above the bay
I made the mistake once of trying to search for sociology on reddit and it was all these people complaining about how the field ~drinks the leftist koolaid~ and this one post or comment or something was like “it’s such a shame because it seems like it could be such an interesting field but everybody in it keeps circling back to the same couple of people, ie Marx, Weber, Foucault, etc” and I just. Yes, that’s how grand theories work. And somebody else was complaining about those damn Marxist-indoctrinated academic leftist conspiratory professors and it’s just like. I don’t know how to explain to you that Marx is widely considered to be the father of sociology and that’s the reason why the first week of any sociology class is about Marxist theory, and basically every single theorist that has come after him has critiqued his work to various degrees, which is… the opposite of propaganda. And just… the way people complain about identity politics and ~leftist propaganda circlejerks~ within their sociology departments is just. If they’re actually being honest about it, then either their schools have shit departments or they don’t actually realize the scope of the field. Because there are folks who are like “I feel like it would be worthwhile if it were more political science and history-based” and I’m like that is a thing you can get out of sociology. I had a sociology professor who didn’t know jack shit about identity politics who was really invested in the sociology of economics and looking at society on the basis of class and work and organization. I read ethnographies of different workforces, I learned about the development of capitalism from agrarianism to feudalism to mercantilism, I learned about labor laws and paraprofessionals and gig economies. It’s incredibly easy to find sociology that relates to economics, which seems more the cup of tea of reddit libertarians than the queer theory that I enjoy. You like philosophy? Take theory classes. You like math? Take research methods. I took a sociology class on social well-being, which included all kinds of stuff like mental health, public policy, cultural organization, family studies, etc. There were so many libertarians in my soci classes, but they got something out of it and they had their own readings through the lens of different theorists and at the end of the day, they did sociology just as validly as I did, since there’s no one way to do it and no one opinion that work in the field has to stan. Neoliberalism is a whole fucking grand theory, and actual modern sociologists work within it! There’s literally something for everybody within sociology and if you’re complaining about how the entire field is somehow a hegemonic conspiracy, you don’t know jack shit about it.
