Sociology and criticism

O’Donovan begins Desire of Nations with a discussion of post-Enlightenment criticism of authority, the unmasking of the self-interest of power that is at the heart of modern and post-modern thought. This unmasking, he says, originates in Christianity, but detached from theology and the church it has degenerated “into little more than a rhetoric of scepticism.”

In this context, he makes these penetrating observations about the rise of sociology:

“though sociology was obviously a classicizing movement of thought in its eighteenth-century origins, it was never a classical one. It could not recover the classical innocence which had once conceived as one object of study both the natural ordering of society and the art of government. It had to take into its system the critical deconstruction of the art of government; and that meant that the society in which it hoped to reunited politics and ethics was conceived headless, shorn of its decision-making capacities, an organism that blundered forward undirected save by the unconscious dynamics at work within it. Hence the recurrent charge that sociology was, in fact, anti-political. A politics that does not encompass the direction of of society ceases to be a politics at all. But there is no room for direction in a society ruled by the imperative of universal suspicion.”

Two elements of this are particularly intriguing: First, the way that a distinction of natural/social and political/artificial is embedded in the foundations of sociological thought; and, second, the inherently anti-authority, if not always anti-political, bias at work in sociology as O’Donovan describes it.