It's Pure Sociology™
An intriguing school of thought
One of the most exciting things that can happen when you’re researching a topic is stumbling into a huge conversation you were entirely unaware of. I found myself going down a rabbit hole of this sort after picking up Mark Cooney’s Warriors and Peacemakers, on Joseph Heath’s emphatic recommendation. It turns out Cooney was a student of Donald Black, and saw himself as entirely engaged in fleshing out his teacher’s framework.
Black was not a modest man, dubbing his framework “Pure Sociology” and going rather farther than the merely implicit arrogance of that label:1
George Homans observed that all of sociology's explanations were psychological and that truly sociological theory did not exist. He dismissed the distinctiveness of sociology as a myth. But sociologists did not defend themselves. They gave up. They surrendered their subject matter without a fight. They gave THE SOCIAL to psychology.
My work, however, is different. It is radically sociological. It contains no psychology whatsoever and entirely eliminates the individual from its formulations. It proves Homans wrong. (. . .)It restores THE SOCIAL to its proper owner: sociology. It attains a degree of sociological purity previously unknown and probably unimagined. It is more Durkheimian than Durkheim. Far more.
This diatribe is, if anything, among the more modest characterization that Black presents of his work, indeed the quoted paper alone contains yet greater extremes of self-congratulation.
That aside, the project really is quite intriguing. And while I have some qualms with Black’s particular school of the philosophy of science he subscribes to, I must conclude that his framework does what he sets out to make it do rather well.
The framework
Black wanted to do away with theory that is fitted to a particular scale or social unit of analysis. The purity of “Pure” sociology lies in its complete focus on “THE SOCIAL” (in all caps lest you underestimate its significant). He therefore set about making predictions based on the structure of social space, rather than on, say, individual psychology.
As he puts it2:
Each instance of human behavior, large or small, has its own multidimensional location and direction in social space. Each has a social structure. (. . .)My paradigm identifies not litigious person and violent person or litigious societies and violent societies, but litigious structures and violent structures.
In each case the structure in question is formed along five dimensions:
Vertical: Differences here are “present when there is an uneven distribution of wealth, or social stratification.”3 The higher up along this dimension, the wealthier or greater in social stature one is relative to the one or ones they are being compared to.
Horizontal: This could be considered the degree of intimacy, or social closeness. It is “measured by the degree to which [people] participate in each other's lives, including the scope of their interaction, its frequency, duration, and their linkages in a wider network.”4
Symbolic (Cooney prefers “Cultural”: This “refers to the expressive aspect of social life, or culture, whether aesthetic, intellectual, or moral. It includes arts, ideas, values, ideologies, religions, languages, and ceremonies. The quantity of culture is unevenly distributed, and social life varies with its location and direction in this distribution, and with the cultural distance that might be involved. (. . .) A difference in the content of culture is another kind of cultural distance. A Hindu is thus more distant from a Protestant or Catholic than is either of the latter from each other. There may also be an aesthetic, intellectual, or linguistic distance, even a culinary or musical distance, every expression of culture closer or further from the next.”5
Corporate (Cooney prefers “Organizational”): This is “the capacity for collective action, or organization. (. . .)social life may have a direction from more to less organization or from less to more. A group might help or injure an individual, for instance, and vice versa, and the more organized the group, the more organizational distance this involves.”6
Normative: The extent to which an individual is or has been designated deviant, or subject to authoritative social control. “Some have long records of more or less serious forms of deviant behavior; others have reputations entirely unblemished. Behavior is distributed unevenly in this space of respectability.”7
Black explains that8:
The location of a person or group in social space, seen in relation to others, is a status. People have a status in vertical space measured by their wealth, a radial status measured by their participation in social life, a normative status measured by the social control to which they have been subject, and so on. One person might have more vertical but less radial or normative status than another, for example, more cultural or organizational status, or some other combination. Moreover, all these together may be combined and compared, so that one individual or group may have, overall, more or less social status than another.
Black, and his students, apply this framework by looking at everything from the court system, to violent crime, to suicide, and offering generalized theses rooted in the statuses of the participants.
Here are a couple of such theses from Cooney’s book:
“The relationship between violence and third-party status superiority is U-curved.” Or more simply, “Violence is least likely when third parties, such as legal officials, are neither too high nor too low in status relative to the principals.”9
“Violence increases with the stability of third-party ties.”10
The theses themselves, tailored to be as general and testable as possible, are less interesting than the taxonomies Black and his students create of different social types based on their location in social space and the sort of case being analyzed. For example, Black offers five different types of “support roles” in a conflict, varying by degree of “partisan intervention” (that is, the extent of openly and aggressively taking a side), and five “settlement roles” by degree of “authoritative intervention” (with informal peacemaker on the one end an “repressive peacemaker” along the lines of a colonial authority, on the other).11
The discussion then draws upon extensive empirical literature to offer examples from all sorts of social and historical settings; contemporary wealthy nations as well as contemporary small scale tribal societies, as well as pre-modern societies around the world. In Cooney’s book, for example, an exploration of classic honor culture transitions into a discussion of how the very same dynamics naturally emerge even today, when you combine tie stability with either extreme (but usually the lower one) of the “U-curve” of violence, where people are too low in status relative to legal officials.12
Explanation vs prediction
Pure Sociology is a bit funny, in that in form it seems very structuralist—an approach that is arguably rooted in the continental rationalist tradition—but the espoused philosophy of science is very much a post-Popper positivism with a heavy emphasis on prediction—something much more empiricist in nature.
The result is a bit funky if what you’re looking for is an explanation of social phenomena. Here is a telling footnote from Black’s paper on epistemology13:
A theory is an explanation. An explanation orders a fact with a general proposition. A fact is an observable aspect of reality, and to order a fact is to show that it obeys a pattern. As a branch of science, therefore, the mission of theoretical sociology is to order differences in the observable aspect of social reality. I further seek to formulate theory from which it is possible to deduce—and thereby predict—patterns of social variation.
Though his proximate inspirations are 20th century figures such as Wittgenstein and Hempel, the above is practically pure Hume. It’s all about ordering observations into patterns, little more.
But this is not explanation; it is organization or summarization, which are quite valuable in and of themselves, but also distinct. We do not explain why it is that the image in the mirror moves the same direction as the object in front of it by simply noting that this always occurs with some specific materials polished to a certain extent. Instead, we explain it with the science of optics, where theoretical models are developed of the actual causal mechanisms that produce reflections.
Black does not do this. He does exactly what he said he would: he organizes vast amounts of empirical research on radically different types of societies across a great deal of history into a set of patterns describable in a unified, sophisticated framework. Moreover, he formulates these patterns such as to be predictive, with the explicit intention that if the future does not follow the pattern, it can be taken as evidence against the framework.
And, to be fair, that is a tremendous accomplishment in itself. I lack the empirical chops to truly judge Black on his own terms, though I am seeking out criticisms along those lines. Unfortunately, most of the criticisms seem to be along the lines I am offering here: criticism of Black’s philosophy of science, or of the attempt to be scientific in sociology in the first place, or other meta-criticisms of that kind. Ultimately I would be more interested in a sociologist who was an expert on some society or an aspect of one that clearly, empirically did not match the patterns that Black and his students have offered.
Implicit explanations
Sometimes it appears to me that there are explanations implied, however; even psychological ones (sorry, Black!)
One example is that very U-shaped curve of violence. In Black’s framework, a legal official that is of much greater status than the people they are applying the law to will be more formalist, decisive, coercive, and punitive than they would be to someone closer in status to them.14 Because of this, low status people (in any or all of the dimensions) will be unlikely to seek legal authorities to resolve their disputes, which is precisely what creates the conditions for greater criminality and violence in those communities.
But wait a moment: doesn’t this imply that people in general do not like dealing with authorities that treat them in an overly formal, decisive, coercive, and punitive manner? It is hardly a fully fleshed out psychology but it seems like a straightforward inference from Cooney’s discussion of the topic, at least.
Ultimately I think Pure Sociology (a phrase so grand I still struggle to invoke with a straight face) is a very interesting approach with a great deal of valuable nuts and bolts work performed by its adherents. It does not explain social phenomena is the fullest sense of the word but it goes a very long way in that direction, and otherwise distills some fairly universal social patterns into a form easily amenable to analysis. Black may have employed comically triumphant rhetoric to market his framework, but I think he and his students undeniably accomplished something praiseworthy. With Heath, I’d strongly recommend Cooney’s book at minimum. If you’re interested in an analysis of the legal system, Black made his name with The Behavior of Law. For myself, I’ll likely continue slowly going through these for a time, as well as looking into some of their critics.
Black, Donald. “The Epistemology of Pure Sociology.” Law & Social Inquiry 20, no. 3 (1995): 849-850. http://www.jstor.org/stable/828807.
Ibid, 852-853.
Black, Donald. “Appendix: A Strategy of Pure Sociology.” Essay. In The Social Structure of Right and Wrong. San Diego, California: Academic Press, Inc., 1993. 159.
Ibid, 160.
Ibid.
Ibid, 161.
Ibid, 161-163.
Ibid
Cooney, Mark. Warriors and Peacemakers. Kindle ed. New York, NY: NYU Press, 1998. 38.
Ibid, 120
Black, Donald. The Social Structure of Right and Wrong. San Diego, California: Academic Press, Inc., 1993. 98.
Cooney, Mark. Warriors and Peacemakers. Kindle ed. New York, NY: NYU Press, 1998. 107-131.
Black, Donald. “The Epistemology of Pure Sociology.” Law & Social Inquiry 20, no. 3 (1995): 830. http://www.jstor.org/stable/828807.
Black, Donald. The Social Structure of Right and Wrong. San Diego, California: Academic Press, Inc., 1993. 145.