two - Why sociology?

Summary

Let me open my ‘sociological tale’ by explaining why I think we need sociology today, as this will shed light on my own background in the discipline and my views about what it means to be a sociologist. In our post-modern society where everything must have instrumental value, the question of the usefulness of sociology has come to haunt the discipline. How we answer this question will in many ways define the future of the sociological project in the UK and beyond. However, before we answer the question ‘Why sociology?’, perhaps a more fundamental question is ‘Why Why sociology?’ In other words, why is the question of the value of sociology, which has caused so many ruptures between those who regard sociology as a critical normative discipline, and those who believe it is an objective methodology for the accumulation of facts to be used by others in the creation of policy, such a serious one today? Although it is possible to trace this debate back to the founders of the discipline and explore differences between Marx, Weber and Durkheim in their view of the purpose of intellectual work, I think that it is also possible to relate the crisis of sociology, if we may call the troubling question of the usefulness of the discipline a crisis, back to much more recent social and political transformations which took place in the 1970s and which Zygmunt Bauman explains through the idea of individualisation.

These transformations, which Bauman connects to Thatcherism and the emergence of what we now call neoliberal capitalism, created a society premised on a view of the importance of the individual, selfrealisation and the competitive spirit. In the wake of this shift from the social, which was, in Europe at least, largely understood through the concept of class and the idea of class struggle, to the individual, who has now become the focus of everything, it is not surprising that sociology has today become a kind of spectral discipline, a discipline haunted by questions of its own value and importance, but which also haunts contemporary society and the academy like a ghost from the past.