>Unfortunately that is exactly what Wolfe seems to have been arguing.
>He has not only abandoned Marxism but has defected from any sort
>of adherence to an Enlightenment rationalism (also manifested in his
>recent writings on religion). Anyway I am curious about what you
>mean by the "limits of reason" anyway. If you mean that any scientific
>analysis will have its limits in terms of comprehensiveness and
>depth of explanation then I have no quarrel. If you mean that our
>attempts at posing scientific explanations for phenomena will
>necessarily face limitations from the inadequacies of our data sets
>then I have no quarrel but I get the feeling that you are asserting
>something rather different.
we agree. i do think that somethings are not amenable to sociological analysis in the same way that carrol argues that obsessive-compulsive behavior and Depression are not amenable to freudian analysis or even sociological analysis.
have you ever read Brian Fay's Critical Social Science? i have in mind some criticisms he has of CSS in that book. that might clear things up if you are familiar with the book. if not, i'll carve out some time to give a synopsis.
while i don't agree with everything Fay says, I think he has a reasonable criticism.
more broadly, i do think that we cannot expect that science (we) can fix everything. and i guess, chaz summed it up the other day wrt to desire/needs. in that case, that discussion re capitalism and the production of human needs, i generally find myself negotiating the Scylla and Charybdis of the two extremes.
my complaint, to reiterate, was that i couldn't criticize wolfe without the entire article and i could not assess your friend's complaints in that case either. i didn't think that plucking one or two sentences was enough for me to know what wolfe said.
as for the case. i happen to think, given what we know now, that it was not amenable to sociological analysis. some things, perhaps, such as a kid following another kid can be understood by social psychology. but when sociologists get down to individuals, we can't really explain why some kills others, why they kill themselves, why they end of defacing web sites, why they start toking on a joint daily. it's that which i don't think we can explain. i wouldn't call it evil. but what i might call it wouldn't necessarily fly on the pages of the NYT. evil is, really, just a way of label. there are probably numerous equivalent "social science" words for the same, yes? he wouldn't have been doing anything different had said "some things we can't understand" and pasted some acceptable sociological word to it. yes, evil works on people differently and for that he should be held accountable.
but to conclude that he wants sociologists to roll over is a stretch!
kelley