The elephant in the room: Human nature and the sociology textbooks

Abstract

This article considers the approach to human nature implicit in four textbooks often used to introduce sociology. Human nature is seen as a set of drives and capacities, which play a key role in people’s actions in any social context. In the textbooks, a variety of arguments suggest the irrelevance of a concept of human nature to the discipline. Partly, this message is conveyed by opposing social to biological explanations. In addition, the discipline is framed to exclude the concept of human nature. Society, on the one hand, and the culturally unique individual, on the other, exhaust the sociological arena. Accounts of socialization imply the transcendence of biology and with that, human nature. Refutations of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are supported with broad ranging rejections of biological explanation, with a similar implication that human nature is not a necessary concept in sociological accounts. Nevertheless, human nature is the elephant in the room. The concept is required and assumed in the detail of these textbooks as they explain current sociological research and analysis. One impact of the denial of human nature is to misunderstand current disputes between sociology and evolutionary psychology.