Difference between American and European sociology

We believe that the exchange published below on sociology, its national schools, and their methods as applied to the subject of social mobility will be of interest to the layman as well as the specialist. Social mobility is a question whose importance far transcends any scholarly discipline. Many momentous political and social decisions now and in the future will hinge on it, whether or not the social scientists adequately prepare the way—and whether or not we take their advice. For this and other reasons, we have seen fit to print this exchange as a regular “Study of Man” instead of in our correspondence columns.

_____________

Mr. Lipset Writes

I Should like to comment on Herbert Luethy’s critique, “Social Mobility Again—and Elites” (in your September issue), of the article “Class and Opportunity in Europe and the United States” by Natalie Rogoff and myself, which appeared in your number of December 1954.

1. The basis of Mr. Luethy’s article is an unqualified attack on American sociology as vulgar empiricism, and implicit praise of the presumably more cultured, non-quantitative European social science. Like many other forms of anti-Americanism, Luethy’s attack is based on little knowledge of America, and also, which is more surprising, less knowledge about European scholarship.

He alleges, for example, that concern with social mobility is “an obsession of American sociologists.” In fact, few American sociologists have paid much attention to social mobility until recent years. If anything, concern with social mobility has been an obsession of Europeans. There are literally thousands of quantitative studies of social mobility in different parts of Europe dating back to the late 19th century. Before and after World War I, German, French, Italian, and English scholars were busy inspecting marriage registers to find out the relationship between the occupations of fathers and sons, or of marriage partners, or securing data from questionnaires given to people in different occupations. A detailed early report on such studies may be found in Pitirim Sorokin’s excellent book Social Mobility (1927). In 1931 Paul Lazarsfeld, then at the University of Vienna, wrote a short book Jugend und Beruf (“Youth and Occupation”), which summarized over one hundred twenty German and Austrian quantitative studies dealing with a problem Mr. Luethy thinks unanalyzable: the factors affecting young people’s choice of careers. The idea of a “coefficient of social mobility”—what Mr. Luethy calls the factor of “pure mobility” and which he credits to American sociology—was first developed by an Italian, Federico Chessa, in his excellent study La Trasmissione Ereditria delle Professioni (1912).

The first international sociological association, formed at the turn of the century, was largely a European organization; it decided to make its first international project the study of social mobility. The International Sociological Association, formed after World War II, also designated as its principal research task the study of social mobility. And curiously, the I.S.A. committee in charge of this project has had difficulty in finding American sociologists who are interested in the problem. Mr. Luethy to the contrary notwithstanding, there are comparatively few American studies of social mobility.

2. Mr. Luethy seems to have found disturbing our suggestion that advanced industrial countries have similar rates of mobility. On second thought, however, he sees that this is not only possible but obvious since European society is no more static than American, given wars, revolutions, genocide, transfers of population, and industrial expansion. (I might add that the abundant European data on mobility in the more stable pre-World War I Europe indicate a considerable amount of movement, both up and down the class structure.) He then goes on to argue that Europeans today, unlike Americans, are inclined to regard social mobility as a “nightmare”—what they want is security and stability. I should be the last person to argue that individuals in Europe, or America for that matter, are happy about the prospect of losing jobs, or being pushed around from one place to another, which is what he is actually talking about. American workers, in spite of their concern to improve their socioeconomic position, also want more social security, more unemployment insurance (the guaranteed annual wage), and more trade union protection. But in Europe and America, the parties and organizations of the working class have at the same time been fighting successfully for a more fluid social structure. They demand, in particular, an expansion of educational opportunities for the children of the lower classes. And the evidence would suggest that many workers in all countries become small businessmen.

All the available evidence from survey studies suggests that one consequence of the welfare state and the increase in income around the world, has been an increase in the level of aspiration which workers have for their children. In a number of European countries, one finds that many working-class parents desire middle-class occupations for their sons. A successful journalist may consider social mobility “a nightmare”; but I doubt greatly if the low-paid Parisian workers would agree with him.

3. Mr. Luethy suggests that the rise in the social position of the entire lower class in America as a consequence of increased wealth is more important in explaining differences between America and Europe than variations in rates of individual mobility. I am in complete agreement with him. This point was, in fact, one of the major arguments of our article. Natalie Rogoff and I held that “the assembly line and mass production, with the higher wages and more equitable distribution of wealth they make possible, are thus probably more responsible for the development of the American ‘classless’ society than trends in social mobility.”

4. Mr. Luethy seems to think that our finding that most advanced industrial countries have similar rates of mobility is not a contribution to knowledge. But presumably data showing that Europe had lower rates of mobility than America would also have been “obvious” and supererogatory. (I might add that studies which I have located since the original article was written indicate somewhat comparable rates of mobility in Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States.)

5. Mr. Luethy objects to isolating “‘pure social mobility’; i.e., that degree or margin of mobility which exists independently of the historical expansion or contraction of the economy’s occupational structure, and is thus not due to over-all changes in job opportunities, but entirely to individual causes.” He thinks this distinction is artificial and worthless for analytic purposes. Essentially all that this distinction assumes is that there are three factors which may affect the amount of social mobility in a society: (a) changes in the “opportunity structure,” a shift in the size of relevant classes; (b) demographic factors, the effect of the fact that the lower classes have a higher birth rate than the upper classes; and (c) interchange mobility, upward movements which are balanced by downward movements. The latter constitutes “pure mobility.” Now in spite of what Mr. Luethy would like to believe, the latter form of mobility represents a major proportion of mobility in all industrialized societies. The phrase “shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations” is a popular recognition of this fact. All the studies available indicate that approximately 25 per cent of the children of middle-class parents become manual workers in most Western countries. And this seems to have been true before World War I as well. Surely it is important to analyze the factors involved in this type of movement, and also to deal with its consequences. In recent decades we have seen what emphasis has been laid on the reactionary political role of the downward mobile in different countries.

6. Mr. Luethy argues that “there are not only thirty-six ways of measuring social mobility, there are as many types of social mobility itself.” Of course there are many types, although I am sure there are not thirty-six. This is only to call attention to deficiencies in the analysis of mobility, and to the need for more research.

7. Mr. Luethy doubts that social science can contribute anything to our knowledge of what makes some people more successful than others. Clearly, we shall never be able to locate all the factors which affect individual or group behavior. But does Mr. Luethy mean that we cannot discover some of the factors? Sociology and the other social sciences are trying to specify and test propositions that purport to account for variations in behavior. The amount of behavior which can be explained by our analyses will always be limited. But is no knowledge, or intuition, better than some empirically based knowledge?

Let me end with a question. How does increased knowledge concerning mobility serve a “utilitarian” purpose? What does Mr. Luethy think that sociologists will be able to tell policymakers on the basis of knowledge about social mobility? Until he makes clear what he means by the charge that students of social mobility are involved in “social engineering,” I must charge him with intellectual irresponsibility.

_____________

Mr. Luethy Answers

This rather futile exchange results from a misunderstanding. My note in COMMENTARY on “social mobility” was excerpted from a review article in French appearing in Preuves (Paris) for April 1955 that was devoted to a bulky tome on French genealogy relating specifically to the “old bourgoisie.”

Let me re-state my theses briefly: (1) the history of families, in a country with a strong family structure like France’s, could provide the study of social history with an excellent tool; (2) as now understood, particularly in France, family history seems to serve nothing more than the vanity of snobs; (3) setting out to “demonstrate” that the oldest bourgeois families—and their fortunes—are very, very old, works like the one mentioned above nourish the myth that the French social structure is largely petrified. Having noted this, I went on to oppose to the myth of the “ancientness” of European societies the myth of the “dynamism” of American society, a myth nourished by the diametrically opposite attitude, which holds that a fortune or position achieved by one’s own efforts, and not inherited, is an object of legitimate pride. These two opposed myths exaggerate certain characteristics of the two societies that, while real enough, are far less revealing than they seem to be.

It was to back up this criticism that I touched on the Lipset and Rogoff article; and basing myself on a criticism of the French study of social mobility cited by the authors—a study that, in my opinion, gives no conclusive results—I took the liberty of suggesting that for the study of European societies it would perhaps be better not to follow the methods of American sociology by rote. These may be well adapted to the society for whose study they were designed, but are much less valid for the more “historical” and “traditional” societies of Western Europe. I argued that social history, in Europe at least, is not anonymous, and that a sufficient number of real inquiries into differently circumstanced families, covering several complete generations, would yield a more concrete image of the movement of society than could be obtained by plundering anonymous file cases.

COMMENTARY saw fit to publish the part of this review article dealing with the Lipset and Rogoff study, omitting the section on the book in question, Receuil genéalogique de la bourgeoisie ancienne, as this could hardly be expected to interest the American lay public. Mr. Lipset could therefore not have known that the object of my article was not at all “an unqualified attack on American sociology,” and still less “implicit praise of . . . European social science”—it was precisely European social science that I explicitly criticized and made fun of.

Yet having granted the basis for Mr. Lipset’s misunderstanding of the excerpt, I still cannot help thinking that there is something a little “obsessive” in his taxing me, from the very start, with “anti-Americanism.” Have I laid rough hands on a national idol, and without knowing it insulted America in its person? Why such a tone? And why the utterly uncalled for insinuation about the “successful journalist” who treats the misery of “low-paid Parisian workers” with scorn? If these are examples of quantitative sociology at work, I can only say, without heat, that they are most inept.

_____________

But from harsh words let us turn to compliments. It seems that I gave American sociology too much credit in attributing to it discoveries that belong to Europe. (A strange way of showing my anti-Americanism: what would I have been accused of had I said, as does Mr. Lipset himself, that American students have discovered nothing and that everything they know came from Europe originally?) He is very kind in conceding to Europe Sorokin’s important works; in my ignorance I always took Sorokin for an American scientist, in view of the fact that his whole work, except his first things published in Russian, before 1917, has been produced in America. Of course, the very word sociology was contributed by Comte; and Germany and Austria take precedence in modern sociological theory. The notion of “absolute mobility” we owe to Federico Chessa, an Italian. But Auguste Comte is no more, and Chessa has had no success, and had fallen into the most complete oblivion until quite recently, when his researches were resumed by American investigators. In Germany—a pathological case of what one might truthfully call the “sociological obsession”—we have had a break in the continuity of sociological study. And as far as France is concerned, I must content myself with calling attention to the study of social mobility on which Mr. Lipset and Miss Rogoff relied in making their comparison. This little and most deceptive article, employing methods quite elementary in character, is in actual fact the first and only study of this subject ever attempted in France!

Of course, scientific workers of all nationalities have a praiseworthy tendency to deplore the slightness of the work done in their own countries, and to make comparisons to the advantage of that done elsewhere—if only in order to stimulate the public conscience and patriotism of the people in their own countries who pay the bill for scientific work. But all the same, it is not Germany or Scandinavia that has since 1945 come up with all those multiple “social research projects,” well endowed and and equipped with the most modern quantitative methods thanks to Unesco and the great American foundations. In most of the projects in European countries, the style, the methods, and even the researchers come from the United States.

Now in my review article I contended that for several generations American sociologists have been “obsessed” with the problem of how to integrate “all the heterogenous contributions of the many traditions, races, and nations making up the American people” (these are my very words). Fortunately, I do not have to dwell at length on this point, since in the meantime COMMENTARY published William Petersen’s excellent study, “The ‘Scientific’ Basis of Our Immigration Policy” (July 1955). American social scientists, research workers, experts, investigating committees, and centers of study have for almost a century and a half studied the consequences of the various waves of immigrations in relation to the absorptive capacity of American society, and to the adaptability of various ethnic and social groups. If Mr. Lipset holds all this not to be sociology, then we certainly disagree in our notion of this science. And does not this enormous amount of preparatory work, which resulted in a whole body of legislation on immigration fraught with the most serious political and social consequences, constitute an answer to the last question—what can sociology say to “policy-makers”?—asked so magisterially of me by Mr. Lipset?

_____________

As to the “accusation” that I am supposed to have made against American sociology, that it is “a useful and even utilitarian science” (my own terms!), it was not an accusation but praise; it was exactly this “will to usefulness” that I contrasted with the aimless games played by the French genealogists I was criticizing. Moreover, as it appears to me, several celebrated sociological schools have arisen in the United States precisely out of what were originally solely utilitarian research projects sponsored by big business and trade unions; it is to such survey projects that we owe so much of our knowledge of labor productivity, of the practice of “public relations,” of the organization of markets, etc., etc. But perhaps here, too, Mr. Lipset will object that these projects were not sociological.

Why is Mr. Lipset so eager to make sociology a useless, hence “noble” science? In my humble opinion, it is precisely its social usefulness that makes American sociology so vital, and has inspired those of its projects which have had the greatest—well—usefulness. If Mr. Lipset thinks that his science ought not to aim at practical results, then he ought to explain what there is in it that is so interesting to the “low-paid Parisian worker.”

_____________

I ask pardon for having responded in the same tone in which I was addressed. That tone adds nothing to the discussion of the problems raised. So let me simply re-state our points of disagreement:

How is the development of sociology in the US different from the one in Europe?

What is European sociology?

How sociology emerged in Europe and flourished in America?

What is an American sociologist?