Rethinking ‘Current Crisis’ Arguments: Gouldner and the Legacy of Critical Sociology

Abstract

Proclamations of ‘current crisis’ in sociology are long-standing and have recently resurfaced in Britian and North America. This article explores the response of Alvin Gouldner to an earlier 1970s perceived ‘current crisis’. It then discusses some of the key dimensions ascribed to the current ‘current crisis’ – fragmentation, the decline of the intellectual, the need for a higher profile for public and professional sociology - to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Gouldner's ideas for analysing the situation of contemporary sociology. It concludes that Gouldner's critical sociology provides a useful basis for understanding current debates about fragmentation and public sociology, but less so in explaining the decline of intellectuals. In addition, neither Gouldner nor contemporary thinking about sociology's present-day ‘current crisis’ give much attention to the vastly increased regulation and bureaucratisation of the university system accompanying the expended remit of regulatory government, something we think underlies the discipline's successive perceptions of crisis. The contemporary version of critical sociology, with which this article aligns itself, provides a more structural and less voluntaristic rethinking of ‘current crisis’ arguments.