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Liquidating Sociology

Liquidating Sociology

Last updated on: August 6, 2026 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Liquidating Sociology 2026-08-01T14:58:17-04:00 Gene Veith

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We have long complained about how leftwing “critical theory” has infected higher education and academic scholarship. One discipline–sociology–has gone all in on woke ideology, abandoning objectivity and the pursuit of knowledge in favor of leftwing activism. Some observers, including some sociologists, are saying that the field no longer deserves to be considered a legitimate academic discipline.

Carol Schmidt, a member of our congregation, is the wife of the late Lutheran seminary professor and sociologist, Dr. Alvin Schmidt (author of the classic How Christianity Changed the World). She has been putting me on to articles about what is happening to the subject that her husband taught in several colleges, in addition to his theological work at the Fort Wayne seminary.

One of the articles is by Pamela Paul in the Wall Street Journal entitled Is It Time to ‘Liquidate’ the Study of Sociology? She notes that the discipline, the study of social behavior, has been extremely influential in the realm of public policy, identifying social problems such as crime and family breakdown and proposing possible solutions. Today, though, the field, which used to offer multiple perspectives on the issues, has changed. Recently, she writes, referring to the American Sociological Association,

The ASA’s president described sociology to its members as “a form of liberatory praxis” that is “currently undergoing a renaissance as antiracist, decolonial, feminist, queer and transnational theorizing lead us to more inclusive insights.”

As another prominent sociologist says, “I believe in sociology as a weapon.”

Paul quotes University of Illinois sociologist Ilana Redstone, who has traced the consequences of a 1971 Supreme Court decision that ruled that policies with a disparate impact on different groups constitute illegal discrimination.

Within sociology, it meant that any inequality among groups was de facto the result of discrimination, rendering moot other possible theories, Redstone says: “We’re treating questions around causation as settled.” Even suggesting research into alternative sociological explanations is viewed as racist, morally wrong and victim blaming at best.

Today, 80% of the articles published in sociology journals have to do with inequality. And many of those articles completely violate with the principles of scholarly rigor and objectivity. Paul quotes another dissenter:

“If you look at the data on so much of the current research on capitalism, sexism, racism, you’ll see that sociology is misrepresenting the evidence, concealing the evidence or distorting it outright,” says Kevin McCaffree, a sociologist at the University of North Texas. He points to numerous studies purporting to show the pervasiveness of poverty in America, rampant sexism in the hiring of women and the harms inflicted by “microaggressions.”

Paul’s article goes into the plight of sociologists who disagree with the prevailing ideology that controls their profession:

They describe an atmosphere in which to get ahead, you must consistently submit to political litmus tests, publish accordingly and pray that you make it to tenure without getting excommunicated. Specializing in a stodgy subject like religion, the military or law enforcement—especially if one has anything positive to say—is as unfashionable as flaunting a fur coat.

In their view, contemporary sociology’s relentless focus on race, gender and class, its emphasis on the need for social change over the benefits of social stability and its obsession with inequality amount to an abdication of scholarly duty, decreasing the value of sociological research, reducing its impact and undermining public trust.

A key critic is the well-regarded sociologist of religion Christian Smith (whom we have drawn on at this blog), author of The Sacred Project of American Sociology (in which he applies what we discussed yesterday as “sacred” to his own profession). Paul quotes him:

“Sociology’s sacred project champions emancipation, autonomy, equality, justice, inclusion, diversity, open-mindedness, progress, tolerance, and cosmopolitanism,” Smith wrote. “In the end that sacred project actually tends to produce sectarian narrowness, exclusion, uniformity, silencing, self-censorship, lack of debate, the negative sanctioning of nonconformists, and the debilitation of rigorous thought.”. . .

“From my point of view, sociology should be producing intellectuals who think deeply and insightfully about the world,” he says. Instead, he says, it’s producing technicians and activists. “The painfulness of all this is that I believe sociology really matters and makes a contribution. But sociology is heading down the wrong road. Over time, I’ve thought to myself, ‘What if we just liquidate the discipline?’”

Smith has recently resigned from his position as a tenured sociology professor at Notre Dame, where he taught for 20 years. (For more on that, see our blog post Temptations of a Christian University.)

Prof. Smith’s anguish and that of the other dissident sociologists whom Paul quotes is heart-rending for me, a fellow holder of the academic vocation. I found a haven from the corruption of my discipline, English, by teaching primarily in Christian colleges.

But I don’t know that I’d be in favor of “liquidating” sociology completely. The metaphor itself comes from the totalitarian ideology that Smith is opposing, in which Soviet or Nazi operatives sought to eliminate ideas, groups, or individuals that opposed them by making every trace of them disappear, like liquid running off into the soil.

Society is a legitimate object of study. The field has made important contributions to the sum of human knowledge. The discipline’s founders–such as Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and W. E. B. DuBois–were important thinkers. More recently, Peter Berger (a Lutheran) has made important contributions, and sociologists like James Davison Hunter have greatly aided us Christian cultural critics.

The article describes the woes of sociologists who are dissenting from the norms, but that shows that they exist. Meanwhile, the article also charts the decline of the field under its current leadership, with enrollments plummeting, majors switching into other social science fields, and reactions such as Florida dropping their core sociology requirement in all state colleges and universities.

In this case, the liquidation is not being carried out by secret police and concentration camps. Rather, the liquidation is being carried out voluntarily by the field’s own practitioners who have been eroding their own profession. Let sociology in its current state continue to fail until it liquefies and evaporates. Then it can be reconstituted on better foundations. The solution is not to liquidate sociology but to make it solid again.

(See also Kali Jerrard’s post A Discipline in Need of Reform at the blog of the National Association of Scholars, which agrees with this diagnosis and cites what happened in Denmark, which is far from being a right wing state but is still culturally Lutheran: “We should follow the Danes who in 1986 closed their publicly funded sociology departments after deciding they were too far down the rabbit hole of neo-Marxist activism. The discipline was later rebuilt with academic freedom and scientific integrity at the forefront.”)

Illustration: Free Sociology PowerPoint Templates and Google Slides via slideegg. [Note the bulleted categories for this introduction to sociology Power Point, downloaded 1.3 thousand times: Functionalism, Marxism, Feminism, Social Action Theory, and Postmodernism.]

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