At the least for a non-insider, sociology shouldn’t be a really helpful science, if it may be known as a science or perhaps a self-discipline in any respect. With its checkered historical past, it appears extra like an “undiscipline.” Though there are some sensible exceptions, the widespread denominator of most sociologists appears to be the idea that people, or a minimum of non-sociologists, are a product of society and that socialism is the answer to all issues. Present exceptions revolve across the rational-choice faculty of sociology, impressed by economists who utilized their methodology to “social” points similar to discrimination, marriage, social capital, and so forth. On the first rank of those economists figures Gary Becker, laureate of the 1992 Nobel prize in economics
In his Nobel lecture, “The Financial Method of Life,” Becker famous:
Specialists from fields that do take into account social questions are sometimes drawn to the financial means of modelling habits due to the analytical energy supplied by the idea of particular person rationality. Thriving colleges of rational alternative theorists and empirical researchers are lively in sociology, regulation, political science, historical past, anthropology, and psychology. The rational alternative mannequin gives essentially the most promising foundation presently accessible for a unified method to the evaluation of the social world by students from the social sciences
In considered one of his most necessary works, Legislation, Laws, and Liberty, printed in three volumes from 1973 to 1978 (College of Chicago Press, 2022, for the consolidated version by Jeremy Shearmur), Friedrich Hayek, additionally a Nobel economist, suggests {that a} distinct science of society (“sociology”) doesn’t make extra sense than would a definite science of the pure world (name it “naturology”):
I have to confess right here that, nonetheless grateful all of us should be for a few of the descriptive work of the sociologists, for which, nonetheless, maybe anthropologists and historians would have been equally certified, there appears to me nonetheless to exist no extra justification for a theoretical self-discipline of sociology than there can be for a theoretical self-discipline of naturology aside from the theoretical disciplines coping with specific courses of pure or social phenomena. (p. 534)
