Dissent, Winter 1964
On Veblen, Mills…And the
Decline of CriticismDouglas F. Dowd
Note: This essay is a revised version of one written for the volume The New Sociology: Essays on Social Theory and Social Values in Honor of C. Wright Mills, edited by Irving L. Horowitz and to be published this spring [1964] by Oxford University Press.If these are, as ever, times that try men's souls, most academics will soon see to it that the trial is carried on at a safe distance from the American campus. And the consequences will be most damaging in the area where it is least seemly and most advanced: in the social sciences.The institutionalization of aloofness will not be halted unless it is understood, and unless strong alternatives are offered. That is a large task; it may already be a hopeless one. But the task is worth attempting, not just because the academy contains remnants of a worthier tradition, but because many students are almost desperate in their eagerness to explore the nature, and mitigate the intensity, of today's troubles. Students cannot do that alone; soon they will not be able to do it at all. Soon, one's degree in the social sciences will depend upon what Veblen would have called a “trained incapacity” to distinguish between the vital and the trivial. It will be a degree combining misunderstanding of theory with misuse of mathematics, one leached of any social commitment.
I mention Veblen deliberately. His personal history, his outlook and work, his virtues and defects, the place he occupies in American social science-are all pertinent to an explanation of the current malaise of social science; not least because today's is in many ways an aggravation of sickness evident to Veblen in his day. But the already aggressive social scientism is further emboldened by matters barely or not at all present for Veblen. For the consequences of these more recent “matters” one must turn to the career of C. Wright Mills.
Veblen and Mills were different in many ways. Mills was gregarious, Veblen a virtual anchorite; Mills was outspoken and political, Veblen oblique and (he presumed) above political controversy; hills was aggressive in life and muscular in print, Veblen retiring and, as a writer, involute. Aside from the linguistics involved, Mills would not have worked through The Laxdaela Saga; Veblen could not have written a Listen, Yankee.
Yet Veblen and Mills seem also much alike, especially if we view their careers from the standpoint of contemporary developments. The battle between humanism and scientism in the social sciences was one they fought throughout their lives, as teachers and writers. Style and special training apart, Veblen could have written The New Men of Power, White Collar, or The Power Elite; Mills could have written Absentee Ownership, The Nature of Peace, or The Higher Learning. And what Veblen attempted in economics, especially in The Place of Science in Modern Civilization, Mills attempted in sociology in The Sociological Imagination.
Veblen and Mills would have designed the good society differently, but both wrote with the good society in mind. Both were motivated by what they saw as the widening gulf between ends and means. They were repelled by much the same processes and relationships. They asked similar questions which, wherever they began, allowed no resting place; and which led both men finally to question the institutional foundations of modern society.
If Veblen and Mills were much alike in the breadth of their focus, it must be added that they were also much alike in the nature of, and the reasons for, their failures—both as social scientists and as human beings. Their failure was glorious, when measured against what usually passes for academic success; nor can either the glory or the failure be separated from their radical stance.
Veblen and Mills were radicals in the analytical, if not in the programmatic sense. Both were committed to democracy and individual liberty, to peace, and to material well-being, for all and without qualification. That commitment may be taken as a net large enough to catch all but a few social scientists these days—not to mention politicians, businessmen, and even generals. This, the liberal rhetoric, is now the air we breathe; but as that rhetoric is usually meant, like the air we breathe, it is polluted. The pollution consists of conscious or unconscious reservations sticking at class, or nation, or color, or religion, or—something. They are what Veblen would have called “invidious” reservations, none held by either Veblen or Mills—least of all the hardiest of them, that of nationality.
Knowledge, analysis, and viewpoint combined in Veblen and Mills to make them not only radical but also profoundly pessimistic. Contemporary social scientists tend increasingly to be almost cheerful, and not only by comparison. Veblen and Mills explored the jungles and slums of modern society, which they found dank and reeking. Social analysis tends now to be filed from a hermetically-sealed room, in which neither life nor odors may exist—by assumption. Today, such reports are in flood; they were trickling already in Veblen's time, and had become a river before Mills died. The rate of change accelerates. As Veblen and Mills dissected society, both also took pains to explain why so very many of their colleagues were unable to see through, even to see, the veil of hypocrisy, moral numbness, patriotism, and self-righteousness separating the comfortable minority (in and out of academia) from the “underlying population.”
II
As earlier for Marx, as ultimately for all who study society within the broad perspective of humanism, what Veblen and Mills took to be vital led them in one way or another to examine the question of power—who holds it, how it is obtained, how used, how rationalized. For Veblen this meant at first a study of “the leisure class,” a term transmuted through study and bitterness to “the vested interests.” For Mills the relevant focus ineluctably became “the power elite.” Neither Veblen nor Mills left us with an adequate theory of power or social change; but in this century they were the two American social scientists who most persistently kept such questions in view. They knew how deep and important the problem was, and they cared about what was at stake; it was this that made them radicals. As such, they developed systematic analyses that searched and roamed. This was the strength they shared; and it was their mutual weakness. It took strength to stand against the onrushing specialization and trivialization of the social sciences—a trend now approaching the limits of credibility. The weakness of Veblen and Mills resided in the fact that they attempted so much, in what was almost a lone endeavor—and this in a society that, for the very reasons it needs serious analysis, contains towering obstacles for those who would make the attempt.
Progress in science requires the cooperation of many well-trained specialists working diversely toward a common end: understanding. Veblen and Mills sought to understand the conditions for a humane world society, a goal difficult to attain under the best of circumstances. But when the surest means of academic success lies in paving the road to a technical obscurantism—in, for all practical purposes, pushing back the frontiers of knowledge—then a Veblen or a Mills can scarcely be taken to task for falling short of his goal; surely not by those who have sat idly by or stood as obstacles in the path. The economist Rothschild, in a related context, once remarked that “it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.” Veblen and Mills, at their best and worst, were vaguely right.
It would be better still to be precisely right about the larger dimensions of the human condition. This is doubtless an unattainable goal. Even to be tolerably “right,” even to have a barely adequate framework of social theory, dearly requires considerable specialization in the social sciences. It was not specialization as such that Veblen and Mills reacted against, nor is it that which is being attacked here. When specialization is an antonym for dilettantism, it is a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for social analysis. But when, as is increasingly true, specializations are developed without conscious reference to or adequate training in the knowledge and purposes of one's discipline, scientific procedure is corrupted. Wizen, as is already notoriously true, specialists lose the ability to communicate with each other, the situation has become ludicrous—but not amusing.
Today, the refinement of specializations is such as to require the acquisition of techniques—especially mathematical and statistical techniques—so demanding as to preclude the acquisition of perspective. Worse, the graduate student today is likely to be unaware of the need for perspective. Like his mentors, he may sense that technicism can serve as a rewarding option to the social scientist's alternative: the plunge into an ever-widening, ever-deeper sea of critical perspectives. Suffice it to say that all the great names in economics and sociology were men of great learning in “related” (and many “unrelated”) fields, as well as masters of their own disciplines. They were all critics, all humanists. It was Keynes who said, “The economist is the trustee of the possibility of civilization.” Perhaps the body of knowledge today is so much larger and more cumbrous that contemporaries can never achieve the breadth and depth of the earlier greats. Perhaps. It is more likely that the growth of knowledge has imposed upon us a greater need for selectivity; but how go about establishing standards of selectivity if there is no purpose, no perspective?
III
In its youth, social theory may have been, too grandiose to be entirely meaningful; the tendency today, toward pulverization, is not likely to be meaningful at all. For society to be understood, it must be appreciated as well as studied: specialized analyses, indispensable to understanding, achieve coherence only when unified and stimulated by consciously-held values. Today as always, this must mean that the investigator have in mind an alternative to the present; if you will, he must have the good society in mind. To suggest that the social scientist work with such an approach, that he work within the framework of a commitment, is not merely an invitation to work harder, or differently. Formidable personal, practical, teaching, procedural, and theoretical problems must be confronted—problems such as those confronted by Veblen and Mills.
They were possessed of talent to a degree few are likely to have; even so, Veblen and Mills paid a price for their professional recalcitrance. Veblen's difficulties in gaining and keeping a first-rate academic post, his slow promotion, his low salary, and the general turbulence of his career, need no recounting here. If Mills had lesser difficulties, this may be explained in part by his location in one of the bastions of academic freedom in America, and in part by the fact that for many of his colleagues he did not emerge as an unremitting social critic until late in his life. When that role became apparent, his professional life became more combative and, to an unfortunate degree, warped.
Saying this, it is important to point to an important feature of Veblen's and Mills's professional, and even their social, existence. Given their career choices, both were outsiders by birth. Both became professional outsiders. standing off to view society through a glass darkly. But there is yet another sense in which they were outsiders: both, in fact or in effect, withdrew from their colleagues, from their profession, even from their professional responsibilities, as their work and views fell into a persistently and ever more deeply critical pattern. Not salary an rank, but the ability and finally the desire to communicate with associates came to suffer. They took on the symptoms of the social critic trapped in a complacent environment.
At its beginning, the path of social criticism, for both Veblen and Mills, was sandy with skepticism; at its end, it was strewn with the sharp stones of bitterness. Toward the end of their lives, a shrillness appeared in their writings that one does not find in earlier years. Living in a society that seemed almost eager to accord with their gloomiest observations, and surrounded by colleagues who regarded them, if at all, with some combination of tolerant amusement and hostility, both men became progressively more intemperate. Having arrived at, or been brought to, that stage, both men have been judged as such.
Need this happen? If the conventional become mellow to the point of blandness as they age, must the unconventional become all bile? Only, I think, if to be unconventional means to work alone; to become an intellectual gunfighter, a recluse. Veblen and Mills of course had professional defects and were less than perfect as persons; but much of what was true in both these respects came from working under conditions of too little professional cooperation and recognition, and too much professional hostility—conditions conducive to imbalance in manner as well as in analysis.
This is not to suggest, obliquely, that social critics expect huzzahs or rewards from the society they question—although there is a (doubtless naive) sense in which that case could be made. It is to say, however, that the personal costs of a critical stance might well be reduced, and the quality of its product improved, were the number of functioning social critics to expand, were they to work together, were they to shed their usually defensive posture.
The academic profession in America is the social critic's refuge; even, in extreme cases, his foxhole—with all the limitations of such a vantage point. Although academic freedom has had an honorable career in some American colleges and universities, its career has been less than honorable in many more. As a concept and an ideal, academic freedom is barely understood, let alone supported, in the non-academic community; within academia, the notion has more frequently been identified with narrow considerations of job tenure than with creating an atmosphere in which the free pursuit of understanding might prevail. As with other freedoms, the weakness of academic freedom may be explained in part by the infrequency with which it is exercised.
There have been periods of vitality for the academic social critic in America, and those periods are instructive: they reveal that the quantity and the quality of social criticism and the strength of academic freedom rise and fall together. Social criticism, although never strong in the immediate postwar years was, if compared with today, rampant. It came from Right and Left; nor was participation confined to faculties. Is it an aside to point out that these were the years in which Veblen received his greatest attention in America? when Mills received his higher education? when the social sciences most actively performed their function of social criticism? when academic social critics, though never as secure as their conventional colleagues, were both more productive and less precariously situated than before or since?
It is easy to say that the heyday of the social critic was a result of the Depression; that the combination of McCarthyism, Cold War, and disillusionment on the Left, along with industrialized affluence, accounts for the current desuetude. Today's problems may be less evident to the man in the street than was his own unemployment; maybe. But surely their urgency is not beyond the ken of a properly trained social scientist. In accounting for the timid, do we also account for the celebrants, the cheerleaders? How does one account for the acquiescence in McCarthyism before it triumphed? We return to the loneliness—perhaps today we should say the alienation—of the committed social scientist; to which, in recent years, we must add certain institutional trends that intensify his. loneliness and encourage his silence.
Social criticism today is more unsettling than earlier because those few who engage in it stand isolated, etched against the horizon. It is less productive of useful results because the problems afflicting society are immense and ever more complicated, while simultaneously the number of those who would attack such problems is reduced by the process of intellectual emasculation mistakenly called specialization.
IV
This unhappy situation is the latest stage of a rising trend. Today the trend accelerates for several related reasons. As the society has expanded, it has produced institutions whose power and problems are substantial and multi-faceted. At the same time, the techniques of the social sciences have narrowed the training and the focus of the novice. The two developments come together in a complementary manner: the economist can now work for business groups, for labor groups, or for the military, say, to the profit of both himself and his employer. Similarly for the sociologist, the political scientist, the psychologist, even the anthropologist. Demand and supply are reciprocally stimulating. And “society” in the social sciences increasingly becomes something to be manipulated for the benefit of one or another of its component parts—one or another of its “vested interests.” In the process, the social scientist stands in danger of becoming a lackey, and his training that of a lackey's. None of this is to be understood as arising from a conspiracy among evil men. It is a process as natural as the flooding of valleys in the absence of dams and levees. But there has been a default among social scientists, whose function it is, if it is anyone's, to construct the needed dams and levees. To do so, the social scientist must be guided by a vision of safety and desirability.
The ranks of social critics in the social sciences, never thick, are steadily thinned out; the supply of recruits dwindles to the vanishing point. Potentially interested undergraduates are bored and turn away; or they stay in the social sciences to be trained as steely-eyed, if amiable, technicians. Those critically-minded few who survive the cold douche s of the undergraduate major, mistakenly expecting that graduate work will at last introduce them systematically to the urgent social issues that first attracted them, find their frustrations compounded. They join the careless procession that moves from sociology to sociometrics, from po litical economy to economics to econometrics, even, if one can believe it, from economic history to Cliometrics. The social sciences cannot make sense or progress without quantification and logic, to be sure; nor can they make sense or progress if their practitioners are informed by quan tification and logic solely, let alone when they are lacking a definition of progress.
The manner in which the foregoing process has speeded up, and spreads, is familiar; it may be characterized by Gresham's dictum: once the debasement of coinage begins it will become cumulative if there are no conscious efforts to halt it. As the study of moral philosophy and social problems moved toward “social science,” the process of specialization and the development of quantitative techniques were quite appropriate. However, given the pattern of rewards in the academy, and those that beckon outside, these useful coins have been debased.
One normally has to teach in the academy, and the better teacher, other things being equal, is preferred to the poorer. Alas, rewards are meted out primarily for publication; publication, in turn, is facilitated by a narrow focus; in turn, this encourages quantification. There are, of course, elements of the picture that keep it from being totally dismal: some who publish much, publish meaningfully; some quantified work is broad in focus, and some that is narrow is valuable; generalists who preserve breadth and imbue purpose as teachers are still rewarded, particularly in the good small colleges. But the trend remains a forbidding one.
This is, of course, the era of the research grant. The granting agencies, beset by numberless applications—and apart from any more insidious motivation—tend understandably to seek objective criteria as their guides. This inclines them to the narrow, the quantifiable, and ordinarily the non-controversial projects, if only, but not only, because the last are likely to be finished with dispatch. Those who receive the bulk of the grants tend, over time, to gain power in the best faculties of the land; over time, they set standards for admissions and curricula. Mastery of technique, and the acquisition of perspective, both essential, come to seem competitive; and the latter gives way to the former.
With all this, a related development: the undergraduate curriculum is steadily infiltrated by attitudes and purposes that encourage a dubious specialization. The new young specialists who become teachers are unable to teach in a broad tradition, and would be disinclined to even if they had the ability. So a Bachelor of Arts degree comes to mean a degree in training for a specialty. Specialization and quantification, necessary attributes of science, take on a life of their own which dangerously threatens the historic perspectives and purposes of the social sciences; so much so that both the perspectives and the purposes are already well on the defensive, must be argued for, with hope that fades. Back in the world, meanwhile, problems multiply, institutions fray or rip, structures wobble, and the new social scientist decries the ignorance and gullibility of the masses. And the unsophisticated involvement of students in political issues is deplored.
V
It will bear repeating that one cannot sensibly dissent from, indeed one must support, specialization and the use of mathematics and statistics as tools of inquiry in the social sciences. But, it has been said, the specialist should be like a tack: a sharp point given force through a broad top. The newcomers are pointed at both ends. They are specialists in tools; their interests are at best aesthetic, but more usually careerist; they have little training in either the traditions or the impulses that carried the social sciences into this century.
How and why do the established members of the profession allow such trends to gain momentum? It is not absurd to begin an answer by asking another question: How and why did social scientists, among others, allow a response of panic before McCarthyism to sweep so many universities? Lacking a firm commitment to standards, the elder statesmen puzzle in silence, or acquiesce in “evidence” that has the appearance of objectivity. And in the academic world, evidence consists all too often of performance on examinations, and performance in publications. Bemused by these “objective criteria,” and hesitant to argue for something less certain, if more meaningful, to take their place, those who should know better behave no better than those who know nothing. True, the critic can still find a perch, whether as student or as professor, if only to make everyone feel that things are as they should be. But, as Veblen pointed out long ago, “only individuals with an aber. rant temperament can in the long run retain their self-esteem in the face of the disesteem of their fellows.” In the academic world, where status is often an important substitute for money, the observation has more force than elsewhere.
And yet there is an uneasy feeling in the social sciences that all is not well. Hardly a department meeting goes by without a murmur of concern over the present trend (excluding those places where the triumph has been achieved, and there are some); but few meetings conclude without a new brick being laid on the wall threatening to seal social scientists off from society. A sign of the uneasiness, as well as a prime indication of the reasons for it, may be found in a symposium recently sponsored by the American Academy of Political and Social Science: “Mathematics and the Social Sciences.” In order to explore this topic
one professional was to speak to the uses and another to the limitations of mathematics in economics, political science, and sociology. The uses, for economics, were ably stated by Leonid Hurwicz, one of the better craftsmen of mathematical economics; the limitations were analyzed by Oskar Morgenstern, a prime mover of mathematics in economics, who wrote approvingly: “…we see that mathematics penetrates more and more aspects of economics and that no limits are in sight where this process may stop.” The mind boggles.
What are the alternatives to this threatening ice age? For Veblen the tasks of the economist centered on the study of institutions at work; and to Veblen the very existence of an institution implied that it was to some extent dated: “Whatever is, is wrong.” To make that more than an amusing epigram, much work is necessary, and the work involves much in the way of social criticism. For Mills, the sociologist must engage in “structural criticism” that, while not neglecting the quantitative, emphasizes the qualitative side of social existence, explores relationships, illuminates process, and brings value to bear on fact. Surely a renaissance with such purposes as these among social scientists, manifested in class and in print, could stem the hemorrhage of bright students that has so weakened the vitality of the social sciences in recent years. From such a starting point, meaningful use could be made of mathematics and statistics by specialists who were about something and knew what it was.
A renaissance of such dimensions will not be led by those who, like Veblen and Mills, are defensive about their position. Veblen s defensiveness was hidden behind a mask of diffidence verging on hostility in his teaching and dishonesty in his writing—however, sardonically the latter may have been disguised. Mills too frequently clothed his acute judgments in spurious statistical wrappings which served him as a defense against the conventional-minded. Veblen mumbled; Mills shouted. The academic loneliness of the two men, indeed of all social critics, helpful though it is to explain such defensiveness, by no means can be used to condone it. The principle of selection of the conventional teacher and writer are no more readily justified than those of the critic; indeed, less so. The uncritical social scientist is as much in default of his professional obligations as would be a doctor whose diagnoses were confined to cheerful comments about his healthy patients.
To be committed should mean an attempt to place the intelligence and energies of students at the disposal of their values, using the open procedures of science. Commitment need not and should not mean that the social scientist use the classroom to put forth a program (although it might well mean that he do so in print); it should entail teaching that probes, asks questions, and does so systematically while taking nothing as sacred, nothing as given. In economics today, so much is taken as “given” that many no longer even list what is being ignored; some students may now believe that society, far from being the subject matter of the social sciences, is merely a synonym for “parameters.”
Proceeding along the lines of a Veblen or a Mills means that some precision has to be exchanged for some vagueness; but it means nothing worse than that. The fear today is not that minds will be led down one path to the exclusion of others; it is that young minds, spinning on dead center, will pursue no path.
The question to be asked of those who work with a commitment is simply this: what is the relevance of this work to that commitment? A satisfactory and humanistic answer requires no single technique, approach, project, or focus, nor need it by any means exclude the use of abstract models; it requires merely that he who does the work should know the relevance of his work to the problems of our society. The commitment of the new social scientist, increasingly, is to technique itself. This would be a cause for derision only, were it not for the effective zeal of the devotees of refinement. Their zeal, along with the basic shaping institutions of academia and the confusion of those who should know better, has allowed an imperialistic spread of the needle-like specialists.
Those who pursue the refined specialty easily develop precise results. This, combined with a loss or initial absence of perspective, as easily contributes to arrogance. The humanistic social scientist is more likely, of necessity, to be humble in face of the mass of events, institutions, and processes he must grapple with. Humility is appropriate before such problems; defensiveness, not. A revival of morale and conscious efforts toward cooperation among those who would, in Veblen's words, prevent “the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture,” is not only possible, it is long overdue.
Aug 8, 2000
