I certainly hope I didn't suggest any sort of simple-minded reductionism in advocating a futile attempt to replace sociology by psychology. But I think that it's been a weakness of historical materialism that it has never really hooked up its very good sociological analysis to a micro-explanation of how the sociology is realized in individual human beings and operates through them -- a very different proposition from the idea that we can could "dispense" with sociology is we had the right psychology, or even exhaustively explain the sociology in terms of individual psychology. Both of these ideas are erroneous in my view. We need both sociology and psychology.
One thing I like about Nietzsche is that he manages to do two things that Marx does not, except in in some historical narratives: (1) deploy a really sensitive and sophisticated psychology, much more articulated and intelligent than the simple interesting/desire maximization of mechanical materialism or rational choice theory and (2) hold that psychology in just the right sort of dialectical relationship with a social class analysis, neither attempting to explain the social phenomena as a mere effect of psychology or vice versa, nor holding the two separate apart as if they had nothing to do with one another.
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> > We can't just take over Nietzsche's psychology,
> but we
> > can aspire to integrate a real psychology (not the
> > crude rational-choice theoretic approach that
> > mechanical materialism shares with neoclassical
> > economics) with our science and our sociology in
> the
> > service of our ends in something like the way that
> > Nietzsche did.
> >
> >
> I share andie's respect for Fred, for many of the
> same reasons.
> However, as a social psychologist with one foot in
> psychology and one
> foot in sociology, I question andie's assumption
> that sociology must be
> informed by "real" psychology. In my view, that's a
> category error;
> it's analogous to saying that since animals are made
> of atoms and
> subatomic particles, the study of biology must be
> based on quantum
> physics. There are different levels of analysis
> here running more or
> less parallel to one another.
>
> Simple example: say we want to analyze the pattern
> of social
> stratification in a society. The psychologist
> typically explains
> stratification by pointing to greed or selfishness,
> but that's not
> adequate from a sociological perspective.
> Regardless of the
> psychological tendencies of people in a society, if
> certain social
> conditions and relations do not exist, then those
> psychological
> tendencies cannot contribute to social
> stratification. --No matter how
> greedy or selfish a person is in a hunting and
> gathering society, the
> social structure of that society makes it impossible
> to produce the
> rigid and gross inequalities we see in our society.
> From the
> sociological perspective, what we need to analyze
> are the social
> structures that make possible certain social
> patterns and discourage
> others; the consideration of psychological
> tendencies is completely
> irrelevant to that analysis.
>
> Now, this is not to say that psychology is trivial;
> if we want to
> understand individual thought and behavior,
> psychology is crucial. But
> that psychological analysis cannot replace
> sociological analysis of the
> way society "works".
>
> Miles
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