Exploring Pathways to Social Justice

orAs a sociologist interested in the scientific study of social life, I have long been concerned about the ideological bent of much of sociology. Many sociologists reject the idea of ​​sociology as a science altogether and prefer to engage in political activism instead. Others subordinate scientific goals to activists and are unclear about what the goal of sociology should be. Still others say different things depending on the audience.

The American Sociological Association (ASA) does the latter. Last December, the Board of Governors of Florida’s state university system removed an introductory sociology course from the list of college courses that could be taken to fulfill part of the general education requirement. It seemed clear that sociology’s reputation for progressive politics played a role in the decision. Florida’s Commissioner of Education, for example, wrote that sociology had been hijacked by political activists.¹ The ASA denied the charge and went on to state that sociology is “the scientific study of social life, social change and the social causes and consequences of human behaviour”.

While this definition certainly fits my vision of what sociology should be, it contradicts another recent statement made by the ASA itself when it announced the theme of this year’s annual conference. The theme is “Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy,” which, as the ASA website explains, “emphasizes sociology as a form of liberatory practice: an effort to understand not only structural inequalities, but to intervened in the socio-political struggle.² It’s easy to see how the Florida Commissioner of Education somehow got the idea that sociology is filled with ideology.

The ASA’s statement in defense of sociology as a science of social life seems disingenuous. This is unfortunate – we really need a science of social life if we are to understand the social world better. And we must understand the world better if we are to effectively pursue social justice. The ASA’s brand of sociology as liberatory practice leads not only to bad sociology, but to misguided attempts to change the world. As I have argued in my book How to think better about social justiceif we are going to change the world for the better, we must use the knowledge of sociology. But bad sociology only makes things worse.

Contemporary social justice activism tends to draw from a sociological perspective known as critical theory. Critical theory is a type of conflict theory, where social life is understood as a struggle for dominance. It is rooted in Marxist theory, which saw class conflict as the driver of historical change and interpreted capitalist societies in terms of the oppression of wage workers by owners of the means of production. Critical theory understands social life similarly, except that dominance and oppression are no longer simply about economic class, but also about race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, gender identity, and more.

There are two problems with social justice efforts based on critical theory. First, this form of social justice—often called “critical social justice” by supporters and “woke” by detractors—willfully ignores the insights that can come from other sociological perspectives. Critical theory, like conflict theory more broadly, is only one of many theoretical approaches in a field that includes a number of competing paradigms. It is possible to see social life as domination and oppression, but it is also possible to see it as a network of relationships, or as an arena of rational market-like transactions, or as a stage where actors play out their roles, or as a system. where the different parts contribute to the functioning of the whole. If you are going to change the social world, it is important to understand how social life works, but there is no excuse for relying exclusively on critical theory.

The second problem is that, unlike most other sociological perspectives, critical theory takes an adversarial stance towards science. This is partly because critical theory aims not only to describe and explain the world, but rather to change it – an approach the ASA took in speaking of sociology as “liberatory praxis”. However, the problem is not only that critical theory prioritizes political goals over scientific ones, it is that it also sees science as oppressive and itself in need of critique and dissolution. The claim is that scientific norms and scientific knowledge – like other norms and other forms of knowledge in liberal democratic societies – are constructed simply to serve the interests of the powerful and enable the oppression of the powerless.

Critical theory makes statements about observable aspects of social reality, but because of its political commitments and its hostile attitude to scientific norms, it tends to act more like a political ideology than a scientific theory. As an example, consider Abram X. Kennedy’s assertions about racial inequality. Kendi, a scholar and activist perhaps best known for his book How to Be Anti-Racist, has said, “As an anti-racist, when I see racial inequality, I see racism.”³ The problem with this approach is that while racism is a potential cause of racial disparities (and often the root cause!), in science, our theories must be testable, and they must be tested. Kendi presents his idea not as a proposition to be tested, but as a fundamental truth that should not be questioned. In any true science, claims about social reality must be formulated into testable hypotheses. And then we have to collect evidence evidence. Usually what we find is variation, and this case is likely to be no different. That is, we are likely to find that in some contexts racism has more of a causal role than in others.

We often want easy answers to social problems. Social justice activists may be inclined to turn to would-be prophets who proclaim what seems to be the truth, rather than scientists who know that we need to do the work necessary to understand and address things. Yes, science gives us imperfect knowledge and points to the difficulties we face in changing the world… but since we live in a world of trade-offs, there are rarely easy answers to social problems. We cannot create a perfect world—utopia is not possible—so any kind of social justice rooted in reality must strive to enhance human flourishing while acknowledging that not all problems can be eliminated, certainly not easily or quickly.

What does it all mean? First, we should be much more skeptical of one of the central claims of critical theory—that the norms and institutions of liberal democratic societies are merely disguised instruments of oppression. Do liberal ideals such as equality before the law, due process, free speech, free markets, and individual rights mask social inequalities in order to advance the interests of the powerful? Critical theorists do not subject this claim to scientific scrutiny. Instead, they take the presence of inequalities in liberal societies as self-sufficient evidence that liberalism is responsible for these failures. However, any serious attempt to pursue social justice informed by a scientific understanding of the world would involve comparing liberal democratic societies to other societies, both present and past.

Scientific sociology cannot tell us the best way to organize a society, and social justice involves making trade-offs between competing values. We may never reach a consensus on what kind of society is best, but we should consider the possibility that liberal democracies seem to offer the best framework we yet know for effectively pursuing social justice. At the very least, they provide mechanisms for the peaceful management of disputes in an imperfect world.