> The sociological textbooks i have looked at, if i recall, are pretty much
> like what is on wikipedia----pretty generic. I'm not all that sure of what
> there is to 'get wrong' in durkheim or max weber; and even debates about
> marx (value, rate of profit) to me often look like they are either fake or
> based on ideology (like debates between protestants and catholics, or
> shiites and sunnis).
Dalton Conley's new, super-hip and big selling intro book, You May Ask Yourself, among other things, says Marx only had stuff to say about capitalism, that he believed all societies had two classes, that he believed revolution came directly from economic crisis and that he was blind to and couldn't explain the internal differentiation of capital and the working class. It also says that Weber thought capitalism came directly from Protestantism, that he corrected Marx's failure to understand issues of status, party and bureaucracy and completely leaves out the centrality of rationalization as a meaning-crushing force... that what Weber cared most about was the death of meaningful social action.
These problems exist in every Intro book I've looked at except Giddens', and THAT one has gotten far worse and less historical with each new edition. You're right about Durkheim, except of course that no textbook I have ever seen stresses that the key to understanding the shift from mechanical to organic societies lies in the issue of population growth, social differentiation and human beings who "naturally" walk/flee rather than compete/fight... much less that the reason that organic society wasn't equilibrated was because there was too much left over mechanical crap floating around, e.g., religion, royalty, and unwarranted privilege of all sorts. (You don't even want to know how awful the textbook I reviewed for Sage this summer was... almost made me give up that it could have gotten to the reviewer stage.)
> IN sciences, especially philosophy of science, you get similar debates (eg
> about memes, or group selection, or selfish genes); in physics, you have
> the 2nd law of thermodynamics; and more examples exist --- some of these
> are real, but some people involved are just blabbing for a living
> (philosophy of mind seems to be a big one here).
>
Most scientists wouldn't accept that philosophers of science are scientists, no? The thing is I am not talking about debates, these folks (he says about to sound like James Heartfield) are just plain WRONG about Marx and Weber and present unbelievably incomplete and inaccurate introductions to Durkheim. (AND don't get me started on Conley's brutalization of Simmel and Formal Sociology). If there's a debate, and I'm not talking about the bullshit kind of "balance" the contemporary news media treats as "debate", then I expect that debate to be fairly, not ideologically or falsely, presented.
>
> while i tend to side with alan sokal (who seems a bit humorless with his
> belgian sidekick) and think if you step out your window in your highrise
> pomo department at NYU to get down with the fellow oppressed, you will break
> your skull, the pomos i think actually had a point----they just didnt know
> how to say it, so they made a joke poem.
But this just shows how little Sokal understood what the folks he attacked were writing. No one ever said that you wouldn't fall if you stepped out a window, and while there are idealists among the science studies crowd there are also idealists among scientists so the dualism he predicates his position on was crap and his argument was based on a staggering misinterpretation of the folks he was critiquing and - for all that Andrew Ross was pretty darned weasley during the whole thing - Sokal also didn't report in his Hoax article that the Social Text folks asked him more than once to edit out or revise some of the most inane crap he wrote (and he didn't appear to know that they published it knowing it to be deeply deeply flawed.) Sure there's some obscurantism in science studies... as if there wasn't any in other disciplines...
> ...SNIP...
>
> i would like to see some examples. (perhaps these debates continue in some
> 'philosophy of sociology' journal, where the various camps deconstruct and
> tear each other apart.)
>
>
I think the points you made about textbooks being more industrial and
careerist than contributions to students' intellectual development are fair
but I don't believe they'd look the way they do if large numbers of Intro
teachers hadn't been taught much of the same crap in their Intro courses,
and their Grad Theory courses. Unfortunately, I get rid of just about all
the Intro books publishers send to me after confirming that they're every
bit as bad as the one's fro the previous year. I like Conley's book in
general but am seriously considering going back to Giddens, even though it'd
gotten kinda stale after so many years of teaching with it.
And, no, I can't and won't write one myself since I am more than sure that it'd be seen to be too far over most Intro students' heads by publishers and reviewers and the opinion would develop that the thing would never sell. I'll do it if someone offers me a tenure-track job with writing a textbook as a requisite part of the job, though... just so long as they don't insist that it be published...