What is Worth Defending in Sociology Today? Presentism, Historical Vision and the Uses of Sociology

Abstract

In recent years, sociology in Britain – and in national contexts influenced by British sociology – has been diagnosed by various parties as suffering from a wide range of ailments. These forms of self-criticism become ever more acute in terms of their potential effects as huge transformations in university funding regimes are brought to bear on the social sciences. But none of these critiques engages satisfactorily with what is a much more foundational and serious set of problems, namely the very nature of sociology itself as a historically-situated form of knowledge production. Sociology claims to know the world around it, but in Britain today much sociology seriously fails in this regard, because it operates with radically curtailed understandings of the long-term historical forces which made the social conditions it purports to analyse. A sophisticated understanding of the contemporary world is made possible only by an equally sophisticated understanding of very long-term historical processes, precisely the sort of vision that mainstream British sociology has lacked for at least the last two decades. This paper identifies the reasons for the development of this situation and the consequences it has for the nature of sociology’s knowledge production, for its self-understanding, for its claims to comprehend the contemporary world, and for its apparent social ‘usefulness’. A markedly more self-aware and historically-sensitive sociology is proposed as the answer to the pressing question of what aspects of sociology should be defended in the turbulent context of British higher education today.