Mayhew took two leading individualist sociologists as examples for demonstrating the inadequacies of individualism, Talcott Parsons with his theory of social action which attempted to fuse together concepts from Durkheim, Weber, Pareto, and Freud. And George Homans with his individualist version of exchange theory which attempted to reduce sociology to the principles of Skinnerian psychology. However, in Mayhew's view whether one attempted to reduce sociology to Freud or to Skinner was irrelevent since the very conception of a sociology that is reducible to psychology is fundamentally flawed.
Although Mayhew was not a Marxist per se he acknowledged that many of the social scientists whose conceptions of sociology were closest to his own were Marxists. Mayhew seems to have particularly admired Immanuel Wallerstein. On the other hand Mayhew also contended that many Marxists were not free of the taint of sociological individualism.
Jim F.
On Sun, 02 Jan 2000 14:38:56 -0600 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
>I am finding Chip Berlet's analysis of populism relevant to my
>hypothesis that
>Freudian theory not only cannot contribute to political analysis but
>is
>a
>positive barrier to useful analysis. And after posting my reply to
>Doug
>on
>jealousy and racism I decided that I had probably granted too much to
>his
>position in that reply.
>
>Here is my original post:
>
>Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> You don't have to be a Freudian (though it helps) to see jealousy
>> lurking in white racist discourse about black sexuality, for
>example.
>
>Perhaps -- but if you are a Freudian you immediately assume a
>psychological (i.e., a non-historical) cause -- and since even
>non-Freudians in the 20th century are rather spontaneous
>psychologizers, the air filled with psychological explanations of
>such behavior, and no serious efforts at historical explanation
>are made.
>
>What happens if one at least *considers*, as a hypothesis, that
>people operate, within the social setting they find themselves,
>out of fairly intelligent and conscious efforts to explain the world
>around them, using the categories of explanation that that
>world gives them?
>
>I don't know. I just know that way too many of the brightest
>people, who might provide us such social analyses, are headed
>off at the past by the Freudian wranglers and herded into
>psychological corrals.
>
>We are left with two utterly powerless (or even destructive)
>hypotheses: (a) a mystical unconscious or (b) the rational
>choice theorists. The latter are also mystics in so far as
>they define a priori (rather than historically) what "reason"
>or "rational choice" is.
>------------
>
>Two amendments.
>
>First: I see no evidence that any particular psychological state is
>involved in
>what Doug calls Jealousy. "Jealousy" is subject to Marx's critique of
>"Providence":
>it is a summary or paraphrase of the facts masquerading as an
>explanation.
>
>Second, a positive hypothesis to replace the either/or description at
>the
>end of the post: All human thought is rational and conscious.
>
>The first part of this proposition, "All human thought is rational,"
>should be
>taken as a tautology: that is what we *mean* when we say thought. All
>exceptions to this can be explained in terms of Marx's hypothesis in
>*The
>Eighteenth Brumaire* (Man makes his own history but et cetera). The
>great
>error of the Enlightenment, which led to what Marx and Engels called
>its
>
>dividing humanity into two parts, one of which was superior to the
>other,
>was its failure to acknowledge this tautology -- that is, its
>assumption
>that
>it (or one sector of humanity) had access to a power denied to the
>remainder of humanity. The apparent empirical accuracy in many cases
>of this false assumption stem from a failure to perceive the
>conditions
>under which apparently irrational judgments are made. All such
>judgments
>
>turn out, on full examination, to be rational judgments made under
>condtions
>which bar *correct* judgment. "Rational" ceases then to be in any way
>a synonym for "true."
>
>(This is true even of the hallucinations of schizophrenics -- it is
>only
>that
>in their case the historical conditions include a neurological defect
>--
>one
>small portion of the brain being smaller than is that part of the
>brain
>in non-schizophrenics. It is misleading, however, to call those
>hallucinations
>"irrational." That label should be reserved for social institutions
>and
>no
>longer used to refer to the thought or action of individuals.)
>
>Instead of sneeringly dismissing the judgment of white racists that
>blacks
>have more fun as irrational (that is as jealousy) we should see it as
>(1) a
>quite rational conscious judgment and (2) a profoundly false and
>vicious
>
>judgment. It is mere psychologistic dogmatism to believe that those
>judgments
>have to be understood through an appeal to the mystical science of the
>unconscious.
>
>The second part of the proposition, All thought is conscious, is also
>a
>tautology. There is no evidence, empirical or theoretical, that
>unconscious
>thought (*or* feeling, for that matter) exists. We are of course
>unconscious
>of what we don't know. That is one of the reasons that individual
>thought
>is always mostly (in a quite unpsychological sense) unconscious: no
>individual
>possesses enough knowledge of the world to know the full meaning of
>his/her own thought. As individuals we always think and act with
>insufficient
>knowledge of the meaning of our thought and action. (This is of course
>intensified under capitalism by the division it establishes between an
>act
>and its motive. I make this sandwich not to eat but for whatever
>purpose
>
>I wish to use the wage I receive from Burger King. So appearances are
>radically separated from reality under capitalism. Psychology
>capitalizes
>on this necessary socially determined unconscious to ground the
>superstition
>of unconscious thought, of "an Unconscious.")
>
>In my original post I suggested that with the atmosphere permeated
>with
>"psychological explanations of . . .behavior, and no serious efforts
>[are
>made to provide] historical explanation."
>
>That was before I had read Chip's interesting post on populism. I see
>it
>
>as precisely the kind of research I was calling for -- a search for
>historical explanation to replace the superstions of psychology. The
>paragraphs excerpted below are particularly vivid in this respect. I
>would
>suggest one minor correction, from the perspective argued here.
>"Whether
>
>or not their grievances are legitimate (or even rational)," he writes.
>I
>would
>say that they are undoubtedly rational -- but they are made on the
>basis
>
>of false or insufficient information, as I believe the whole of Chip's
>research,
>as presented on this list over the last few weeks, tends to support.
>
>Carrol
>
>===============
>>From Chip Berlet on Populism::
>
>Early questions about centrist/extremist theory were raised by Rogin
>(1967) and
>the authors in Schoenberger (1969), and now an increasing number of
>social
>scientists use different approaches. Smith notes that in the 1970s
>there
>was "a
>decisive pendulum-swing away from these 'classical' theories toward
>the
>view of
>social movements as rational, strategically calculating, politically
>instrumental phenomena" (1997: 3). At the same time, there was a
>rejection of
>the romanticized view of populism as inherently constructive. Dobratz
>and
>Shanks-Meile write that in studying populist social movements it is
>necessary to
>consider "socioeconomic conditions, changing political opportunities,
>resources,
>consciousness, labeling, framing, interpretations of reality,
>boundaries, and
>negotiation of the meaning of symbols" (1997: 32). Discussions of
>postclassical
>sociological theories of social movements in general can be found in
>Tarrow,
>Lofland, Klandermans, Buechler and Cylke, Morris and Mueller, Johnston
>and
>Klandermans, and Boggs. Authors such as Himmelstein, Diamond,
>Hardisty,
>and
>Berlet use variations of postclassical theories to study populism on
>the
>
>political right.
>
>Using emerging theories of social movements, it is evident that most
>people who
>join populist movements are not acting out of some personal pathology,
>but out
>of anger and desperation. They are grasping at straws in an attempt to
>defend
>hearth and home against the furious winds of economic and social
>change
>seen as
>threatening their way of life. They may feel abandoned, or claim that
>no
>one in
>power seems to be listening. They come to believe that no one cares
>except
>others in the same predicament. Their anger and fear are frequently
>based on
>objective conditions and conflicts--power struggles involving race,
>gender,
>ethnicity, or religion; economic hardship; changes in social status;
>conflicts
>over cultural issues; and other societal transformations that cause
>anger,
>confusion, and anxiety.
>
>Whether or not their grievances are legitimate (or even rational) they
>join with
>others to confront what they believe is the cause of their problems.
>Often,
>instead of challenging structures and institutions of power, they
>attack
>
>demonized scapegoats, often in the form of conspiracist allegations.
>Sometimes
>they resort to violence.
>
>
>
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