Could sociology and classical liberalism ever be friends—or at least engage each other productively? That’s a tall order, but it’s also the focus of a new edited volume from sociology professors Fabio Rojas and Charlotta Stern, Sociology and Classical Liberalism in Dialogue. It’s published by Rowman & Littlefield but open-access online.
Sociology is an academic discipline devoted to the institutions and cultural patterns that shape human interactions, with a frequent focus on inequality and oppression. To the extent that sociology has an ideology … well, it’s leftist to the core. As Stern reports in her contribution, there are more self-identified Marxists (25.5 percent) than Republicans (5.5 percent) among sociologists.
Classical liberalism, meanwhile, is a political ideology devoted to free markets, personal autonomy, open inquiry, and due process. To the extent classical liberalism has an associated academic discipline, it’s probably economics—arguably the farthest possible thing from sociology. A contribution from Swedish sociologist Patrik Aspers quotes the economist James Duesenberry on the difference: “Economics is all about how people make choices [and] sociology is about why they don’t have any choices to make.”
Why put these two in dialogue with each other? Because each can fill in the other’s blind spots—and if nothing else, partisans of one or the other will have a fun time watching them duke it out.
After an introduction from the editors, dissident sociologists John Iceland and Eric Silver open the book with a broadside against their discipline’s aversion to capitalism. It’s odd indeed for people who see themselves as dedicated anti-poverty warriors to hate economic freedom, the driving force lifting the world above meager subsistence.
As Iceland and Silver explain, sociology’s dedication to Marxian “conflict theory,” in which economic institutions are a zero-sum competition among powerful interests, blinds the discipline to the insights of classical liberalism and free-market economics—which see economic competition as healthy, and highlights how capitalism facilitates cooperation as people work together to meet the needs of consumers and earn a profit. Classical liberals also stress that in a free market, transactions take place only if they benefit each side, and prices efficiently coordinate the activities of buyers and sellers.
Capitalism’s success record is staggering. In an America that sociologists see as oppressive, well-being has massively improved in recent decades. Iceland and Silver tick off some highlights: Per capita, GDP has quadrupled since 1947; median household income is up about 40 percent since 1967 (while, I’d add, household size has declined about a sixth); poverty has fallen half or more since 1959, depending how one measures it; life expectancy has doubled since the Founding; globally, extreme poverty has fallen three-quarters since 1990. We’ve also gained “indoor plumbing, electric lighting, cars, airplanes, and modern forms of communication, including perhaps the most impactful consumer items of the early twenty-first century, the personal computer and the smart phone.”
Yes, there’s a role for government. It can carefully regulate capitalism’s excesses and redistribute to the worst-off—any good “neoliberal” will say as much—but capitalism itself is what drives prosperity and creates the resources to end poverty. And while leftists are quick to allege that the US ruthlessly slashed welfare under both the Reagan and Clinton administrations, in reality, these reforms were mere blips on the timeline, as spending on means-tested programs has consistently grown over recent decades.
Take that, sociologists!
Another highlight of the book is Stern’s essay on classical liberalism and feminist social theory. Feminist sociologists tend to get very upset that, on average, women hold different occupations from men and are more likely to scale back their work to take care of children. The typical sociologist reflexively sees any such disparities as signs of oppression. Stern drives home an alternative explanation, namely that men and women are different in ways that affect their choices in the labor market: Men are more competitive and take risks, whereas women are more focused on social bonding, with thanks going in part to the hormones testosterone and oxytocin. Men have higher spatial ability, women have higher verbal ability.
Reading this essay, I was largely cheering along, as I’ve made similar points myself. But I also found myself wondering if Stern was putting sociology in tension with classical liberalism here, or more in tension with biology. The lynchpin claim, that men and women differ biologically in ways that explain their choices, clearly comes from the latter. Even a society with no particular dedication to freedom would have to confront these inclinations, either to facilitate or to suppress them; and if these inclinations didn’t exist but we still saw gendered labor-market patterns, the sociologists’ explanations would become far more attractive. It is interesting to consider what it would mean for leftist sociologists to concede the biology point: Would they conclude it’s okay to let women and men be different if they’re so inclined—basically, would they accept classical liberalism—or would they still insist on restructuring society to make the sexes equal?
It appears that classical liberalism’s default forms of governance are too easily “molded into vehicles for romanticist, populist, and personalist rulers” to strike that nuanced balance of a strong but limited government.
Meanwhile, the best challenge to classical liberalism from a sociological viewpoint comes in Aspers’s chapter. Classical liberals tend to focus on minimizing coercion backed by force, while sociologists add two more levels to the discussion: the importance of having “the resources necessary to use available freedom,” and “the extent to which our socially conditioned—due to structure and culture—position both enables and hinders freedom.” Aspers devotes his essay especially to the third level, the cultural forces that most classical liberals would argue should be outside the reach of government policy, but that undeniably shape our lives and constrain our choices.
Aspers tours the history of sociological thought and empirical research on these processes. Max Weber, of course, a looming figure in the discipline, already paid much attention to “values, norms, and social structures.” Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s 1991 book The Social Construction of Reality detailed how language, values, and cultural behaviors develop through human interactions and are passed to others through socialization to dominant norms. Pierre Bourdieu questioned the existence of free choice and emphasized how a lack of resources and social capital can prevent people from taking advantage of freedoms that are, in theory, available to them.
The essay won’t turn a libertarian into a socialist, but it does an excellent job of drawing attention to the types of social constraints that classical liberals too often ignore, and of introducing readers to a wealth of sociological thinkers. As Aspers writes, most liberals are familiar with the basic concept here, but they would do well to grapple with it far more, including in empirical research.
Brandon Rudolph Davis, in his contribution, focuses on the common ground that sociologists and classical liberals might find on criminal-justice reform. This is true enough—a dislike of “mass incarceration,” “overpolicing” and the like is a point of agreement between leftists and libertarians more generally. And, as Davis stresses, America has far too often failed to extend its classical-liberal governing principles to racial minorities, a flaw that any classical liberal today should want to rectify.
However, right-leaning or jargon-averse readers will find the piece overwrought and one-sided. It rightly draws attention to the costs of incarceration and aggressive law enforcement, but gives short shrift to the damages wrought by crime and the racial disparities in offending that generate many of the system’s most significant inequalities. The title is “The Predatory States of America”—which are contrasted with the “Contract States of America,” where rights are respected but only for the privileged—and the essay is rife with passages like this one: “The central problematic of the American criminal justice system is that crime and punishment are not directly related to criminal activity, and deviancy is not an earned status. Deviancy is a social construction, and crime and punishment are policy choices.”
Jack A. Goldstone also provides provocative thoughts. He suggests that classical liberalism is embattled today, with the right dedicated to shrinking the government and preserving extreme inequality, the left using the government to play out identity politics, and populism on the rise (partly as a backlash against both). Goldstone urges liberalism’s defenders to look to sociology for solutions.
What has been lost, specifically, is the “classical liberal belief that governments have major responsibilities for which they must be empowered, while at the same time, governments must be held accountable and so must be restrained.” Goldstone argues that even foundational figures in classical liberalism, such as John Locke and Adam Smith, might endorse some measures to tamp down inequality and the political imbalances it creates today; in their own time, they “recognized that strong and effective government is needed not only to enforce contracts and protect private property, but to break up monopolies and ensure the competitiveness of free markets, to ensure and protect the free flow of information, to provide public goods (roads, schools, parks), to protect the majority from oppression by elites, and to protect the minority from the whims and passions of the majority.”
Alas, it appears that classical liberalism’s default forms of governance, representative democracy and constitutionalism, are too easily “molded into vehicles for romanticist, populist, and personalist rulers” to strike that nuanced balance of a strong but limited government. We need elites dedicated to the right principles, but the conditions may not be right for such elites to emerge. Here’s how Goldstone sees sociology coming to the rescue:
Sociological research can document the operation of existing institutions and their effects on society; it can measure and demonstrate the decline of social mobility and the re-emergence of privileged, semi-hereditary elites; assess the extent and impact of inequality on social life; and highlight the loss of pluralism and rise of ethno-nationalist and religious exclusion. In short, sociology can identify the loss of those conditions that support classical liberalism, and suggest ways to restore them.
An extensive research project led by sociologists, specifically, to study how classical liberalism might be restored is somewhat far-fetched. And many readers may emerge a bit skeptical that economic inequality is really the problem Goldstone makes it out to be, especially given the academic debates over how inequality is ever-changing. But this is an excellent list of work that academics across many disciplines might pursue, and Goldstone’s essay in general is a worthy entry in the never-ending debate over the rise of populism in a prosperous and high-tech modern world.
I can’t do justice to every essay here in a brief review, but it’s worth noting the rest: Rojas’s chapter draws attention to the common ground sociology and liberalism share when it comes to freedom for minority groups, highlights the contributions of classical-liberal thinkers to the fight against racism, and notes the role of economic freedom, the free exchange of ideas, and individual rights in minority advancement. On a somewhat similar note, Mikayla Novak notes, “Scholarly proponents of liberalism and social movement studies have developed a similar range of concepts and analytical propositions largely independently of one another.” Lauren Hall’s essay is about how classical liberal principles can improve healthcare, focusing on regulations that limit the diversity of options, from concierge care to doulas and midwives. And Ilana Redstone explains how college campuses, including her own sociology discipline, can benefit from recognizing the power of uncertainty as students confront difficult social questions.
By the end of the book, skeptics of Rojas and Stern’s project—and I started that way myself—have much to grapple with. Classical liberalism and sociology are not opposites that can compromise in the middle, or unrelated spheres that should remain apart, but distinct concepts that have developed on separate paths. As a result, they overlap, conflict, and diverge in ways that can be fruitful to explore. Few readers will agree with everything written in these essays, but all will come away with food for thought.
