Called “one of the most original thinkers of the current period” Liah Greenfeld is University Professor and Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of numerous books about modern society and culture, including the ground-breaking Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Before moving with her parents from Russia to Israel in 1972 – she tried her hand at being, first, a child-prodigy, playing violin on TV at the age of 7, and then a poet, receiving the Krasnodar Region’s Second Prize for poetry at 16. This is from April, 2025.
Why did you remain affiliated with sociology?
Sociology is a part of my biography, like Boston University in which I spent the last 31 years of my teaching career or the Soviet Union in which I spent the first 17 years of my life. Being a part of biography does not make a circumstance a part of one’s identity. Because sociology, BU and USSR are parts of my biography, I remain – and always will be – affiliated with them in the eyes of others familiar with my biography, but I am not defined by these circumstances. I was in no way defined by my Soviet childhood, though I would never deny it; Boston University did not at all influence me as a person, despite the fact that I spent 10 happy and 21 very unhappy years in it. If it made sense in the course of these 21 years I could change universities, but it did not make sense because the atmosphere was the same in all of them; BU paid my salary, however ungenerously, so, I remained affiliated with it. During my first 10 happy years there, this salary was paid by the remarkable college at BU to which I was originally brought as a University Professor. This independent college, or school, was transdisciplinary. It united people from hard and natural sciences with scholars in humanities, creative writers, and a sprinkling of social scientists. Each University Professor was supposed to have contributed to several disciplines and, when appointed, to be affiliated with at least two departments at BU. When I was brought into this remarkable company, in 1994, my 1992 book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity was widely discussed in the general press and reviewed in the flagship journals in history, political science, sociology and even English. Perhaps, more attention to it was paid in political science, because at that time political scientists were more interested in nationalism than other disciplines. But because my previous position at Harvard was in sociology, it was decided that at BU Sociology would be first among my affiliations.
My work has been transdisciplinary (not simply combining approaches characteristic of several disciplines – thus not interdisciplinary – but transcending disciplinary boundaries as the subject required). The University Professors Program (or UNI for short), as our school was called, thus was a perfect place for me. Intellectually, it was a very exciting, creative place: we were 28, and three among the 28 were Nobel Prize winners: Elie Wiesel, Sheldon Glashow (in physics), and Saul Bellow.
UNI was formed in the early 1970s by John Silber, a late giant among American university presidents when the time for giants and creative people among them had long since passed. In the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the collective reorientation of the American academe to the goal of raising a homegrown totalitarian paradise, the atmosphere in the universities was already visibly darkening, thought and speech policing were becoming the order of the day, creativity was suppressed. John Silber stood alone against these trends, protecting intellectual freedom against this assault (and despite the protests of the mediocre faculty in the social sciences and humanities who found totalitarianism congenial – on this see “Back to 1984: The Role of American Universities in Dismantling Liberal Democracy,” Society, 2016). But then he retired. A small man with a small mind came to replace him and – by executive order -- disbanded UNI. (There is a lot of hue and cry today about such actions being illegitimate attacks on academic freedom. Those currently upset should analyze this little precedent.) Most University Professors – those who could afford it -- left in disgust. But I needed my salary and stayed. Administratively, my position was moved to the Department of Sociology.
Should sociology exist as a discipline? Can sociology be saved or reformed?
The question is what is meant by sociology.
In mid-19th century Auguste Comte invented the word as a name for the general science of humanity. Comte was a very interesting thinker, but not a careful philosopher of science; his idea of science was vague and based, quite shakily, on a single example -- physics. And the time was not right – it was too early – for the understanding, even on the surface, as a separate category, of humanity, because the only framework for regarding reality as such was philosophical dualism with its irresolvable psychophysical problem. With its exclusive focus on matter, physics was outside the cloud of confusion this problem created. Those who thought about other aspects of reality – life and humanity – were paralyzed by it, torn between two irreconcilable and equally unproductive positions on the level of fundamental assumptions: materialism and idealism. To develop sciences of these aspects of reality, thought had to break out of the dualist box.
In 1859, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species offered the way to do so. He discovered a law applicable to all of life and completely independent of all the laws that organized inanimate matter and yet entirely consistent with them logically, as they provided the boundary conditions in which, and only in which life existed. It became possible to regard life as an autonomous reality (that is reality with its own causality) – a reality of its own kind, which was called “organic,” irreducible to material reality, though logically consistent, supported by it. This refocused the attention of thinkers interested in life (they were called natural historians then) on the features that distinguished life from matter, and the science of biology was born.
Darwin’s theory pointed the path to the science of humanity as well, and two very gifted individuals, Durkheim and Weber, independently attempted to lay its foundation. Durkheim immediately adopted for the new science he envisioned the name sociology, invented by his compatriot, and Weber, too, after some hesitation, called his project, which he initially referred to as “cultural history,” sociology. The name was somewhat misleading, for it focused attention on society (which is a corollary of life, and thus an organic phenomenon) and not on the distinctive features of humanity, separating it, as a reality of its own kind, sui generis, in Durkheim’s words, from life in general. But it is evident that both Durkheim and Weber in fact focused on culture. It is also evident that both of them conceived of sociology as a science, that is, as a methodical pursuit of truth about what actually exists – an attempt to understand empirical reality and attain objective knowledge about it, drastically different from normative and subjective speculations of any kind. The specific goal of science implied its method, based on logic and empirical evidence: logical formulation of hypotheses which allowed for their contradiction by evidence, later to be called the method of conjectures and refutations, while contradictions by evidence led to the reformulation and expansion of hypotheses, widening their “truth content,” and enabled science – any science so organized – to progress. In addition, for both founders of sociology, their new science was supposed to be a general one, dealing with every aspect of the sui generis reality, just as physics and biology in regard to theirs, and, like physics and biology, including numerous sub-disciplines. This was clearly implied in Weber’s own work, and made explicit by Durkheim, who wrote that sociology – the general science of institutions -- cannot be separate from history and should include the study of politics, law, economy, family, religion, in short, the whole gamut of social sciences as we know them today.
Growing up in the Soviet Union, I heard only criticism of sociology, which there was invariably referred to as “bourgeois sociology,” i.e., something very bad and entirely false. So, as soon as I could, I entered at the Hebrew University an ongoing class in sociology to see what it was in fact. The class at the moment was engaged in a discussion of Durkheim, and there and then I was swept off my feet, fell in love, and decided to dedicate myself to sociology. As I understood it, sociology was indeed a science, a general science, and a general science of humanity. It was the idea that one could approach humanity like physics approached matter and biology approached life, thereby gaining and generating objective understanding of humanity, that swept me off my feet. This is what I fell in love with.
Throughout my life I remained constant. I have been a sociologist in the specific sense assigned to sociology by Durkheim and Weber – a practitioner of the science of humanity. But I realized rather quickly that while the idea of such sociology lived in a few people’s minds, what existed as the academic discipline and the profession of sociology did not even remotely approximate this bright idea. Absurdly, sociology existed as a separate discipline alongside political science, economics, anthropology, history, and so on. It was analogous to a medical specialist knowing only the part on which he/she specialized and having no idea whatsoever about the rest of one’s patients’ organism. And what the vast majority of social scientists did was not science. Social sciences were, instead, a colossal collective fraud.
[In this regard and for the following see my 2020 entry on Social Science in Britannica: starting from the section “Social Science from the turn of the 20th Century.”]
At a certain point, I decided to explore systematically why this was so. And this is what I discovered. At the root of the problem was the institutionalization of an activist, normative project as “social science” in the new American institution – the research university. American research universities were the creation of the post-Civil War business magnates – the new super-rich who appreciated the enormous possibilities science (physics and biology) opened for business and were willing to invest in its cultivation -- and of the East-coast gentry, the scions of old families which formed the bulk of the colonial and pre-Civil War undifferentiated, mostly professional, but by default also cultural, elite. This elite was not intellectually sophisticated, was not much interested in science as progressive accumulation of reliable knowledge about empirical reality, and had no understanding or historical knowledge of the dramatic revolution in consciousness (ways of thinking) that made such accumulation possible. Its central concern was the change in the traditional structure of American society brought by the increasing immigration and, particularly, the rise (partly from among the new immigrants and generally from the less genteel strata of American society) of a new business elite – the powerful new rich, known among the gentry as “robber barons.” The gentry felt their position in society threatened and believed that great wealth, unconnected to the style of life which legitimated social status before the Civil War, was deleterious to the society as a whole and, concentrated in the hands of the few, made the rest of it poorer and created numerous social problems.
In 1865, some of the prominent members of this traditional elite formed in Boston the American Association for the Promotion of Social Science, the goal of which was to aid the development of social science, and to guide the public mind to the best practical means of promoting the amendment of laws, the advancement of education, the prevention and repression of crime, the reformation of criminals, and the progress of public morality, the adoption of sanitary regulations, and the diffusion of sound principles on questions of economy, trade, and finance.” The Association, declared its constitution, “will give attention to pauperism, and the topics related thereto; including the responsibility of the well-endowed and successful, the wise and educated, the honest and respectable, for the failures of others. It will aim to bring together the various societies and individuals now interested in these objects, for the purpose of obtaining by discussion the real elements of truth; by which doubts are removed, conflicting opinions harmonized, and a common ground afforded for treating wisely the great social problems of the day.
In this context, “science” was not the open-ended process of accumulation of objective knowledge about empirical reality by means of logically formulated conjectures subject to refutation by contradictory evidence. It was political advocacy by those with a special insight, capable of making real elements of truth to come out in discussion, i.e. science as an art, specifically, of persuasion: an ideology.
Within a year AAPSS merged with the American Social Science Association, a subsidiary of the Massachusetts Board of Charities, also formed in 1865. The leading patrician reformers -- its officers – included three future research university presidents who played a major role in the creation of these new organizational settings for the life of the mind, which would soon control it. Social scientists capitalized on the uncultured businessmen’s interest in natural science and harnessed this interest to their specific status concerns: offering their cooperation in developing institutions for the promotion of science, they established themselves as authorities over how far the definition of science would stretch. The first research university, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, was established in 1876, when it was thoroughly in the interest of those who identified as “social scientists” – to start with, quite unthinkingly, without any consideration of what this implied – to be recognized as scientists, members, together with physicists and biologists, of the scientific profession.
Self-seeking concerns behind this interest in the name of science were evident in two developments which followed closely on the heels of the formation of the first research university: the division of the “social science” into “disciplines” and efforts to model these disciplines on physics, establishing as unquestionable the belief that what made science objective was quantification, which also was the essence of the scientific method, and that the authority of a discipline corresponded to the extent of the application of this method, that is, the volume of quantitative formulations, in it.
The first “social science” to be institutionalized as an academic discipline within research universities was economic history. That this was history was probably related to the fact that many “social scientists” from patrician American families spent time in German universities, where history had already emerged as a highly respectable profession, encouraging these first American university professors without a particular interest to see themselves as historians. In its turn, the economic focus of the newly-minted historians reflected the old target of their social criticism.
Eight years after the first research university was founded, in 1884, American historians, gathered for the first annual professional convention, formed a trade union: the American Historical Association. During its second annual meeting, in 1885, some of the historians left the AHA and formed the American Economic Association. Several years later, a group of the first American economists left the AEA and formed the American Political Science Association. And in 1905, some of these political scientists, who earlier identified as economists and before that considered themselves historians, quit APSA to form ASS (a telling acronym!)– the American Sociological Society – the American Sociological Association of today. Thus, five years into the 20th century, an association of gentry activists and social critics affiliated with a charity board spawned four academic disciplines, splitting “social science” into history, economics, political science, and sociology.
Now, imagine: these people formed academic departments, offering new venues for employment, and trained the next generation of historians, economists, political scientists, and sociologists – disciplines created solely because of career considerations. These then trained the next generation and so on and so forth. You understand then, why the discipline of sociology alone is not a meaningful focus of discussion and criticism. It is a part of a much larger problem, which can only be understood and resolved on the general level.