The Nature and Scope of Sociology

The seven characteristics of its nature

MU's own reading list follows the standard list, and an examiner expects most of it.

1. An independent science. It is not a branch of political science, of history or of philosophy. It has its own subject matter, its own method and its own body of theory.
2. A social science, not a physical science.
3. A categorical, not a normative, science. It says what is, not what ought to be. It can establish that a dowry prohibition is widely evaded; whether dowry is wrong is a question of ethics.
4. A pure science, not an applied one. Its object is knowledge of society. Applying that knowledge is social work, administration or law reform.
5. An abstract science, not a concrete one. It studies the forms and patterns of human interaction, not the particular events history records.
6. A generalising science, not a particularising one. It seeks general statements about classes of case.
7. Both a rational and an empirical science. Empirical because it insists on observation and evidence; rational because it insists that the evidence be organised by theory and by logic. Sociology needs both, and a body of facts with no theory is as useless to it as a theory with no facts.

The scope of sociology, and the two schools

Every subject has to answer the question: where do you stop? For sociology the question is sharp, because everything human beings do together is arguably social. Two answers were given, and MU examines both.

The specialistic or formalistic school

The claim. Sociology is a specific, pure and independent social science with a limited subject matter of its own: the forms of social relationships, considered apart from their content.

Georg Simmel (1858 to 1918) is the school's leading name and its clearest statement. His analogy is geometry. Geometry studies the form of objects, the sphere or the cube, without caring whether the object is made of wood or of iron. In the same way, sociology should study the forms of social relationships, cooperation, competition, conflict, subordination, superordination, division of labour, without caring whether they occur in a factory, a temple or an army. The content belongs to economics, to religion, to political science. The form belongs to sociology.

Its other adherents.

• Ferdinand Tonnies distinguished two forms of association, Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), and made that formal distinction the centre of the subject.
• Max Weber held that sociology should interpret social action and analyse the forms of social relationship, and that it must be kept distinct from history, which deals with the particular.
• Leopold von Wiese limited the scope to the forms of social process and social relationship, and set about classifying them exhaustively.
• Alfred Vierkandt held that sociology should deal with the ultimate forms of mental or psychic relationship binding people together.

Criticism of the specialistic school.

1. Form cannot be separated from content. Competition between two shopkeepers and competition between two states are the same form and nothing alike. Studying the form alone tells you little about either.
2. The forms are not exclusively sociological. Conflict and cooperation are studied by economists and political scientists too, so the boundary does not do the work claimed for it.
3. No agreed list. Von Wiese counted some six hundred and fifty forms of human relationship. Simmel's list is quite different. A science whose subject matter cannot be enumerated has not really been delimited.
4. It makes sociology too narrow, and cuts it off from exactly the concrete problems, caste, poverty, crime, that make people study it.

The synthetic school

The claim. Sociology is a general science of society which synthesises the findings of the special social sciences. The other social sciences each take a slice of social life, economics the economic slice, political science the political; sociology studies the whole and the relations between the slices.

Emile Durkheim is the leading name. He divided the scope into three parts, and the division is worth memorising because it is the easiest way to reproduce his position.

• Social morphology. The material substratum of society: population, its density and distribution, the geographical setting, the arrangement of people over territory.
• Social physiology. The functioning of society, taken up by its branches: the sociology of religion, of law and morals, of the economy, of language.
• General sociology. The philosophical part, seeking the general social laws that the branches yield.

Its other adherents.

• Morris Ginsberg set the scope as social morphology, social control, social processes and social pathology. The last is worth noting for Module II: social pathology is where crime and disorganisation belong.
• Pitirim A. Sorokin held that sociology studies the relationships between the different classes of social phenomena, the relationship between social and non-social phenomena, and the general characteristics common to all classes of social phenomena.
• L. T. Hobhouse treated sociology as a synthesis of the numerous social sciences.
• Karl Mannheim divided it into systematic and general sociology on the one hand, and historical sociology on the other.

Criticism of the synthetic school.

1. It makes sociology too wide. If it studies everything social, it has no subject of its own and becomes a name for the social sciences collectively.
2. A synthesis needs specialists. No one worker can master economics, politics, religion and law well enough to synthesise them honestly.
3. It risks superficiality, since breadth is bought with depth.

The two schools compared

A worked example

A researcher studies why the residents of a Mumbai housing society and the workers who service it rarely mix socially.

A formalistic sociologist studies the relationship as a form. This is superordination and subordination, with distance maintained by ritual avoidance. The same form appears between an army officer and a jawan and between a landlord and a tenant farmer. The interest lies in what is common to all three.

A synthetic sociologist studies the whole situation. What are the incomes involved, which is economics; what does caste contribute, which is social structure; what do the society's by-laws provide about the use of the lift, which is law; what has migration to the city done to both groups, which is demography. The interest lies in how these fit together in this case.

Neither is wrong. The formalist produces a general proposition that applies widely and explains this case thinly. The synthesist explains this case richly and generalises weakly. The honest conclusion, and the one that scores, is that the schools are complementary rather than contradictory, and that modern sociology in practice does both: it studies particular institutions concretely, and it uses general concepts of form to compare them.

What this does NOT mean

"Pure science" does not mean useless. It means the discipline's own object is knowledge rather than application. Sociological knowledge is applied constantly, in policy, in planning and in law reform, but the applying is a different activity.

"Categorical, not normative" does not mean sociologists have no values. It means that a value judgment is not a finding, and that the two must be kept visibly apart in a piece of work.

"Abstract" does not mean vague. It means the subject studies patterns rather than particular events, and abstraction is the price of generality.

Quick revision

1. Nature: sociology is an independent, social, categorical, pure, abstract, generalising science, both rational and empirical.
2. It is a science in method, but experiment, objectivity, prediction and terminology are permanently harder here than in physics.
3. Scope: two schools. Specialistic or formalistic, and synthetic.
4. Specialistic: Simmel, Tonnies, Weber, von Wiese, Vierkandt. Sociology studies the forms of social relationships alone. Simmel's analogy is geometry.
5. Synthetic: Durkheim, Ginsberg, Sorokin, Hobhouse, Mannheim. Sociology is a general science synthesising the social sciences.
6. Durkheim's three divisions: social morphology, social physiology, general sociology.
7. Ginsberg's four: social morphology, social control, social processes, social pathology.
8. Formalistic is criticised as too narrow, synthetic as too wide. The schools are complementary.

Test yourself

1. Is sociology a science? Give both sides. In method and aim, yes: it observes systematically, gathers data, frames and tests hypotheses, and states checkable general propositions, as Durkheim's study of suicide shows. But it is a social science, and four difficulties are permanent: controlled experiment is mostly impossible, the observer belongs to the society observed, prediction of particular events is weak, and its terminology is not agreed. The correct answer names both sides and concludes that it is a science of a distinctive kind.

2. State the position of the formalistic school and its leading analogy. Sociology is a specific and independent science whose subject matter is the forms of social relationships, studied apart from their content. Simmel's analogy is geometry: as geometry studies the sphere without regard to whether it is wooden or iron, sociology studies competition, conflict, subordination and division of labour without regard to whether they occur in a factory or a temple.

3. State Durkheim's threefold division of the scope of sociology. Social morphology, the material substratum, population, its density and its distribution over territory; social physiology, the functioning of society studied through its branches, the sociology of religion, of law and morals, of the economy; and general sociology, the philosophical part which seeks the general laws the branches yield.

4. Give two criticisms of each school. Formalistic: form cannot be separated from content, since competition between shopkeepers and between states is one form and two different things; and its forms are not exclusively sociological, being studied by economists and political scientists too. Synthetic: it makes sociology so wide that it has no subject of its own; and a genuine synthesis would require a mastery of every social science that no single worker has.

5. Which school do you find more convincing, and why? Either answer earns marks if it is argued. The strongest answer says they are complementary: the formalist supplies the general concepts by which cases are compared, the synthesist supplies the concrete study without which the concepts are empty, and sociology as actually practised uses both.