Saving Sociology (part I).

In this article the author introduces a series of articles that present highly divergent views on the present and future of sociology. The sciences command serious consideration for their rule-driven inquiries. Sociology, having failed to establish powerful rules, compels no such attention. Respect for science is respect for an enterprise transcending its participants. Unless they are themselves giants, individual physicists, chemists, or biologists, for example, must subordinate their analytic individuality to the collectively held paradigms that dominate their disciplines. Individual imagination is certainly useful, but it is not a necessary precondition to successful participation. Knowing the rules and being willing to work within them do, however, constitute such preconditions. In a literal sense, science constitutes an establishment and, like all establishments, it views the exercise of originality with discomforting suspicion. Sociology is in need of saving, but not from its perceived inadequacies. These can be tolerated so long as sociologists able to produce compelling alternatives do so. No, sociology needs to be saved from the silence of those most qualified to speak.