Abstract
On first reading of this book, I was reminded of the argument made in Ben Agger’s Socio(onto)logy from 1989, especially the part that as a ‘disciplinary literature’ bourgeois sociology was unaware of positivism’s role in disciplining and deauthorizing social inquiry, which functions to strip away any moral or political insights from sociological explanation. So, bourgeois sociology delivers discipline, order and predictability, a steadying hand in the face of social paroxysms and conflict which are ignored because they are not part of the domain assumptions guiding establishment sociology.
Both Agger and now Charles Thorpe represent updates and advances in Marxist sociology as guided by Gouldner’s manifesto for a reflexive sociology (Coming Crisis of Western Sociology). Thorpe makes good use of Gouldner, and for the most part it stands as a solid rendering and interpretation of his argument. But like all Marxist-inspired sociology, this project is always a call to arms, an unabashedly political exercise which seeks the unity of theory and practice, going beyond merely the wordplay of clever scholars who talk a good game about the social but are rarely able to improve it, especially when it comes to reducing oppression and inequality which, it is argued, are the logical outgrowths of capitalism itself. Indeed, the most important sentence in Thorpe’s entire book is on p. 227, where he states that ‘real social equality requires socialism’.
Thorpe does not really discuss the fact that sociology is a multiparadigm science, and that as of right now three distinct orientations towards social explanation sit, admittedly uneasily, in relation to each other under the ‘big tent’ that is contemporary sociology. Following Helmut Wagner and Jurgen Habermas, these three paradigms are the evaluative (critical theory concerned first and foremost with the elimination of oppression), the interpretive (pragmatic approaches such as symbolic interactionism concerned with explicating how persons come to make social life meaningful via face-to-face interaction) and the positivist (standard empirical or conventional sociology which aspires towards a natural science model emphasizing causal theory and testing of hypotheses through quantitative methods).
Thorpe does make occasional passing references to multiparadigmaticity but renders this as little more than an aspect of the false consciousness of bourgeois sociologists (those in the camp of the positivist and interpretive paradigms). His blind spot that leads to this position seems to be either an unconscious rejection or conscious elision of the sociology of knowledge of Karl Mannheim – in his Ideology and Utopia – particularly with respect to his argument that political discourse is antithetical to scientific discourse. Ideologies, such as all those connected with the evaluative paradigm in sociology (Marxism, feminism, critical race theory and queer theory), are unabashedly political and have a readymade theory – historical materialism – which is unquestioned by true believers of the theory group and which functions as a source of solidarity for group members. That is, for the most part the tenets of historical materialism are not open to careful and systematic empirical testing to determine whether the hypotheses generated comport with the empirical social world.
Of course, there is a trick evaluative theorists use to reject bourgeois claims that evaluative theory is merely ideology because of its unabashed commitment to a left-progressive politics. This draws somewhat from the soft unmasking of Habermas (from his Knowledge and Human Interests) in which it is claimed that all theoretical undertakings have extracognitive elements, often hidden in the background or domain assumptions of theory group members (their Weltanschauung), as they operate alongside the overtly stated, technical elements of the theory. Indeed, according to Habermas, the primary projects of the three sociological paradigms are as follows. The positivist paradigm – standard science – is guided by technical interests aimed at control of empirical reality, such as the cybernetic principle in which things high in information control things high in energy. The interpretive paradigm, described by Habermas as the practical interests of historical–hermeneutic analysis, shifts the primary goal from explanation to understanding. And the evaluative paradigm, described as critical–dialectical, has the primary goal of eliminating inequality and oppression rather than simply describing a particular state of affairs and developing hypothesis to determine whether predictions comport with empirical reality. The latter is overtly and self-avowedly political in comparison to the other two paradigms which are committed to technical or practical interests in the production of social explanation or understanding.
The critical, Marxist or evaluative paradigm rejects standard predicate or deductive logic in favour of a dialectical approach which tolerates both event and its negation within the analytical framework. Hence, for example, the evaluative paradigm can pull off statements which would not be allowed in standard interpretive or positivist frameworks, for example, ∼P => P, that is, If Not Political Then Political. Under standard rules of logic, such a statement could not be allowed into the theoretical system because it is contradictory and hence has no logical meaning.
From the perspective of standard science, the evaluative paradigm stands as an alien system of thought, one which operates and makes sense only to members of the theory group who are committed to its tenets while rejecting standard procedures of theory formation and hypothesis testing as merely the false consciousness of bourgeois scientists. This is the starting position anyone who reads Thorpe’s book needs to be prepared to adopt, that is, in terms of following the author’s argument and making sense of claims. Insiders to the evaluative paradigm, those committed to historical materialism and to the importance of finding an historical agent who could lead the proletarian revolt towards the ultimate demolition of the capitalist system, will find many things to be pleased with in Thorpe’s book. It is an updated manifesto for Marxist sociology, and it is rendered thoroughly and expertly in the best tradition of critical–emancipatory social analysis.
The book is divided into four long chapters along with an introduction. The writing is crisp and authoritative throughout, and the notes are extensive. What does the title, ‘Sociology in Post-Normal Times’, mean exactly? Although sociology was institutionalized as a scientific discipline in America beginning in the 1880s, it did not reach a settled position in terms of the legitimacy of its knowledge claims until somewhat later. It became a ‘normal’ science – here hearkening back to Kuhn – during the period of Fordism–Keynesianism which lasted for a quarter-century after the end of World War II. It reached its peak during the 1960s with the growth of the welfare state, a set of circumstances which Talcott Parsons identified as providing grand legitimacy to the technocrats of the welfare–warfare state embedded within sociology and government who would oversee its operation and report back to those in charge. Parsons always had a giddy optimism for the professional class of administrators and bureaucrats of government and the academy who engage in bean-counting and cost-effectiveness studies towards the rendering of services to the growing dispossessed of the welfare–warfare apparatus.
Indeed, here Thorpe makes great use of Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich’s notion of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC), and although members of this class typically hold to left-political positions – for example, taking the perspective of ‘underdogs’ such as the poor; those convicted of crimes or otherwise labelled deviant; racial and ethnic minorities; immigrants; and the ill, all the while tracing broader social, political or economic forces to their enfeeblement so as to avoid blaming the victim – the PMC are more like colonizers of the lifeworld (Habermas) because they are more committed to zookeeping and management than to wholesale change of the system itself. They are more committed to incrementalism through legal or administrative adjustments and the doling out of benefits to the dispossessed, rather than to the socialist revolution. Many observers not committed to the tenets of Marxism would lump together all leftist politics into the socialist/communist camp, but Thorpe argues the PMC act more like a petty bourgeoisie insofar as they display righteous indignation against the capitalist system and the realities of inequality and differential treatment generated by it against any of the above named oppressed groups. For example, ‘wokeism’ is not really a project of socialist critique but a bastardization or cultural innovation – along with identity politics – of true Marxism which gives left-leaning sympathizers and fellow travellers the opportunity to display their leftist bona fides without having to commit to wholesale revolutionary politics. For example, during Pride Month, the US military ran ads with a combat helmet adorned with rainbow-coloured bullets, a shockingly odd mixture of wokeism with imperialism and militarism. This teasing out of leftist politics into authentic revolutionary struggle and inauthentic woke cultural and identity politics is one of the key insights offered by Thorpe.
Sociology’s normal science phase came to a halt beginning in the 1970s with a conservative political retrenchment culminating in the Reagan Presidency, the rise of the Evangelical Christian right and the emergence of influential conservative lobbying groups such as the Federalist Society and Alliance Defending Freedom. The reference to the ‘post-normal’, informed by the writings of Stephen Turner and others, represents a changed reality in which the social has gone global and now operates beyond the grasp of sociologists claiming special expertise on the ‘social’, which perhaps was chimera all along but which found legitimacy during the 1950s and 1960s, sociology’s heyday. Even the zookeeping or ‘gardening role’ of the bureaucrats and technocrats of the welfare–warfare state has fallen into disrepair, as the rise of cognitive science, the medical and health sciences and public health surveillance have rendered sociologists ineffective or irrelevant insofar as new types of actuarial and accounting methods are available to observe, document and tame the teeming masses of the walking wounded of neoliberalism.
As documented in chapter 2, these movements were exacerbated and focalized with the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and of course along with it the abnormal or ‘hypernormal’ strangeness of the Trump presidency. Even when Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, the sentiment was that the Bide administration would somehow return the United States to a state of normalcy, but the persistence of the post-normal has remained even through 2022. Trump’s cozying up to Russia’s Putin was, for Thorpe, a sign of the American empire in perpetual decline, and the Biden presidency was saddled with the ensuing Russia–Ukraine War and new concerns over stagflation, a declining stock market, disruptions in world supply chains, skyrocketing costs for gasoline and other fossil fuels and continuing waves of mass shootings across the United States on top of racial tensions and political flashpoints embodied in Black Lives Matter protests and the January 6 siege of the US Capitol. This represents a maelstrom of American decline and fits particularly well the idea that the post-normal is here to stay or at least for the foreseeable future.
Chapters 3 and 4 continue the themes of globalization and how it contributes to both the continuation of post-normal times and the decline of American empire, as well as speculations about how the ‘sociological moment’ could possibly be extended or resurrected in the face of such dislocations and challenges. But like feminists who have continued to bemoan the fact that no feminist revolution has occurred in sociology, Thorpe is likewise not sanguine about the prospects of sociology contributing to the ushering in of the proletariat revolution towards the ultimate overthrow of capitalism. But the reality is, Marxism’s beginnings are independent of the development of sociology as a scientific discipline – as discussed by Gouldner in Coming Crisis – and you don’t really need sociology for the kind of political activism for which Thorpe and others are pining. Rather than the imperialistic ambitions of feminism or Marxism, sociology is better understood as a big tent which tolerates multiple projects including political activism and scientific explanation. Short of a full-blown socialist revolution, sociology’s ‘big tent’ will continue to make available training in Marxist or revolutionary theory and methods, as well as a steady stream of publishing venues for like-minded scholars to share the latest news concerning the state of the art in Marxist-inspired social science. As of right now, this truce between the mutually hostile camps of the three paradigms is holding.
