Rosenstock's Sociology

A few discarded snippets from a review of Rosenstock-Huessy's Sociology, Volume 1 .

Sociologists, Rosenstock-Huessy charges, often formulate their theories in this fashion: “an obscure Force A and a Relation B . . . affect Mr Y.” If sociologists are going to deal with reality itself, they need to take a different approach:

“First of all, a state of affairs, an event, must be brought to examination, together with the lives and names, the place and date pertaining to it, before it is possible to derive any sort of conclusions. Actualization involves calling things by their real names; and giving a name to something is an ineluctable precondition for thinking about the real world. Until this pertains, we remain stuck in unreality. For in reality, the year and day, the place and environment, change every reality – not somehow, but utterly” (4).

Actualization requires naming. Sociology must be nominal if it is to be a sociology of real society.

Rosenstock criticizes spectator sociology, and expands the criticism to scholarship and philosophy in general. Even the categories of philosophy – objective and subjective, for example – are detached from the flux of time and turn the philosopher into “an onlooker at the games of humanity” (82). True sociology, like true philosophy, is participant sociology. Shades of Luther's description of the theologian as one who suffers.

Sociology must pursue the fourfold path of “the soul, of reason, culture, and nature” (230). Not that the cross is a method. These abstractions are only “superstructures” that “represent the universal for which we strive in our capacities as daughter and mother, son and father. We move along those paths whenever our two generations and our two sexes meet each other in a courageous and confident spirit.” However we label them, we should not “deviate from coming to life as ‘holistic’ creatures” (230).

Sociologists tend to forget this. He cites a journal article that makes the “ridiculous” claim, “Scientifically it can no longer be doubted that children need their mother’s love.” It’s a sign that “forgetfulness of what we all know in common is an educational deficiency” (231). This is what makes sociology an “insecure discipline.” With all its research, funding, scientific apparatus, “it knows less (rather than more) about human beings than every layman” (231).