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emptied of critical ideas, sociology soon lost all intellectual content: it
became a set of techniques for gathering data. The techniques were
useful, not least to those in command of those corporate and govern–
ment bureaucracies which set such narrow limits on our political choices.
Sociologists became minor ancillaries of the administrative technologists:
they presented their instruments of inquiry as aspects of a pure science,
if a nascent one, even though their work served very impure purposes.
Not all of sociology, however, was self-consciously technical. Serious
efforts were made in the United States to develop abstract criteria for
sociological analysis and general models of society, though these, too,
were subject to political assumptions. The abstract criteria often dealt
with social constraints as "functions," as mechanical necessities imposed
on men and not as historical forms which could be criticized and
changed. In fact, the models frequently presupposed a consensus which
they had helped bring about. In Europe, a serious and desperate search
to relate the Marxist tradition to contemporary social and political
phenomena began as soon as it became clear that wartime antifascism
had not been the prelude to a socialist Europe. The reluctance of the
European working class to assume a revolutionary mission led to studies
of psychic coercion: briefly, the process of alienation was now seen not
only in the fragmentation of man as citizen and producer but in the
willed servitude of a new generation of consumers. Meanwhile, phe–
nomenologists looked beyond politics for a human essence. They some–
times found it, not just beyond politics, but beyond community, and so
reduced social existence to a giant charade.
The multiplicity of Western sociology had a saving philosophical
virtue: political ideas might infuse sociological notlOns, but they did
so in mediated fashion. Sociologists could, and did, argue about their
assumptions, but they also argued about the social world. Ultimately,
what diminished the appeal of the doctrines of consensus and function
is the historical evidence that consensus no longer exists, that institu–
tions no longer work.
The state socialist regimes have allowed, by and large, no such
public corrections of social thought. A flourishing pre-Bolshevik Russian
sociological tradition was eradicated, and as Stalinism replaced the fre–
quently adventurous Marxism of the early revolutionary years, a dog–
matized and impoverished "Marxism-Leninism" was all that could be
heard in the Soviet Union. The promulgation of "laws" of social de–
velopment of an entirely invented kind had one clear aim: the point
was not to understand the world or to change it, but to justify it. The
implantation of Stalinism in Eastern Europe by the Red Army had
