Book Review of Sociological Insight, by Randall Collins

Randall Collins has probably influenced me more than any other writer. A sociologist who concentrated on theory, with an encyclopedic knowledge of world history and in particular intellectual history, I regard him as a candidate for greatest intellectual of the 20th century whom no one outside his field knows.

Sociological Insight is a short book, subtitled “An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology”.

The dig against sociology is that it mostly discovers stuff that any idiot already knew: It is reified common sense. (A friend and I used to joke that if we ever started a consultancy we’d call it RCS, and not tell anyone what it meant.)

Collins wrote this small book to explain to students considering sociology, and to non-sociologists, why sociology was worth studying. The book is clearly written, divided into short chapters and clocks in at under 200 pages. Used copies are cheap, or you can probably still find it at your local university or college library.

If you read only one book of the books I’m going to review this year I suggest it be this one, or “An Introduction to Weberian Sociology,” also by Collins.

Enough preamble, into the meat. Each section of the book covers one subject, I will precis some of them, but not all.

The Pre-Rational Basis of Social Trust and Solidarity

Collins covers the Durkheimian argument that it is always rational at some point to betray trust and that trust is therefore non-rational. This sounds like game theory, but Durkehim made this point long before game theory. The idea is simple enough, as a game (society) accumulates assets, at some point it is better to betray and grab them all. The long term gains do not necessarily outweigh the what you’ll get from betraying.

If this is true, and it seems to be, then why do we have societies at all? The answer is that trust isn’t rational. The more interesting question is: How trust is formed? The Durkheimian answer is: “Through rituals.”

People assemble, they put their attention together on the same sacred object, they move together, and their emotions move together. There is emotional effervesence, and the symbols become charged with the feelings generated by the ritual. We feel a force larger than ourselves, we feel awe (awesome), we feel as one with the group.

These rituals can be small (the rituals of greeting, the rituals of dating) or they can be huge. You can see the sacred effect in fans of football and fans of rock bands, but also in how people become outraged when a flag is burned, or in how people thinks it makes a statement to burn a flag.

Trust is shared belief and sense of belonging. Ritual groups re-enact it regularly when they meet as groups, we re-enact it every day when we treat each other ritually, which we always do. (Just don’t say goodbye to a close friend; instead, walk away without saying a word. See how that feels for both of you.)

Collins goes into all of this in far greater detail than I can, touching on the caveats, the counter-arguments, the cult of modern individuality, and the creation of the self by the group. The entire section is worth reading because it rebuts the common idea that we are in any way self-contained, or self-created individuals.

Power

Collins then moves on to a discussion of how social power is created: through force, through money, and through solidarity. He discusses the limitations and benefits of each. Force gets you the least cooperation, but you give the least in return; money buys you cooperation, but not enthusiasm; letting people “in” and giving them power to speak and act on the part of the group generally gets you enthusiasm, but it also requires you to share actual power, which you may not wish to do.

Coercion, by the way, requires surveillance, which Collins meant in the old-fashioned sense of “someone watching you” as opposed to all-out electronic surveillance (which is still, eventually, someone watching you), and its effects on conformity, group think, and submission. High-surveillance societies are really coercion societies, and they produce people who appear dull and without any initiative.

This is something everyone should read and think on because we are moving from a low-surveillance society back to a high-surveillance society; perhaps the most high-surveillance society in history, in certain respects. Understanding what it is likely to do us is important.

Crime

Collins covers two theories here. The first is labeling theory. Most adolescents do something that would be considered a crime, but most aren’t caught doing it, let alone given a record. Those who are become criminals, because, once labeled a criminal, your options for doing anything else tend to shut down, while your options for being a criminal open up (not least because of all the contacts you make in prison.)

On top of this, most crimes are not “natural” crimes, i.e, like violence crimes, those recognized by essentially all societies. By making something a crime, we create criminals.

Collins cites the experience of Denmark in WWII, when the police were locked up for a year. What happened? Property crime increased tenfold. Violent crimes did not increase at all.

Collins thus states Crime seems to fall into three categories: (1) Victimless crimes, like drug use, which would not exist if society did not make them a crime; (2) Property crime, which would exist no matter what, and; (3) Crimes of passion which are largely unaffected by the criminal justice system at all (if someone’s so worked up they’re going to assault, murder, or rape, deterrence doesn’t work).

As part of his argument, Collins does cite “socialist” societies like Russia as having no property, but still having property. This is one place I differ with him, I think Communist countries only got rid of property in theory, not practice. Societies which really did have almost no property, like hunter-gatherer bands, also had essentially no property crime. In many such societies, if someone has something you want, you admire it and they give it to you. Of course, some time later someone admires it and you give it to them…

Collins goes on to talk about how crime is useful in a ritual context: If laws are about enforcing ritual categories of sacred and profane, society needs scapegoats, to reinforce the bad/good dichotomies upon which it rests.

Marriage, Love, and Property

Here, Collins makes a strong argument that marriage is about sexual property, or about who has the exclusive right to have sex with other people. There is a section on how dating is a negotiating process and ritual used to create strong emotions, which we regard as love.

There is a hardheaded look at power in marriages, with a note that as women gain resources outside the household, their relative power increases. In the traditional marriage, where the woman is dependent on her husband, she is essentially a servant, with the added side of official sexual duties (and remember, up until very recently in most countries, the law was that a husband could not rape a wife, she had already given consent to sex at any time or place or under any condition.)

This section is historical, moving from the Victorian household and marriage revolution through to the 60s and 70s revolution in dating and mores and is worth reading in the whole, though you may find it has disenchanted romance somewhat for you, even as Collins avers that the rituals do produce love.

Concluding Remarks

There is also a chapter covering what sociology offers to the project of making an AI (a lot, actually, and Collins suggestions are eerily prescient to what is just now happening with social robots), that I’m not going to cover.

What is important about this book is not the specific subjects covered, but that it can teach you how to think like a sociologist. Core assumptions are hammered in: Humans are almost entirely non-rational; personality and character come from the outside, not the inside. Understanding society means looking at variations: If the behaviour is thus here and now, is it different in another time and place? If so, it is not essential, it is social (for example crude studies insist breasts are sexual, but traditional Japanese society viewed them as related to child-bearing and thus disgusting and non-sexually attractive.)

You can only learn about your own society by looking at other societies, and you can only understand individuals by looking at the larger groups which created them.

Sociology is a discipline which is widely despised. Sometimes there’s good reason. But because hardly anyone outside of sociology takes it seriously (unlike, say, economics), sociologists have a higher frequency of doing astoundingly useful work than in other social sciences, save anthropology and archeology.

Reading this book, and indeed anything written by Collins, will pay back your time and open intellectual vistas most people weren’t even aware existed.

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