Physics Envy, "Sex, Lies and Social Science"

"To the Editors, New York Review of Books

In the course of Richard Lewontin’s brilliant essay “Sex, Lies, and Social Science” he remarks that if the study he reviewed is typical of American scientific sociology, then this discipline must be in “deep trouble.” That’s putting it mildly. American sociology has become a refuge for the academically challenged. Some universities have closed their sociology departments; many have decided the discipline merits little new money.

Yet mere stupidity cannot explain the analytic weaknesses of studies like the NORC sexuality project; nor do social scientists so very gainfully employed in such shops simply misunderstand the scientific enterprise. The difficulties with this research, like the larger troubles of sociology, are political.

The British prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared a generation ago, “There is no society, only individuals and their families.” In an eerie way, much positivistic sociological research subscribes to this anti-social nostrum. It does so, as in the NORC study, by not probing subjects which resist quantification; the usual disclaimer is that while such matters as the relation of sex and love may be important, they cannot be scientifically researched. Here is where politics enters; there’s something comforting about sacrificing reality on the altar of research. The “dull science”—as Michel Foucault called American sociology—legitimates dissociation from the entanglements, contradictions, and difficulties of actual social experience. Dull knowledge has the same positive political value in Gingrich’s America as it did in Thatcher’s Britain. Lewontin complains of the superficiality of the NORC analysis, but maybe the very promise of a calming superficiality is what attracted so much money to this project.

However, if Lewontin’s exposé is just, he uses a meat cleaver where a scalpel would have served him better. Is quantifying social phenomena an inherent evil, as at points in his essay he seems to suggest? Lewontin surely wouldn’t deny that the Census Bureau provides useful and necessary information. In principle, survey research has its uses, in revealing how people think about themselves. (I found it both interesting and cheering that 45 percent of men between the ages of 80 and 84 in the NORC study reported still having sex with a partner, even if the aged have confused fantasy with fact.) Method per se isn’t the issue.

I wish Lewontin had put his attack in a larger historical context. From its origins in Social Darwinism and the Progressive movement, American sociology has struggled with the contrary claims of those afflicted with physics envy and researchers—whether deploying numbers or words—more engaged in the dilemmas of society. In that struggle, midwestern Protestant mandarins of positivist science often came into conflict with East Coast Jews who in turn wrestled with their own Marxist commitments; great quantitative researchers from abroad, like Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia, sought to disrupt the complacency of native bean counters. In the last twenty years, more interesting “hard” sociological research has been done in medical, planning, and law schools, and better research on culture and society in the humanities departments, than in sociology departments. The intellectual enterprise of sociology is hardly represented by the dumbed-down study Lewontin rips apart.

What places like NORC command, like other reactionary enterprises, is money. To defend themselves, the minions of these institutions will undoubtedly attack Lewontin for being anti-empirical, which will miss exactly his point, that their brand of science represses trenchant social evidence. My worry is that this repression is more than an academic evil. Sociology in its dumbed-down condition is emblematic of a society that doesn’t want to know too much about itself.

Richard Sennett
Department of Sociology
New York University

April 20, 1995"