Free Sociology

A guest post by Fabio Rojas

I met Fabio Rojas in January of 1990 when we were both freshmen at UC Berkeley. In 1994, he was the best man at my wedding. Now he’s the chairman of Indiana University’s Sociology Department. Last year, he and Charlotta Stern published Sociology and Classical Liberalism in Dialogue: Freedom is Something We Do Together. Here, with his kind permission, is the introduction to the book.

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For many years, the Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian non-profit organization, hosted seminars with the goal of having students and faculty network and discuss the ideas of a free society. In the Summer of 1993, I attended one of these seminars and spent a few days discussing Austrian economics, spontaneous order theory, and theories of individual rights. I had the chance to meet people who were well known within academic libertarian circles, such as historian Ralph Raico, legal scholar Leonard Liggio, and the activist-philosopher Tom Palmer.

There was one lecture that struck me as odd, and I can still remember it over thirty years later. It was a lecture on sociology, which is notable because modern sociology is strongly aligned with progressive political values. I wondered who was invited to give this talk given that every student and teacher of sociology I had met so far leaned extremely to the Left. To my surprise, IHS had recruited a businessman, whose name has faded from memory, to deliver a talk on sociology that addressed political elites. I thought to myself, “sociology and libertarianism are so opposed that they couldn’t find a single real sociologist to make the connection. They had to get some random guy to do it.”

As time passed, I noticed a stark pattern: sociology and libertarianism never crossed. At libertarian academic events, I almost never met someone who studied sociology or claimed to be a sociologist. Similarly, when I began my career as an academic sociologist, I never met another person who claimed to be libertarian or classical liberal. In both settings, people reacted to me in the same way. A person who was committed to sociological research and classical liberalism was seen as a walking contradiction. I once gave a talk at a Students for Liberty event and a sociology student came up to me and told me that he was shocked I even existed.

The conclusion I drew from my personal experience was that the boundary of sociology and classical liberalism was to be avoided. Maybe the ideas of these two traditions were too inconsistent. Even if I was able to resolve the tension, the number of people who might care would be nearly zero. It was simply a fool’s errand to work on this topic.

Things changed as I began to meet others who were interested in how sociology and libertarianism could talk to each other. I once met Anne Wortham, who earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Boston College, and had written a book called The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness. She taught at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and later settled at Northern Illinois University. I met Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University, who had published on the scarcity of libertarian thought within sociology in journals like The Independent Review. I also encountered a steady stream of students who were rooted in sociology, but desired to learn more about classical liberal ideas.

Eventually, I decided that things needed to change. Someone needed to create an intellectual space where sociologists and classical liberals could talk to each other. I reached out to Charlotta Stern and asked if she’d help me compile a volume of writings that explored this theme. That is how Sociology and Classical Liberalism in Dialogue: Freedom is Something We Do Together was born. It can be downloaded for free at the Rowman & Littlefield website.

The book is both an intellectual exploration and an exercise in community building. We ask how both traditions can enrich each other by providing new questions for research, but we also ask sociologists and classical liberals to have a genuine dialogue.

We invited sociologists and scholars in related areas such as criminal justice, demography, and political science to ask how their research area might be illuminated by the interplay of classical liberalism and sociology. John Iceland and Eric Silver, for example, invite sociologists to consider the vast evidence that liberalized markets are associated with global reductions in poverty. Brandon Davis relies on public choice theory to describe how states prey on minority populations through mass incarceration. Lauren Hall uses ideas from Austrian economics to argue that health disparities are best addressed through market competition, not state regulation.

Inspired by the volume’s individual chapters, Charlotta and I have a few big messages for sociology. First, we argue that sociology needs to reckon with its native tradition of liberty oriented thinking. While sociologists often admire socialist figures such as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and W.E.B. DuBois, many prominent sociologists of the past were classical liberals, such as Herbert Spencer, Henriette Martineau, and William Graham Sumner, Yale professor and former president of American Sociological Association. Rather than assume sociology’s inherent collectivism, sociologists need to understand that there is a vibrant individualist tradition at its core and it needs to be revived.

Second, classical liberals can produce research questions that yield important sociological insights. For example, classical liberals relentlessly argue that free markets are the best solution to poverty. Thus, sociologists can study how market liberalization directly allows the poor to climb out of dire material conditions, a position that is at odds with much of current poverty research that focuses on the inevitability of poverty in capitalism.

Third, a classical liberal sociology can be a “third way” in the sociological profession. Most sociologists are either technocrats who believe that dispassionate social science can inform state policy and government regulation, or they hold strong anti-capitalist views that are aligned with Marxism and critical race theory. Instead, sociology can be practiced in a way that reflects a deep appreciation for the institutions that embody freedom such as free speech, open markets, and limited government.

There are those who believe that sociology is hopeless because of its strongly Left orientation. Charlotta and I take a different tack. We believe that sociology can, and should, include different normative perspectives. We invite you to check out the book and be part of this conversation.