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NORMAN BIRNBA.uM
which has not
begun
to solve enormous problems of bureaucratic ossifica–
tion, the reduction of some of those problems to terms soluble by com–
puters is obviously a political priority. The Communist Germans, too,
have made much of computerization: the aged Ulbricht himself, some
years ago, took a three-day crash course in programming. They cannot
yet, however, begin to relinquish the notion of controlling all social pro–
cesses from the center. The Soviet interest in computerization of social
research seems to reflect a political decision - however contested and
uncertain - to allow some areas of society a relative autonomy. It is of
a piece with economic decentralization and the conscious development
of a socialist market. The appearance for the first time at a World
Congress of Sociology of Soviet sociologists of this type went largely un–
remarked. It is a phenomenon which may in the end be more significant
than the crudities inflicted upon us by some of their colleagues. The
establishment of a framework for the study of these processes presup–
poses a prior intellectual decision that they are relatively independent.
The license to study them implies a political decision to use manipulative
rather than coercive means of control. In fact, those regimes with an
intelligentsia closer to contemporary Western culture are precisely those
which have been persuaded to move toward the cultivation of empirical
sociology - and for technocratic reasons.
What about the Western sociologists? Many of our stars were there,
and they were accompanied by a good many intellectual footmen. The
diversity of topics covered by the western papers was immense: family,
community, social psychiatry, work and organization, politics, meth–
odology and much more. Indeed, there was no single Western sociology
represented at the Congress, as a fragmented social world has been re–
flected in a fragmented social science. The papers were full of con–
flicting assumptions about social nature, its malleability and manip–
ulability - all to the good, for pluralism is a good thing, no doubt. But
there was very little debate about the nature of our society, which cast
some doubt on our intellectual seriousness. In some sense, we were the
exaggerated antitheses to the absurd simplifications of our state socialist
brethren. There a terrifying uniformity, here an intolerable confusion.
Perhaps, however, the confusion is willed: a certain kind of categorical
pluralism allows every man his own sociology. In the final analysis, this
is a caricature of a free market - though the market society has long
since disappeared, replaced by its technocratic and bureaucratic succes–
sors. But, despite the confusion, Western sociology has redeeming ele–
ments. Bureaucracy and technocracy themselves have become the ob–
jects of inquiry for those who seek to bring up to date the sociological
