have a formative and lasting effect on US sociology but would also be marginalized in the post-war era.
The rise of fascism in Europe exposed and created the opportunity to challenge the eugenic underpinnings of the social sciences but also the economic determinism of orthodox Marxist theory that was representative of most Marxist thought at the time, and especially the Third Communist International (Poulantzas, 2018).
Columbia University generously provided a space for Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno to establish the Institute for Social Research (ISR) in 1934. Horkheimer led the institute and wrote Eclipse of Reason—published in 1947, 2 years before he would return to Germany—which was a trenchant critique of the rise of fascism in Germany, the failed intrinsic promises of the enlightenment, and the corruption of reason by instrumental rationality. Horkheimer and Adorno’s Marxist revisionism particularly drew on the ideas of Weber and Freud, as they turned to an examination of mass culture and the social psychological dynamics of the authoritarian personality, laying the groundwork for cultural Marxism (Arato and Gebhardt, 1978; Jay, 1973). However, their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, would not be translated and published in English until 1972.
Ironically, their institute was located at the same university where the center of positivist sociology was taking shape, the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR). Perhaps, even more ironically, the director of the newly formed BASR, was Paul Lazarsfeld, an Austrian Jewish émigré, who had left Vienna for the United States in 1933, and, along with around 200 émigrés, had received funding support from the ISR (Jay, 1973). Lazarsfeld had wanted to integrate the two research centers. Horkheimer declined, citing the need to remain independent of funding pressures that left researchers beholden to ‘big business or to mass culture publicity’ (quoted in Jay, 1973: 116). Lazarsfeld and Adorno also attempted a collaborative project that achieved little more than exposing their deep epistemological and methodological differences and, after some harsh exchanges, was abandoned (Jay, 1973).
Nonetheless, Lazarsfeld remained a supporter of the ISR and, with generous funding from the American Jewish Committee in the 1940s, the ISR launched a few large research initiatives that were interdisciplinary and included many non-institute members, including Lazarsfeld and other empiricists at Columbia. The most well-known study to come from this collaboration was The Authoritarian Personality. Horkheimer and Adorno were instrumental in shaping the study, but the use of surveys and interviews would give them intimate exposure to American empirical methods that would have a lasting impact on the Frankfurt School, even after they returned to Germany (Jay, 1973). Moreover, the collaboration would create some very important debates on epistemological and methodological assumptions that would bring more clarity to the paradigmatic differences between critical and positivist sociology and that would later inform the famous debate between Adorno and Karl Popper (Adorno, 1976).
This divide, however, in the era of Cold War sociology would be institutionalized in the university and profession with the predominance of Parsonian structural-functionalist theory and value-free positive social science and the marginalization of critical sociology. State and foundation support for social science research would increase precipitously in the late 1950s, especially after the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957, and this Cold War funding bonanza would channel the type of natural and behavioral research that would flow from research universities from some time to come (Feagin and Vera, 2008).
In the post-war period, Marxist scholarship was suppressed, while an ‘end of ideology’ thesis was embraced, which assumed that the antinomy between capitalism and communism had been transcended by Keynesianism orthodoxy and its articulation of state-managed capitalism. Professional sociology’s adaptation advanced the Durkheimian metaphor of functional systems as healthy organisms, and it persevered around concepts like moral consensus, collective conscience, social order and stability, moderate liberal reform, and structural strain and accommodation (Feagin and Vera, 2008). Theoretical concerns with global capitalism, fascism, and racial formations would be minimized. Critical sociology would be pushed to the margins again, as a more dominant view of sociology would take root which assumed that disinterested empirical study could offer reform initiatives to make capitalism and its institutional system function better on behalf of the larger public.
1960s US Sociology
The 1960s social and political movements, along with the tremendous growth in public colleges and universities, provided a heyday for critical sociology. Critical theories of the past were advanced in the 1960s and 1970s as anti-war and student uprisings, second and third-wave feminism, black power and civil rights movements, global and domestic decolonization initiatives, and Gay liberation following the uprising at Stonewall nourished critical sociology. It was a historical turning point as critical sociology would forcibly elbow its way into the contours of the university and the profession.
The Proliferation of Critical Sociology
Charles Lemert (2011) attributes much of the 1960s revolutionary impulse to ‘the delayed thunder’ of decolonization. He writes, ‘Decolonization was the global event that, more than any other, led to the event that people think of today, as the sixties’ (p. 96). During this time, Immanuel Wallerstein would advance his detailed historical analysis of colonialism as world systems theory. Perhaps most importantly, earlier disquisitions on colonialism and power would position culture as the space for revolutionary consciousness making. This would advance a range of critical studies and theoretical revision and open US sociology to the influences of several post-Marxist thinkers in academic areas like cultural and gender studies. The Frankfurt School’s earlier revisions of Marxist theory would gain traction in Herbert Marcuse’s seminal publication, One Dimensional Man in 1964 but also in Jurgen Habermas’ books, Knowledge and Human Interests in 1968 and Legitimation Crisis in 1973. Cultural Marxism would flourish in the work of the Birmingham school, especially Stuart Hall and Paul Willis, but also through the recovered notebooks of Antonio Gramsci that were translated into English in the 1970s.
Marxism found expression in other ways as well. Oliver Cromwell Cox’s books on race and capitalism gained attention in the 1960s. The role of the state in Marxist thought sparked a brilliant debate between Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband in the early 1960s. Further, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s tome, Monopoly Capital, was published in 1966, while this stream of Marxism became inculcated in the leftist periodical, Monthly Review. Marxist feminism also took root in the writings of Margaret Benston, while Black Marxist-Feminist thought was expounded by the Combahee River Collective in the late 1970s.
Intellectually seizing on culture as a radical space for inquiry and theorizing, post-colonial thought would also take hold in the wake of decolonization. Du Bois’ and Cox’s early work, combined with Fanon’s and CLR James’ writings, and Eric Williams’ 1944 masterpiece, Capitalism and Slavery, would provide a platform for post-colonial theory. Subaltern theories would emerge in the seminal publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, which would be followed later by Gayatri Spivak and other post-colonial thinkers (Chibber, 2013).
Feminist thought would gain greater public attention after the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminist Mystique, but feminist theory would greatly expand during the 1960s and 1970s as various expressions of second-wave feminism were articulated, including radical, cultural, eco, lesbian, psychoanalytic, and standpoint feminisms (Lorber, 2011). Many consciousness-raising radical feminist groups sprung up in the 1960s and 1970s as an antecedent to political action. Black and Chicano feminism grew from a critique of white-dominated feminism and produced the outlines of what we refer to today as intersectionality, perhaps best represented by the Combahee River Collective statement (Taylor, 2017). In sociology, Naomi Weisstein, Kate Millet, 1 Alice Rossi, Arlie Hochschild, and Jessie Bernard were some of the key intellectuals to challenge the biological assumptions that defined sex roles and to advance, in Rossi’s words, a more social androgynous conception of gender (Swinth, 2018). Moreover, feminist sociology would also contribute to breaking the structural-functionalist theoretical grip on the discipline.
Finally, post-structuralism and sexuality studies would also germinate in social and political thought during this time. Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking works, Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality would be published in English in 1977 and 1978, respectively. These books would reformulate an understanding of power through historical analyses of discourses and would turn critical interrogation toward the institutions through which discursive power was organized and reproduced, especially the human sciences, medicine, psychiatry, and criminology. Foucault’s work was synonymous with the critical ethic of the 1960s and 1970s to challenge all orthodoxies, boundaries, hierarchies, conceptual orderings, and establishment views—in other words, to ‘queer the normal’. Foucault’s work followed early studies in sexuality that had advanced the social construction of gay and lesbian identities. British sociologist Mary McIntosh, for instance, known for her work on the ‘homosexual role’, challenged the construction of homosexuality as deviant, while others like Ned Katz, Jeffrey Weeks, and John D’Emilio disputed many of the biological assumptions underlying sexuality. Foucault’s work would later be used to formulate queer theory, which would critique earlier gay and lesbian studies for reinforcing the organization of sexuality as binary (Corber and Valocchi, 2003).
This period also generated a serious challenge to positive social science. The famous debate between Karl Popper and Theodore Adorno in 1961 set the stage (Adorno, 1976). New paradigms emerged during the 1960 and 1970s that advanced alternative epistemological, ontological, and methodological approaches to inquiry, including constructivist, critical, poststructural, and post-modernist paradigms. The anthologies generated by Denzin and Lincoln (2017) have documented this history well.
The explosion in critical thought in sociology during this era was foreshadowed by C. Wright Mills in 1958 when he wrote, ‘The first job of the intellectuals today is to be consistently and altogether unconstructive’ (Mills, 1958: 157). Mill’s scathing critique of what he called rationalist and empiricist sociology—or grand theory and abstract empiricism—would be the opening salvo for 1960s critical sociology that would turn a theoretical lens on the social crises of the era with the intention of understanding and dismantling the organization of power (Mills, 1959). Mills, like Marcuse, would be an icon of the New Left and would embolden sociologists to challenge the profession itself. The best rendition of this would be the launch of the Sociological Liberation Movement (SLM) in 1968.
The Battle Within
The SLM was created out of the New University Conference (NUC) which had been established in the spring of 1968 at the University of Chicago. The NUC initiated radical caucuses across several social science disciplines. Members of the NUC joined with graduate students from Columbia University to establish the SLM, which adopted ‘Knowledge for Whom’ as its slogan, a play on Robert Lynd’s seminal 1939 book, ‘Knowledge for What?’ One of SLM’s key actions would occur at the ASA’s annual meeting in Boston in 1968 when the president of the organization, Phillip Hauser, invited Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, William Cohen, to give a keynote address at one of the conference’s plenary sessions. In advance of the meetings, Hauser threatened to have anyone arrested who tried to disrupt the meetings (Flacks, 1991). It was a loaded moment: a member of President Johnson’s cabinet had been invited to speak while the SLM was pushing the ASA to pass a resolution against the war and, while halfway across the country, Major Daley was calling in the National Guard and positioning 250 cargo jets in preparation for the 1968 Democratic National Convention (Ross, 2009). Hauser would speak at the conference, but not without critical commentary from a panel that included a 26-year-old representative of the Radical Caucus, Martin Nicolas, who would deliver his now famous “fat-cat sociology” speech (which was later published in The American Sociologist). As Robert J.S. Ross (2009) suggests, sometimes eloquence should not be sacrificed to paraphrasing:
The honored sociologist, the big-status sociologist, the jet-set sociologist, the fat-contract sociologist, the book-a-year sociologist, the sociologist who always wears the livery—the suit and tie—of his masters: this is the type of sociologist who sets the tone and the ethic of the profession, and it is this type of sociologist who is nothing, more or less than a house servant in the corporate establishment, a white intellectual Uncle Tom not only for this government and ruling class, but for any government and ruling class, which explains to my mind why Soviet sociologists and American sociologists are finding after so many years of isolation that, after all, they have something in common (p. 21).
The SLM would secure one concession from the ASA at the convention—to adopt a motion that prohibited any ASA conventions from occurring in Chicago after Dailey’s brutal response against protestors in 1968. Further, the SLM would organize caucuses of radical sociologists at its national meetings between 1969 and 1972 (Flacks, 1991).
The battle for establishing critical sociology was not only fought within the discipline but at universities as well. Removing tenured faculty was difficult but disciplining pre-tenured faculty or denying tenure were easier contrivances for university administrators, and several radical sociology professors were purged in departments across the country (Brown, 1991). A flashpoint would occur at the University of Chicago, where Marlene Dixon would be fired pre-tenure by President Edward Levi. The firing of Dixon in Chicago led to student protests and the takeover of the administrative building that lasted 16 days. President Levi was not to be outdone, and he flexed his muscles by expelling and issuing lengthy suspensions to 120 students, the largest purging of student protesters at the time at any major university. The event radicalized many students, but it put Levi on the reactionary map, and he was later appointed Attorney General by President Gerald Ford (Brown, 1991).
Of course, the left-wing flank of US sociology was not greeted favorably by the sociology establishment either, as Hauser’s threat to arrest them in 1968 suggested. Edward Shils, an apologist for the Vietnam War and co-signer to Parsonian Cold War sociology, referred to critical sociology as alienated sociology and made Mills the target of his contempt as ‘an alienated intellectual, out of touch with society and with sociology’ (Burawoy, 2016: 386).
Shils was by no means alone. Morris Janowitz, a department member in sociology at the University of Chicago, not only saw critical sociology as a threat to the discipline but believed it was antithetical to science. Richard Flacks (1991) recalls that Janowitz authored an article on how to control the protests and uprisings by rounding up protesters and arresting them, which was offered as a more humane form of control to police violence and the use of deadly force. This form of liberal sociology represented the profession’s mediating identity and its tethered relations to elites. Flacks (1991) writes that Janowitz’s view was ‘that sociology had no choice but to provide systematic knowledge to elites’, to which Flacks’ asserted that the profession ‘was on the road to becoming integrated with the control apparatus of a repressive state’ (p. 20).
The polarization within the profession had its benefits by establishing the boundaries, but also the legitimacy, of a more radical sociology. Flacks (1991) offers the irony of this when he asserts, tongue-in-cheek, ‘that more radical sociologists were created under the mentorship of Morris Janowitz, Philip Hauser, Edwards Shils, and Donald Bogue that under the influence of all of us academic Marxists and self-avowed radicals’ (p. 23).
Critical sociology gained ground by leaps and bounds in the 1960s and 1970s due to social and political crises and social movements. Oppenheimer et al. (1991) foresaw its future in similar terms:
‘The future of radical sociology as a vibrant and exciting intellectual option is inextricably linked to the growth of political and social movements in the United States. In the absence of social and political movements, radical sociology cannot hope to occupy more than an exotic niche within the profession’ (p. 11).
The expansion of critical sociology during this period was unmistakable, and it was not about to be eliminated, especially as more of the ‘disobedient generation’ entered the profession (Sica and Turner, 2006). Nonetheless, by 1980, the movements had all but disappeared, and the economic crises of the 1970s would position political and economic elites to reorganize capitalism and restructure its relationship with the state. This would have grave consequences for the university. Further, as neoliberalism began to take shape, it gave more credence to establishment sociologists who were sitting uncomfortably in departments with growing numbers of Marxist, feminist, and race scholars. Critical sociology would again confront a backlash inside and outside the profession.
The Neoliberal University
Despite the expansion and changes to the discipline, the institutionalization of critical sociology, and the social unrest that had gripped the country in the 1960s and early 1970s, ASA leadership appeared uneasy with the growth of a critical paradigm. ASA presidential addresses during this time, apart from Alfred McClung Lee’s in 1976, remained politically demure, at best seeking ways to incorporate concerns with racial protests, the distrust of reason, social control systems, unequal education, social change, masculine role strains, status differentiation, the decline of theory, and an alienated counterculture into a politically tepid professional and scientifically certified language. However, the turning point away from the 1960s and 1970s critical sociology insurgency was perhaps best symbolized by Peter Rossi’s 1980 ASA presidential address. Rossi’s sang the virtues of applied sociology, pointing out that the increase in state and foundational research funding over the prior two decades and the need to demonstrate sociology’s relevance had delivered the moment for sociology to embrace its technical advancements and its policy relevance. Rossi (1980: 890) called for greater recognition of applied social research ‘in the form of more attention to that activity within our curricula, in our professional journals, and in the rewards our profession gives for scholarly accomplishments’.
Interestingly, Rossi was, in many ways, the new generation’s Robert Merton. He had been trained by Merton and Lazarsfeld at Columbia and had dabbled in Trotskyist politics earlier in his life. By 1980, though, he had abandoned his leftist influences as idealistic and had focused his work on liberal reform through applied sociology, policy studies, and the virtues of positive social science. His presidential address fit the historical moment to tamper down critical sociology, articulate sociology-related career trajectories, establish the relevance of sociology in the halls of the university and the state, and redirect sociology to the safe spaces of liberal reform (Rossi, 1980).
Indeed, Rossi’s vision was discerning. With the transition to neoliberal capitalism taking root in the 1980s, the university was beginning to change, along with most other institutions. Reductions in public monies and the imposition of austerity, the elimination of interdisciplinary programs, the assault on tenure and the growth in precariously employed faculty, the explosive increase in tuition, the dependency on private interests and foundation funding, and the entrepreneurial turn and focus on professional training would reorganize higher education.
Within this transition, sociology was in the crosshairs. The elimination of the sociology departments at Washington University and the University of Rochester in the 1980s, and serious consideration at both Yale and Duke Universities sent shivers down the proverbial spine of the profession (Black, 1999). The radical components of the discipline were under attack, and the reorganization of capitalism and state institutions rendered these developments historically displaced. Preoccupied with its legitimacy, the discipline once again turned inward to validate its scientific credentials (Erikson, 1997). To satisfy the entrepreneurial forces in the university, programs in applied sociology and in criminology grew rapidly, as students flooded into these programs to find a more practical application for their tuition-burdened education (Black, 1999).
Nonetheless, the resurgence of corporate-liberal sociology was less successful in marginalizing critical sociology in the profession as it had done in the first half of the century. By the 1980s, Rossi was articulating but one direction for sociology in what had become a fractured discipline. Michael Burawoy (2016) explains that sociology has become four distinct sociologies: professional, policy, critical, and public sociology. Despite the threats by university presidents to axe sociology from its curricula, and despite the discipline’s flexing of its professional and policy muscles, the different bands of critical sociology were marching on in the 1980s and afterward as a vibrant part of the discipline. The current manifestations of critical sociology illustrate this advancement.
Since the turn of the century, several ASA presidents have represented a more radical and critical sociology (Joe Feagin, Michael Burawoy, Francis Fox Piven, Patricia Hill Collins, Erik Olin Wright, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Ruth Milkman, Mary Romero, and Aldon Morris), even when the institution itself has placed a cautious, intervening drag on this momentum (Romero, 2020). The small group of black feminists who issued the trailblazing Combahee River Collective statement on interlocking oppressions would inspire Patricia Hill Collins’ and others’ work on intersectionality, which is now a mainstay in sociological theorizing. Building on the pioneering work of Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick, queer theory has secured its place in sociology by shifting the epistemological focus from identity to practice, by theorizing sexuality as a regime of power and knowledge, and by reconfiguring the relationships between sex, gender, and sexuality (Corber and Valocchi, 2003). Marxist Feminist thought has also found grounding in the work of social reproduction theorists like Lise Vogel, Nancy Fraser, Cynthia Arruzza, and Tithi Battacharya (Arruzza et al., 2019; Vogel, 1983). Anti-capitalism is again finding traction in classrooms and in public and professional discourse, led by the late Erik Olin Wright’s work on utopian initiatives for eroding capitalism and Michael Burawoy’s steadfast endeavors to center Marxist epistemology and methodology (Burawoy, 2009; Wright, 2019). The French influence of Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu has advanced poststructural thought in sociology by theorizing in the shadows of Durkheimian structuralism to provide varying analyses of the constitution and reproduction of social and political power. Foucault’s work has spawned a new stream of studies in governance, while Bourdieu’s grainy analysis of the conversion of different forms of capital, along with the embodiment of social location and culture, has become central to the sociological lexicon (Wacquant, 2016, 2018). Further, the discipline has easily integrated the ideas of critical race theory into its critical repertoire, melding a theory that had its origin in critical legal studies led by Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw into its own advancements in structural racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Feagin, 2006; Omi and Winant, 2014). An internal movement in the discipline is rewriting the canon finally to anoint W.E.B. DuBois to his rightful place (Burawoy, 2021; Itzigsohn and Brown, 2020; Morris Aldon, 2015). The critical tradition that has long argued that white supremacy and capitalism are mutually constitutive has been advanced through the concept of racial capitalism and, in doing so, has recovered the work of Oliver Cromwell Cox and Cedric Robinson (Burden-Stelly, 2020; Dawson, 2016; Fraser, 2016; Kelley, 2017). And certainly, students are demanding more critical theories inside departments and universities, despite the constraining nature of the neoliberal university.
Of course, there are many differences and tensions between various critical theories. Some of the differences are foundational and represent cleavages within the critical tradition. For instance, the conception of intersecting hierarchies of power and domination has inspired considerable theorizing and become a central framework in many graduate student research agendas, but debates concerning whether class, racial, gender, or sexual analysis is fundamental remain divisive. While these divisions can foment intractable theoretical identities, they can also foster constructive theoretical debates. As described above, the merging of these theories to advance critical thought is often a powerful testament to the advancement and history of critical theories, as represented by Black feminist, Marxist Feminist, or Queer Marxist theories, or theories on racial capitalism or abolitionist feminism (on the latter, see Davis et al., 2022). Moreover, many critical theorists are analyzing and debating these cleavages in ways that enrich critical thought within sociology. The Nancy Fraser-Michael Dawson debate on Marxist feminism and racial capitalism (Dawson, 2016; Fraser, 2016); Wendy Brown’s integration of Foucault and Marx (Brown, 2017); and Burawoy’s (2019) critical examination of Bourdieu through a Marxist lens are all good examples. This intellectual energy is indicative of critical theories’ influence on the field. If sociology in the 1950s and early 1960s was largely preoccupied with the question of how social order is possible, critical theories have centered a different question in sociology today: how is power organized, reproduced, and contested?
In the first quarter of the 21st century, critical sociology has secured its place within the larger discipline of sociology, which is shared with other forms of sociology. The tensions, struggles, and articulations of these different forms of sociology will persist, and the ebbs and flows of critical sociology’s place within the discipline will be shaped by events both within and outside the profession.
Back to the Future
The elimination of sociology as a core requirement in Florida’s public colleges and universities is testimony to the expansion and growing significance of critical sociology. The field is not under attack because of the professional and policy representations of sociology; it is the target of a right-wing movement that sees the empirical interrogation of the organization of power as a threat. It is the institutionalization of critical sociology and its public penetration that has provoked a counterattack.
As we have seen through the history of critical sociology, social and political crises have once again pushed critical sociology to the public foreground. The climate crisis, the pandemic, the racial uprising, and the reorganization of global capitalism (amid the wars and mounting new Cold War) have underscored the need for rigorous and systematic analyses of power. The concerns and movements around these social eruptions have politicized a new generation of students who are seeking out more critical analyses, while political speech has expanded on both the right and the left.
Social crises and related movements and the valorization of critical sociology is again provoking a reactionary response from political elites, university administrators, and some colleagues within the profession. Critical sociology in the United States is in an institutionally more secure place to confront these challenges than in the first part of the century, but, as always, within the halls of power, it can be vulnerable. The attack on critical race theory has been well documented. At least 18 states have banned or restricted critical race theory or the discussion of racism or sexism in public schools through legislation or executive measures, and similar bills are making their way through other state legislatures (Schwartz, 2024). Further, the scope of these bills is increasing. In Idaho, the state forbids state colleges and universities from using state appropriations to ‘support social justice ideology’ that is ‘represented in student activities, clubs, events and organizations on [college] campus[es]’. Further, they require state universities ‘to report all social justice spending to the legislature’ (Goldberg, 2021).
At the university level, the neoliberal university has constrained critical research and education through a variety of mechanisms. The university’s emulation of the corporate structure and its instrumental rationality is firmly entrenched. Student’s educational pathways are disciplined by spiraling tuition, and most classes are taught by poorly paid contingent faculty; tenure is under attack as tenure track lines are reduced, a bloated administrative tier of the university gobbles up large chunks of the university revenue, while corporate-controlled boards of regents reward university presidents for implementing these changes with outrageous salaries, some in the seven-figure range. Further, the top-down model of management has generated a form of academic Taylorism, where everything gets reduced to measurement. Teaching gets reduced to student enrollment and retention, course evaluations, and universal measures of student learning objectives. Meanwhile, faculty are assessed based on research output, journal rankings, grant funding, and the number of faculty paper citations (Fasenfest, 2021).
The structures of state university systems also reflect a deepening division of labor between its research and teaching universities. States treat only a few of its public universities as research institutions, where research is dependent on acquiring corporate, foundation, or state grants. Faculty at these universities are largely relieved of teaching obligations (passed onto contingent faculty) in favor of grant seeking from which the universities skim a large percentage in ‘indirect costs’. The remainder of the state university system has been loaded up with teaching expectations, where faculty teach increasing course loads (sometimes four to five classes a semester) and herd as many students as possible through credential-seeking classrooms, all of which is becoming more of an extension of the community college model than indicative of the traditional 4-year university.
Critical sociology struggles to find its way within this structure of higher education to create and sustain spaces for critical education and research. The pressure that these changes put on the discipline increases the divisions, competition, and sometimes vehemence between representatives of the different types of sociology that coexist within the profession. Which type of sociology will be privileged, expanded, rewarded, and validated within the university and the profession? This brings us back to Jukka Savolainen and Anne Barrett’s op-eds.
It is in this context that we need to consider Savolainen’s view that the discipline has become politically brazen and ideologically corrupt and needs to return to its roots. He finds the 2024 ASA convention theme, Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy to be offensive. He might also have mentioned the 2021 ASA theme, Emancipatory Sociology, or the title of The Society for the Study of Social Problems’s national meeting that same year, Revolutionary Sociology. Perhaps the ASA theme in 2022, Bureaucracies of Displacement, and in 2023, The Educative Power of Sociology, would have provoked his ire as well. These titles and the leadership that promoted them represent the increasing veracity of critical sociology.
Certainly, Savolainen is not alone in his perspective. His voice within the discipline—in reaction to the expansion and current relevance of critical sociology—is not different from the reactionary treatment of it by political elites around the country, and the insider view that he and other sociologists represent will get advanced by these elites. Similarly, the mounting attack on critical sociology within and outside the discipline will put pressure on the leadership of sociology to retreat inward and emphasize its scientific credentials, and legitimate itself as a science within the academy. But, as we have seen, none of this is new. The ebbs and flows of critical sociology have followed similar patterns since the origins of sociology.
The need for critical sociology will always exist because it generates a theoretical conceptualization of economic, political, and social crises. Most likely, the counter-reactions will also always exist because critical sociology takes aim at the institutional order through which power is reproduced, including academia and the university. But as Anne Barrett’s voice amid the Florida debacle indicates, critical sociology now provides a solid foundation to speak out against the reactionary posturing in Florida. Critical sociologists need to support her and her colleagues in Florida and other states where similar counterattacks are mobilizing. Moreover, critical sociologists need to shore up and defend its epistemological and methodological framework, strengthen its institutional presence, and act in solidarity in the face of a counter assault.
What all sociologists should be able to agree on is that sociology is an empirical discipline. Graduate students learn early that it does not matter which paradigm they are working from. To do sociology requires that we focus our work on the empirical world. This is no less true of critical sociology. The claims that it sacrifices science at the behest of ideology are misleading. What distinguishes the epistemology and methodology of critical sociology is that it begins with the ontological assumption that what is empirically real is a representation of the organization of power. No observation, fieldnote, interview transcript, regression equation, statistically significant finding, or theoretical insight stands outside of the relations of power. Critical sociology, in its varied expressions, is always the interrogation of power and its historical and empirical manifestations. Its motivations for the study of power are indeed value-driven and, therefore, eschew the disinterested claims of positive social science. But as Burawoy (2022: 3) asserts, ‘a science with moral foundations is no less a science for that. It is a science guided by visions and convictions that vitalize empirical research’.
The post-1960s inroads made by critical sociology are institutionally grounded through professional journals, organizations, conferences, graduate and undergraduate curricula, and public collaborations. There are several examples of organizations and journals that demonstrate this history and that need continual support and vigilance in reactionary periods. The Women’s Caucus, created in the late 1960s, would become Sociologists for Women in Society in 1971 when a group of its members insisted that the new organization be concerned less with women in sociology and more about women in society (Brown, 1991). The Association for Black Sociologists was established in 1970 in response to the exclusion of Black scholars in the discipline (Romero, 2020). The Marxist section of the ASA was formally established in 1976 and while its membership peaked in 1979, its numbers have remained relatively constant since then, while other sections that have included critical theories have grown precipitously (Sex and Gender; Race, Class and Gender; Racial and Ethnic Minorities; Inequality, Poverty and Mobility; Political Economy and the World System; Labor and Labor Movements, Latina/o Sociology, Political Sociology, and more). The Association for Humanist Sociology, established by Alfred McClung Lee in 1976, continues today to foster a dissident edge, along with its journal Humanity and Society. The Insurgent Sociologist, which began publication in 1971, and would become Critical Sociology in 1987, is a fount for peer-reviewed, rigorous critical thought and research, and a vibrant alternative to postpositivist mainstream journals. These organizations and journals, along with many others, provide the institutional foundation for critical sociology that needs to be supported.
Finally, critical sociologists will need to foster solidarity across the theoretical identities that separate us, across the types of colleges and universities that stratify us, and across the tenure and non-tenure lines that strangle us. Further, we will have to do this despite the crafty strategies of university, state, and foundation elites to co-opt and divide us. And we need to push ourselves into leadership roles in the various institutional and organizational bodies that anchor us.
As the Florida case suggests, the mobilization of reactionary forces across the nation is intensifying, and it could get worse depending on the outcome of the 2024 election. Further, the recent trend of university presidents brutally disbanding pro-Palestinian groups on campuses indicates that an emboldened, repressive culture is growing within administrative ranks as well. Sociology is and will continue to be in the crosshairs of these historical developments. As such, critical sociologists need to be vigilant of their institutional moorings in the profession and university and defend them both externally and internally. Establishing and institutionalizing these networks of solidarity under the rubric of critical thought and practice are necessary to the future of critical sociology.
In sum, this historical sketch reveals that despite the repeated attacks from inside and outside of the discipline, critical sociology has grown and firmly established itself within the discipline of US sociology. The genie is out of the bottle, and it is not going back in. The need for a rigorous and systemic study of power will persist, just as the counterattacks to the public dissemination of this type of knowledge will continue to mobilize. In turn, Critical Sociology will need to clearly and regularly articulate its epistemological and methodological foundation, expand its institutional moorings, and act in solidarity across the many boundaries that can divide us.
Reflecting on the rise of critical sociology in the 1960s, Richard Flacks (1991) reminisced about the ‘hope for a community of radical intellectuals engaged in a collective effort to remake sociology’. Despite the retrenchment of this hope in the 1980s and after, he nonetheless pointed out that ‘as academic job markets change once again, along with national political climates, the time may once more be right for reconnection’ (p. 27). That time is now.
