But the idea is that there is a kind of determinism, that there is a series of statistical data from the past that can be used to predict the future, and from those statistics, from that data, a deterministic vision is born. So, for example, everything that is forecasting, futures analysis, and things like that is based on past behaviours, statistics extrapolated into the future. It says, “Then it must be so.” And we calculate elections, we do statistical extrapolations, calculating future votes from past votes.
I recommend two great books in this regard by two sociologists. I brought them here for Joaquín, so that he knows new names that he might like. The first is Pitirim Sorokin (Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences).
I bet nobody knows him. Nobody knows him. The poor man was marginalized. Parsons marginalized him. He kept him there, in a corner of the department. He completely overshadowed him. But Sorokin was great, a giant among giants. I will tell you more about him later. Read his Social and Cultural Dynamics, for example, or take the book I am referring to now, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences. It is translated into Spanish, a thick book. He wrote thick books like that, books nobody reads, books sitting in libraries covered in dust that nobody picks up. Only I pick them up, those old things.
In that book, Sorokin criticizes, one by one, what he calls quantophrenia: the idea of quantifying everything, the whole idea of establishing data through tests and indicators. He attacks the test-type indicator with enormous fury. The idea that everything has to be test-like, that your intelligence can be measured through a few little questions they ask you, and then they create an index and something like that. So he makes fun, one by one, of all the traits of modern sociology and related sciences: economics, politics, and so on.
And second, another name for Joaquín: Stanislav Andreski (Social Sciences as Sorcery). I do not know if anyone knows him. Andreski really was a libertarian. Pitirim Sorokin was more conservative. I will say something about him later. But Andreski was a libertarian, he was active in the Libertarian Party of the United Kingdom. He was a Polish war émigré who ended up as a prisoner of war in England and stayed there when the war ended.
He is a very interesting man, all his works are interesting, but especially Social Sciences as Sorcery, where he makes a satire of all these modern sciences. He compares them with the grimoires of the sorcerers of the past. The sorcerers of the past had a sacred book. They would open it, and with that book, with those inscrutable symbols, they would watch the flight of birds and the entrails of birds, and from there, with those books, they would produce a spell: “The king must not invade this place; he must not do such a thing.”
Now the modern sorcerers also appear. They come out with things nobody understands. They put them on blackboards, they write summations, derivatives, they make a calculation, and then they say: “Monetary policy has to increase by 1% next month.” [laughter] They pull out the grimoire. Andreski makes a mockery of all this.
The problem is that those books, of course, are books that today nobody knows, nobody sells. They are not considered scientific. They are dismissed as pseudoscience, or as talk-show chatter, or things like that. They are said not to be rigorous because, without any proof, rigor is identified with mathematics. It is the old Leibniz myth of creating a perfect language made of abstractions, things that later become concrete. And yet not even they themselves are capable, I repeat, of putting their texts entirely into mathematical language. They need a title, and the title has to express what they are saying, because what they are saying in the text, what they want to demonstrate, they are not capable of putting into mathematical form. Not even they themselves.
So they give us lessons, as Randall Collins (The Sociology of Philosophies) says, right? Not even they themselves are capable of doing it, and yet they want to extrapolate it to sciences like the social sciences, which are infinitely more complex. Not even they themselves are capable of doing it in their own texts.
I am not criticizing mathematics, obviously. I am criticizing mathematics in uses that are not proper to it, which is very different.
Alfred Schütz (Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality) also has a very beautiful work called “Tiresias, or Our Knowledge of Future Events.” Tiresias is one of those Greek figures, like Oedipus or Electra. Tiresias is the symbol of the prophet, the one who predicted the future. It was a divine punishment, to know the future and these things. What Schütz explains is the idea that the future cannot be predicted from what we see here and now, because the future is the result of human actions, conscious human actions, and we do not really know where those actions are going to go.
These authors defend verbal sociology. They say that all the great advances in the social sciences were made verbally, and that it is good to reclaim this, because we are always surrounded by these things. Remember that the two books, Sorokin’s Fads and Foibles and Andreski’s Social Sciences as Sorcery, are both translated. They have been out of print for many years, but surely somewhere on the internet there is still some rare copy for anyone interested in these things.
Well, this class is short. So, of course, when I got into this mess, I said: uh oh, because these things are very extensive. One could go on and on: sociology of the family, economic sociology, sociology of consumption. So I said: what am I going to talk about? I decided to talk a bit about social structure, focusing on that. Much remains unsaid. I repeat that I am not a professional sociologist; I am just a reader who likes to read things. I do not have systematic knowledge of the whole field. So I decided to focus much of the class on social structure, social stratification, and class structure. Much remains unsaid, much remains undiscussed, but I wanted to comment on a few things, and then you can ask me questions or argue with me.
When we talk about social classes, we explain how society is ordered, how it is hierarchized into different groups. The first sociologists distinguished class structure very well, but they did not distinguish it in economic terms, as the Marxists later did. Instead, they distinguished the domination of some people over others in political terms, not economic terms.
For example, we have those French authors, Charles Comte, and also Auguste Comte (The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte), the father of positivism, who is also one of the fathers of modern sociology and of its methodological deviation, because Comte establishes the idea that a kind of millenarian era would arrive, a kingdom of science governed by laws: the theological stage, the metaphysical stage, and finally the positive stage.
The first sociologists, such as Charles Comte, Augustin Thierry, or Destutt de Tracy (A Treatise on Political Economy), when they wrote about these things — the so-called ideologues — described social classes politically. There is a social class of people who take money from others. There is a class of those who take money, of rulers who live at the expense of the rest. There is a class that lives by parasitizing the other.
Here I always remember old William H. McNeill (Plagues and Peoples; The Pursuit of Power). In Plagues and Peoples, he says there are two types of parasites in history: microparasites, which are parasites of all kinds — bedbugs, lice, nits, and so on — and macroparasites, which are states. [laughter] They are like bigger lice, bugs that take rents from the rest. I am not saying this, do not put words in my mouth. William H. McNeill says it in Plagues and Peoples. He compares the two types of plagues that fell upon peoples.
The idea that government is born from a band of plunderers, a band of bandits, is not alien to sociology. In fact, the predatory theory of the state — the theory that the state is an organized band of people dedicated to extracting rents from the rest, and then hiring intellectuals to justify what they do — is called the sociological theory of the state.
Sociologists such as Lester Ward (Dynamic Sociology), Ludwig Gumplowicz (The Outlines of Sociology), and Franz Oppenheimer (The State) defended this view. Some thought this was fine, or at least necessary, but basically they agreed on the same thing: a band of pirates conquers a territory, puts the subjects to work, and orders them to give up 10% of what they earn.
This also appears, for example, in Stanislav Andreski’s (Military Organization and Society) work. It is not translated, I think, but it is a great book. There he looks at how herding tribes — the Maasai and others — conquered peasant peoples, cracked their heads with clubs, and then put them to work for them, demanding parts of the livestock and the fruits of the livestock. He tells that whole history: Vikings, pastoral tribes, conquest, domination. Alexander Rüstow (Freedom and Domination: A Historical Critique of Civilization) also tells these kinds of stories.
So one looks at the origin of the state, and states appear basically as bands of predators who hit the rest on the head with a stick in order to take their money. Today they will call it “efficient provision of public goods.” [laughter] But Andreski says it wonderfully: the state is that. [laughter] It does not mess around much. In its origin, it was that. Now it is more refined. It uses different means of hegemony and coercion. But the idea is this: there is a class that dominates the others.
This is a sociological tradition. It is in Oppenheimer, and more recently in Charles Tilly (Coercion, Capital, and European States). Tilly explains very well how the state is born from war: the most brutal one is the one who commands, and the one who wins the war orders the loser to pay tribute. Basically, it is that. It is not as sophisticated as the analyses of Samuelson or Musgrave on public goods and negative externalities. [laughter] What happened is that those bandits were smart enough to hire the best intellectuals of their time to justify their power.
There is a book that was poorly received in its time, by the historian Jacob Burckhardt (Reflections on History; The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy), who was Nietzsche’s teacher. In Reflections on History, he also explains this. And then he has another little book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Everyone thinks it is a book about Renaissance culture. But the first chapter is called “The State as a Work of Art.” There he explains how the princes of the Renaissance hired painters, sculptors, and others to sing praises to the state. They hired the best philosophers and artists to elaborate the thing for them.
Today, the modern court intellectuals are in the great American universities, and they make theories of public goods. [laughter] They talk about information asymmetries and little things like that. They start talking like that. We need someone there so that heads are not cracked anymore. [laughter] But that is what the sociologists said. I am not saying it. The sociologists who study the state, all those I am mentioning and whoever else you want to look up, say this.
Then there are other authors who focus, for example, on studying time: the sociology of social stratification, not so much in the sense of political and economic classes, but in the sense of class stratification in relation to time.
There was a sociologist I have spoken about before, Edward C. Banfield (The Unheavenly City; The Democratic Muse). He has a series of very curious books. One is The Democratic Muse, a savage critique of the cultural policy of states. That is, states should not fund the arts, they should not fund cinema, they should not fund literature. But he also has a book translated into Spanish as La ciudad en discusión, The Unheavenly City, in which he stratifies societies by time. Bernard Barber (Social Stratification) also does this in a book called Social Stratification.
The classic distinction in the social sciences defines classes in economic terms, in the sense of ownership or non-ownership of the means of production. So there would be the rich and the poor. For these authors, however, what matters is the vision of time that a person has. If a person has a certain vision of time, they are capable of achieving things. One thing comes before the other. In other words, first comes the vision of time, and that leads to better or worse performance. That is the theory.
They speak of time in the sense that there is a temporal upper class, a temporal middle class, and a temporal lower class. The upper class is the one that thinks long-term, very long-term. These are people capable of sacrificing present consumption for future consumption, people capable of sacrificing present pleasure for future pleasure.
Those are the great personalities, the people who give their money to create a university, or the great heroes who even give their lives for humanity. They are people who think very long-term. Middle-class people are those who think about their old age, their children, and these kinds of things. Lower-class people are those who, as soon as money comes in, spend it, or even consume their capital. It is the old idea of “coin earned, coin spent,” as they used to say in my area. As soon as the coin arrived, it was already spent. [laughter]
And not only did they spend it; sometimes they consumed their capital. Look at the drunkard, the drug addict, the vice-ridden person. You see that they even consume their own body. You see young people of twenty-five or thirty years old, yellow, without teeth, gaunt. Because pleasure in such the short term, wanting satisfaction in such the short term, leads them even to sacrifice their own bodily capital. This is the lower case of social stratification, according to the vision of time we have, says Banfield.
Banfield was a man very much on the right. His revolutionary students once tried to climb in through the window during a strike because he was very conservative.
Transcribed and translated to English from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR-q017t6iM
