A sociologist rages against the dying of the light

Sociology: How a Never Ending Story Is Enriching My Journey into that Good Night: Reflections at the Intersection of Sociology, Science Studies, and Autobiography* Sal Restivo, Lately of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Ghent, and New York University.

Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas

PREFACE

         When I first saw the call for contributions to the retired sociologists section of the ASA meeting in San Francisco, I thought it might be an opportunity to share my experiences as a retiree who didn’t believe in retirement. I was also drawn to the idea of travelling to San Francisco to see that city again and visit with some dear friends I haven’t seen in ages. I wrote a paper, I submitted it, it was accepted and I am about to share it with you all. I wondered all along if I really had anything to say to a professional group of people who likely thought about “retirement” more or less like I did. Now as I look over what I’ve written it seems to me that I have written a story that tries to navigate between the Charybdis of a self-indulgent memoir and the Scylla of a manifesto on sociology in science studies. The metaphor is one to conjure with since the Strait of Messina which separates the two sea monsters has Sicily, the home of my father’s family, on one side, and Calabria, my mother’s birthplace, on the other. 

   OVERTURE

         In this paper, I look back over a career outside the central corridors of the profession of sociology fighting for the sociological cogito as an activist in the Radical Science Movement, a professor in the classroom, and a researcher in science and technology studies. The journey has taken me from engineering, physics, and mathematics to sociology and anthropology, to the science studies movement, and in the last decade back to sociology. I have been fighting against a conspiracy of mythologies most of my career: the myth of the individual and free will, the myth of the “I” which Nietzsche understood as a grammatical illusion, the myth of a God who cannot be proved or disproved, the myth of the brain as the font of all of our behaviors and thoughts, and the myth of a pure Platonic math and the absolute monarchy of a one and once and only logic. The very idea of retirement was never a piece of my life plan.  As I approach my 80th birthday I continue to write for the pure joy of writing, obeying the imperative that to live is to write and to write is to live. I also remind us all that if writing fuels life life must fuel writing. And I explain why it is necessary to continue to fight for the sociological cogito. We are still, in many ways, indebted to our founders and crystallizers in the Age of the Social 1840-1930. This was followed by the 2nd Age of the Social 1930-1970, a significant period of growth and diversity in theory and research including the development of the sociology of knowledge and science. We are now in the 3rd Age of the Social 1970-2050. I choose 2050 on the mostly hopeful assumptions that we and our planet will still be here, and that sociology will by that time have established itself as one of the robust core sciences with physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics.  

         Since I first wrote and submitted this paper to ASA, our lives have been changed dramatically and dangerously by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our August meeting has been cancelled because of the pandemic and I, like most of you, have been sheltered-in since late March. This paper takes on a new significance in this context. While many people around the world have found being sheltered in challenging emotionally, mentally, physically, and socially, I have transitioned without difficulty, In part this is because sheltered-in is my default lifestyle. It isn’t the case that I have traditionally lived my life completely inside my house or apartment. But I have not been burdened by this lifestyle to the extent that I have needed others to suggest and provide activities and hobbies to entertain myself, to keep myself busy. Writing is for the most part an indoor activity. I have also created an environment that makes being sheltered in easy. As a former weightlifter, powerlifter, and personal trainer, I have always had a home gym. I have nourished my far-ranging interests with a substantial home library. And I have several musical instruments that I play almost every day – several accordions, a guitar, a harmonica, drums, and a piano. My mythical self assures me I could have thrived on my own in this environment. I’ve lived most of my life single and alone. In fact, months before the pandemic, I met a woman who entered my life and my home and has been there to share sheltered-in with me. She has certainly, my mythical self notwithstanding, made sheltered-in easier.                                                                                                                             

         People would have had less trouble adapting to the current conditions if they had been encouraged to adopt callings and diverse interests instead of jobs that narrowed, specialized, and monotonized their work lives, commodified them, and led to rather lengthy retirements that promised only a vague period of unplanned and undirected leisure without adequate safety nets (most notably in the United States and its government without compassion). I understand how limited this view is in terms of sex, gender, race, and class differences and the practical realities we face in life as we knew it before the pandemic and life as we know it in this moment. There is nonetheless a rationale for radically altering the way we program people to think about and prepare for old age and retirement. The issues are not only-or even primarily- financial. There is no denying the need to financially sustain people after their working days are behind them, never mind while they are in the work force. However, we need special programs to deal with the inequalities of race, ethnicity, sex & gender, and class and their associated injustices that address issues of aging and work. These programs must go beyond the classic concepts of social security and welfare and to broader considerations of what it means for a radically social species to age. I am writing this in interesting times. To live in interesting times is widely understood as a curse that originated in China. No one has been able to find that idea in the Chinese literature. The closest expression in Chinese is “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.” This expression appears in Volume 3 of Feng Menglong’s Stories to Awaken a World (1627). Whatever the expression and whatever the source I write this triply embedded in interesting times. I’ve mentioned the pandemic; I’ve been shelter-in for a couple of months in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is only in the last two weeks that I have begun to venture out, masked and wearing safety gloves, to take walks around my low density neighborhood in Queens, New York. I’ve also started to catch up on overdue visits to my doctor and dentist. Second is the murder of George Floyd, an African American male, by a Minneapolis policeman, Derek Chauvin. Chauvin pinned Floyd to the ground following a minor infraction by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes. This has led to protests across the United States and around the world. Inevitably, overwhelmingly peaceful protests have been marred by acts of violence caused by what we called in the ’60 “outside agitators as well no doubt opportunity. The third piece of my/our interesting times is the illiterate and illegal presidency of Donald J. Trump; illegal because he has openly violated various provisions of the U.S. Constitution or stood on the precipice of violating them by, for the most recent and relevant example, threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to have U.S. armed forces bring “law and order” to streets crowded with peaceful demonstrators exercising their first amendment rights. This was so outrageous that his own secretary of defense and several former secretaries of defense spoke publicly in opposition to his threat. Illiterate? Read my tweets!

INTRODUCTION

         Once my career in sociology had launched, I imagined I would teach sociology for a living until the dying of the light. I had a project that would never end: following the callings of sociology and teaching. But I would not teach until the dying of the light. There would be unanticipated changes and a transition to a new way of satisfying the calling and my muse. It wasn’t the case that the changes were entirely unanticipated. I and others had been writing about the commodification of the universities and the reduction of mental labor for decades. What was unanticipated, what I didn’t anticipate, was the speed and scale of the changes. I imagined in the midst of all this that my little niche could be protected. I was wrong. I would leave an academy in ruins and begin to write my way into that good night telling the never ending story of sociology. My story matters because it is a story about sociology trying to take root and survive in John Wayne’s universe.

         The calling to science and the academy came early and for reasons I don’t have the space to tease out here. I grew up in a home without books; we didn’t even have a Bible. My Italian immigrant mother raised me as a Roman Catholic. I was precociously alert to the programming. She would move my hand through the sign of the cross, night after night and night when I was an infant. Eventually, I could perform the movement without her help. I was not a good candidate for the church even as a child. I panicked at my Confirmation ceremony when the bishop claimed me for the army of Jesus.  I was already suspicious about what was going on when earlier he oiled me up and slapped me. My Sicilian father, born and raised in Brooklyn, had an eighth grade education but possessed a practical genius that allowed him to almost single handedly maintain the six family house we owned. The abilities that led me to engineering were honed helping him paint, lay concrete, do electrical work and plumbing, and so on. And I was primed for Marxism and more when at the age of ten he took me to the shoe factory he worked in.  I learned early on that he didn’t believe in believing. 

         In the midst of this intellectually barren life nourished by unconditioned love (punishment was virtually unknown in our family), there I was at four or five scribbling for hours on end in one of my father’s black and white composition books.  I couldn’t write words yet, certainly not in script, so I scribbled little “u”s strung together in sets of 2 to 6 or 7 with spaces, periods, and even the occasional paragraph. I had found a way of life. I would soon precociously find a profession.                          

         On the first day of first grade, I stood at the entrance to my assigned room holding my mother’s hand, a scene repeated all over the first floor of Public School 86 in Brooklyn, New York on a September day in 1946. Unlike most (maybe all) of the other kids and some or all of the mothers, I was not crying and already tugging to let go of my mother’s hand. Somehow, the door to the still empty classroom seemed to me to be a portal to a world that would save me from the threats and troubles of the world outside.                                                                                             

         That world, my neighborhood, wasn’t the most dangerous neighborhood in Brooklyn but dangers lurked. There were school bullies who would punch you around for fun. Kids as young as 7 and 8 owned certain blocks; if you didn’t have their permission to walk on their street you could be in for a beating. I had the good fortune of having a father who had been an amateur boxer and taught me the basics of boxing and self-defense by the time I was six. I had the “bad fortune” of having a mother who taught me to be afraid of everything. So I got punched around and my only defense was not my boxing prowess but my knowledge base. And surprisingly it worked more often than not. “Don’t hit me and I’ll tell you how far Mars is from the sun;” “Leave me alone and I’ll tell you the speed of light.”  Later on, I improved my proficiency on the speed bag thanks in part to lessons from my dad’s friend, Joe Pasco. Joe performed a vaudeville act showing off his skills with the help of twenty or so young women speed bag champions. My proficiency would allow me to serve as the student punching bag leader in gym class at Brooklyn Tech. That meant an automatic A every semester and a waiver for the swimming requirement. I never did learn to swim but I could make that speed bag sing.                                                                                                                                      

         On that September day in 1946, on the threshold of my first day in a classroom, I became a professor. In elementary school I was already known as the “little professor;” by junior high, I was “the professor.” I wasn’t always or even often at the head of my class but I was always in the game of firsts. Even kids who beat me up after school would inevitably vote for me as class president. As my education and career unfolded I was rarely number one but in the network of top tens, twenties, or thirties. But I had a “feel for education.” My sense of the sacredness of the classroom, and of the academy would define the way I entered and left the revolution as a “child of the ‘60s.” Where did I come from?

         Brooklyn Technical High School made me feel for the first time that I belonged somewhere. For several hours five days a week I was locked in with 6000 boys with an average IQ we were told of 140. There were others like me. I wasn’t from Mars after all. There were 14 year olds who could solve differential equations but couldn’t tie their shoe laces, one who already owned his own radio repair shop, some who would organize seminars for teachers on the latest technologies (including one on transistors). There was a single engine plane aeronautical engineering majors could work on, elaborate electrical labs where we build and tested radios, voltmeters, and oscilloscopes. Computers began to come in the year I graduated and I never got to work on them or learn programming. 

         Brooklyn Tech would give me a feeling for science, for reason, for truth, and for objectivity as well as an understanding of the relationship between hand and brain. I’d study Maxwell’s equations in one class and in the next one use a lathe or work in a foundry. I didn’t know at the time how complicated the words and worlds of science were nor that I would one day contribute to unravelling that complexity using the tools of sociology.                                                                                             

         The City College of New York, still Red University when I attended in the early 60s, would give me something else; a feeling for the political and the life of the mind. I also honed my skills as a weightlifter and powerlifter on an award winning weightlifting team that had the highest GPA of any club or team, academic or athletic, at the school. We counted among our members world class athletes and one of the future fathers of string theory, Leonard Susskind. I learned sociological theory almost literally at the feet of Bernard Rosenberg (a contributing editor of Dissent magazine from its founding until his death in 1996). Rosenberg gave sociology a human face and taught it fiercely as a force for social equity and social justice. He sat on the edge of his desk, bent over, chain smoking, his hands shaking violently at times, and brought sociological theory to life. I still have and value my paper on Weber’s The City with his A+ mark and his kind remarks. We used to worry that he would just fall over dead one afternoon.  The historian Aaron Noland (“I am a Proudhon man”) introduced me to Marxism and theories of revolution. And he taught me how to use Brooks Brothers clothes in the interest of socialism. My mentor was the anthropologist Burt Aginsky. He had studied under Kroeber, Boas, and Benedict. He was obsessed with the problem of universals in culture, not a popular topic among anthropologists of that period. A millionaire, he had a Park Avenue apartment with an entire room for his cello and a kitchen the size of a small bathroom. I’m sure there must have been a kitchen suitable for a millionaire elsewhere in the apartment, but that tiny kitchen is where I often met with him along with others in his small group of student acolytes. Unlike his other students, I never accepted his invitations to dinner at his home in the Hamptons where guests might include public figures like John Steinbeck.  I felt out of place in ways his middle-class students didn't. He and his students helped put me on the road to a PhD, something I hadn’t considered before I met him. He had us read so much social science that by the time I got to grad school there was very little of the assigned readings during my first two years I hadn’t already read. All of this was reconstructing my practically Platonic understanding of and commitment to pure science and pure mind.     

                            THE AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION                                                                                       

My first active participation at ASA was as a discussant at the 1977 meeting. By that time I had already been a founding member of the Society for Social Studies of Science at the 1975 ASA meeting, and presented a paper on Joseph Needham and Chinese science at the first meeting of the society in 1976. By 1981, I was well on my way to pioneering work in the sociology of mathematics. I gave a talk at the 1981 ASA meeting on mathematics and the limits of the sociology of knowledge. The sociologist of knowledge Kurt Wolff, nearly 70 years old at the time, was the commentator and he praised my erudition in a way that made me feel he was using the word “erudite” pejoratively. Wolff’s remarks and the general audience reaction suggested sociology wasn’t quite ready for the sociology of mathematics. Perhaps the very idea threatened to undermine sociology’s efforts to defend itself as a science, and one that could be mathematized at that. I presented at ASA only twice over the next three decades.     

           My last presentation was on the social brain in 2012. And again, I’m not sure my colleagues were fully prepared to welcome a sociologist mucking about in the brain. Perhaps they would have been more receptive to a talk on the sociology of mind which had a pedigree going back to Mead and the founding sociologists. 

           Between 1966 and 1974, I marched a little, participated in teach-ins, was active in some Science for the People actions at AAAS and other professional meetings, and supported collective actions such as the March 4 1969 research stoppage. This would lead me reluctantly and uncertainly to the ramparts as a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In the middle ‘60s, following the promulgation of the Port Huron Statement (1962), the political manifesto of SDS (written primarily by Tom Hayden), I became faculty advisor for SDS students on the campus of Michigan State University. Along with other professors in that period, my syllabus changed day to day depending on the latest headlines, It was not unusual for a course on religion, or politics, or physics, or economics to morph into a course on the sociology, politics, or anthropology of war in the middle of a semester or on the day after a horrific headline about the Indochina War.                                                                                                                                            

Notwithstanding a handful of counter-examples, I never sought nor rose to a position of formal leadership in the activism movements in science or in the academy. I wasn’t a good candidate for formal leadership roles. I wasn’t inclined to follow others either or unthinkingly obey rules or chains of command. For someone so tuned into our radically social nature I was a happy “independent” (“loner?”).  I was uneasy in social situations in general and would never be a good schmoozer or networker. I was a lucky networker, not an active assertive one. Thanks to a good foundational graduate and post-graduate network I ended up well-networked to leading scholars and scientists across the intellectual spectrum. Leading figures in physics, psychology, history, mathematics, sociology, anthropology, chemistry, biology, and feminist, cultural, and literary theory became friends, supporters, and mentors. I did not do as well connecting to the brokers and middle-men of the academic world. My modest ambitions did not go beyond classroom teaching and research guided as much as possible by my own interests. I sought fellowships, not research grants (this did not endear me to my deans: “not a team player”). The exceptions: I was the founding director of one of the first PhD programs in STS, director of a Masters program in sociology, and was elected president of the Society for Social Studies of Science (1994/1995). That was more or less the extent of my administrative experience. And I did get my share of research grants!

                          FROM THE RAMPARTS TO THE CLASSROOM

        My resistance to the movements and organizations in radical politics, my profession, and the academy had a lot to do with my temperament but it also reflected a sense that the activists around me tended to be angry, misogynist, and always on the threshold of violent actions. The academics seemed more interested in hearing their own voices than achieving teaching, learning, and administrative goals in a timely manner. And my colleagues were never at their best when they became administrators. My transition from reluctant activist in the society at large to self-conscious activist in the classroom, already apparent during my years at Michigan State, now crystallized when I joined the faculty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1974 and became part of the Center for the Study of the Human Dimensions of Science and Technology (soon abbreviated to Human Dimensions Center, HDC).  This turned out to be the perfect platform for taking my radical predispositions into the classroom as a once and always professor. And I was successful in the sense that I was allowed to ply my trade with collegial and administrative support even when students complained that I was a communist or atheist. 

         One of the unintended consequences of hiring an STS scholar in a department of sociology and anthropology was that my colleagues had difficulty deciding on criteria for promotion and tenure. So I set about transforming the social science departments into a Department of Science and Technology Studies. The support I had received for my teaching and research for the bulk of my career began to change when the 2000s arrived.                                                                              

         I began to have visions of the story of Qin Shi Huang’s burning of the books and burying of the scholars in 213-212BCE. The story may be apocryphal but it is a reminder that as educators and researchers we work with the barbarians always at the gates. And they have other ways to silence us than by burning our books and burying us alive. I imagined I would teach up to the moment of the dying of the light. And then I found myself unable to continue because of a radical change in the teaching and learning environment. The change was not entirely new but the scale of the change was dramatic.   Universities were overrun by generic administrators fostering secrecy, suspicion, and subversion; and proliferating tools of surveillance, accountability, and assessment. The goal wasn’t to improve teaching and learning, but rather to exercise ideologically conservative control over the genesis, communication, and transmission of ideas, concepts, and theories. There was also an administrative concern with avoiding and litigation that might be initiated by students or their parents based on conflicts over classroom and textbook content.  Suddenly, I had become in the words of one administrator a dangerous presence in the eyes of the administration. I was teaching a dangerous subject – sociology; I was teaching dangerous topics: sex, religion, economics, politics; and my student oriented teaching was dangerous. Gone were the days when two academics, my late dean, a Roman Catholic priest, and a colleague in history who was a pillar of the local Roman Catholic community, would throw students out of their offices for challenging my academic freedom. In the 60s, there were narcs and FBI informers in my classrooms. Now there were members of on-campus religious groups taking my classes to monitor my teachings. I was witness to a new world of alternative facts and anti-science that has entered into our culture and emanated from the very centers of governments and notably these last few years our own Oval Office.  

         Our schools and universities have become crucibles for the commodification of inquiry and the reduction of facts, knowledge, and information to a pablum. The convergence of the twin processes of bureaucratization and professionalization are fueling the end of the university, the end of science, and the end of objectivity. Irving Louis Horowitz saw this coming many years ago and it had been a slow evolution until a punctuation of that evolution in the 2000s.  We have become a Misinformation Society. 

                        SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCES: MYTHS & REVELATIONS

         Today, I practice my Kropotkinian anarchism sitting at my computer amidst the resources of my home library, the research resources of New York City, and the Internet and writing on the topics that intrigue me in neuroscience, religion, fiction, and autobiography. Kropotkin, let’s recall, understood anarchism as one of the sociological sciences. My objective in writing has been more or less the same since I wrote a series of papers in graduate school on the concept of social structure. It was somehow easy for me to grasp the idea that social facts were real. I had a tough time persuading my fellow American graduate students that groups were real. The Indian students were easier to persuade. You should all have a theory about why that was so. That problem was to motivate my teaching and my writing until today. It followed me into the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies which I am associated with. 

         Almost from the beginning, STS had a problem with sociology. Given the problems associated with the concept of “social construction” inside and outside of science studies proper, it is interesting to note that the Society for Social Studies of Science was organized at the 1975 meeting of the American Sociological Association and its first president was the American sociologist of science, Bob Merton. I was fortunate enough to meet and befriend him during his later mellow years! He was very generous and complimentary to this young scholar who had called him an “ideologue of science.” Few sociologists, regardless of motivating ideologies, could match him in sociological acumen and understanding of social structure.  In what follows I write as someone who also knew Tom Kuhn.                                                                                                      

For those who imagine that there was in this moment as the 1970s arrived a Mertonian/Kuhnian divide, it is well to remember that the two were “at one” with each other as Merton pointed out. The Kuhnian revolution was a myth that Kuhn himself acknowledged. The driving idea behind STS was that science was not an autonomous self-correcting social system and value-free but a product of social, cultural, and historical forces, factors and contexts. This meant that as a social system, science was subject to pathologies that could disrupt or interrupt positive features of scientific practice. Durkheim already understood this and understood that this didn’t mean objectivity was impossible. Moreover, as Marx (with Nietzsche and Durkheim and later G.H. Mead) already recognized, the scientist him- or herself was a social being and consciousness was a social fact. Marx, Durkheim, and other classical sociologists laid the foundation for understanding scientific knowledge as a social construction. When this concept crystallized among science studies students in the 1970s, the philosophers along with some historians and physical and natural scientists understood this as a form of relativism that opposed realism. In fact, social construction brought into our awareness the everyday everynight, moment to moment actions of scientists; it was not a synonym for political, religious, economic or other determinants of scientific facts.                                                                                                                             

         Marx understood that science was social; so did Durkheim who wrote about logical concepts as collective representations in the closing pages of The Elementary Forms. Thanks to Mannheim and Merton and the resistance to a sociology of scientific knowledge in the sociology of knowledge and science, it took almost a century for this idea to take root and ground specific studies in the new post-1970 sociology of science. Instead of social constructionism unequivocally nurturing the sociology of scientific knowledge it gave rise to charges of relativism by scientists, philosophers, and historians. Contrary to these challenges relativism in STS, to the extent that it was part of STS agendas, was not opposed to realism but to absolutism. There is no question, nonetheless, that some defenders of STS fed such challenges.                                                                                        

The “social” in “social studies of science and technology” which seemed crucial in its early history has become increasingly contentious over the years. The concept of the “social construction of science” has been widely viewed by intellectuals of all stripes as such a danger to science and rationality that it led to the science wars of the 1990s pitting philosophers and historians of science as well as other scholars against scholars in science studies, and cultural, feminist, and literary studies of science. This has been more a matter of who has jurisdiction over research on science itself as opposed to a matter of science studies researchers championing an anything goes relativism; not even Paul Feyerabend could unequivocally sustain this position to the end of his Against Method (1975), no matter anarchism as his default lifestyle.

         Thomas Kuhn (1970/1962) somehow became the whipping boy for the self-appointed bodyguards of science. Their misreading of Kuhn was encouraged by many of the founders of the science studies movement, notably Barry Barnes (1982). Kuhn was read as encouraging a view of science as “socially constructed,” an idea interpreted as implying that science was at least in part socially determined. This challenged a long standing view that science operated in a simple and straightforward way as a logically dependable way to gather objective knowledge without a human face and untouched by human hands, a view associated in the modern period with the logical positivists (the Berlin School and the Vienna Circle).  Kuhn, an uncompromising believer in objective science and scientific progress, strongly resisted this interpretation of his work (Restivo, 1983; cf. Keller, 1998 and my annotation).                                                                                                  

The defense of the social construction or social shaping of science in STS caused philosophers, historians, and scientists to charge the field with promoting an unrestricted relativism that undermined the objectivity of science. This is reflected in the heated controversies between sociologists and philosophers at the 1981 Lake Cazenovia, New York workshop organized by Don Campbell (key combatants included myself and philosopher David Hull), in the science wars of the 1990s, the long running debates between philosophers, historians, and sociologists over “social constructionism,” and the “end of the social” movement (notably championed in STS by Bruno Latour, a metaphysician cum theologian masquerading as an STS scholar). Latour notwithstanding, sociologists of science (notably for example, David Bloor, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and myself along with Randall Collins) have continued to advocate for a strong sociological perspective and defended social constructionism. I’ve described it as the fundamental theorem of sociology. It is in this context of contention and controversy that STS scholars are now plying their trade and students of science and society should keep this in mind as they survey that field.                                                                                                                                                                       

         The fact is that the critics couldn’t really support their charges directly. For example, Daniel Dennett (2006: 312-313) described science studies researchers as perhaps well-intentioned but na?ve observers of scientific practice who produced “comically bad interpretations of what they had observed.” These claims reflect a multiplicity of fallacies. Many of the founders of the science studies movement were originally trained and educated in the sciences (e.g., Woolgar in engineering, Restivo in engineering, Barnes in natural science, Pickering in physics, Edge in astronomy). Those who were not (e.g., Sharon Traweek, Daryl Chubin, Karin-Knorr) were highly sophisticated scholars well-versed in the sciences and philosophy. The problem is that critics like Dennett could make sweeping claims but could not support those claims. In an exchange of emails some years ago, I challenged Dennett to produce a list of names of these “na?ve observers” of scientific practice and he offered lame excuses for not doing so. Gross and Levitt, whose Higher Superstition (1994) was one of the first shots fired in the science wars, did name names: “sociologists and historians” Bruno Latour, Steven Shapin, and Simon Schaffer; and among the feminists, Donna Haraway and Evelyn Fox Keller, and others including sociologist Stanley Aronowitz and historian Carolyn Merchant.  Leaving out Latour, a wild card originally trained in philosophy and theology and an agent provocateur, we have: Shapin, originally trained in biology and genetics (Reed College and Wisconsin); Schaffer, while specializing in the history of science, studied natural sciences at Cambridge and did his PhD thesis on Newtonian cosmology and the steady state; Haraway has a PhD in biology from Yale; and Keller has a PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard. These are hardly the credentials of “na?ve observers” of science or anti-science advocates. Speaking as someone personally acquainted with most of the principles named I can add to what their CVs announce that they are all exceptional interdisciplinary scholars. The same cannot be said to the same degree for biologist Gross and mathematician Levitt. The fact of the matter is, as I have clearly demonstrated, none of the researchers most closely associated with science studies itself (Restivo, 1995) could be held to such charges.   Barnes and Bloor (1982: 47n) have tried to clarify some of these issues and indeed point out that the form of relativism they defended was nothing more nor less than “disinterested inquiry,” a classic conception of science.                                                                                                                                        STS's PROBLEM WITH SOCIOLOGY                                                                                        

One might also consider here sociology’s problem with sociology. STS is as much at war with itself today as it was in the beginning. It has been uneasy with the sociology in STS, it has had trouble embracing social constructionism as something more than a controversial philosophical idea, and it has failed to do justice to science studies; it has been and is more at ease with social studies of technology and the environment than with social studies of scientific knowledge.                                                                                                                                                           Social constructionism was dramatically represented in the movement from social system of science studies to social studies of scientific knowledge. It broke away from traditional (Mertonian) sociology of science which held that scientific knowledge itself was independent of society, culture and history. This tradition linked Mannheim’s (1936:79) sociology of knowledge (“There could be no sociology of 2+2=4;” take note of Spengler’s (1926: 60) contrasting view, “There is no mathematik but only mathematics”) and Mertonian social system sociology of scientific behavior. As a result, key figures in STS such as Bernard Barber (a 4S president and Bernal Prize recipient) and Thomas Kuhn (a Bernal Prize recipient) could be hesitant about and even opponents of applying social construction to scientific knowledge. Even Merton was at best ambivalent about the movement to study the content of science sociologically. Clearly, some sociologists of science did not want to take the chance of offending scientists. This concern was expressed in many discussions I participated in or overheard at STS conferences and in my academic travels. This is a good place to recall Merton’s (1968: 661-664) defense of Boris Hessen’s Marxist sociology (historical materialism) of Newton’s Principia, a brilliant unfinished piece of sociological reasoning. Merton clearly and concisely distinguished between individual motivations and interests on the one hand and structural determinants on the other.                                                                                       

Part of the reason for the resistance to science studies was (1) the classical idea of “pure science,” (2) the idea that naked nature was the only determinant of the facts identified by scientists. At the Cazenovia Conference, philosopher Richard Boyd took it upon himself to instruct the sociologists of science (including among others myself, David Bloor, Steve Woolgar, and Karin Knorr-Cetina) on the nature of science. He went to a blackboard, sketched an eye at one end of the board and a tree at the other. The only links between the two objects were “things in the world” (like trees) and “terms that refer” (like the word “tree”). That was it. No intervening or mediating social or cultural factors. You couldn’t get a cleaner more singularly na?ve picture of na?ve realism.  One other part of the reason was the wrong-headed association of social constructionism with naive relativism.   Not one of the core founders of the field was a relativist in the na?ve sense philosophers like Daniel Dennett claimed. Contention and controversy notwithstanding, it remains clear that STS is in general concerned with the production, representation and reception of science and technology and their social, cognitive, emotional, epistemic and semiotic roles and with the mutual interactions of science and technology with each other and other institutional sectors. One of the most significant differences between STS and traditional sociology of science is that it gave birth to a new sociology of science that took on the analysis and theory of scientific knowledge itself.             

         The variety of influences and foundations for STS made it wildly interdisciplinary. This was part of its strength when compared to traditional history, philosophy, and sociology of science but also a weakness. Interdisciplinary was more often than not interpreted to mean “flexible” as one STS program described itself. The benefits that accrue to interdisciplinary research must be balanced against the possibility of losing discipline and becoming whatever any given individual scholar, graduate student, or research group wants the field to be. Narrow definitions of STS blur its intersections with collateral fields concerned with science and technology (e.g., cultural studies, communication theory, literary studies, feminist studies, postcolonial studies); broad definitions tend to undermine the novel contributions of sociology. I have tended to straddle the threshold between reasonable disciplinary advocacy for sociology and a more extreme disciplinary imperialism on the one hand and a flexible, broadly interdisciplinary position on the other (Restivo, 2018a).                                                                         

STS AS PROVOCATION AND DISOBEDIENCE                                                                                                     

In 2004, Steve Woolgar wrote: “Since its beginnings, STS has undergone numerous modifications and reincarnations, yet the initial work stands as an early articulation of its continuing provocative potential. We need to understand the dynamics whereby the “disobedience” fostered by STS can flourish and persist.” I have never been certain I understood what this master of skepticism and irony was saying at any given moment but there are not too many ways to twist the meaning of “disobedience” – even when it appears between quotation marks. That “disobedience,” the radical potentials of STS in providing a new narrative in reply to the perennial question “What is science?” has been eroded by professionalism, bureaucratism, the myths of individualism and free will, and a vulnerability to philosophical and literary discourse over and against social scientific discourse.    

         One of the problems of sociology in STS is the long term influence of ethnomethodology. This is apparently easier to accept for many STS scholars than social constructionism and a causal, scientific sociology. There is a reason 4S was born in the corridors of a meeting of the American Sociological Association. Interdisciplinary considerations notwithstanding, that meeting set the stage for a new view of science and technology seen through the lens of the sociological imagination and what Randall Collins has called the sociological cogito. That imagination and that cogito have been imperiled in this field from the very beginning when it was already clear that the field was going to be dominated by ethnomethodology, philosophy, and (technoscience notwithstanding) the easy case of technology as opposed to the hard case of scientific knowledge. This is the case in spite of the fact that the most important presence at the first 4S meeting (Cornell, 1976) was not in Ithaca; he was in Edinburgh. But a copy of his recently published book, Knowledge and Social Imagery, was being passed around and browsed through during almost every session. But David Bloor’s (1976) strong programme and his programmatic paradigm for a sociology of mathematics did not in the end prevail. It fell victim to the individualistic fog that obscured the sociological cogito. To the extent that the strong programme survived it was because Bloor was more of a naturalist philosopher than a sociologist. Bloor (the brilliantly calm, knowledgeable, and focused academic) won the day intellectually; but Bruno Latour (the flamboyant entrepreneur) won the day politically and became the face of STS. One of the reasons it has been difficult for sociology to take root in STS is that the new field attracted so many scientists, philosophers, and historians who held sociology in low repute.                                                                                                                                                  One of the glaring examples of this feature of STS was Bruno Latour’s remarks following Donald MacKenzie’s Bernal acceptance speech at the 2005 4S meeting. MacKenzie brilliantly situated himself and his work as socially constituted. In the terms laid out in my book on Einstein’s Brain (Restivo, 2020), he understood himself as standing on the shoulders of social networks. Latour went to great lengths to argue that we all knew that it was MacKenzie the individual we were honoring. STS’s identity crisis showed up again in giving the Bernal Prize to Thomas Kuhn (1983) who surprised everyone except Restivo (and off in England Mary Hesse for one) by announcing that he had made no contributions to the sociology of knowledge and that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had been designed as an internalist history of science in the tradition of and as an homage to his mentor, Alexander Koyré. If you weren’t in the audience listening to his speech, you wouldn’t know everything he actually said. The speech was edited before being published under the guidance of Bernard Barber to soften the anti-STS sentiments. One can find other examples in the history of STS that demonstrate a perennial identity crisis and resistance to sociology.   See my annotation to Slezak, 1989).                                                                                                                                                                  As a once and always advocate of the sociological cogito one might say that in the way psychology was Freud’s tyrant, sociology has been and is my tyrant. I have been, to paraphrase Freud, tormented by the goal of examining what shape the hard cases of mathematics, logics, brains, and gods take if one considers them in terms of the sociological cogito. As a result, I have provoked STS pioneer Barry Barnes to ask me: “Sal, why are you so sociological?” and historian Nils Roll-Hansen to ask me whether my sociology of mathematics wasn’t an exercise in sociological reductionism. And Bruno Latour, long ago and already on the path to metaphysics, explained while exclaiming “I know nothing about science” why my sociology, “contaminated” by Durkheim and Marx, couldn’t contribute to his agenda. He has become a champion of Durkheim’s contemporary Gabriel Tarde in his assault on Durkheim and sociology. Tarde, acknowledging the complexities and subtleties of his thought, is by comparison more individualist in his thinking than Durkheim. And now we see a growing literature resurrecting Tarde. You can draw your own conclusions about what this means for sociology.  Perhaps as Barnes implied I am too sociological. Perhaps, indeed, from his perspective we students of Durkheim, Marx, and even Merton are all too sociological.   And yet, while I believe Tarde’s increasing popularity is more about an appeal to metaphysics and less about a robust sociology, I may not be giving him enough credit. His appeal may be related to the increasing relevance of complexity theory. I say more about this in Appendix 1.

THE POLITICS OF THE CLASSROOM                                                                                                            

Recent events have reinforced my earliest understanding of the classroom as educationally a sacred space and politically an arena for unfolding radical agendas by way of the sociological cogito (contra Weber, for one; see Appendix 2 on elective affinities). Modules on the economy became lessons in radical political economy and the continuing relevance of Marx; those on marriage, family and sex became lessons in open liberating relationships; those on religion became lessons in Durkheimian and Marxian sociology of religions and gods. The classroom wasn’t a neutral space; it was and had always been a politically charged space and traditionally an arena dedicated to teaching patriotism, nationalism, love of God, flag, and country, and lawful obedience; exposure to the ways in which society actually functioned and who benefitted from law and order was not on the agenda. I once shared an office with the distinguished Costa Rican sociologist/lawyer Eugenio Fonseca who had written on the blackboard in our office that “Law is the institutionalization of the social injustices of a society.”  Thus the need and market for “lies my teacher told me” books by James W. Loewen (1995; and of course Howard Zinn’s A Peoples’ History of the United States, 1980).                                                                                                                                          THE JOYS OF WORK: CONFESSIONS OF AN AMATEUR WITHOUT PROFESSIONAL AMBITIONS                                                                                                                                  

         Marx taught us that work can be one of the sources of our greatest joy if we can see ourselves in the objects we create. I have been fortunate enough to have experienced work in just this way. I had a taste of factory work as a junior engineer for the Seaberg Elevator Company, and a taste of the service industry as the physical director of the long defunct Shelton Towers Hotel health club in New York City. I experienced exploitation (obviously of the least consequential form) at the hands of a fruit delivery truck driver who promised me and three of my junior high friends a dollar each to help him unload a small truck load of cabbages. At the end of a hard day of dragging boxes of cabbages off his truck and into the store’s storage area and assuming we were each owed one dollar, we were each handed a quarter.  My friends and I briefly discussed dragging all the cabbage out of the store and back into the street. It didn’t take long to realize the futility of such action. I was lucky though. I had a calling to the academy and eventually found my way there.                                                                                                                                                                        I had a wonderful mentor in my PhD program at Michigan State. Some of you may have known him: John Useem. I would not have put up with the nonsense of graduate school if John hadn’t early on accepted me as a junior colleague and took a metaphoric machete to make a path for me past all that nonsense. John was a no nonsense fellow and one of the last things he said to me on my way out the PhD door was this, and I quote: “If you ever publish anything popular I will disown you.” When John talked, you listened. You won’t find anything popular amongst my many writings. I have admittedly naively written to my own interests and not to markets and audiences, not even to the core problems of my colleagues. For reasons that my father was never able to fathom and so you might not be able to either I came to understand money as something you spent not something you saved. Fortunately, the government and my university knew better. But in what was formally “retirement” I began to develop a better appreciation for the value of the dollar. John Useem was long gone. Perhaps I could write for income. So I decided I needed an agent. This turns out to be a Catch 22 effort. 

         To get a good literary agent, you have to publish successfully (thinking now primarily about non-academic titles); to publish successfully you need an agent. So here’s my advice on how to get an agent with a minimum of blood, sweat, and tears, especially if like me you are averse to schmoozing and marketing yourself. Get yourself a niece who has a penchant for good grades and appreciates the power of the comma, and graduates from NYU’s journalism school with honors. Let her get an agent and publish a book. Then ask her to introduce you to her agent.  I’m sure many of you have mastered the world of brokers and networks better than I have.                                                                                                 

         So I had an agent and I was pitching my little Einstein book, already far along.  Unfortunately, it was too academic for him to take on. In the wake of my experience with Palgrave PIVOT’s non-royalty $400 honorarium contract, I decided to cut my umbilical cord to Useem and try to write something popular. Thus, my Your Social Brain, a trade book. But for reasons having to do with the nature of the agent-publishers relationship, my agent couldn’t figure out a way to support it.  While I pitch it elsewhere, I have one more academic book in progress that may finally land me at Campo de Fiori in Rome alongside Bruno (Giordano, not Latour): Society and the Death of God and it is designed to drive the final sociological nails into the Old One’s coffin. It is scheduled to be published by Routledge in 2021.                                                                  

         I never entertained any thoughts about retirement as a period when I would have to find hobbies and hang out in senior centers playing shuffleboard or bingo to find a meaningful way to live out my final years. As a last resort, I imagined resurrecting my credentials as a personal trainer and developing fitness programs for the aged and feeble. I was good at imagining ways to earn money, not so good at following through and not ambitious enough to do so. There wasn’t even the need to pause and think about what I would do next. I would just continue to do what I had been doing since I started scribbling in my dad’s composition notebooks. Today, I continue writing, writing, writing into that good night. And I am still trying to nourish sociology and insure that it survives.                                                                                                                                                                                       CONCLUSION                                                                                     Where are we - where am I - today? Sociology is indeed beginning to seep into the public imagination. It was all well and good for the conservative pundit George Will to urge “Thou shalt not commit a sociology.” And yet this political scientist with his Princeton PhD always has at hand social statistics produced by his sociology brethren. If sociology is starting to develop a public presence, it’s not primarily because of what sociologists are doing directly. There are co-opters everywhere and psychological interpreters of sociology for an audience still under the spell of the myth of individualism. A philosopher from Berkeley, Alva No? (2009) has claimed the study of society for biology; another philosopher, the notorious John Searle (2010) has proposed that the study of society is a philosophical project. The “Philosophy of Society” is a new field designed to study “human society.”   And there are physicists and engineers who believe that “society” falls under their jurisdiction (e.g., Philip Ball and Adrian Bejan). And a management consultant, Denis Pageau, claims that sociologists know nothing about society and he has invented “societalogy” to study societies as organizations.                                                                                                                                

        New York Times writers David Brooks and Nicholas Wade have brought sociology into the public arena but dressed it and Durkheim up in the cloth of psychology. The Pulitzer Prize winning biologist E.O. Wilson (2013) who we radicals were stoning in the ‘60s over issues in sociobiology, has written a book that does a better job of explaining why humans are the most social of the social animals than any sociologist I know of. He doesn’t give any indication that he is indebted to sociology per se but he is familiar with anthropology. He gets so far as to recognize that there is a relationship between religion and tribalism. Standing on the threshold of a sociology of religion all he can see are physical laws for explaining religion (which he dismisses) and biological ones (to which he turns). With a sociological explanation right at hand he turns to the dynamics of biological organization to explain religion.                                                                                                                                                 David Brooks’ The Social Animal (2011) includes a discussion of Durkheim’s classic study of suicide. The Kirkus reviewer sees Brooks as integrating “sociology, intellect and allegory.” But at the end of the day, the brain industry and psychology capture Brooks and he is left arguing not Durkheimian social facts but that the brain is the source of our identities and consciousness. Wade (2009: 7) reviews Durkheim’s views but is blind to any sociological message they provide. He writes on the one hand that “People survive as social groups, not as individuals, and little is more critical to a social species than its members’ ability to communicate with one another.” And then on the very same page he writes with Chomskyian na?ve assurance that “The rules of sentence formation are so complex that babies must presumably possess an innate syntax-generating machinery, rather than having to figure out the rules for themselves. The existence of such a neural mechanism would explain why infants learn to speak so effortlessly, and at a specific age, as if some neural developmental program is being rolled out at the time.” But the choice isn’t between innate machinery and figuring out things for themselves. The choice is between innate, individual, and social (interactional) causes. And have Wade or Chomsky ever watched children learning a language? It involves a great deal of trial and error and continual intervening interactions with adults who correct and clarify. Learning a language is not a Herculean effort for children but it’s not “effortless.”                                                                                                                                                            

        Why can’t Wade make the obvious step on the same page from “social species” to social causes? My conjecture is that he is a victim of what I have called “dissocism.” Intellectuals have been held hostage by the cult of individualism and widespread dissocism – social blindness spectrum disorder. Dissocism is defined as social blindness, the inability to see “the social” and to see it as a locus of causal forces impacting our behaviors, emotions, and thoughts. The analogy is to mindblindness (Baron-Cohen, 1995) in autism and just as there is an autism spectrum disorder I conjecture a dissocism spectrum disorder.                                                                                    

        At the end of the day, money, fame, awards, recognition, or even promotions have not been the driving reasons I write. I write because I have come to be the kind of person for whom to write is to be alive. But if writing is the fuel of life what is the fuel of writing? It might be drugs, alcohol, sex, mountain climbing, or any of a number of activities. For me one fuel has been music. I play piano accordion, and am teaching myself to play the C-Griff chromatic button accordion, and the three row button accordion. I doodle at the piano, and am teaching myself flamenco guitar. I live with a wonderful woman, and I have a worldwide network of friends and colleagues. I am a former weightlifter and powerlifter and have had a home gym for many years. And last but not least I have an amazing physician and an equally amazing dentist. If this sounds like a recipe for a long and healthy life, I remind myself every day that when he was my age my father had several months to live. And I am now living with moderate kidney disease. The boy from Mars turns out to be human and mortal. 

EXISTENTIAL POSTSCRIPT

         Sociology opened up a hidden world to me, a world the physicists and philosophers did not know about. Nietzsche was the great exception, the philosopher who wasn’t a philosopher and understood that it was better to be a Basel professor than to be God. His approach, especially in combination with Marx, Durkheim, and Kropotkin and later Rosa Luxembourg and Emma Goldman helped me access a reality in which God was dead (never was, never could be, never will be). I am an accident in an accidental universe ruled by terror, violence, and death. If our species was ever coupled with the natural world, culture has uncoupled it. With the advent of culture we were pushed out of time and place so that we are always crawling our way through webs of terrifying and unknowable things. 

         We are at the end of the day sculpted by and at the mercy of culture, a fragile veneer of defense in a universe where everything and everyone is fragile and temporary, all marking time until they die. Not only does the emperor have no clothes; there is no emperor.  And yet, in a world in which volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, poverty, illness, and yes pandemics overshadow rainbows, daffodils, the laughter of children, the sun setting over the Sonoma desert, and people dancing in the rain why am I sitting around writing another book? We should learn our key lessons from disasters and catastrophes, not panoramic views of sunrises and sunsets. 

        Why do I persist? Why not follow Phil Ochs, or Nietzsche? Why not choose death or madness? Perhaps in order to do what I do, be a scientist of the human condition, in order to act as if things can be explained and understood, I must already be dead or mad or both.

         Some people are prepared to see Elvis Presley (d.1977) eating at McDonald’s in 2020. We Nietzscheans must be prepared always not to say what we see but rather what am I really experiencing in this moment, am I in my right mind, am I harnessing all of that little bit of reason humans have been able to crystallize? We Nietzscheans, we “higher ones,” are more like gerbils than we think. The bulk of my work represents a heroic commitment to our capacity to reason. But there is a dark side here, a version of existential sociology that does not escape the individualist atomism of classical versions. Where is the light of meaning? Do not look to the heavens; it isn’t there. Look instead to your immediate networks, your local intimacies, friends, lovers, acquaintances, communities. Not all of us can find complete sustenance and nourishment in these localities but what is available for you to find can only be found there. This can involve investments in more than one level or form of solidarity, and solidarity modes that are more and less virtual and real. Different levels, forms, and modes will produce different forms of human beings, different forms of life. The solidarity issue becomes more important and intense as we age. And then what can we say about those who like me embrace the sociological cogito but prefer the cave to the crowd. Well, caves have their networks too!!!           

Words are not the last word.

Without a solid base of physical strength, you can't accomplish anything very intricate or demanding. That's my belief. If I did not keep running, I think my writing would be very different from what it is now. Haruki Murakami, 2005.

*This is revised and expanded version of the paper I was to present at the August 2020 meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco. Since its acceptance, I have been revising and expanding it as part of two autobiographical projects I am working on, one a novel (The Professor), the other a memoir (Buddha, Nietzsche, Mae West, and Me and a cast of thousands in a one act play about the life of a mind standing on the shoulders of a social network). I am thinking of publishing them back to back in one volume and in homage to the old Worm Runner’s Digest. Let the reader decide which one is fiction and which one is non-fiction. And then whether or not the distinction makes a difference!

References & Selected Annotations                                                                                                

Barnes, B. (1982), T.S. Kuhn and Social Science (New York: Columbia University Press). Barnes, B. and D. Bloor (1982), “Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of Knowledge,” pp. 21-47 in M. Hollis and S. Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge MA : MIT Press).  In this chapter, Barnes and Bloor define relativism as “disinterested inquiry.” It is unlikely that Daniel Dennett or any of the philosophers who associate STS science studies with relativism have read this piece, or the defense of science and “objective reality” one finds in the writings of all the key founders of STS including the realist philosophers most prominent target, Harry Collins (Latour is prominent but lacks Collins’ seriousness and substance).

Baron-Cohen, S. (1995), Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Bloor, David (1976), Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).  

Brooks, David (2011), The Social Animal (New York: Random House).                                                    Collins, Randall (1998), The Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Social constructivism (I prefer "constructionism" because of its manufacturing connotations), Collins writes, is sociological realism. The sociological cogito assures us of the reality “of thinking, language, other people, time and space, material bodies:” p. 860.    

Feyerabend, P. (1975), Against Method (London: Verso).

Gross, P. and N. Levitt (1994), Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press).                                                                                                                                            Joyce, Patrick (2012), The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, (London: Routledge 2012).    

Keller, E.F. (1998), “Kuhn, Feminism, and Science?” Configurations, 6, 1: 15-19. Keller quotes an addendum to Kuhn’s acceptance speech (4S Bernal Prize) in which he says his concerns (internal history notwithstanding) have indeed been sociological but they have been inseparably linked to cognitive and epistemic concerns. The fact that Kuhn was unusually tuned into the role of the scientific “community” and group processes in science does not make his work sociological. He is completely unaware of the dynamics and pathologies that can accompany social processes (Restivo, 1983). 

Kropotkin, Peter A. (1908), Modern Science and Anarchism (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association). An introduction to Kropotkin’s understanding of anarchism in theory and practice as one of the modern sociological sciences that rely on naturalistic methods and a materialist philosophy: pp. 91-94.     

Kuhn, T. (1970/1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). See the “Postscript-1969,” 174-210 in the 2nd ed., enlarged. He announces that he is “a convinced believer in scientific progress” on page 206. See my remarks on Keller, 1998.                                                                                                 Loewen, James W. (1995), Lies My Teacher Told Me (New York: Touchstone Books).                                                                                                                             Marx, Karl (1956/1844), The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House).                                                                                                              Merton, R.K. (1968), Social Theory and Social Structure, Enlarged Ed. (New York: The Free Press). The older Merton may have been ambivalent about the social construction of scientific facts but he was the master of clarifying the distinction between “the motivation and the structural determinants of scientists’ behavior:” see pp. 661-664 where he defends Hessen’s sociology (historical materialism) of Newton’s Principia against historian G.N. Clark’s focus on individual motives and pure interests.      

No?, A. (2009), Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang).

Restivo, S. (1983), “The Myth of the Kuhnian Revolution,” 293-305 in Randall Collins (ed.), Sociological Theory 1983 (London: Jossey-Bass Publishers).                                                          Restivo, S. (2011), “Bruno Latour: The Once and Future Philosopher,” pp. 520-540 in George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepinsky (eds.), The New Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists (Boston: Blackwell).                                                                                                                      Restivo, S. (2017), Sociology, Science, and the End of Philosophy: How Society Shapes Brains, Gods, Maths, and Logics (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Restivo, S. (2018), The Age of the Social (New York: Routledge).                                                                                                                                    Restivo, S. (2018a), “The Yin and Yang of the Sociology of the Philosophy of Scientific Practice,” Invited lecture, International Conference on Practice Based Approaches to Science, Mathematics, and Logic: Challenges and Prospects, September 28-29, University Foundation, Brussels, Belgium. Pdf at salrestivo.org

Restivo, S. (2020), Einstein’s Brain: Genius, Culture, and Social Networks (New York: Palgrave/PIVOT).        

Searle, J. (2010), Making the Social World (Oxford: Oxford University Press).                                                                        Slezak, P. (1989), “Scientific Discovery by Computer as Empirical Refutation of the Strong Programme,” Social Studies of Science, 19, 4: 563-600. The journal editors were so committed to an interdisciplinary agenda that they published an article (and the lead article at that) undermining the very rationale for STS and the journal’s agenda. 

Spengler, O. (1926), The Decline of the West, Vol. 1 (New York: Alfred Knopf).

Wade, Nicholas (2009), The Faith Instinct (New York: The Penguin Press). 

Wilson, E.O. (2013), The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright).                                                                                                              Woolgar, Steve (2004), “What Happened to Provocation in Science and Technology Studies?” History and Technology, 20, 4: 339-349.                                                                                         Zinn, Howard (1980), A Peoples’ History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins).

                APPENDIX 1. DURKHEIM, TARDE, AND RESTIVO

           I was initially suspicious of Tarde as a sociologist when his banner was picked up by Latour. I originally read Tarde as starting his sociology from individuals and individual brains. This is indeed the case, but on further review his perspective is more subtle and complex.  I still believe he appeals to the metaphysical and myth of individualism in people like Latour, but I am impressed by the details of his Leibnizian monadological analysis. As a theorist, I believe the power of theory is that it can and should be at once the slave of data and at the same time not intimidated by the facts of the matter. My re-evaluation of Tarde has been aided by reading the Argentinian sociologist, Sergio Tonikonoff’s paper on Tarde’s heritage (2018; and see Thomassen, 2012). I believe that Sylvia Walby’s (2007, 2009) comes into play here insofar as she brings complexity theory to bear on sociological theory. Her concept of “societalization” represents a view more Tardean than Durkheimian.  It seems to me at this juncture that my own work (in retrospect) may be understood as unself-consciously and unintentionally bridging the gap between Tarde and Durkheim in two respects. While posing as a strict Durkheim, I have argued that we need a theoretical framework that integrates dialectical theory (drawing specifically on the works of Bukharin and Gurvitch), general systems sociology (especially open systems theory), ecological/evolutionary sociology, and David Bohm’s cosmology of an “infinity of things in becoming.” My argument is that these four “paradigms” converge on each other and thus promise a general theory (Restivo, 2018: 57-74, 159-171). In constructing my model of the social brain, I was not specifically thinking about the 4 paradigm theory. It now seems to me that that paradigm implicitly underpins my model. Furthermore, I now think this model is not just about the brain but is a template for the individual, society, and the full range of social phenomena. My description of the model follows (the model is presented in Restivo, 2020: 115 and on my home page at salrestivo.org).

        Originally, I set out. To model Geertz’s argument for the synchronic emergence of an expanded forebrain among the primates, complex social organizations, and at least among the post-Australopithecines tool savvy humans, institutional cultural patterns. This recommends against treating biological, social, and cultural parameters as serially related in a causal nexus. Rather, these levels should be viewed as reciprocally intertwined and conjointly causal. The claim in a nutshell is that human behavioral repertoires emerge from the complex parallel and recursive interactions of genes, neurons, neural nets, organs, biomes, the brain and central nervous system, other elements of the body’s systems and subsystems down to the molecular level (see Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion, 1999) and our social interactions in their ecological and umwelt contexts. This implies that we need to re-think socialization. It is a process that simultaneously informs and variably integrates the biological self, the neurological, self, and the social self to construct personality and character. In addition, each element in the model must be understood as a dialectical entity containing its own internal “seeds” of change, and as following a temporal dynamic that may be at different times synchronous or dyssynchronous relative to other elements. Each element is conceived as an information system with all systems multiply inter-linked by the circulation of information. In the latest revision of my model I have added diagonals with double-headed arrows that criss-cross the model. This maps the chaotic dynamics and cooperative neural mass discussed by C.A. Skarda and W.J. Freeman (1990) in “Chaos and the new science of the brain,” Chapter in Shaw G (ed.) Concepts in Neuroscience 2 275-285; and see C.A. Skarda and W.J. Freeman (1987), “How brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1987) 10, 161-195. The unit model is activated in a triad of unit models and it is that triad that is the basic model of brain/mind/culture/world. This reflects the idea that the triad is the basic unit of social life (Restivo, Weiss, and Stingl, 2014: 104n1). This diagram is the General Connectome. A connectome maps the elements and interconnections in a network. The term has been used specifically in connection with mapping the neural connections in the brain. Connectomes may range in scale from maps of parts of the nervous system to a map of all of the neural interactions in the brain. Partial connectomes have been constructed of the retina and primary visual cortex of the mouse. In line with these developments, my model represents the highest level of the connectome, a connectome of connectomes.

        Based on ideas in my recent writings on the brain (Restivo: 2018, 2020) I can now offer an initial concept formula for the probability of an “innovative thought”. iT_p = qc^2 x K+G, where qc^2 is the amount of cultural capital the person commands and K is a constant that represents the cultural context and network structure the person is embedded in; qc^2 because doubling the amount of cultural capital, for example, quadruples its impact factor.  K=C+Nt. C = Cultural Context, an index that takes into account a variety of demographic, class, gender, and institutional diversity indicators; N = the density and diversity of the network structure of the society. G=the genius cluster quotient at time t. When considering the etiology of behaviors that are traditionally considered genetically grounded, it is now important to recognize that the brain, like humans, arrives on the evolutionary stage always, already, and everywhere, social. Therefore, what we have considered to be linearly transmitted genetic phenomena must now be viewed in the context of a brain that is at no stage of development separated from the social and cultural imperatives that form us. The very notions of “genes” and “genetic” must now be revised in the context of the social brain paradigm.

        The next stage in this project is to embed the basic triad of the General Connectome in the nested networks of the social and cultural connectomes locally, regionally, and globally so that we now visualize a Global Connectome driven by the circulation of information across nested networks. On the rationale for a global connectome (my interpretation), see P. Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization ( New York: Random House, 2016). My model of the social brain invites comparisons with Pescosolido’s (2011) network episode model III-R.

Barnes, H.E. (1919), “The Philosophy of the State in the Writings of Gabriel Tarde,” The Philosophical Review, 28, 3: 248-279.

Pescosolido, B. (2011), “Organizing the Sociological Landscape for the Next Decades of Health and Health Care Research: The Network Episode Model III-R as Cartographic Subfield Guide,” pp. 39-66 in B. Pescosolido, J.K. Martin, J.D. McLeod, and A. Rogers (eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Health, Illness, and Healing: A Blueprint for the 21st Century (New York: Springer).

Restivo, S. (2018), The Age of the Social: The Discovery of Society and the Ascendance of a New Episteme (New York: Routledge).

Restivo, S. (2020), Einstein’s Brain: Genius, Culture, and Social Networks (New York: Palgrave/PIVOT).

Tarde, G. (1890), Les Lois de L’imitation: études Sociologique (Paris: Alcan). 

Tarde, G. (1895), La Logique Sociale (Paris, Alcan).

Tarde, G. (1898), Les Lois Sociale: Esquisse d’une Sociologie (Paris: Alcan).

Thomassen, B. (2012), “Emile Durkheim between Gabriel Tarde and Arnold van Gennep: founding moments of sociology and anthropology,” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 20, 3: 231-249.

Tonkonoff, S. (2018), “Sociology of Infinitesimal Difference. Gabriel Tarde’s Heritage,” pp. 63-84 in F. Depelteau (ed.), Handbook of Relational Sociology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

Tosti, G. (1897), “The Sociological Theories of Gabriel Tarde,” Political Science Quarterly, 12, 3: 490-511.

Walby, S. (2007), “Complexity Theory, Systems Theory and Multiple Intersecting Social Inequalities,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 37, 4: 449-470.

Walby, S. (2009), Globalization and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities (London: Sage).

APPENDIX 2: ON SCIENCE, VALUES, & ELECTIVE AFFINITIES                                                                      

         Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation,” delivered as a 1918 lecture, considered the value of science as a career. This is a modern locus classicus of the idea that science and values are separate and distinct actions. Science offers us methods and means of explaining and justifying a position, but it cannot tell us why that position is worth holding; this is the task of philosophy. Science cannot direct us in the fundamental questions of life; those can only come from personal beliefs, including religion. This leads him to separating faith and reason, and fact and value in politics. The classroom for Weber should not provide a platform for personal politics. He uses the concept of “elective affinities” elsewhere in his writings but the term does not appear in this lecture. It is clear, however, that science and religion, fact and value, teaching and research, science and values do not have this property of “reciprocal attraction and influence, mutual selection, active convergence and mutual reinforcement” (Sahni, 2001)

Elective Affinities (French: Les affinités électives) is a 1933 painting by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. The title is taken from the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe novel Elective Affinities (1809, German; 1854, English). The idea played a foundational role in Max Weber’s sociology.

Magritte had the following to say about this work:

One night, I woke up in a room in which a cage with a bird sleeping in it had been placed. A magnificent error caused me to see an egg in the cage, instead of the vanished bird. I then grasped a new and astonishing poetic secret, for the shock which I experienced had been provoked precisely by the affinity of two objects—the cage and the egg—to each other, whereas previously this shock had been caused by my bringing together two objects that were unrelated.

Constantine, D. (1994). Translation, Introduction, and Notes to Oxford World Classics, W. von Goethe’s Elective Affinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Herbert, R. H. (1978). "Max Weber's Elective Affinities: Sociology within the Bounds of Pure Reason", American Journal of Sociology, 84, 366–85.                                                                                                                        McKinnon, A.M. (2010) "Elective affinities of the Protestant ethic: Weber and the chemistry of capitalism." Sociological Theory, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 108-126.                                                      Sahni, I-P. (2001), “The Will to Act': An Analysis of Max Weber's Conceptualisation of Social Action and Political Ethics in the Light of Goethe's Fiction,” Sociology, 35, 2: 421-439 Weber, M. (1946). Science as Vocation, in From Max Weber, tr. and ed. by H. H. Gerth, and C. Wright Mills.(New York: Free press).

SAL RESTIVO has held professosrships and endowed chairs in North America, Europe, and China. He was most recently Professor of Sociology, Science Studies, and Information Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (ret. 2012); Senior Fellow, Center for Intercultural Communication and Interaction, University of Ghent, Ghent, Belgium, 2012; and Adjunct Professor of Technology, Culture and Society at New York University (ret. 2017). He is an honorary Special Lecture Professor, Research Center for Philosophy of Science and Technology, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China 2007- . He is a founding member and former President of the Society for Social Studies of Science (1994/1995), and his many publications include Science, Technology, and Society: An Encyclopedia, Editor-in-Chief (Oxford University Press, 2005); Sociology, Science and the End of Philosophy: How Society Shapes Brains, Gods, Maths and Logics (Palgrave Macmillan, 1917; and most recently Einstein’s Brain: Genius, Culture, and Social Networks (Palgrave PIVOT, 2020). His Society and the Death of God will be published by Routledge in 2021).