Is Sociology too Activist, and not Sufficiently Rigorous?

I am entertaining myself at the hospital by reading *John Levi Martin’s critique

of *Ashley Rubin’s report on the current state of politics vs. rigor in sociology.

The short answer to my title question is, “No.” I read the original *Vanderbilt/WUSL report (Boghossian, et al. 2026) and then skimmed the Rubin report heavily. Like Martin and others on social media, I found it lacking in data and argumentation. Martin does not try to determine the degree of politicization of sociology; rather, he asks “whether she actually marshaled evidence to support her arguments" and  "whether she correctly represents her sources.” His answer to both is No, and I agree with him. Some of the content of this post is also covered in my recent book, Urban Life in the Distant Past, and in various papers. Data, arguments, rigor, and social science are central to my scholarly identity.

I’m not sure anyone cares what an archaeologist thinks about all this, but I have knowledge of some parts of sociology, a discipline I largely have great respect for. We have even more serious problems of activism/rigor in anthropology. I have spent decades fighting for rigorous social science over interpretivist archaeology in a number of publications, and I attribute my own epistemological breakthroughs (giving me the tools to properly critique non-scientific approaches) to my reading of sociology. I went to sociology for neighborhoods and cities, and came back with epistemology (and neighborhoods, cities, inequality, etc.)

My Interactions with Sociology 

Working on Teotihuacan housing and social class as an undergrad in the 1970s, George Cowgill suggested I read (Sjoberg 1960). I got a lot of inspiration from that book on approaches to social analysis of cities that could be applied archaeologically. Yeah, I can now write a serious critique of Sjoberg, but his book was formative in my thinking. George also suggested I read (Lenski 1966), which was also crucial in my learning about how ancient inequality compared to conditions in the modern world. I realized at the time that his empirical application to preindustrial cases left a lot to be desired, but it was the comparative/theoretical concepts that I drew on (and still did for a long time; generations of students had had to endure me talking about the differences between estates and castes, with slides from Lenski).

From Lenski, with modification.

Also from the old days, the ethnocentrism of Wirth set my teeth on edge. I’ve published and blogged on much of this.

When I got into transdisciplinary work on urban neighborhoods (mid-2000s) I read a lot of sociology. Sharon Harlan was part of a transdisciplinary project on neighborhoods at ASU. We got Rob Sampson to give a talk and he is someone doing important work on a topic that interests me, using data and methods that I find compelling. And, he cites me! (there is a story here). I also got insights lot from work by John Hipp, Douglas Massey, and other sociologists. Working with Sharon Harlan on the interdisciplinary neighborhoods project was great. Oh, and as long as I’m flashing the names of sociologists, when I taught at Loyola in the 1980s—in a combined anthropology/sociology department--I went to holiday parties occasionally with Jerry Suttles (too bad I wasn’t into neighborhood analysis then…). 

The Rubin Report

Rubin’s main point is that the increasing politicization of sociology (leftward) has caused a lowering of scholarly standards. Martin’s “reader’s guide” is a detailed take-down of her evidence and arguments. She does not demonstrate a leftward movement, although this is definitely a topic of debate in sociology. Nor does she provide evidence for a decline in standards. Her analysis is poorly grounded in disciplinary literature, and she makes numerous mistakes. You should read Martin, it cheered me up sitting in a dreary hospital room.

 My Two Cents

I will just give my own brief (and perhaps naïve) views on some aspects of these debates, with a couple of quick comparisons to cultural anthropology and archaeology (the parts of anthropology I know best). If you want to talk about the politicization of a discipline, it seems you need to consider at least three domains: (1) The politicization of the research of individual scholars; (2) The politicization of research topics; and (3) The politicization of major professional organizations.

The politicization of the research of individual scholars.

 Do their political beliefs influence their choice of topics to research? Do their political beliefs skew their research? Do they try to pass off political findings as scholarly findings? I know there is a non-partisan literature on this, in sociology and anthropology, but I don’t know the work of enough sociologists well enough to weigh in (although those whose work I do know, do not show excessive politicization). I do have a biased sample: when I see a sociology paper on a topic of interest, if it looks too political or too interpretivist, I just ignore it and don’t even put it in my Endnote database (Rubin’s report is not in the database). Read Martin, whose discussion here is very good.

The politicization of research topics

As Martin implies, there are topics and themes in sociology where politicization has reached farther than in others. But my impression is that sociology is far less guilty here (that is, it shows less of a pervasive political bias, in fewer fields) than anthropology. I am very interested to see that Joe Henrich comes up with in his report on anthropology. His intro in the main report is pretty brief and vague.

Parts of archaeology are deeply implicated here. For some colleagues, if a Native American myth contradicts the findings of archaeology (e.g., "we always lived here" vs. clear archaeological evidence for arrival in the past few centuries), the archaeologists defer to the myth. Such an approach may be important if you want to work with a tribal group, on their lands, but not if you want to build a scientific account of the past. These arguments have been ongoing in archaeology since the 1970s.

My own fights have been less against overt politicization/activist work in archaeology and more against postmodern-derived interpretivist and relativist approaches. These are often cloaked in political terms, though, making me think this is at least a vaguely similar or parallel development. I can say without doubt that much or most of this work does not use basic social-science scholarly epistemology. A typical paper will position itself within some abstract theoretical domain (structuration theory; new materiality; postcoloniality; post-humanist ontology; etc.), then lay out some archaeological evidence, make a few post-hoc speculative interpretations, and return to the theory in the conclusions. Concepts are not formally defined, they are not operationalized (a big task in archaeology), and there is no testing of hypotheses. These are weak papers that contribute little to the building of an empirical record.

Charles Tilly

For years I used this blog to battle these post-processualists (what we call the postmoderns in archeology, although they claim they are now so far beyond that period). I lacked the tools or concepts to take apart their work systematically. Then, I discovered a literature on epistemology in sociology (mechanisms , analytical sociology, Charles Tilly, etc.), and I immediately started publishing critiques of the postprocessualists in archaeology. Major sources I relied on were: (Abend 2006) (Demeulenaere 2011) (Sampson 2010) (Boudon 1998), and also: (Tilly 1998) (Tilly 2008) (Bunge 1999). Charles Tilly is another of my social
science heroes. Anthropology lacked the epistemological tools I needed to promote a rigorous approach in archaeology. For years, this blog was full of my ranting and raving as I worked out these ideas. I even turned three blog posts into a good journal article on epistemology (Smith 2021). Sometimes I gloss the difference in these camps as a humanities vs. social science approach to archaeology (Smith 2017), although that syllogism is not a great fit, for a variety of reasons. If you want to get me really steamed (as in writing Smith 2017), claim that archaeologists must choose between being a humanities or a natural science. Neither one! We are a historical comparative social science!

Back to the Rubin report. I don’t care if the interpretivists want to spend their time speculating like mad on their favorite topics, but I do care deeply about the negative implications for the field of archaeology. There is so much of this work that simply does not contribute to the accumulation of a body of solid empirical findings. A generation of my colleagues has taught this stuff, and it is now pervasive (although less so in the U.S. than in Britain). If we don’t operationalize our concepts, why bother? I come back again and again to the words of Steve Haber from a book review, “the fundamental question of all serious fields of scholarly inquiry: How would you know if you are wrong?” (Haber 1999). I think that the empirical adequacy, argumentation rigor, and scholarly standards HAVE declined in some major areas of archaeological research (while they have improved marginally in other areas).

I’m inclined to think that Rubin’s postulated decline in standards in sociological research is NOT correct. Martin makes this clear (although it would be good to see more data…..). As Martin discusses, methodological sophistication (in statistics, other numerical models, spatial analysis, simulation, etc.) is far higher in sociology today than 40 years ago, and far higher than in anthropology. Grab the first sociologist you see walking down the street and the first cultural anthropologist, and the former will be more sophisticated about things like sampling, data, measures, rigorous arguments. Not that we don’t worry about such things in cultural anthropology or archaeology, but the disciplinary contrast is pretty clear.

The politicization of the major professional organizations

While Martin shows that Rubin’s understanding of governance in the ASA is faulty, it looks to an outsider like the ASA is probably more heavily politicized today than several decades ago (Massey 2007). I was fed up with the politicization of the American Anthropological Association for some time (why pass resolutions on current topics that anthropologists have no special knowledge of or influence over? Virtue signaling. By the way, if you haven’t read Musa Al-Gharbi’s We have Never Book Woke, I urge you to get a copy today). The removal of the word “science” from the AAA bylaws in 2010 was the last straw, I resigned after 30 years. But, the actions of a professional organization are a very different kettle of fish than the research of its members, a point Martin makes, but could be emphasized more.

 -------------------------

Sorry to be so long-winded. I really enjoyed Martin’s paper. I would conclude that sociology may indeed be more strongly politicized today than 50 years ago, but at the same time, it is clearly more rigorous and sophisticated in its data, methods, and arguments. Too bad we don't have a more scholarly and contextualized analysis of the situation than Rubin's poor-quality report.

References

Abend, Gabriel  (2006)  Styles of Sociological Thought: Sociologies, Epistemologies, and the Mexican and U.S. Quests for Truth. Sociological Theory 24(1):1-41.

Boghossian, Paul, Kwami Anthony Appiah, Kit Fine, Joseph Henrich, Katherine E. Fleming, Jason Merchant, Gary Saul Morson, Gideon rosen, Ashley Rubin and Sean Wilentz  (2026)  Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. Vanderbilt University and Washington University of St. Louis, Nashville.

Boudon, Raymond  (1998)  Social Mechanisms Without Black Boxes. In Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, edited by Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg, pp. 172-203. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Bunge, Mario  (1999)  Social Science under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Demeulenaere, Pierre (editor)  (2011)  Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms. Cambridge Universitiy Press, New York.

Haber, Stephen  (1999)  Anything Goes: Mexico's "New" Cultural History. Hispanic American Historical Review 79:309-330.

Lenski, Gerhard E.  (1966)  Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification. McGraw-Hill, New York.

Massey, Douglas S.  (2007)  The Strength of Weak Politics. In Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Joya Mistra, Naomi Gerstel, Randall Stokes, Douglas L. Anderton and Michael Burawoy, pp. 145-157. Universitiy of California Press, Berkeley.

Sampson, Robert J.  (2010)  Eliding the Theory/Research and Basic/Applied Divides: Implications of Merton's 'Middle Range'. In Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociology as Science, edited by Craig Calhoun, pp. 63-78. Columbia University Press, New York.

Sjoberg, Gideon  (1960)  The Preindustrial City: Past and Present. The Free Press, New York.

Smith, Michael E.  (2017)  Social Science and Archaeological Inquiry. Antiquity 91(356):520-528.

Smith, Michael E.  (2021)  Why Archaeology's Relevance to Global Challenges Has Not Been Recognized. Antiquity 95:1061-1069.

Smith, Michael E.  (2023)  Urban Life in the Distant Past: The Prehistory of Energized Crowding. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Tilly, Charles  (1998)  Durable Inequality. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Tilly, Charles  (2008)  Explaining Social Processes. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO.