A. H. Halsey - A History of Sociology in Britain, Science, Literature, and Society (2004)

A History of Sociology in Britain
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A History of Sociology in Britain
Science, Literature, and Society
A. H.Halsey
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PREFACE
‘It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life to be rather driven by the fear of evil than attracted by
the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished
for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward.’ That was Samuel Johnson
in 1755 writing the preface to his dictionary, whose object, his mother tongue, he went on, had been ‘hitherto
neglected, suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and
fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation’. Much the same may be said of
sociology by both friends and enemies.
When colleagues forty years ago began to suggest that I write a history of sociology in Britain, I was reluctant. It was a
job for retirement and it was the 1960s when there was much sociological research to do. Now, after fourteen years of
‘retirement’, there can be no excuse for further delay.
Having begun as an undergraduate at LSE in 1947, I specialized in the sociology of higher education (Halsey, 1995)
and in the techniques of survey and the use of Official Statistics (Halsey and Webb, 2000), I have advised the Secretary
of State for Education and served on the Council of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Moreover, I have
held teaching and research posts in Liverpool, Birmingham, the Centre for Advanced Study of the Behavioural
Sciences at Palo Alto, Harvard, Chicago, and Berkeley, as well as in Oxford. This may sound all very creditable and
may perhaps induce credulity in the reader. But it is salutary to remember W. G. Runciman's introductory text
(Runciman, 1998), which ends (p. 211) with the point that ‘only through the practice of sociology and psychology can
we hope to understand not only how far but also why Dio Chrysostom, a famously eloquent stoic philosopher of the
first century ad, was right to ask: why oh why are human beings so hard to teach, but so easy to deceive?’
Personal Confession and the Truth of this History
It is up to the reader to decide on the truthfulness of this history, but here let me sketch the biography of the author. I
have already written an autobiography (No Discouragement, Macmillan, 1996). I also recount in Chapter 4 my
experiences as an undergraduate at LSE in the late 1940s. As to the origin of the subject, I am aware that words change
their meanings through space and time and that this is true not least for ‘sociology’. It is well known that Philip
Abrams, the late professor of the subject at the University of Durham, has argued for a kind of British
exceptionalism—that sociology started so late in the British universities because there were alternative means of access
to government and decision making in the relatively peaceful development of nineteenth-century Britain. R. N. Soffer
(1978, 1982) later opposed Abrams's analysis, arguing that British sociology under Hobhouse and later Ginsberg had
based itself on biological assumptions to contend that evolution entailed progress towards social consensus through
the steady emergence of the rational will of individuals leading eventually to the unity of mankind. This so-called
orthogenic version of the Darwinian theory of evolution dominated British sociology, deflected attention from social
conflict, and therefore effectively eliminated sociologists as potential advisers on social reform. The con-trast with
American, German, or French experience between 1880 and 1920 was heavily drawn. In a later series of articles and a
book (2002), Lawrence Goldman has challenged this view, seeing Britain (England) as not essentially different from the
United States, Germany, France, or Italy in failing to develop academic sociology from the late-nineteenth to the
mid-twentieth century. Where Goldman and Soffer differ is that Goldman forthrightly declares this a cause for
congratulation rather than despair in the sense that, being motivated fundamentally by social reform, early sociologists
were satisfied by their own interventions and successful in transforming industrial society by building up a network of
empirically based reformist institutions inside and outside parliament, such that R. H. Tawney was eventually able to
think of the state as a ‘serviceable drudge’.
This was the atmosphere of my childhood—belief in the potency of politics. As a student I listened to David Glass's
inaugural lecture of 1950, in which he envisaged that the main destination of sociology graduates would be in Whitehall
and perhaps Westminster. My contemporaries and I were activists, full of enthusiasm for the reform of British society
in the direction of the welfare state. What we had at LSE was an education that was not a training for sociology but a
course in the understanding of society. Thus economics and statistics were prominent. Much of the old B.Sc. (Econ.)
degree was oriented to the political management of an emerging welfare state, of macroeconomic planning informed
by Keynes, of ethical socialism from R. H. Tawney's historical knowledge of industrialism, of reasoned ‘piecemeal
social engineering’ from Popper.
I personally had enjoyed and endured an English upbringing steeped, such were the times, in individualism with, no
doubt, its intellectual roots in Hobbes and Locke modified perhaps by T. H. Green, but even stronger roots in daily
experience, though again modified for the working class by familism and the social or communal rituals of conformity
such as the Sunday suit or the Monday washday. Thus we read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) in parallel with
Emile Durkheim's Division of Labour (1893), and, in my own case at any rate, realized what was the relation between the
cult of the individual and the ‘conscience collective’—the one the vehicle of reason, the other the source of moral
obligation.
vi PREFACE
Of course, as post-war students we looked back on an inter-war childhood as a period of failed government policy
with respect to the production (unemployment) and distribution (unequal wealth) of the nation. But with Beveridge
and Bevan we saw the future state, as did Tawney, as a reliable instrument for the delivery of health, education, and
welfare. I remember reading Ignatio Silone's novels at the time and noticing that his Italian counterparts of the
inter-war grammar school scholarship boy were taught by Roman Catholic schoolmasters to hate the state and to
worship a Garden of Eden called Russia. My working class, by contrast, thought of communism as associated with
cucumber sandwiches on rectory lawns and Russia as a strange exotic tyranny.
Thus, Popper's attack on historicism was deeply impressive to me. The Hobhouse tradition of seeking laws of social
development, though never explicitly mentioned by Popper, was thereby rendered suspect and we were prejudiced
against it and converted to Popper's version of ‘positivism’ as well as, admittedly reluctantly, to piecemeal social
engineering. Our activism also led us to quantitative surveys. Popper was not apparently a philosopher but a physicist
interested in the methods of the social sciences. It was his conversion of philosophy into methodological problems that
attracted us—all very abstract but most persuasive.
At the same time, along with an addiction to the normal athletic activities of a male (very late) adolescent, I had
become steeped in English and European literature as part of the taken-for-granted equipment of political
understanding of the day. In short, I was also a Victorian child, led by the promise of science to a new political and
social order and inspired by idealistic novels and other arts to the creation, at last, of a new utopia. I have never
subsequently lost these early orientations.
One argument for writing this book is to preserve institutional memory. I have been sadly reminded of the speed at
which remembrance may fade in times of rapid change. In this case two particular forces have been at work—the
expansion of the universities and the failure of bureaucracies to bring their records into rhythm with reality.1
Thus, in
connection with my survey of professors of sociology (living, retired, and dead), Professor Larraine wrote to me from
Birmingham to tell me that he did not know that I had served there from 1954 to 1962. He was appointed in 1977.
And questionnaires were returned to me from Leicester intended for Joe and Olive Banks marked ‘Not known at this
address’. They had retired in 1982. I tried again, using the private address at Husbands Bosworth in Leicestershire
which I had last visited in the 1980s. This time the postman did remember, got the new address in Buxton from the
neighbours, and sent on the questionnaire.
In 1970 in Sociology one of my predecessors, R. K. Kelsall of Sheffield University, reviewed the ‘brave attempt’ by
another, G. D. Mitchell of Exeter University, to write the history of A Hundred Years of Sociology. He applied three
PREFACE vii
1
Adequately to describe the contemporary ‘system of tertiary education’ would require the combined ironic genius of a modern Dickens, Veblen, and Kafka.
tests. Does the author succumb to the temptation of making brief mention of many sociologists or review at length the
comparatively few? Is the choice of people and specialisms a wise one? Does the author stand back and analyse the
recent past as convincingly as the more remote past? Mitchell failed all three of Kelsall's tests. He presents a catalogue
of names, he leaves out Marx and barely mentions conflict theory or mathematical modelling, and he is more
convincing about 1868 than about 1968.
Author and critic are now both dead. Now it is my turn to be judged. I have tried to overcome all Kelsall's hurdles.
Only the reader can tell whether and to what extent I have done so. I fear especially for the third test. How to know the
young or recent history are difficult challenges. As to the first, I have listed all the professors in my survey in
Appendix 1.
I am most grateful to the Nuffield Trust and still more to the Leverhulme Foundation for grants in aid of this project,
which enabled me to secure the secretarial services of Sarah McGuigan, the computing services of Jane Roberts, and
the research services of Claire Donovan. And my debt is the greater to Nuffield College for providing the intellectual
milieu and the library services headed by the ever helpful Elizabeth Martin, that have made the labour more enjoyable
and less arduous than it would otherwise have been.
What follows is not a conventional nor even a genuine history in the sense of systematic interpretation of primary
sources. But it does contain a survey of the professors of sociology in British universities, a collation of public statistics,
and an analysis of citations and contents of the main sociological journals published in the United Kingdom. Claire
Donovan has helped with a content analysis of published articles in British journals over the century, especially since
1950. The idea was to track the rise and fall of sociologies of this, that, and the other, such as the economy, the polity,
education, race, or religion, and of ideological disputes over Marxism, feminism, ethnomethodology, eugenics,
symbolic interactionism, functionalism, etc.
My acknowledgements are due to all the colleagues who answered my questionnaire, and those among them who were
kind enough to be interviewed or to comment on a pilot version of the questionnaire. I am particularly grateful for the
help of these colleagues who were kind enough to respond to my invitation to add their comments to the questionnaire
and to all professors of sociology in the United Kingdom, especially Frank Webster (then at Birmingham) and Richard
Jenkins (Sheffield) who sent me accounts of the history of their departments quoted in Chapter 5.
My thanks are also offered to Brian Harrison and his colleagues at the New Dictionary of National Biography for
permission to draw on the entries which I have written about Morris Ginsberg, T. H. Marshall, W. J. H. Sprott,
R. M. Titmuss, Charles Madge, and Barbara Wootton.
Special thanks are due to the seven essayists who have contributed the epilogue. I chose them as seven significant
voices in contemporary sociology.
Finally, grateful thanks are offered to those friends and colleagues who read drafts of chapters, especially John
Westergaard, who saved me from descending
viii PREFACE
in several places to cohort-bound and egotistical prejudices, Julia Parker, who helped me immensely with her
knowledge of social policy, Martin Trow, David Cox, and my daughter Ruth. Of course, none of them is responsible
for any of my remaining miscredences, mistakes, or misrepresentations.
A. H. Halsey
Nuffield College
Oxford
December 2003
PREFACE ix
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Contents
List of Figures xiii
List of Tables xiv
Part I.Context
Introduction 3
1. Literature or Science? 15
2. The Rise of Scientific Method 29
Part II.Narrative
3. Sociology Before 1950 47
4. British Post-war Sociologists 70
5. Expansion 1950–67 89
6. Revolt 1968–75 113
7. Years of Uncertainty 1976–2000 122
Part III.Analysis
8. The Professors 147
9. Celebrated Sociologists 168
10. The Shape of Sociology 180
Part IV.Conclusion
11. Epilogue in Eight Essays: Halsey, Bauman, Crouch, Giddens, Oakley, Platt,
Runciman, and Westergaard 203
Appendices
Appendix 1. The Professorial Survey 2001 225
Appendix 2. Students Numbers and Quality 1950–2000 233
Appendix 3. Citation and Content Analyses (by Claire Donovan) 241
References 250
Index 267
xii CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
8.1. Paths to the professoriate (with odds ratios): UK universities, all subjects, 1989 151
8.2. Social origin of sociology professors 157
8.3. Religion of sociology professors 157
8.4. Education of sociology professors 159
8.5. Qualifications of sociology professors 160
8.6. Publications of sociology professors 160
8.7. University of first chair 163
10.1. Key trends 1950–2000 185
10.2. Nationality and high quantification 188
10.3. Empirical papers by method 1910–2000 192
A2.1. UK universities all students 1950–2000/1 234
A2.2. UK universities all full-time and part-time students 1950/1–2000/1 234
A2.3. UK universities all undergraduates 1950/1–2000/1 235
A2.4. UK universities all postgraduates 1950/1–2000/1 235
A2.5. UK universities all sociology students 1965/6–2000/1 236
A2.6. UK universities sociology students 1950/1–2000/1 236
A2.7. UK universities part-time sociology students 1965/6–2000/1 237
A2.8. UK universities sociology undergraduates 1965/6–2000/1 237
A2.9. UK universities sociology postgraduates 1950/1–2000/1 238
LIST OF TABLES
7.1. The general hierarchy of universities in 2002 124
7.2. Sociology: the institutional hierarchy in 2002 125
8.1. Correlates of career success 1976–89. UK universities; all subjects 148
8.2. First chairs in sociology in UK universities by year of foundation 154
8.3. Proportions holding doctorates 1994–2001 161
8.4. Preferences for research 2001 161
8.5. Which political party do you feel closest to? 162
8.6. Where would you place yourself in the following political spectrum? 162
8.7. Do you think of yourself primarily as a sociologist? 163
8.8. Decline of sociology 1960–90 164
8.9. Attitudes to career in British sociology 165
8.10. Comparison of vice-chancellors and professors 166
9.1. Who have been your most important mentors during your career? 169
9.2. In the world as a whole, which sociologists in the twentieth century have contributed most to the
subject? 171
9.3. A comparison of ISI methods with the Donovan/Halsey method applied to the 1990 and 2000
sample 173
9.4. The most highly cited authors 1950–70 175
9.5. The most highly cited authors 1980–2000 176
10.1. Popular areas of sociology 1910–2000 185
10.2. Methods used in British journal articles 1910–2000 189
10.3. Qualitative methods 1910–2000 191
10.4. Ideology in sociology 193
A1.1. Survey of British professors of sociology 2001 232
A2.1. A-level scores at entry 1970–2000 239
A2.2. Entry and graduation quality in the United Kingdom 1963–6 240
A2.3. Correlation of entry score with class of degree 240
A2.4. First-class graduates from UK universities (% with firsts) 240
Part I Context
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Introduction
IN THE PREFACE we have offered a personal sketch of the atmosphere of the inter-war period (1919–39). Readers may
have heard (10 November 2002) Jiang Zemin, the retiring Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, urging his
comrades to keep up with the times and to welcome capitalists into the Party! Could one believe one's ears? The point
is that even about ten years ago, not only would the ghosts of Stalin and Chairman Mao have been aghast but no social
scientist could conceivably have predicted such a pronouncement. No event so spectacular is to be found in the
following pages. Yet, it is doubtful whether any of the handful of British sociologists in 1900 could have predicted that
by 2000 as many as 2,000 sociologists would be teaching 24,000 students in the universities of the United Kingdom.
This is the puzzle, both the facts and the predictive impossibility, which makes up the case for a history, institutional
and intellectual, of this extraordinary expansion and its accompanying fragmentations. We shall elaborate the story in
Chapter 5, and numerically in Appendix 2. As to the credibility of our own sensations, we must remind ourselves of
the wise remark of John Eldridge that ‘a sociology that does not cultivate an historical awareness cripples itself, since it
cannot begin to encounter some of the central problems of explanation and interpretation’ (Eldridge, 1980: 193).
What then, in a historical context, is sociology?2
In any formal sense its beginnings were inchoate. The study of social
relations? Yes, but as we proceed it will become clear that many approaches and definitions are, and have been, in
contention. Sociology has no agreed boundaries or birthday. It is probably coincident with civilization. Its boundaries
are shifting and disputed. Perhaps it is better to be pragmatic with Ralf Dahrendorf (1995) and say that sociology is
what the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) does or did, just as Herbert Morrison affirmed ...