Inventing Social Justice: SSSP and the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

I would like to start with a question that I have borrowed from colleagues in the Humanities who are interested in the history of science (de Santillana 1959). What was Galileo’s crime? Most responses to this question would focus on his revolutionary discoveries about the movement of the planets around the sun. Another view of his crime, however, was that he chose to communicate his Žndings about the earth and the sun, not in Latin, the medium of the educated elite, but in Italian, the public vernacular, parola del popolo. My address today is a call to the Society for the Study of Social Problems to build on its legacy and move toward committing Galileo’s crime. I will examine different approaches to making the knowledge generated by scholars in SSSP available to a public outside of the academy and our professional community. I believe that a search for this new direction has beneŽts not only for inventing social justice, but also for reinventing and energizing the sociological enterprise. Let us begin with a brief look backward. As we all know, the founding of SSSP in 1951 was grounded in its opposition to the American Sociological Society’s commitment to a “pure science” model of sociology, and the belief that sociology had lost sight of humanistic goals (Galliher and Galliher 1995; Skura 1976). The early opposition to ASS was often grounded in personal animosities, but there was also the concern that ASS was not democratic and was dominated by an “Eastern establishment” not very open to the aspirations of younger sociologists. But SSSP was not alone in its emergence as an alternative or oppositional movement. At least a decade before the founding of SSSP, some of the newest generation of professional psychologists were concerned about the narrow professionalism of their Želd and in 1936, they formed the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). These early opposition movements looked like attempts to reform the larger and more dominant professional associations of their disciplines. It was not until the early 1960s that SSSP set in motion the beginnings of a critique of mainstream sociology that went to core issues of epistemology and methodology—How do we know what we know? And what is the role of the sociologist in the process of creating new knowledge? In 1961, Alvin Gouldner’s presidential address to SSSP examined the doctrine of a value-free sociology and judged it to be a group myth that, among other things, served to marginalize the role of sociologist as critical intellectual and to elevate to center stage the sociologist as value-free professional.