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The Decomposition of Sociology, by Irving Louis Horowitz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 282 pp. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-19-507316-9.
Irving Louis Horowitz has been a prodigiously productive sociologist, social theorist, essayist, journal editor, and book publisher since his first work, on Giordano Bruno, appeared more than forty years ago, followed soon by works on Helvetius and Sorel. But Horowitz quickly went well beyond analyses of social theorists, helping to establish an agenda for sociology in the 1960s with such works as The New Sociology and Professing Sociology, along with analyses of U.S. policy, especially Project Camelot. His range grew wider later, with writings on political sociology, genocide, social science and public policy, academic publishing, and an important work on C. Wright Mills, whose unedited essays and works Horowitz was also instrumental in bringing to publication. All of this while running a journal and a press. And if that were not enough, Horowitz has always written engagingly, argued vigorously, and presented his thoughts usually in jargon-free, straightforward prose.
Unfortunately, The Decomposition of Sociology is not a worthy successor to this vast oeuvre. The first half is an un-unified, intemperate, accusatory diatribe, filled with the kind of absurd generalization and unsociological analysis of America and of the field of sociology that we would expect more from Allan Bloom and Charles Sykes than from the man who produced The New Sociology. Divided into two parts, "The Decomposition of Sociology" and "The Reconstruction of Social Science," Horowitz's new book argues that sociology, "as a result of a special set of historical and current situations, and internal pulls no less than external pushes, has become so enmeshed in the politics of advocacy and the ideology of self-righteousness" (p. 5) that it has undermined the possibility of scientific research. The social sciences are now more "staging areas for political action" (p. 245) than "sensitizing" agencies for behavior or moral reflection" (p. 197). This situation has been brought about by a "new extremism...made of deconstructionists; new historicists; people in gender studies,...