Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [110]
PHYSICS ENVY
As it turns out, this tendency to judge sociology by the standards of physics is an old one, going all the way back to Auguste Comte, the nineteenth-century philosopher who is often credited as the founding father of sociology. Comte imagined that sociology, which he even called social physics, would take its place alongside mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology as one of the six fundamental sciences describing all of reality. Sociology in Comte’s view would be a “total theory” of all human experience, encompassing all the other sciences and extending them to account for cultures, institutions, economies, politics, everything—exactly the kind of general theory that my physicist friend was looking for. Comte never got around to articulating this theory in any detail, but his philosophy of positivism—the idea that social entities and forces can be described and analyzed in the same way as physical entities and forces—set the stage for all the grand theories that followed.
One of the first such theories was proposed shortly after Comte by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, a contemporary of Darwin’s. Spencer advanced the notion that societies could be understood as organisms, where individual humans could be thought of as cells, institutions played the role of organs, and development was driven by some loose analog of natural selection. It was Spencer, in fact, not Darwin, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Spencer’s specific ideas were quickly rejected as naïve, but his basic philosophical claim that societies are organized the way they are in order to serve some holistic function persisted alongside Comte’s positivism, and informed the thinking of sociologists such as Émile Durkheim, who is still considered one of the giant figures of the discipline.
The apotheosis of grand theorizing, however, didn’t arrive until the mid-twentieth century in the work of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, who advanced a brand of theory that became known as structural functionalism. According to Parsons, social institutions were made up of networks of interlocking roles, which in turn were played by individuals who were motivated by rational ends. At the same time, however, individual action was constrained by social norms, laws, and other mechanisms of control that were encoded in the institutions of which the individuals were a part.2 By exhaustively classifying all the various functions that different sorts of behavior could satisfy, along with the different social and cultural structures in which they took place, Parsons attempted nothing less than to describe all of society. It was a grand edifice indeed, and Parsons’s name is generally listed among the great social theorists of the ages. But as with Spencer and Comte before him, the ink was scarcely dry on Parsons’s “general theory” before the critics tore it apart: it said little more than that “people do things because they want to,” it was not really a theory at all, but just a “set of concepts and definitions,” and it was so complicated that nobody could understand it.3
Looking back on the wreckage of Parsons’s theory some years later, Robert Merton—the sociologist whose work on the Matthew Effect I discussed in the previous chapter—concluded that social theorists had been too quick to try to emulate the theoretical successes of their physicist colleagues. It wasn’t that Merton didn’t sympathize with the envy that physicists could inspire in others. As he put it, “Many sociologists take the achievements of physics as the standard for self-appraisal. They want to