Social Theory – Holley Sociology

Media Influencers and Understanding Media: Paris Hilton and Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan needs to be credited with identifying, in the 1960s, the first media cultural generation, that we now call the Boomers. We know that this has been followed by subsequent generations, each identified by its own popular culture. McLuhan made a brilliant start by identifying media users as a new sociological feature of countries. He invented the name ‘media’ and recognized its importance for the cohort of people who grew up with it.

But where McLuhan went wrong was misrepresenting what this media-using cohort of people were actually achieving. McLuhan called this media use by young people a form of ‘tribalism.’ With this term he saw youth as failing. McLuhan regarded the only useful contribution to society as what was political and ideological. For him the newly appearing Baby Boomers lacked all serious literary and moral impact…unlike his own generation.

For himself, and people his age who lacked any surrounding media, McLuhan regarded people as influential only when they were literary individuals, private thinkers who worked alone and thought for themselves, and whose only support was alcohol. McLuhan expected men – and not women or youth – to be private, boozy, and essentially moral and politically oriented contributors to the institutional order of their society.

McLuhan couldn’t see any useful purpose for the ‘tribalism’ displayed by the media-using young people of the Sixties. For him, their deficiency, was their inability to contribute abstract concepts to the ideological discourse of the state.

Let’s jump forward forty years and look at somebody else who made, in my opinion, an equally important analysis of the meaning of media. I’m talking about Paris Hilton and her contribution to media influence through fashion and beauty. Around the Millennium, Paris Hilton was criticized by the older generation for ‘not doing anything’ and therefore not deserving any fame.

But Paris Hilton did make a huge contribution. She demonstrated that being beautiful, wearing the right clothing, hair and makeup was enough. You didn’t have to do anything that was political, ideological or charitable, in order to be influential. Being beautiful was enough, because it was an effective use of the power of media. Paris Hilton showed that political, ideological, and philanthropic activities were irrelevant to the popularity of the media. Today’s ‘media influencers’ now understand this basic truth. At the Millennium, it was not clear how much work went into presenting oneself. Before she went out, Hilton had to spend 45 minutes on hair, and another 45 minutes on makeup, as well as finding and wearing the right clothing. She would make changes of clothing during the day so that news photographers could publish her pictures at different events on the same day. This was not ‘doing nothing’; this was hard work that was relevant and necessary to effective deployment of media.

In sum, Paris Hilton’s achievement was showing that being beautiful is enough; through media, anyone can be influential with youth and affect society. You don’t need to be conceptual, policy oriented, or a political advocate for one cause or another. The media is its own thing, a fact which every subsequent generation has learnt for itself, and inspires so many of our young women to become media influencers. McLuhan was wrong. He could not have predicted the profound change which has shifted society away from literary high culture and politics. Much of the old ruling heights of political consciousness have lost influence due to the rise of media.

More sadly, social science generally, has failed to catch up with the importance of youth and media. Why did reading and print media decline? Without media, how do we know how young people see themselves collectively? What is each generation adding to media? The great transformation by which youth and media have been elevated into importance is demonstrated perfectly by Paris Hilton.

Today, people have largely forgotten Marshall McLuhan. His limitations are now all too obvious; businesses now study each youthful media cohort and report on what is new. These innovations are taken very seriously – and rightly so.

So it is disappointing that academic social science has so far failed to learn the Paris Hilton message that using the media is enough in itself. What is the mechanism by which media is so effective? How does the personal life of young people shape politics, economy, and popular culture? Our current social sciences cannot tell us the answer because, in important ways, our sociology and political science are stuck back in the McLuhan Era. They still suppose that written commentary, and policy making within formal organizations, are the only ways of steering society. Revisiting the legacy of Paris Hilton may be a good way to cast off the obsolete vision that still sees no purpose for the media in a modern country.

Government as Law or Listening to People?

The recent strikes in France against Macron’s perfectly reasonable plan to raise the retirement pension age, again pose the question of how good Continental ‘governance by rational law’ really is. The alternative is expressed by the English-speaking countries that operate by business style contracts, a reduced kind of law, and by listening to complaints that are based in actual lifestyle. Brexit and the recent battles, with Macron and Barnier, over how the UK should continue to interact with continental Europe, illustrate all the mutual incomprehension that arises from having two different systems behind the activities of government.

Recent strikes across France show what goes wrong when governments use a political approach based on law. The policy behind it appears absolutely clear; and to its fans, this looks a very rational way of proceeding. But Hugh Schofield (BBC News 7^th March 2023) reveals the ugly underside of this. All political gains from government policy are seen by their beneficiaries as eternal political rights, which need to be defended forever by violence if necessary. Schofield refers to the French Revolution as a foundation of this. Flexibility, compromise, and updating, because times and conditions have changed, all become impossible. What first appeared as rational turns into street battles between right and wrong.

English speaking countries, correctly see the advantages of their approach. Compromise and adaptation help things to move along more smoothly. They can change with the times in small, aggregating steps. There does exist, of course, an inherent disadvantage to this unwritten process. It is, definitely, less rational in that, at no point, is it necessary to put in writing, or to conceptualize in any broader way, what is going on. The English-speaking countries are notoriously bad at explaining themselves, to their own people and to outsiders. While explanations won’t stop the on-going, low level Mandevillean grumbling and complaining, serious minded audiences could usefully be told the underlying purposes and success rates of the various projects going on in the English-speaking system. A prime example comes from the advocates of Brexit who seem unable to explain its potential usefulness. Brexit may add resilience to the economy, diversity in industries, and robustness in employment, all of these being gains from avoiding the Continent’s legal absolutism.

So do we prefer the rigidity of everything signed as an international treaty (Macron, Merkel)? Or do we like inattention to detail (Johnson), or lost in detail (May)? Viewed within the current political scene, there appears to be no good choice. Fortunately, modern countries don’t rely only on the political sphere. Lots help comes from other sources – the economy and, even more, from a country’s sociology.

All three social science systems work by listening to people. Each has its own method for doing this. What picture and results they give us depends on how much time and effort society has put into the different zones of politics, economics, and sociology. Which best expresses the material reality of how people are living? Which of these should we be listening to most? These are big, yet to be decided, questions of social science that take us beyond particular politicians and specific moments in history.

The Connection Problem in Sociology

Our profession posits the existence of many features of social life. I’m interested in the synchronization of free individuals over their lifecourse. But whatever one’s topic of study, if it takes place in an advanced society of today, the connection problem remains to be answered. What is it that binds people together? If the facts we find cannot be linked to coercive institutions – the structural explanation – or explained by restrictive civilized culture – some -ism or -archy – our social science has got an explanation gap. How do autonomous individuals relate to each other across many varied phases of life and contrasting conditions? Every pattern sociologists find, from the smallest fad to the biggest macro trend, poses the same problem of connectivity. How are these people communicating? In our complex societies, how do patterns in private life exist at all?

This is the Hobbesian problem of social order writ large. Hobbes wanted a solution based on coercion – the Leviathan. Locke offered a solution based on shared, enlightened interest through property ownership. But today’s life demands explanations that are infinitely more detailed and reaching separate individuals. And, at the same time, our explanations must recognize differences over time. Individuals and generational cohorts innovate collectively across each decade. What is more, these manage to be collectively orderly. How can this be explained?

Where can our missing connectors be found? Let’s take an example of transition from courtship to committed relationship. Lydia Kiesling gives us a biographical account of her finding ‘the one’ at age 23 in a sudden revelation after a period of wild dating (The Cut 2019). Lydia knows she’s out of sync with her peers; too precocious early on, and too quick to commit to a life partner and enter the next phase. Other undergraduate students reading this account, circa 2020, recognized this girl as being out of sync too. Her age is essentially still undergraduate college, with today’s five and six year graduation rates in mind.

So one individual is free to be out of sync. But, at the same time everybody, individual and observers alike, knows what the normal and expected chronology here really is. What does this example tell us about generational sync overall?

What is the cause of it? Should we describe it as ‘normative’? This seems too strong by half. Our protagonist is not harmed in the least by being in breach of any such norm; she knows she has been ‘wild,’ but can do what she wants and end up with a happy result that suits her and her partner equally. What is the power of a norm if it doesn’t matter to the people involved?

But, apparently contradicting this, everybody shares a consensus understanding of what the right age is for each stage of the life course; this is a collective awareness held by the whole cohort. And this shared perception is validated by the fact that the average age members of one generation complete each phase of life close to the same age. People pair up in budget-sharing couplehood in their mid 20s, and marry at around 30. What is more, these age synchronizations are not inherited. They are different from their own parents’ age timing and in the content of their courtship process. e.g. the rules of dating, breaking up, and finding new suitors.

What conclusions can we draw from the facts we have found here? The evidence of collective sync suggests that some kind of norm or rule exists. We see this in one of young people’s most important choices – the selection of their life partner. On the other hand, breaking the chronological rule appears to be totally without any penalty. Apparently, the obedience to timing is completely optional. This latter implies that norms or rules carry no reward or cost for breaking them. How does something with no consequences get created and how can it be influential? This is part of a problem sociologists face in trying to understand what connects people in private life. Young people appear to be collectively coordinated by age, but in practice individuals are evidently free to operate separately. They can create their own futures, heedless of others. What sociological principle is at work here? Whatever connects people must be a new kind of order. It cannot be one of culturally defined rules of the type enforced by state civilizations. Nor can it be a principle of rational action based on reward or loss – of the economic kind. Youth courtship shows us neither norms, nor rewards and punishments. Fixed civilized fixed rules for everyone, or self-interest in the economy, just don’t seem to apply here.

So what should sociologists do? Do we throw our hands in the air and despair of ever explaining what goes on in private life? Should we retreat and confine our studies to politics and formal organizations? Is it just safer to pick topics that aren’t sociological – that are political and economic – because, and here is the huge paradox, sociologists are afraid to study topics that are sociological? They find that blaming problems on the economy and institutions is much easier to do! Trying to be a sociologist of the real lives of youth today may take you into a difficult terrain where rules exist but are optional for individuals. This new zone isn’t based on morals. Nor can we easily see good or bad consequences. It lacks all current explanation. In sum, it’s too hard for the modern mind to grapple with personal relationships and it appears only fiction writers and entertainers can present it – as drama and not social science. Can sociology as a discipline just accept that it has been defeated by this?

This author admits to being unconventional for a sociologist. I believe social science can escape from its ‘connection problems’ if it ventures into a new explanatory framework. If we take our entire private lifecourse as one topic and study it within its own relationship rules and logic, I feel confident that this will show us how private connections stand in the center of social life. And this, I believe, will reveal youth and lifecourse to be their own, shared sociological sphere.

Why Can’t I See Society?

Here’s how I think people see things. We can see people as individuals but we can’t see ‘society in these people.’ I can see myself; I’m a person and the individual aspects of myself are clear to me. But I cannot see any society within me or showing up in my actions – whatever is going on kinda looks like it’s me as an individual. So, if society exists, why can’t I see it?

Let’s ask a parallel question, one that is about another feature of modern life – the economy. Can you, or anyone else, really ‘see the economy?’ We buy things; everybody buys stuff. But does all the buying by people and the selling by businesses really add up to something we can call ‘an economy’?

Most people today do believe that something called an economy really exists. This contrasts with the widespread doubt felt whether our society is any more than a nominal term – a shorthand for certain trends but which doesn’t actually exist as one, coherent thing.

In the past, the economy was not recognized as existing either. Back then, it wasn’t as highly developed as it is today and that didn’t help. But it, in the past, it was also true that people didn’t know where to look for what was economic. Where can you see the economy? What subsequently changed to make it believable?

The answer is that the economy has been given indicators that show how it is alive. Great effort has gone into data collection and this has resulted in well recognized indicators that measure revealing summaries of many recurring economic activities. We hear about prices, learn about its growth, and watch its sectors expand or contract. All these facts are revealed to us as trends because the measures are made repeatedly – again and again, at great expense, and with wide agreement about what they are studying. The result is that ordinary people can see the economy; we learn about its aggregate behavior in inflation, growth, and the rise or decline of whole industries.

Over time we discover whether the economy is growing, shrinking, or failing. The relevant measures are constructed repeatedly, a fact that involves a big commitment from social science. It is this which lets us see trends over time. Despite having no center – you cannot walk up to the economy’s castle, see its temple, or learn its commandments – but thanks to publicly available measurements, we see the evidence of the economy as a living entity in our country.

Social scientific measuring has given visibility to the economy. We can now see the living, breathing presence of this amorphous thing in our lives. We all believe the economy is real. But what about society? Is that doomed to be be forever invisible and unbelieved? Could society be real too?

My contention is simple. I have come to the conclusion that when we get around to collecting the equivalent data for society, people will see it too as a living reality around us. Being composed of small actions, being large and amorphous – these are not insurmountable obstacles to becoming visible. Someday we will be able to visualize our society; I am sure this can be done. In future, we will recognize society at work in our own lives and see its effects in the people around us. When that day comes, we will thank a new generation of social scientists for putting so much effort into finding and publicizing the data that is most informative and revealing.

How Students See the World: Inequality or What?

I’ve noticed that, when my students get the chance to write, they don’t focus on inequality, even though their professors understand this as ‘the dominant research paradigm in sociology’ (fabiorojas orgtheory.net April 28, 2020).

Recently, the topics freely chosen by undergraduate students got me thinking about this again. Asked for their own experiences of youth, students in a recent class chose to write about such topics as popular culture, consumer objects, strict parents versus more modern ones, and the transitions between phases of life such as between middle school, high school and college life. These should have given scope for identifying unfair and difficult aspects of their lives. But their papers really didn’t complain about anything they faced.

Those students who did talk about difficulties – for example having been forced to parent younger children, deal with the death or divorce of parents, or having very strict parents – saw these as factual realities which could be dealt with. Adapting to a different sequence of phases in their life, having foreign born parents, being first generation college, or having sports injuries, were all seen as conditions which could be overcome, balanced with their own personal needs, and understood as aspects of personal identity. Children of foreign parents or strict ones just saw this as an opportunity to possess both a foreign and an American identity, and to balance their own needs with the expectations of their parents. There wasn’t a problem here; nobody saw themselves as, in essence, different from other students. All the features they described were seen as the general pattern by which all people grow up.

Looking at these answers, I had to ask whether students were expressing their true feelings. Was it possible that my presence as the instructor was preventing them from complaining? Alternatively, are students generally suffering from some nation-wide ‘false consciousness’? Were they unable to discern the reality of the world around them or recognize the kind of suffering they are living under? These thoughts suggested a ‘hermeneutic’ problem here. How do people learn to understand the world correctly? But the complexity of any hermeneutic analysis is deciding on which side the misunderstanding lies. Which people need help here? Could it be that students are simply occupied with more important concerns than the inequalities that sociologists worry about? Are our students showing us that the real world has different priorities, things more important than the inequalities professional sociologists stress?

It seems certain that somebody is understanding the world incorrectly. But is it the students or their professors in the universities? The hermeneutic says that one of these two sides needs re-educating, but which one is it – the students in their papers or the sociologists in their professional thinking? Definitely, there is a problem here; in this case I cannot see how both sides of this can be right.

Are Sociologists People?

When they are dead they are. Even persons who are men and Marxists can speak touchingly about a deceased colleague’s personal qualities. Consider a recent newsletter obituary in a sociology sub-field. On Twitter, the serious challenges of work-life balance are presented through the sociological head, and the private side remains voiceless.

The rest of the time, what should we consider sociologists to be? Are they personal life deficient mouthpieces spouting structural concepts? Sociology speakers cannot talk about love; it’s non-admissible in our professional vocabulary. What other essential features of life are prohibited when sociologists talk?

For a sociologist, does it matter who you kiss? Does it make any difference who you commit to marrying, how you bring up your children, and what jobs you won’t take because they’re not where you want to live? Do people ‘compose a life,’ evaluate opportunities, and have long term goals? A visitor from another planet reading our published sociology would conclude that these personal activities do not exist or are not relevant to our collective life.

At what cost to our profession do we ignore private life? Is this the reason we leave non-marriage, fertility, and stratification to other professions – economists, demographers, and IQ hunters, for example? Ultimately, is this why sociologists cannot define society? Without love, without marriage, and without society, how much of sociology’s subject matter is actually left?

It is paradoxical that a profession which prides itself on helping others cannot talk about what matters most in people’s lives. Sociology’s vocabulary gap is a huge problem. Are sociologists going to wake up to this any time soon? Or will they go on forever ignoring, what Harriet Martineau declared a hundred and fifty years ago was the core of ‘morals and manners,’ namely what people care about most but talk about least – which is what is in their hearts? Let’s create a sociology that starts with love and then moves on to the hopes and fears about these relationships. The woman founder of sociological methods long ago stated that this is where we should begin. Can we afford to wait another century before this work of reconceptualizing sociology gets started?

Do Sociologists Know what “Ghosting” is?

I teach a course called “Sociology of Romance” but I wasn’t familiar with the term “ghosting” until my students explained it to me. Class discussion quickly made clear that ending relationships by sudden non-communication was deplored by students; no one would speak to defend it. But for me that raised layers of problems about how sociologists explain courtship behavior.

Why do students continue to use a mechanism that makes them feel bad? A lot of easy explanations fall away when we look at this closely. For example, calling this ‘youth culture’ needs a lot of caveats because courtship changes every decade or so. It isn’t the same culture, indeed different generations find each other incomprehensible. Older people note today’s absence of dating and are suspicious of a “hookup culture” where there is no dinner and a movie Undergraduates today can’t believe older singles “dated people they didn’t know.” Each generation finds its own courtship familiar and acceptable while that of others is baffling.

Two further points on how we study this. First, the scant academic studies that do appear miss important aspects. Early discussions of the hookup dating scene missed the intense “talking to someone” by messaging and “Facebook stalking” which was going on. Young people were still getting to know each other, it was just being done though social media.

Second, the terminology sociologists use is inconsistent and doesn’t fit with broader explanations of society. Was “rating and dating” a tradition or a practice? Is today’s “hookup” best described as a culture, a script, an intimate tie, a fad, or even a social movement? Is a “group chat” something we should study as a formal organization? The difficulty of conceptualizing courtship suggests a broader problem. Perhaps sociologists aren’t much interested in romantic relationships because they aren’t prestigious in the profession. Ghosting cannot influence society; it just isn’t part of the conceptual framework. Sociologists generally dismiss private relationships because they are ephemeral, full of rapidly obsolete slang, and lack any sustained way to influence society. ‘Structural’ explanations have more prestige. So, with courtship outside sociology’s knowledge base, sociologists aren’t able to ‘know’ about dating in a serious professional and theoretical way.

But what if we can show that courtship matters? Does the way we date shape later life choices and indirectly create a cohort-wide understanding? Perhaps the speed with which courtship practices appear, along with universally understood rules, is a model of broader change in society? In this case, ghosting, and things like it, reveal a lot about society’s future.

Just being a professor and listening to undergraduates doesn’t change our profession’s concepts. Personally, we can acquire commonsense knowledge from many sources – as participants in dating, being parents and friends of young people, consuming media entertainment, and working as teachers in a classroom. But none of this theorizes ghosting or adds it to sociology’s professional knowledge. Without concepts, theories and cases that explain its importance, personal familiarity with current dating leaves the discipline of sociology without professionally “knowing” what ghosting is. Without concepts and a theoretical framework, none of us can use it in our writing, our lectures or in our critical assessments of the readings we assign. Hookups continue to be outside how we explain society.

In a recent paper I have tried to fill some conceptual gaps about courtship. I present this at ASA 2019 in New York in August. Please come. You will be most welcome and, with your help, we may all soon have courtship ghosting as part of sociology’s professional knowledge. Then we will truly be able to say that sociologists “understand” ghosting and we will all be able to write, teach and increase public understanding of it.

English Club Football Victory in Europe: A Story Mandeville Would Love

Today, English clubs dominate European soccer. If you ask why, the simple answer is they just buy the best players. The victor here is money. This is the opposite of the German Bundesliga strategy of each club cultivating its own players and slowly building up a pool of local talent. English club football does the exact opposite: it simply buys the best players from anywhere in the world and pays whatever huge sums of money it takes to snag them.

Is this an example of vice beating morals? It’s an old question. If he could travel from the early eighteenth century and see this today, would Bernard de Mandeville be delighted with this example? Wasn’t his whole point that vices like greed for fame and profit make the world a richer and more lively place? If this argument has been known to social science for so long, why is it still strenuously resisted?

Is it wrong that money should win? Are we witnessing here the evil of big business against a German model that is more honest and moral? How can social science answer this question? Big enterprises connect in complex ways. Does the German model only help Europeans whereas global purchases launch footballer’s careers around the world? Is the English model an economic imperialism, robbing developing countries of their best talent? Doesn’t English club football get the money to pay for all these talented players because the fans find their matches more exciting? After all, bigger audiences make Premier League clubs more profitable, while the German games are often boring. In this case, big money appears to express the world popularity of a genuinely more exciting style of game played by English clubs.

In the end, Mandeville isn’t acknowledged because his theory is harder to understand. It relies on processes we call the ‘invisible hand’ – complex unintended outcomes that are hard for social scientists to track through their particulars. And sociologists are not familiar with giving such processes credit for working out well; too often people are seen as victims in these circumstances. But when its only a game, the stakes really aren’t that high. Aren’t the play-offs of a sports tournament a moment to evaluate an important theory of this neglected social scientist? It’s my guess that many other good things result from Mandevillian ‘private vice.’ The challenge lies in specifying exactly under what conditions these things work out well.

Preparing for Happy Sociology

Fabio Rojas (orgtheory.net what would happy sociology look like October 10, 2018) https://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2018/10/10/what-would-happy-sociology-look-like/ writes …

As I’ve noted before, there are lots of great developments in modern society, but they get much less attention than negative events What would “happy” sociology look like?

There would be a cultural sociology that asks about the cultural preconditions of the industrial revolution, the single event in human history that lifted the most people out of poverty.

There would be a similar cultural sociology examining the massive decline in inter-personal violence and war that has occurred over the last two or three hundred years.

There would be a cultural sociology examining the liberation of minorities, women, and LGBT people in many nations.

There would be an economic sociology that examines how modern economies support an insane level of cultural diversity.

There would be a sociology that explains how societies produce things that essentially wipe out many forms of infectious disease and drastically reduce child mortality.

There would be a cultural sociology that explains why individual freedom remains strong in a world with fascism, national socialism, communism, radical religious groups, and populist nationalism.

*****

Professor Rojas has, again, addressed the most important question facing sociologists. He challenges us to explain both what is good and what’s bad in society. I want to offer my own thoughts on what sociology’s next steps should be as we make our discipline happiness ready!

First, I have concluded that, as a whole, sociologists don’t believe that anything exists within society that can really be described as creating good. Our concepts and introductory textbooks show nothing but the forces of “inequality and oppression” which always seem to win. Individuals may have good motives and groups try to make life better but sociologists never identify endogenous forces within society that actually make people happier. If this is true, happiness in society will be reduced to a search for scraps of food during a famine. You cannot be ‘balanced’ when the reality of your society is truly horrible.

The evidence however points in the opposite direction. Rojas shows that society is getting better in important ways. If, as I believe, this progress arises from processes within society, it is clear that sociologists have neglected these. Studying society in a more balanced way means revisiting our sociological concepts and explanations and looking for what we have missed. My own view is that personal relationships and their chronology over our lifetimes is a sociological process that creates good. This offers a new approach that potentially links Rojas’ six good features of society. But this radically new analysis is in its infancy. Developing an approach that is capable of balance is a huge task – one that will involve our whole profession.

Anything new takes a lot of work. But isn’t explaining society in a balanced way the most important thing we can do? And isn’t understanding life in society why we all became sociologists in the first place?

How good are the social science disciplines? – 3 Psychology

My overview of social sciences concludes with academic psychology.

Lay people suppose that psychologists study human motivation. If they did, we would know a lot more about modern people. Lay people want to know how their future-orientated outlook will take them through their lifetime. Unfortunately for them and for social science, decades ago academic psychology turned instead to studying lab rats, then fruit flies and, currently, brain scans. Confining itself to short term effects, psychology has been criticized for small sample sizes, statistically non-significant findings and non-replicability. Its switch to natural science might be okay if psychologists had given up trying to explain society. But they still try to. Developmental psychology inexplicably stops studying children when they reach some unspecified ‘adulthood.’ Modern people assume that we all grow and continue to learn throughout life. But psychologists can’t study this because they are averse to ‘roles’ because those things are created by society. This leads to the absurdity that children and youth are studied without society but then, suddenly and inexplicably, it’s okay for adults to relate to the people and associations of society! The public, like other social scientists, aren’t going to learn from psychology where lifelong motivations come from. Academic psychology isn’t ready to recognize social time either biographically for individuals or historically as societies change.

In clinical psychology, doctors and therapists have to categorize people’s problems under the current version of the DSM. This handbook’s distinctions don’t inspire confidence when former mental disorders vanish from newer editions of the DSM. Were older diagnoses wrong, or did society change and turn formerly abnormal mindsets into useful features of society? Over the decades we have lost the neurasthenic, the neurotic and the narcissistic. Psychology cannot tell us why its own concepts later become obsolete. Here is an academic study that fails when it faces the problem of time. Professional clinicians have to change historically and healthy human beings continue to grow over their lifetimes. Clearly psychology is unable to explain aspects of its own subject. For social scientists it’s no surprise that human beings cannot be understood simply by natural science; they are actually and irretrievably part of society!

Envy of this discipline is unlikely for anyone who wants to explain our collective social life.

Overall, my review of three disciplines shows none of them to be better than sociology. Political science, economics and psychology are all baffled by some aspect of their own subject. Practitioners in their fields work with concepts that are unknown to their academic counterparts.

So overall nothing in these social sciences looks impressively good. There are no grounds for complacency here. I want a sociology that is able to define ‘society’ and no doubt the other social sciences should improve theirs. The work will be hard but isn’t isn’t trying to really understand the world the most important thing we can do?