The Social Animal

But explanation, in sociology or elsewhere, can mean several different things. Why, to go back to my earlier example, do I shake hands with you when I’m introduced to you? Because I don’t wish to seem impolite, because that’s how I was brought up, because it strengthens social ties within our community, because a mutual friend decided that we should meet, because in our culture that’s what we do instead of rubbing noses, or because in ruder and more violent times the symbolic meaning of a handshake was that neither of us held weapons in our hands?

That isn’t even an exhaustive list. But for the practising sociologist the important distinction is the threefold one between genetic, motivational and functional explanations. This difference does not, let me emphasize, correspond to the difference between evoked, acquired and imposed behaviour: explanations of each kind can be sought for all three. But sociologists are, typically, more likely both to be studying imposed behaviour and to be looking for functional explanations. Let me go back once more to the example of infantry drill in seventeenth-century Europe. If you want to know where it came from, the answer lies in a narrative account of the development by Maurice of Nassau, captain-general of Holland and Zeeland for forty years from 1585, of systematic routines for marching and countermarching, loading and discharging matchlock guns, and transmitting words of command down through co-ordinated tactical units. If you want to know what influenced the people involved, the answer lies in the careers and ambitions of the leaders of early modern European armies on the one side and the dispositions and responses of volunteer or conscripted foot-soldiers on the other – responses which may, as I’ve pointed out already, be explained as much by an unconscious bonding effect of co-ordinated movement to the sound of drums or music as by a cultural process of deliberate imitation or learning. But if you want to know why it came to transform the way in which wars were fought, the answer lies in the competitive advantage which armies so drilled enjoyed over their opponents and the function which drill performed in promoting discipline during training and garrison duty as well as on the field of battle.

The same distinction can be made on topics which fall more nearly within the domain of one of the specialized social sciences. If, for example, you are an economist studying the automobile industry, you may want to know about the initial commercial exploitation of the internal combustion engine, in which case you will need to find out about the cost – benefit calculations which showed it to be worthwhile. Or you may want to know about the appeal of the product to its potential purchasers, in which case you will need to find out about not only its utility as a mode of transport but also the effect of advertising in expanding consumer demand for it and the part played by peer-group imitation or rivalry in raising its priority as an item of household expenditure. Or you may want to know why some manufacturers have been more successful than others, in which case you will need to find out about production techniques, marketing strategies, tariff barriers, and rates of technological innovation and obsolescence. Indeed, you may well want to draw directly on models derived from the theory of natural selection, as a number of economists have done, in order to explain why some particular firms and their particular products win out over others in competition for market share.18

These examples can also be used (as the handshake example can) to illustrate the difference between the approaches of sociologists or anthropologists on the one hand and historians on the other. There is a familiar contrast, much discussed by philosophers of social science, between narrative explanations (‘because he couldn’t find a horse, the King of Ruritania lost the battle and therefore his kingdom’) and lawlike explanations (‘all monarchies, including the Ruritanian, depend on some kind of religious legitimation’). But the contrast mustn’t be overdrawn. Narrative explanations presuppose underlying regularities of certain kinds which must be true if the particular chain of causal connections is to hold; lawlike explanations are valid across the range of instances to which they are applied only if specific historical conditions are presupposed too. Lack of a horse only leads to the loss of a kingdom in a context to which implicit generalizations about certain forms of warfare apply, just as religious legitimation of a monarchy can only come about after a series of events which were contingently sufficient for it to do so. Sociologists, it could accordingly be said, are all closet historians (and historians closet sociologists).

For example: Madagascar is an exceptionally interesting area to study, not only because it is an island but because, over the course of the past 200 years, a network of small, scattered kingdoms has been replaced, first, by a central bureaucratic state employing slave labour, second, by a colonial regime which abolished slavery at the same time as imposing its own political institutions, and third, by a post-colonial government serviced by a professional, administrative and commercial bourgeoisie. This intriguing evolutionary pattern, convincingly analysed in the work of the anthropologist Maurice Bloch, presents a wide range of different contrasts which call for a correspondingly wide range of explanatory hypotheses. But if your interest is in the first of the three transitions, you will find yourself drawn to the particular sequence of events whereby a particular nineteenth-century king, having captured a sufficient number of slaves to exploit to the full the rice-growing potential of a particular territory, was able to exchange the surplus for European weapons which had by then become available and with them to capture yet more slaves and thereby build up a momentum of conquest which put his kingdom in control of the whole of Madagascar.19 This is not only a textbook example of a narrative explanation; it also tells specifically against a would-be lawlike one since any generalization of the form of ‘whenever one of a number of competing states gains priority of access to more advanced military technology it will establish a momentum of conquest sufficient to guarantee victory’ can be demolished by counter-examples from other times and places where the other conditions which were necessary in the case of Madagascar failed to obtain.

But suppose that your interest is not in the political history of Madagascar, but on the contrary in the patterns of traditional social behaviour which have persisted throughout the successive changes of regime. Bloch draws attention to the persistence of a ritual of circumcision in which the ceremony is performed and the traditional blessing given by a chosen ‘elder’.20 He holds that in Madagascar, as elsewhere, such rituals are a function of institutionalized inequality, and is therefore unsurprised that the role of the persons chosen as ‘elders’ under each successive regime should turn out to be constant not in its defining practices but in its rank: in the first period, the ceremony is performed by local kinship group elders; in the second, by royal administrators; in the third, by French colonial officials; and in the fourth, by prominent local capitalists. QED. Notice, however, that he is explicitly not processing a lawlike generalization of the form of ‘the amount of ritual communication in a society varies with the social distance between its constituent roles’. What he says is that institutionalized inequality is what rituals like this one are about. To explain them, accordingly, involves an analysis of both the meaning of the ritual to the participants and the features of the history and culture of Madagascar which account for the successive replacement of one kind of ‘elder’ by another. And yes, there is a valid generalization which can be framed, if you want it, to the effect that people prefer their domestic ceremonies presided over by persons of higher rather than lower rank. Would any professor of anthropology be flattered to have his or her inaugural lecture chaired not, as advertised, by the university vice-chancellor in academic robes, but by a bare-footed freshman in an unwashed T-shirt?

All this, however, brings us back to the need for genetic, motivational and functional explanation in the study of human social behaviour. For example: in many different societies, there are communities and subcultures where the advantages of behaviour which the dominant ideology defines as ‘criminal’ outweigh the disadvantages. Parts of London and Newcastle, as of Chicago and Los Angeles, are obvious examples. Able-bodied young males are likely to be at least part-time occupants and performers of the role of ‘thief’: the chances of being caught are small, there is no alternative employment on offer which is both legitimate and gainful, there are easy pickings in the more affluent community down the road, and so on. Yes, but why exactly do they do it? Is it through rational choice, unthinking conformity to the peer-group, class or ethnic hatred, innate predisposition, an urge to escape from boredom, pathological greed, or what? However obvious the function, we still want to know why those who do it do and those who don’t don’t, and which of the relevant features of the environment would need to be changed for those who do not to want to any longer. It still isn’t a question to be answered by taking their own account of why they do it at face value: if, for example, they say that they do it because they are driven to it by poverty, the street-wise sociologist will wait for evidence of their changing their thieving behaviour when they cease to be poor. But don’t we still want to know what motivates them to do it as well as how they started and what they get out of it? Of course we do.

Ideally, therefore, the explanation of an observed pattern of human social behaviour will not only link a motivational to both a genetic and a functional hypothesis but provide a theoretical underpinning for all three. You don’t need a sociology degree before you notice that young men are more aggressive than elderly women. But maybe you do need a sociology degree (with some biology and psychology courses thrown in) before you can produce an adequate answer to the question: why does what looks like a causal connection between young maleness and a propensity to violence hold good? We need not just the evidence which might, but doesn’t, invalidate the claim that the connection is causal. We also need an explanation for the explanation. To take a textbook example from physical science, the discovery of a causal connection between altitude above sea level and the boiling point of water was made long before the notion of atmospheric pressure provided the theoretical grounding for it. In sociology, we are still a long way from the sort of grounding of wide-ranging causal hypotheses in deep and powerful theories which has been achieved in both physical and biological science. But that’s part of what makes it such a fascinating subject to pursue. Whatever (exactly) it is that you want to know, there is plenty left to find out about how we all behave as social animals, and there are plenty of alternative hypotheses available to explain it when you do.

Then what, in all this, about the philosophers, preachers and poets? Don’t they offer both explanations and descriptions of patterns of human social behaviour as valid and authentic as those put forward by academic social scientists? Well – nothing stops them. Nietzsche’s writings, to take a celebrated example, contain a number of sociological conjectures about the evolution of human nature for which he himself claimed ‘scientific’ status, including his view of systems morality as expressions of sublimated feelings of resentment towards those with power on the part of those without it. But Nietzsche wasn’t setting out systematically to test a set of explanatory hypotheses against the evidence most likely to conflict with them. He was, for his own very different purposes, constructing a just-so story about the ‘genealogy of morals’ and using it to subvert the conventional view of what human beings are doing in passing judgement on each other’s behaviour at all. The writings of philosophers, preachers and poets are sociology to the extent that the authors make them so. Some of the most potent intellectual cocktails yet mixed, like Freud’s, derive their potency precisely from the cunning, not to say dangerous, way in which they combine the two: would-be therapeutic regimes derived from a psychoanalytic theory which fails the standard tests to which new therapeutic drugs are routinely subjected may turn out to do more harm than good. But the difference between the kinds of conclusions to which the reader is asked to assent is still the same. It isn’t up to you or me whether Sahlins or Obeyesekere is right about the Hawaiians’ reception of Captain Cook, even though our respective ideological presuppositions may lead us to hope and expect that it’s the one rather than the other. But we do have, and will continue to have, a further element of discretion in deciding whether or not we share Nietzsche’s unflattering view of the Christian conception of morality, even after every item of relevant evidence is in.

To emphasize the difference as firmly as I have been doing is not – repeat not – to question that to analyse it is a philosophical rather than a scientific exercise: the philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy, not of science. So when the French philosopher and literary critic Jacques Derrida, in his book On Grammatology, announces to his readers that the nature of the difference between a philosophical and an empirical question isn’t simply an empirical question, the (or at least, my) surprise is that he feels the need to italicize it.21 Who is he contradicting? There is always scope for argument over the borderline. But no contemporary sociologist or philosopher holds that the conceptual distinction between conceptual and empirical questions is ‘simply empirical’. Likewise, when textbooks on the philosophy of social science correctly insist that social scientists themselves are both its subjects and its objects, who wants to say otherwise? The question is: what follows? And the answer is that although social scientists are on that account exposed to the risk of making mistakes of a kind which doesn’t arise at all in the study of inanimate nature, it doesn’t prevent them from formulating explanatory hypotheses about their own and other people’s behaviour which can be tested by the same criteria of validity. Empirical sociologists talking about facts and their causes are apt to be denounced by their more philosophically minded colleagues as ‘positivists’. By this, the anti-positivists usually mean to imply a nefarious commitment to an ideology of science which denies the truism that the practice of science raises some genuinely philosophical issues. But when they come to attack the empiricists’ specific conclusions, you can bet that they will tacitly acknowledge the existence of empirical criteria by which observations of, and hypotheses about, patterns of human social behaviour stand and fall. Or if they persist in maintaining that all ‘social facts’ are ‘ideological constructions’, you need merely ask them whether, if charged by a court of law with a murder committed by somebody else, they would accept that their innocence was only an ideological construction (which the concept of ‘murder’ as an act of intentional, wrongful killing self-evidently is), and not in any sense a ‘fact’.

There is, to be sure, nothing self-contradictory in doing both. All students of human social behaviour, whatever label they attach to themselves, are free to draw on whatever empirical observations they like in order to persuade their readers to share their personal convictions about the human condition, the meaning of history, the phenomenology of the life-world, the postmodern experience, the contradictions of rationality, the dualism of knowledge and action, the existential dilemma, the ontology of social life, the paradox of reflexive subjectivity, and so on and so forth. The sociologists of the kind whom their opponents denounce as ‘positivists’ are apt to be no less contemptuous of those whom they in their turn denounce as practitioners of ‘substitute religion’. But each is as legitimate an intellectual activity as the other. The two are not in competition except in the trivial sense that professors giving lectures of the one kind may be competing for student audiences with professors giving lectures of the other. One of the most influential contemporary practitioners of ‘substitute religion’ is the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, whose ambition (if I understand him correctly) is to formulate the ideal conditions under which rational human beings could communicate with each other free of the constraints imposed by ‘positivist’ social theory and the social institutions which it reflects. It is, in my judgement, a heroic but ultimately self-defeating intellectual enterprise. But whether my judgement is right or wrong, it’s an enterprise as fundamentally different as Nietzsche’s is from seeking first to distinguish and then to explain the different patterns of human social behaviour to be found in the historical and ethnographic record and then, if the researcher is so minded, to describe what they have been like, subjectively speaking, for the people whose patterns of behaviour they are. The only kind of philosophical argument to which this book stands categorically opposed is one which seeks to deny that empirical sociology is possible at all. But that sort of argument is best countered simply by doing what the sceptic says can’t be done; and, as I’ve hinted already, you will find even the most anti-positivist practitioners of substitute religion doing it too, where and when it bolsters their arguments of the other kind.

III A Catalogue of Errors

IF SOCIOLOGY IS AS OLD as Herodotus and Aristotle – to say nothing of Herodotus’s Chinese contemporary K’ung Fu Tzu, otherwise known as Confucius – you may well wonder why it has taken so long to get as far as it has. But the same could be said about many other branches of science. Although mankind’s attempts to make sense of both the natural and the social world go back for many thousands of years, it’s remarkable how recent is the dramatic increase in knowledge which has transformed the world and the way we live in it. How and why it has happened is itself a controversial question. But the fact remains that physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and sociology as they are now understood and practised are all a product of the past couple of centuries or less.

This isn’t to say that earlier ideas about the workings of the social as well as the natural world were all mistaken. Aristotle had some good ones, not least about the relationship within a society between political stability and the relative size of its middle class – a hypothesis lent additional support as recently as 1996 by evidence set out in an article published in the Journal of Economic Growth.1 So did the fourteenth-century Islamic political theorist Ibn Kaldun, who detected in the societies which he studied a recurrent tendency for them to oscillate between government by egalitarian warriors from the desert and hierarchical bureaucrats in the towns. So did Machiavelli, whose insights into the pursuit of power and the means of its retention by the rulers of the city-states of late Renaissance Italy have made his name a part of our everyday vocabulary. But all such ideas were, and were bound to be, relatively parochial in their scope and imprecise in their formulation by the standards of late twentieth-century sociology. The term ‘sociology’ was itself only coined in the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte, who to that extent has to be acknowledged as its founder. But Comte’s writings, for all that he was remarkably prescient about the global impact of industrialization, are nowadays studied closely only by those whose interests lie on the wilder shores of defunct ideas. The sociologists who did most to make the subject into what it still, for the time being, is are Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. It would, I think, be fair to say that there is no serious sociologist now writing who has been untouched by any trace of their influence. But there is something rather odd here. In all sciences the advances made in one generation are likely to be superseded in the next, usually through their absorption into a deeper or more wide-ranging theory. What is striking about these three founding fathers of sociology is how far they all went astray in their quest for the Big Idea.

With Marx, much of the difficulty (but at the same time, much of the reason for his influence) is his fusion of sociological with philosophical argument in precisely the way I had in mind in the concluding paragraphs of Chapter II. Literally thousands of books and articles have been written about the relationship between the ‘scientific’ and the ‘humanistic’ Marx. Nor is that surprising, given the enormous appeal of a doctrine combining a messianic prophecy of a better world with a hypothesis both supporting the prophecy and at the same time endorsing a revolutionary programme to make it come true. But he didn’t get it right. Marx’s belief that the course of human history is determined by conflict between a dominant class and a subordinate class which in due course replaces it led him to predict that the ‘proletariat’ would shortly displace the ‘bourgeoisie’ and usher in a utopian social order about whose details he was notoriously vague. But as a Polish joke was later to put it, ‘Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism it’s the other way round.’ Marx’s sociology was mistaken in three ways. First, he was wrong in supposing that in capitalist industrial societies the progressive immiseration of an expanding proletariat would lead to a revolutionary transfer of power. Second, he was wrong in supposing that where socialist revolutions did come about, they would do so in industrial rather than still predominantly agricultural societies. Third, he was wrong in supposing that in socialist societies class conflict would come to an end. So why, you may well ask, is he still taken so seriously? The short answer is that he has made it impossible for any subsequent sociologist to look at the world and the human societies in it without conceding a more prominent part to class conflict and what he called the ‘social relations of production’ than had been admitted in pre-Marxist sociology. In that sense, and to that extent, ‘we are all Marxists now’.

Max Weber, who was born nearly half a century after Marx, disagreed with the Marxists not because he didn’t recognize the importance of class conflict in human history but because he denied that all other forms of conflict could be reduced to it. Not only did he see political as opposed to economic interests as having their own independent part to play, but he also gave to ideas, and particularly religious ideas, an importance which the Marxists denied them. Ideas, as he put it in a memorable phrase, are like switchmen diverting the course of history down one railway track rather than another.2 His own view of history was as a process of inexorable ‘rationalization’ originating in the societies of early modern Europe. But, like Marx, he turns out not to have got it right. Whatever he meant by ‘rationalization’, it is not the inexorable process which he supposed – even though he saw it as being interrupted by the occasional emergence of a ‘charismatic’ religious or political leader – and it is not to Europe alone that the modern advance of science and technology is due. Yet Weber, too, has permanently influenced his successors. The best way for me to convey this is not to try and summarize his most enduring contributions, but simply to point out how often I mention him in this book. The eminent French sociologist Raymond Aron once said that Weber is not merely the greatest sociologist but the sociologist,3 and it is hard to think of any other for whom the claim could plausibly be made.

And Durkheim? Durkheim was a near-contemporary of Weber’s (although, to the puzzlement of later historians of ideas, they never took any account of each other’s work). Unlike Weber, however, Durkheim sought to establish sociology as an autonomous subject by postulating a conceptual realm of the ‘social’ in which human institutions were all to be explained by reference to other ‘social facts’, these being defined as such by the ‘collective consciousness’ of the society in question. This extrapolation from the unquestionably valid observation that social behaviour is not simply a matter of individual choice has proved seductive to more anthropologists than sociologists, perhaps because of their stronger sense of the importance in human societies of custom and ritual. But it is flawed for a reason which Durkheim seems never to have grasped. If human social behaviour is explicable entirely by the social environment within which the persons whose behaviour it is have been brought up, then this must include the way they conceptualize their behaviour to themselves – an inference which Durkheim was, in fact, explicitly willing to draw. But the inference rests on a fallacy. For if, as Durkheim believed, even the concept of duality derives from a perception of dualities in the social organization of society, how can they be perceived to be dualities without some innate prior capacity for doing so? Quite apart from the findings of evolutionary psychology and biological anthropology, which have undermined the conception of the human mind as a blank slate on which society imprints what it may, there is a logical error here reminiscent of the old chestnut about the painter El Greco being astigmatic (work it out for yourself if you don’t know the answer already). In Durkheim’s last book, he went so far as to argue, by a sort of reverse-evolutionary study of the Australian Arunta, that all religion is essentially the worship of society by itself – as if much religious doctrine and practice weren’t explicitly hostile to the established institutions of the societies in which they have arisen on that very account. As Evans-Pritchard later remarked, it was Durkheim, not the ‘savage’, who turned Society into a God.4