I was told not to take the class. “Classical Sociological Theory” had a reputation. It was supposed to be too hard, with too much reading and high writing expectations. Wait a year, people said. I signed up anyway.
We met on the second floor of what is now Wallenberg Hall at Stanford University. The reading was dense, and Robert Freeland treated that as his problem rather than ours. He never lectured just to get through the material. He slowed down when we were lost, and he firmly believed that first years like me could argue with Marx, Weber and Durkheim. He made old, dry text feel like it was about the present.
By the end of the semester, I wanted to know more. What hooked me wasn’t any single argument; it was realizing there was a way of looking at society that I hadn’t encountered before. I had been taught to see the world around me based on incentives, costs and benefits, but those tools never quite fully captured what I could see. Sociology did.
Sociology has become a national flashpoint
I’ve been thinking about Freeland’s class a lot this year. Not because of Marx, Weber or Durkheim, but because sociology has become a national flashpoint in the higher education culture wars.
Florida recently removed introductory sociology from its general education core. The course survives as an elective and the major is untouched. Of course, the American Sociological Association (ASA) objected.
The Wall Street Journal recently asked whether it was time to liquidate the discipline. That question wasn’t rhetorical. It came from Christian Smith, a distinguished sociologist of religion who left his chair at Notre Dame and quit the ASA. I’ve written about that debate myself, and anyone who has read those pieces knows I haven’t exactly been shy about my criticism.
But something has been missing from all this discussion of sociology: We’ve spent months arguing over what sociology has become and almost no time on what it is for.
Sociology asks critical questions about society
Few Americans major in sociology — the discipline accounts for about 1% of college degrees — but nearly all of us ask sociological questions regularly. Why do young men have so few friends? Why does one congregation thrive while another declines? Why don’t neighbors know each other anymore? Why has confidence in nearly every major institution fallen for decades?
Most of us use sociology more than we realize. Ideas like social capital, organizational culture, institutional trust and role conflict all came out of the discipline.
Those aren’t political or economic questions but social ones. We ask them at dinner tables, in church hallways, on podcasts. And we usually answer them with anecdote, intuition or ideology.
Decades later, I teach politics and social science myself, and much of what I assign is sociology — work on trust, community and belonging that my students never think to call by that name. I understand better now what Freeland was doing. He wasn’t telling us what to think; he was teaching us how to ask critical questions.
Marx made us think about ownership, work and power. Weber helped us recognize the power of ideas in promoting change — what people believe about duty, vocation and salvation. And Durkheim tried to address one question that is as relevant today as when he wrote over a century ago: What holds a society together, and what happens when those bonds weaken? He called the answer “anomie,” while we call it loneliness today.
Graduate school is where I finally understood what made those questions sociological. History explains what happened, economics explains incentives, political science studies institutions and power, and psychology starts with the individual.
Sociologists start somewhere else — with relationships, neighborhoods, workplaces, congregations, families; the connections between people that shape the lives they lead. Once you start seeing the world that way, it’s hard to stop.
Most of us use sociology more than we realize. Ideas like social capital, organizational culture, institutional trust and role conflict all came out of the discipline. My history professors knew it and, more than once, one stopped mid-lecture and said, “Let’s do a little sociology.”
Sociology and religion
You can immediately see the value of sociology in religious life. I’ve sat through many Jewish communal meetings over the years where the same questions come up: Why is attendance thinning, and why have familiar faces stopped attending?
The first explanations usually involve programming or dues. And while debate ensues, I almost always reach for sociology instead, because Durkheim’s question about solidarity is the practical question every synagogue and community center eventually asks: Will the young families come back after the holidays?
I’ve also had many conversations with Latter-day Saints over the years, and the same thing surfaces whenever they describe their own congregations. People pay attention and notice one another. New families don’t stay anonymous, and when someone stops attending and participating, someone reaches out.
It makes sense that sociologists have spent so much time studying these communities. Congregations don’t develop those habits by chance. Long before researchers created the term “social capital,” Latter-day Saint congregations and synagogues were building it. It helps explain why one congregation flourishes and another doesn’t.
The same sociological approach works outside religion. Freeland’s own research, for instance, asked why two similar firms develop completely different cultures. Economists usually begin with incentives. Sociologists ask why people facing the same incentives often behave differently. The same approach applies to schools, hospitals and union halls.
Sociology and politics
Then there was Marty Lipset, an undergraduate mentor who grew up a socialist kid in the Bronx. Politics is boring, he liked to tell me — an odd thing to say to a future professor of politics. He taught me not to overlook the connective tissue of society — those relationships and institutions that explain why things happen. The evidence took him into unions, religion, democracy and what made American politics different; that perspective helps explain many of the things we see every day without even realizing it.
Despite its strengths, sociology is struggling. Over time, too much of the discipline drifted toward activism, and too many departments came to share the same political assumptions. That is why I believe Florida was right to remove introductory sociology from its general education core.
But legislatures and trustees can’t make a discipline intellectually curious again — only scholars can do that, and, fortunately, some already have. Christian Smith is one of them; so are Ilana Redstone, Musa al-Gharbi, Kevin McCaffree, Melissa Wilde and Ashley Rubin. They disagree about almost everything except one point: Sociology has lost something worth recovering. I hope more of the discipline joins them.
Freeland now teaches at Wisconsin. Somewhere this fall, another room of first-year students will open Marx, Weber and Durkheim just as I once did. I hope they leave asking better questions.
Our nation feels deeply unsettled at the moment. Americans regularly wonder why fewer people are marrying, why so many are lonely and searching for something in their lives, and why some communities flourish while others struggle. Those questions aren’t going away; the choice is whether we’ll answer them with evidence or ideology. That’s why I keep teaching sociology.