This is a guest post by Christian Robitaille, editor of The Anthem Companion to Raymond Boudon
It is often argued by contemporary sociologists that the quest for a value-free, scientific study of society is vain. Indeed, sociology is currently heavily influenced by critical theorists, poststructuralists and other normatively oriented theorists. To them, the very idea of building a scientific sociology is perceived as an attempt by social powers to obliviate the existence of structures of oppressions, thus leaving them unchallenged. At best, intellectuals who attempt to follow Max Weber’s quest for a value-free inquiry of society are perceived as naïve pawns of social powers, serving them in order to perpetuate a system of domination which benefits them. Sociology, it is claimed, must abandon such a quest and focus on promoting a political agenda; it must deconstruct, in the Derridean sense, hidden attempts at justifying structures of oppressions such as capitalism in order to substitute for them various kinds of more-or-less quixotic systems.
But is an alternative way of conducting sociology possible? Must sociologists conform to this idea of promoting political agendas or is the old quest for value-freedom still worth pursuing? For sociologists who think such a quest is a worthy one, the work of Raymond Boudon constitutes a refreshing starting point. Admittedly, bringing back science in a social science is no easy task; political biases, ideologies and spurious theories are indeed at the forefront of many sociological discourses. Nevertheless, Boudon’s social theory provides us with a path forward.
By focusing on the individual reasons social actors have to hold values and beliefs or to perform actions, social scientists can reconstruct intriguing social phenomena without imposing their own value judgements. Rather than attempting to uncover obscure hidden forces which determine human action – something for which nothing but ideologically tainted speculations can be put forward as evidence – social scientists, according to Boudon, need to pay attention to how social contexts influence singular reasoning processes. For instance, people do not support war or immigration restrictions as a result of having their minds possessed by a discursive structure controlled by imperialist or nationalist powers, as poststructuralists and critical theorists often argue; they rather have reasons to think that their beliefs are justified. It is the role of social scientists to attempt to find out what, given the typical social circumstances of actors who hold such beliefs, influences their reasoning processes on these matters.
This can be done in a value-free manner. Explaining what good reasons actors have, from their standpoints, to believe a war is justified is neither a condemnation nor a praise of the actors’ beliefs. In fact, social scientists who may personally agree or disagree with the studied actors can both reach, in principle, similar conclusions on such a question, as their endeavour is not to uncover what deterministic ideological forces are at play in unconsciously forming beliefs, but to understand what was taken into consideration in the actors’ thinking processes and what contextual elements had an impact on these processes. A social science does not assume that all thinking and acting must fit the critical narrative of either being the result of unconscious ideological possession by social powers or as attempts at resistance. Funnily enough, one could ‘deconstruct’ this false dichotomy and realise that it reveals a discursive framework quite similar to those of the alleged powers critical theorists and poststructuralists aim at contesting. The fact is that a genuine social science does not aim at imposing unverified assumptions on every social fact analysed, classifying it as either a product of power or as an attempt to resist such power. It rather aims at discovering true explanations of social phenomena and doing so, as Boudon pointed out, presupposes evidence rooted in methodological individualism and rationalism.
The main contribution of The Anthem Companion to Raymond Boudon lies in providing anglophone scholars with the bases of such a scientific alternative to the prevailing state of sociology. It unites various scholars who share Boudon’s concern for building sociology on rigorous and scientific grounds. Any scholar who wishes to participate in such a project will benefit from reading it.