Sociology as a Science

[On p. 91 of the May 1973 issue of The American Sociologist , I wrote the following: ". . . Davida Gates presents a lachrymose jeremiad about 'the poor status of sociology within colleges and universities.9 One of the reasons for this decline is given on the same page, where M. Bulmer castigates the 'curiously parochial9 and 'markedly ethnocentric' (1 would also add, if I may borrow Robert Bierstedťs 1948 term: 'temporocentric') sociological journals. . . ." In general, sociology departments have been politicized, ideology has been stressed at the expense of social science, the sociohistorical approach has been neglected, other cultures have been chauvinistically deemphasized, and sociology majors have been intellectually victimized. The present author believes that one of the solutions to these problems is more serious introductory textbooks. After all, other disciplines have been eminently successful in this respect. Claude A. Villee's Biology , 1977, for instance, and Linus Pauling and Peter Pauling's Chemistry , 1975, are not Mickey Mouse products. Thus, as an example, the chapter on sociology as a science could be written as follows, or somewhat similarly.]*