Modernity or Morality?

It would be a mistake to believe that a sociological approach to moral obligation has been in decline in contemporary liberal democracies because the other social sciences, especially economics, have designs on its subject

matter. On the contrary, rather than having been "colonized," sociology's problems stem from its own inability to decide exactly what its subject matter should be.

Many sociological theorists, especially in the classical period of the field's development, knew at least what their subject matter was not . For a writer like Durkheim, the sociological theorist most explicitly concerned with morality, both the market and the state were to be viewed with skepticism. The state, he wrote, "is too remote from individuals; its relation with them too external and intermittent to penetrate deeply into individual consciences and socialize them within. Where the state is the only environment in which men can live communal lives, they inevitably lose contact, become detached, and thus society disintegrates."^[8] The market was even more alien to Durkheim's ideas about a moral social order. Unlike today's enthusiasts for the market, he put no value on the creation of wealth: "Too much wealth so easily becomes a source of immorality. Through the power wealth confers on us, it actually diminishes the power of things to oppose us." For Durkheim, economic and moral man were in opposition; utilitarianism and other defenses of the market were merely "apologies for a diseased state."^[9] Markets cannot be trusted as a form of moral regulation in modern society, he wrote, because "the more one has, the more one wants. . . . To achieve any other result, the passions must first be limited. Only then can they be harmonized with the faculties and satisfied. But since the individual has no way of limiting them, this must be done by some force exterior to him."^[10]

Yet for Durkheim, as well as for other thinkers in the sociological tradition such as Simmel or Mead, it was one thing to find markets and states wanting, but it was another thing entirely to find a satisfactory alternative. Civil society would seem to be the obvious choice, yet in putting forward civil society as a moral ideal, the sociological tradition immediately faced a difficult decision. On the one hand, if civil society was viewed as an organic community with strong social ties that were in the process of being destroyed by modernity, sociologists who accepted morality ran the risk of rejecting modernity. On the other hand, if they accepted large states and complex economies as the price to be paid for modernity, they ran the risk of rejecting morality. The sociological tradition was faced with a dilemma: both morality and modernity were important, yet each seemed to work at cross purposes to the other. To be modern was to be free from ties of community and tradition and to live instead with forms of regulation that were formal, specified, and impersonal, whereas to be moral was to live with

common cultural values and strongly inscribed traditions that effectively denied democracy, individual self-development, and equality. In short, one could have either individual rights without binding moral codes or binding moral codes without individual rights.

The easiest response to such a dilemma was, of course, to choose one or the other. Ferdinand Tönnies knew what his choice would be. The moral order of Gemeinschaft, he wrote, "has its roots in family life and . . . its forms are in the main determined by the code of the folkways and mores," while under more modern conditions the moral order is "entirely a product and instrument of public opinion, which encompasses all relations arising out of contractual sociableness, contacts, and political intentions."^[11] A moral sociology, therefore, led Tönnies to reject modernity in favor of traditional social bonds that expressed a more organic form of moral community. This way of thinking about morality has had some influence in sociology, including notably the urban sociology sparked by the University of Chicago in the 1920s. Yet extensive historical research has revealed that, in fact, a lost world of community was far from idyllic. In rejecting modernity, moreover, such a sociological approach to morality rejected as well the freedom and self-realization that come in modernity's wake.

This same difficulty faces contemporary thinkers who uphold the moral understandings of the past in the face of the changes wrought by modern economies and political systems.^[12] Although it is true that the market has caused a weakening of the social bond, it is also true that the market represents progress over premarket forms of social organization that limit the capacity of individuals to realize their individual freedom. One can therefore defend the bourgeois family as the best protector of valuable moral rules, but only by adopting a certain skepticism toward one of modernity's most powerful and positive tendencies: the freedom of women to enter the larger world of economics and politics. (The best effort in presenting a justification of the bourgeois family that I know of, while wishing not to engage in "nostalgia or reactionary romanticism," still finds "destabilizing" the entry into the work force of women with small children.)^[13] In a similar way, the modern state tends toward rules that are formalistic and bureaucratic, but it is also the most realistic protector of equality, as well as the primary line of defense against the market. Rejection of the state as a moral agent, consequently, especially the modern welfare state, carries with it the rejection of important social gains won only through struggle.

Most contemporary sociologists, it must be said, have recognized the dangers of such antimodern inclinations: Tönnies has inspired far fewer

followers than Marx or Weber, both of whom sometimes expressed longings for a lost moral world but each of whom, in different ways, made their peace with modernizing tendencies. I therefore have little more to say about theorists who took this course, other than to repeat that my disagreements with them are essentially political—that is, I would seek to preserve, and then to improve on, the gains in freedom and collective obligation brought about by reliance on markets and states. Yet even as we recognize such gains, we must also be wary of the other direction, which in fact has plagued contemporary sociological theory more than Gemeinschaft longings. Because markets and states are the primary ways by which modern liberal democrats understand their obligations to one another, if sociology welcomes modernity uncritically, it risks sublimating a specifically sociological understanding of moral obligation into either the assumptions of methodological individualism associated with the market or structuralism associated with the state.

Caught between its longing for a premodern form of organic community and its jealousy of the other social sciences, especially economics, which seem so rigorous and self-assured, sociology, despite its origins in moral theory and philosophy, has failed to develop as an adequate moral science. It is difficult to measure precisely the impact that social-scientific theories such as those of the Chicago school of economics or of the political philosophy of John Rawls have on the way individuals make their everyday decisions (academics often being given to exaggerating their influence). Yet this much can be said: when individuals, uncomfortable with moral decisions rooted in either self-interest or enforced obligations, look to the social sciences (or to popularizations of their theories) for answers, they find something of a vacuum where sociology ought to be. Sociology, it would seem, has not lived up to the moral inspiration of its founders.^[14]