Stephen Turner is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. "An omnivorous bi-lingual reader - in history, philosophy, political theory, cognitive science, and legal studies - Stephen P. Turner can be relied on for a generous perspective on the life of the mind. His long intellectual engagement with classical sociology and its heirs enables him to sift with ease the serious from the trivial. Even Turner's unusual academic position, combining insider and outsider characteristics, affords him a unique perch from which to view sociology in the round: a major figure in American and international sociology, of astounding productivity." - Peter Baehr (August 2025)

1. You are a refugee from Sociology, with an appointment in Philosophy. What made you leave?

It is a complicated story, but the dates are significant: 1986 was the nadir of the granting of US Sociology bachelor’s degrees, and also represented a change in direction. That was the last year I taught Sociology in my own institution. When the field revived it had more in common with Women’s Studies, and that was the case in my institution as well. By then I was gone from sociology except for some brief returns to teach or appear in courses. I had never been part of the graduate program and had taught graduate sociological theory as a visiting professor at Notre Dame and BU but not at my own institution. Department politics were pretty brutal.

The experiences I had the few times I returned to the department didn’t make me miss sociology. I was called back to teach a course on Comparative and Historical Sociology which I had originally designed, and took over the reading list the professor, who sadly was dying, had already created for it. One of the books on it was Hobsbawn’s Primitive Rebels. Hobsbawn, a Marxist, said that the (Italian) rebels in question lacked the appropriate class consciousness: that is what made them “primitive” rebels. The female student—and by this time the program was almost all female— who was assigned to discuss it objected to it because she thought it said Italian people were stupid, and she was Italian. The other students had their own complaints about life that they could associate with their identities.

Students were motivated by personal grievances or managed to find things to have grievances about. They were all victims. That is what sociology had become. “The personal is political” had been elevated to a methodological principle. Finding something to be offended by because of your identity became the starting point of research. At the same time the “personal” gave the victim a special authority that couldn’t be questioned. So these topics weren’t really discussable. Nor were others. Another time I was called back to give a department talk, which I chose to do on sociology and cognitive science. I was told that this was unacceptable biological reductivism. This kind of response made The Closing of the American Mind seem like child’s play: sociology was shutting itself into an intellectual closet.

2.You also had criticisms of conventional methods and theory in sociology. How did that relate to your leaving?

The departure was more a matter of administrative politics, rather than my choice alone, but the two were connected. I had been writing on philosophy of social science my whole career, including a comment on a ludicrous paper on “logic” that was published in the ASR in 1971 during a brief fashion for theory construction. I had thought that knowing some philosophy of science would both give me some intellectual leverage in sociology and point to ways of improving sociology. My MA thesis in philosophy was on measurement theory in philosophy of science. My dissertation was a defense of sociological explanation. What I learned was that this kind of writing, in American sociology, was looked down on by the elite as an activity for losers, and despised. But in philosophy it was fine, and relevant to a lot of other topics. So it was a better place for me to be. The sociology caste system is or at least was very strong, and I was never going to be part of the club anyway, so a found my audiences elsewhere and in other countries. Books like The Social Theory of Practices and Liberal Democracy 3.0 could be completely ignored in American sociology and find a big international and interdisciplinary market. And I found that you can engage in methodological and statistical discussion elsewhere than American sociology, with better people, and with a greater response.

3. What went wrong in sociology, in your view?

I did a paper for an Australian journal called “De-intellectualizing Sociology,” and that is probably a good label for what happened. Sociology was at some point in the past was a lively place with interests in big picture questions and big ideas, and a desire to bring facts to bear on contentious matters of policy. I trace it to the Labor Statistics movement of the 19th century. The bulletins of the Bureaus of Labor Statistics of the era make great reading. They managed to engage in questions like the relation of the fall of the Roman Empire and inequality. But they were resolutely factual and even-handed. For many reasons, some of which had to do with ideological conflicts, that kind of factual discourse became unacceptable, especially in the seventies. The protests against James Coleman and Edward Banfield represented a refusal to deal with anything that went against or even complicated the narrative of oppression that became increasingly dominant. What had attracted me to the field in the first place was no longer there, and the new way of doing sociology had no need for ideas or theory—they had the answers they wanted and didn’t care to debate them. In a way this was a replay of the older refusal to debate methodological issues: consensus by gaslighting and exclusion. I recently co-edited a collection of papers with a French and a Quebecois sociologist called The Future of Sociology: Ideology or Objective Social Science? The contributors were almost all old, retired, or soon to be retired, or in one case leaving the discipline. Other people would have ruined their careers by even raising the issue. But the response has been silence anyway.