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Notes
Thanks to Stefan Beljean, John Dryzek, Bob Goodin, and Ana Tanasoca for their comments and suggestions.
The origins and effects of the politicization of sociology are described in broad terms by Deflem (2013).
For example, Marsden (2005) does not discuss this element of Coleman’s career. In his invaluable account of the relationship between political philosophy and sociology, Healy (2007) also misses Coleman’s contribution. Favell (1993) provides the most comprehensive discussion of Coleman’s normative orientation while Heckman and Neal (1996) are instructive regarding Coleman’s engagement with Rawls. Adams (2010) is right to note that much remains “unknown” about this preeminent American sociologist.
Indeed, not only is Coleman’s normative work barely known, Coleman was attacked personally by sociologists on spurious normative grounds. He was accused of being a Nazi, despite the fact that he marched, with his young children, in the civil rights movement. The problem, it seems, was that Coleman’s research yielded findings that did not accord well with the “conventional wisdom”, e.g., that busing students between schools achieves its aims. This is an ironic illustration of the perverse effects of cryptonormative commitment in sociology, i.e., commitments not subjected to scrutiny used to thwart the research of others. See Coleman (1989).
This kind of process is described by Thacher (2006), which ought to be canonical for normative sociology. Note that “joint venture” is conceived here a rather abstract way—it is “joint” in an intellectual not practical sense. A full-blooded joint venture between political theorists and empirical social sciences is certainly possible, if more ambitious. See Robert Goodin et al.’s Discretionary Time, which constructs and deploys a measure for the cross-national study of freedom in everyday life (Goodin et al. 2008). I have undertaken a joint venture of modest proportions, see Sass and Dryzek (2014).
Dryzek (2008) describes the how empirical claims of varying levels of robustness are deployed within political theory and suggests, in general, that political theory requires “better facts”. Hirschman (2016) considers the status of stylized facts across the social sciences and provides a particularly useful discussion of their normative valence—one, we might add, that should be taken into account reflexively when they are deployed within normative theories.
Indeed, this field developed along the legalist model which Abbott (2018) proposes, i.e., via the accumulation and synthesis of findings generated by normative case studies.
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Sass, J. The Cryptonormative Swamp: a Response to Abbott’s ‘Varieties of Normative Inquiry’. Am Soc 49, 448–455 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-018-9383-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-018-9383-3