Like the seventeenth century imperial British reduction of Enlightenment science, the US military’s assumption of science funding after WWII reduced from science an influential, lasting tradition of positivist-mechanism locked onto ontological reification, the thingification of processes. This postwar domestic mobilization reoriented Biology to pursue positivist-mechanist research, anchored in gene reification, as far as possible. While political elites and scientists wrestled over the civilian state science institution, the National Science Foundation, elite American universities imported elite antisocialist emigres to help Robert Ezra Park guide the establishment of elite Sociology departments hosting a new tradition inspired by German philosopher Georg Simmel.
Simmel was from an affluent background, and in adulthood he was (literally) adopted by a family friend, a prominent publisher affording Simmel an amplified voice. Simmel’s pop philosophy critiqued the symbolic moral affronts suffered by urban Jews in European cities. Where the most influential turn of the 20th century American Sociologists (Veblen, Du Bois, Gilman, Ward, etc.) were non-elites engaged with the democratic Enlightenment search to understand how social relations are comparatively reproduced and to what distribution of costs and benefits, Park recognized Simmel’s writing for popular audiences and his concern with urban ethnic social-psychological relations as a promising way to realign Sociology with the postwar elite Anglo-American agenda to replace the nascent welfare state with militarization.
The new postwar American elite Sociology would surveil minority urban populations while attempting to capture the imagination of the popular classes. Following Simmel, this surveillance would be sympathetic, focusing on the social margins of urban life, contributing to the elite pathologization of the average postwar working-class American, and foregrounding in the popular imagination and in liberal party politics the patronage of urban minority populations by Anglo-American elite interests. As guiding conservative intellectuals from Hobbes, Burke, de Maistre, Calhoun, and on down to von Mises, Hayek, Schmidt, Schultz, Freeman et al explained, liberalism could be returned to conservatism, egalitarian tendencies back to a militaristic, patriarchal steep and immobile inequality, by inciting fear of levelling, flogged mercilessly as the true tyranny. Peace would only arrive with the restoration of the Great Chain of Being as a mystical protection racket tying non-elites to idealized elite patronage. Deferring to the pan-elite postwar agenda, an eyes-down mechanism legitimized in Sociology the rise of social-psychology as the surveillance of ethnic urban identities and interactions, and reporting on these in accessible narratives. The small aperture of this work made the most of the micro-observational and popular story-telling skills of proud men fresh from humble urban ethnic origins, rescued in the Cold War with jobs and voice expropriated from the disgraced egalitarian organizers of the welfare state. New elite-school Cold War Sociologists embodied the social-mobility promise of collaboration with the inegalitarian imperial restoration.
Detailed surveillance would also assist police to control urban threats to the postwar military-economic elite order, preventing the earlier pan-ethnic, cross-racial working-class organizing that gave rise to the welfare state and to the communist modernizations of rival empires. Even while women and geographically-mobile African-American communities pressed for political, civil, and social citizenship inclusion, the US military would serve as an Antienlightenment vehicle (underwriting the expansion of militaristic, nationalist Evangelical Christianity and funding militarized Judeo, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu nationalisms, as well as promoting militarized policing, carceralism, and surveillance capitalism) for both imperialism and the valorization and domestic expansion of Southern slaver infrastructure.
While the institution of an elite Sociology expanded the discipline, establishing in the US one of the largest Sociology traditions in the world, well-funded elite Sociology established a status agenda at odds with Enlightenment Sociology. As the margins were centered in elite Sociology, Cold War coalitions of business and military elites, and their collaborators attacked and banished great American Sociologists such as WEB Du Bois. At the same time, positivist-mechanist quantitative population analysis was instituted in the Sociology departments of premier state universities. Soon Criminology was instituted to assist the conversion of the Anglo-American welfare states into carceral states. By the turn of the Twenty-first century, the US was a global capitol of Sociology, but American Sociology was impressive for its often-conflicting babble of diverse, animating philosophies, ontologies, paradigms, theories, epistemologies, research agendas, and levels of scholarly rigor.
In the Anglo Commonwealth, Sociology was not even instituted in universities until American elite Sociology had created the elite-safe Cold War version. Professionalizing the traditional duties of elite Anglo women as women were incorporated across class into the labor market, a strong para-state tradition of moral regulation and symbolic refinement took hold in Anglo-American Sociology. Moral discourse-regulation Sociology resonated with liberal political party communications tactics. Although classical Enlightenment Sociology, and its contextualized comparativist methods, would shift to the social democracies and never disappear, the restoration of the traditional American nonelite Enlightenment Sociology community was fitful, incomplete, and often token in the Anglo-American world.
The common factor in the postwar shift and expansion of Sociology was its embrace of military and business elites’ Cold War surveillance and management agenda as positivist-mechanism–via both interpretivism and quantitative methods. This positivist-mechanism demanded an elitist, anti-developmental ontology of reification, thing-ifying social identities, jettisoning Enlightenment Sociology’s democratic epistemology and research agenda, banishing processual scientific knowledge, and sidelining autonomous science’s epistemology and methods of contextualized comparativism. Whether via positivist-mechanism or logical positivism/idealism, reifying the social particularly undermines the development of sociological science because that reification has usually caught insignificant moments of social processes, motivated by inegalitarian governance interests. Cases in academic social reification ranged from Kuznet’s myths based on data from the very welfare state achievements conservative economists were laboring to reverse, to Foucault and other Cold Warriors’ just-so stories hiding and mis-attributing to democratic expansion the ongoing influence of conservative power elite mobilizations, to the contemporary political identarian moral campaigns of finance-directed management, dismantling the last of the welfare state institutions as refuges for evil souls.
To know the social world requires a processual ontology because institutionalized social relations share with biological phenomena a longer-range development framework (inclusive of regression) and non-linear, episodic change. For example, the development of democracy–its institutions, infrastructure, and facilitative dispositions– can only be grasped from a processual perspective, and will be misunderstood from a reifying ontological point of view. Post-Black Plague peasant wars erupted to overturn servitude in Europe, and progress was not achieved until the rise of the Enlightenment, and its division of elites, created space for non-elite organizing and the Revolutionary Era. Even there, the concept of universal human rights was not convincing until the Haitian Revolution. Even there, global elites and their collaborators have not yet stopped punishing and disorganizing Haitians for advancing the feasibility of democracy world-wide. We cannot know how we live and why, compared to how others have lived and why, and what is possible given our human commonalities across the different environments we have created, until we adopt the processual scientific framework, using the reifications of mechanism instrumentally, with explicit, scholarly consideration for whether the instrumental reification captures a significant moment within the social process we want to understand. Without this sociological science, geared to support democratic Enlightenment, we fail to reproduce knowledge distinct from authority.
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 