At some time during any sociology course, the question is bound to come: Well, so what? What is any of this good for, anyway?

The first thing I should tell you is that I'm not absolutely certain that I know. But to some extent I think I do, and I can really explain it best when I tell you what good it is for me.

There have been many times when I have wondered if, after all is said and done, sociology is just one more academic pursuit, perhaps having some abstract, intrinsic merit such as knowledge for its own sake, but ultimately of little real worth or consequence. There are some moments when I do conclude that it is just another something more to know, or just that much more nonsense.

But there are other moments when the knowledge of sociology seems almost too real, almost too much to be aware of, too overpowering, and I find myself longing for an earlier naivete and a long lost innocence when my world was far less complicated and much more immediately enjoyable.

I think I have learned a great deal during my acquaintance with people and ideas sociological. And after more than 30 years of familiarity, I feel as though at times I am really able to understand, to catch glimpses of the world with an awareness borne of what C. Wright Mills called "the sociological imagination."

In my teaching I have discovered that I cannot tell students what it is or how to do it, so much as I can share with them my own experience, my own sociological awareness. This is what I would like to do here: to describe as clearly as I can some of the view afforded by my experience with sociology. Here, then, as the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers might say, are some of my own learnings, stated as well as I know how.

I must always start with myself.
"It has been my experience...." That phrase sums up how it is that I learn. I have found that I am my only real teacher, since what I know and what I believe are the result of my active acceptance or rejection, my interpretation, my understanding, my believing, my acting on specific tasks.

Each individual is the locus of his or her own reality, and I am the locus of mine. In some ways this is a paramount lesson of sociology: Max Weber, who many consider the most influential of the classical sociological theorists, focused on the importance of verstehen--the subjective interpretations that people make of their own and each other's behavior--as the necessary starting point for understanding human activity and studying it scientifically. Alfred Schutz, who was perhaps the most prominent philosopher of the sociology of everyday life, described people as always acting from the vantage point of their particular "here and now," the existential coordinates of the world uniquely their own. George H. Mead alluded to something quite similar when he noted that the meaning an object has to an individual is not inherent in the object itself but "resides" in the kind of behavior which the individual is prepared to direct toward it. Thus in learning as in life, I must start with my self, as I fully expect that each of you must start with yours.

At the same time I must continue on to others.
Sociology has provided me with the intellectual tools for understanding this personal experience: that as a distinct, separate, solely corporeal entity, I am "less real" than the social relationships through which I live out my life and through which I realize the sustenance of human existence.

This insight is somewhat difficult to communicate because many people seem to be immediately defensive or apprehensive about "being dependent," a condition often viewed negatively. What I have discovered is that there is no way of not being dependent. By our very nature people are social, and in that sense, social beings. We are all necessarily implicated in a web of social relationships, and it is through those relationships that we, in fact, exist.

Charles H. Cooley, an early sociologist at the University of Michigan, stated this idea with superb clarity when he wrote, "Society and individuals do not denote separable phenomena, but are simply the collective and distributive aspects of the same thing." This realization was a long time developing for me. As a participant in western society I had been socialized in an explicit tradition and ideology of individualism. Further, I had been seduced by what seems to be the patent obviousness of my physically separate and distinct body. Physically separate, I concluded that each one of us must be socially independent. But that was a mistaken conclusion, much too hastily taken; for I found I actually existed as a partner in many, many compound relationships with other people. Thus, for me, dependence and especially the interdependence that social psychologist Jack Gibb describes as an inherent aspect of full self-realization, is not only necessary but positively valued as well.

To understand the nature of society, I must first understand human nature.
More importantly, I need to understand my own nature as a particular instance of that peculiar animal, homo sapiens. From this derives the fact, which most of us seem much too ready to forget, that what we learn about people, we learn about ourselves.

It is this reflexiveness that often makes studying sociology hard and sometimes awkward. What I study when I study sociology is not just something "out there." What I study has very much to do with what goes on with me "in here." In this respect, the study of other animals is only partially helpful because it is precisely the ways in which humans are different from all other animals that I need to understand most. I can understand human behavior only by understanding humans, by coming in contact with and trying to comprehend the lives of men and women, the living of people.

This has led me back to what is called philosophical anthropology, to the openly speculative efforts of such diverse thinkers as Aristotle, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Abraham Maslow, Lewis Mumford, Eric Fromm, and Jean Paul Sartre. All of these thinkers have, in various ways, attempted to locate and describe the common human starting point--that complex of inherent qualities upon which we each build in developing our distinctive humanness. In a very real sense, all my sociological learning and all that I am writing here is simply what I understand about human nature. For example, Aristotle characterized the human as "the political animal." In the context of his time this meant that humans were unique in being by nature participants in the polis, the Greek city-state. In modern terms this means that our distinctive humanness derives from our participation in society. Thus humans are essentially social, collective beings.

At the same time, each of us is finally alone and separate; each of us must die individually, while others live on. We are each finally governed and motivated by what Alfred Schutz called the fundamental anxiety: "I know that one day I shall die, and I fear that death." In this respect, society is finally superior to each and every one of us; it was here before we arrived and it remains behind when we depart. This is part of what the philosopher and social psychologist George H. Mead meant when he said that "society precedes the self." This is one of the ways in which Georg Simmel, a 19th century contemporary of Max Weber's, noted that the group was superior to the individual.

In the writings of many of the thinkers I have mentioned there is one characteristic which appears to distinguish humans again and again. This is the feature of self-consciousness. Humans are animals aware of themselves--and disrupted, even thrown off by that awareness. For Sartre, the human is the animal who "knows he is going to die;" for Fromm, the animal "for whom his own existence is a problem he must solve." Once self-conscious, once self-aware, humans are no longer quite "natural", no longer completely at ease with themselves. This "dis-ease," this un-naturalness is inherent in the condition of being human. As Mark Twain once quipped, "Man is the only animal who blushes...and needs to."

Human nature is such that, by our very being in the world, we are alienated.
With this realization things changed around a lot for me. My own experience of alienation became not a problem to be solved, but a condition to be at the least accepted, at the most embraced. The fundamental human situation may, in fact, be one of alienation. As Mead demonstrated, one becomes human by gaining a self, but the very process of gaining a self is to experience the experiencing subject as the object that is experienced. Such detached self-consciousness is, according to Marx's classic definition, one form of alienation. Thus in the writings of such diverse thinkers as Karl Marx (who was responding to the earlier philosophies of G. W. F. Hegel and Ludwig Fuerbach), Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Eric Fromm, and R. D. Laing, I have found again and again that the very process which gives to each of us a self--and thus makes us distinctly human and social--at the very same time alienates us from those selves. The human being is, by virtue of being human, separated from his or her self--alien, "un-natural."

How can this be? It is indicative of what I think of as a primary feature of human living: dilemma. More and more I have come to understand human existence in terms of irreconcilable opposites which necessarily seem to occur together. The gaining of selfhood through separation is one instance of this dilemmic quality. Perhaps this is best epitomized in Eric Fromm's discussion of "the art of loving", in which he notes that loving someone means eventually being pained by their loss or bringing them pain through their loss of you. One cannot change this; one can only abide it. It is inherent in that difficult and glorious social relationship we call love. Thus my living, my being alive in the world, is the activity of sustaining the constant tensions between dilemmic alternatives. I know myself in that tension, as that tension.

The point of all this is to be in the world in a real and active way; for me, life is to live.
Karl Marx once wrote that philosophers have long been given to discussing the world, but the point is to change it. The purpose of understanding for me is to gain some effective leverage over my life; to be able, in Schutz's terms, to fulfill my projects in my acts, to bring my fantasies into reality; in Mead's words, to manipulate aspects of my situation and achieve some sort of equilibrium. This means that I do not stay in "one place" for long because my understanding is to afford me movement.

Kurt Lewin, an influential American social psychologist, described all organisms as being characterized by locomotion--physical or cognitive self-induced change--toward solutions to their problems. What this means for me is that I continually want those events which intrude themselves into and comprise my life space arranged in ways that work for me, and I want to participate in that arrangement. I have had some trouble with this aspect of life because the admonition to "settle down" seems to imply serious restrictions to locomotion and hence to the variety of experience that life might offer. I want to know so that I may both be and do.

Much of what I am trying to communicate in these first few learnings is warmly summarized in Alfred Schutz's simple phrase, "We grow older together." Life is tenuous at best, and it is always fatal. We each move down its inexorable path at our varied paces toward the only event that is conclusive: death. Yet enroute we build and share very compelling realities with one another. It is mostly in the intimacy of physical co-presence, emotional response, and intelligible communication with caring others that we transcend our individual isolation, and so both comprehend and conquer our one-way journey. It is only in the presence of another that we realize ourselves even while we age, and, indeed, recognize our aging. It is because of this unique togetherness of human beings that, to paraphrase Sartre, we are always somewhat beyond ourselves, together becoming more than who we each might become taken individually.

Knowledge is always incomplete, partial, distorted, and inadequate.
To the extent that what I learn involves me, education and growth and change become synonymous. Sometimes those changes are of my own making, and sometimes they are not. In a forceful book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity that was very popular in the sixties, two professional educators, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, applied the sociological perspective to the process of education, revealing the ways in which it shapes what we become, often without our realizing it. It is through this shaping process that "society's future"--literally embodied in the students who comprise the next generation--is guaranteed.

Yet somehow in this process we humans seem to tell each other everything except what we really need to know. We construct pictures that are only partially accurate, and we are always leaving important pieces out. At a societal level we do not want to know that Thomas Jefferson had a black mistress, or that during the middle of the Viet Nam War over 50,000 men were AWOL from the U.S. Armed Forces, or that homosexuality is widespread in American prisons, or that those states which have abolished the death penalty have seen no increase in the crimes to which it had previously been attached, or that the United States has one of the highest rates of infant mortality among the industrialized nations of the world.

In sociology, this whole process of learning and changing and becoming human is called socialization. It is the process whereby society produces "new human parts" to replace those that wear out, fulfilling what Talcott Parsons (perhaps America's most famous and most difficult sociological theorist) would call "the functions of integration and pattern maintenance." Such a process must necessarily be biased and partial. In terms of Freudian theory, socialization requires the restrictions of individuals so that the whole of society might be more free.

But such cultural repression may no longer be required or valid. The unsettling thesis of necessary and powerful societal dominance over the individual has recently been challenged by such contemporary thinkers as Robert Theobald, Herbert Marcuse, Philip Slater, and the rising voices of feminist thinkers who thus raise difficult and profound questions about what we should now chose to force ourselves to do.

Whatever my education, however incomplete my understanding, I must act.
There is no way out of this for me or, I believe, for anyone. Even though we know very little, still we must act--we cannot not act. And to act we must decide, we must select from among alternative choices a line of action and its subsequent consequences. To do one thing is not to do another. Here again is one of life's dilemmic qualities. Strangely enough, even not doing something is, both practically and sociologically, doing something. In fact, it may be the most important thing going on at the moment. For example, try not paying your income tax next year or, better still, try not putting on your clothes before you go to work tomorrow! This characteristic of human life is what the philosopher William James described as the "forced choice."

Realization of this has helped me to understand what the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre meant when he wrote, "I choose myself from day to day...." One cannot not choose. Although I would often like to wait awhile before I make my choice, that is not possible. As David Matza brilliantly illustrated in his analysis of the process of becoming a marijuana user in Becoming Deviant, when you are sitting around in a group and someone hands you a joint, you've got to do something: put it to your lips and draw on it, pass it on, drop it, get up and "use" the bathroom, become engrossed in something else so you can be intentionally oblivious to the situation... something has to happen. What you cannot choose, except in some very special and extremely rare circumstances, is not to choose. In this respect, we may never have enough information or knowledge to know exactly what to do, but however much or little we have, it is all that we have at the time and it is always more than nothing. Thus science and other forms of knowing take me as far as they can; then I must carry myself the rest of the way, and embrace the responsibility of doing so.

If I want to fully try to comprehend human behavior, it won't work for me to use a rational model.
People are just not like that: they do not operate on a loss/gain basis in which profits are maximized, or with outcomes shrewdly anticipated, or according to long range plans designed with various contingencies figured in. Some of the greatest minds in the social sciences have worked hard to move us away from that naive, enlightenment picture of humans as the rational animal.

To understand human life, I must try to recognize and acknowledge sorrow and laughter, terror and lust, disappointment and surprise, poignancy and irony, and that quieting desire to just hold onto another breathing person. We are so much more emotion and feeling than reason and rationality. The work of Freud, Pareto, Weber, and countless others have well articulated these dimensions of our lives which we know so intimately but often don't quite know how to say..

In line with this, I have found that I can best attempt some expression of my understanding of people through the use of metaphor. As the contemporary sociologist Scott Greer has written, metaphor helps us by "stating the unknown, the hitherto un-symbolized; in new combinations of the known, it evokes meanings not possible before." Such expression is distinctly outside a fully rational realm. But if I am fully and accurately to comprehend human behavior, to know people authentically, I must contemplate such metaphors. The intellectualism of the modern university tends to over-emphasize the rational model. The result is that other pervasive dimensions of human life are ignored or devalued.

In much the same way, we in the universities over-value science as the only legitimate and valid form of knowledge. Scientific truths are not the only truths, and sociologists are beginning to recognize that people, in their everyday rounds of commonsense experience, demonstrate this all the time. The writings of such sociologists as Alfred Schutz, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, Peter McHugh, and David Matza have become exciting and challenging to me because they focus on these everyday realities. Subsequently, I hear myself sometimes saying: I know that; I've seen that happen; that is something that has happened to me; that describes my own life! Sometimes I simply respond, "Oh, yeah!"

In sociology, I am not only able but compelled to study values.
This answers a great personal need in me because, probably like most people, I am continually drawn to questions of value. Since sociologists look at human behavior and are beginning to realize its emotional and non-rational dimensions, it is inevitable that they look at values, for it is inevitable that people act in terms of what they value, of right and wrong, good and bad, good and better.

That giant of sociology, Max Weber, articulated a framework of value-oriented behavior over 70 years ago which is still much in use today. This is another element that makes sociology exciting and meaningful to me, moving it beyond arid intellectual abstractions. We are concerned instead with real events that are the result of real choices and that have real outcomes and consequences. This is one reason why Peter Berger, in his Invitation to Sociology, warns that not everyone should study sociology, for it may prove too shocking or disruptive. In fact, the sociological perspective is a very potent form of self-induced alienation, since it requires a difficult and convoluted self-examination and detachment. Thus we study not only what people do, but that in the name of which they do it. In such studying I cannot help but discover and examine myself, and my own actions and attitudes.

Some values are more valuable than other values.
It is thus that we are able to implement our activities. Part of the agonizing richness of life for me is to choose among values and to act them out, however imperfectly, in my own behavior. And while I am valuing, I am observing the valuing process being acted out thorough the behavior of others. Like all people in all of life, even when I "do sociology" I am electing some values over others.

This is again a controversial area in sociology, continuing a discussion identified by Max Weber over half a century ago. Weber was a German scholar with a great desire to also be a man of political action. In the manner of dilemmas, Weber thought scholarship and politics to be mutually exclusive human endeavors, yet both were necessary to society. This polarity between objective analysis and value-centered action has been a painful one for many sociologists. As Scott Greer has pointed out, politics, "in whatever guise," is the way "we resolve our normative differences."

Sociologists are directly involved in the study of social norms. It is in this arena in which policy--public value choices--is made, and societies thus created and modified. Obviously, the desire to participate in these choices would be especially felt by people who are so closely connected to the study of, and who have the knowledge about, the processes and effects of people's valuing behavior. Thus we have today in sociology, as well as in many other intellectual disciplines, a sharp debate between those who contend, with Weber, that sociology as a science must remain value-free, and those who maintain that sociology as both a science and a human endeavor never was and cannot be value-free. This is a complicated and emotional issue; I suspect it will not be resolved, but in the fashion of dilemmas will be sustained as a continuing tension in sociology with profound implications for the future.

Both I and the society in which I live are human productions.
"We" are produced by my behaviors, your behaviors, and the behaviors of others much like us. That society which socializes us was produced by people who preceded you and I, and you and I in turn, while changing it in some ways, will insure the continuity of that same society. So at the same time that I feel contained, restricted, even captured and encapsulated by society--by some large, vague, anonymous "Them"--I help create and insure those very containments and restrictions. This has been another profound learning for me and it relates directly to what I have mentioned above about being essentially "value-bound" and alienated.

Emile Durkheim, the 19th century French sociologist, brilliantly incorporated a view of human nature in his understanding of the dynamics of the form of society to which such human nature gave rise. Durkheim has become the intellectual grandfather of such contemporary sociological theorists as Peter Berger, Erving Goffman, Thomas Luckmann, and Harold Garfinkel. All of these men share the general view that human society is largely a fabrication, an unwitting conspiracy perpetrated by humans upon themselves and endowed by them with the binding quality of morality.

The result of such collaboration, known in contemporary sociology as the normative order, forcefully and often dramatically defines what is "normal". Garfinkel and McHugh, among others, have investigated particularly those aspects of the normative order that we automatically take for granted. We are just beginning to understand how this commonsense order is constructed. What seems so exciting and important to me is that once realizing that society is constructed (actively negotiated into existence by our own behavior) and discovering how we un-natural creatures go about doing this so "naturally," it becomes apparent that we can change it. We can do society differently!

Yet not entirely. For the corollary to this is that however relative I learn values, ideas, and behaviors to be, I will live out my life in a specific time and place and in this rather than another cultural milieu. In this context, relativities will be relative only to the absolutes which contain me and from which personally I can escape only partially and with much effort. For the normative order is real and it is morally binding. Furthermore, I am only able to accept some part of the world at any one time as problematic, as not yet decided upon or concluded, as being indeterminate and vague, as continually open to renegotiation. As Peter Berger has written, it is both necessary and wise to develop an appreciation of what is trivial.

I live more in the world of symbols--especially words--than in the world of those things that are symbolized.
What I am writing right now attests to this. Think of all the physical things we do not have to move around because we are able to manipulate symbols instead. The ideas I am sharing with you right now, the information you presented in your last paper or report, a conversation on the telephone, a grocery list, the last check you wrote, your plans for Friday night or next summer's vacation -- all of these are only possible because you and I can manage and understand marks and noises which stand for something else. T. S. Eliot once wrote, "I gotta use words when I talk to you." But words and language, our most important symbol system, not only enable me to transcend physical and temporal limits, they trap me in a new set of restrictions. In fact, language demonstrates, perhaps more powerfully than anything else, the dilemma inherent in the human condition--that people are freed through their restrictions.

I cannot know something, cannot even perceive or recognize it until I am able to make a representation to myself of what that thing is. In a very real sense, I have to know what I am looking at before I can see it. But knowledge of the thing--its representation or symbolization--is not the thing itself; it is, in fact, always less than the thing itself. That is the great economy of symbols, and the great difficulty.

The trouble with words comes from the fact that they are literal; they leave out more than they capture; what they include is selective, and therefore words are only approximations. In fact, words are merely figures of speech. One conclusion I have drawn from this is to try never to listen to someone only literally. Rather, I try to hear what it is that they are trying to say, for which words, or other symbols, are but an imperfect means of communication.

Words, and what words mean, and how people use words are all extremely important. And for a number of reasons: hardly anything is ever meaningless when it comes to the behavior of people. The words they choose are the words that they, in some way, intend to choose. Phenomenological sociologists maintain that human behavior is characterized by its intentionality--our inherent tendency to put into effect in the world, the images we have in our minds. Thus people are intentional, as Alfred Schutz would argue. In the words of Sartre again, people are "without excuse." Since there are so many words to choose from, that we choose one rather than another, that we talk rather than remain silent, is important.

I try to pay attention to this because it is one of the ways I can try to hear what someone is trying to say. Certainly, Freud's ideas have borne this out. People describe their world both with the words they use and the way they use them. People even kill each other because of words--words like "mutherfucker," "dirty kike bastard," "Godless atheistic communist," "imperialistic capitalistic dog," "nigger," "pig." One of the reasons we invent words, it seems, is to make it easier and less unpleasant for us to kill one another. Words name the world for us, and so reveal the world we live in. If Americans have a penchant for nouns rather than verbs, as Postman and Weingartner have suggested, then we will tend to inhabit a world of things more than one of processes or activities.

Institutions are perhaps the most peculiar and unique inventions of human beings.
They are our products, yours and mine--the crystallization of words, the embodiment of ideas in behavior. They are, to paraphrase the philosophical anthropologists, the social replacements for our atrophied instincts, serving to guide our activities along regular and coordinated routes. Instinct-less, we are institution-ful, and perhaps overly so.

In trying to comprehend institutions, I have come to the conclusion that such "things" as libraries, and universities, and certainly capitalism (whatever that is), contrary to what some radical activists often believe, cannot be blown up or destroyed as if they were made of concrete. Libraries, and universities, and capitalism, and even the Pentagon, are all ways of being in the world; they are particular ways of behaving. Arnold Gehlen, a German sociologist, has argued cogently that institutions are apparent and inevitable behavioral imperatives. They solve for us the agony of that monstrous indecision which would otherwise immobilize us when we need to act and do not know what to do.

Since we must act, there is a way in which we require and invite institutions to rule our activities. At the same time, we often bridle at the restriction of such regulation. At such points of friction it becomes important for me to remember that such institutions were originally creative attempts to solve human problems and meet human needs. When "our" creations begin restricting me in ways that neither I nor others seem to have intended or agreed to, I begin to experience in an immediate and convincing way one of the dimensions of alienation which Marx identified more than one hundred years ago.

In some ways this is a classic illustration of what Robert Merton has termed "collective ignorance;" each of us is doing something that we each think the other guy expects or requires, all of us ignorant of the fact that nobody really does. How many times have we heard it said, "I'm just following the rules," "I'd like to help you, but the regulations say," "It's not my idea--actually I agree with you, but I only work here," "My job is to enforce them, not make them," etc.? When that goes on long enough, I begin strongly to suspect that bureaucracies are simply over-elaborate arrangements for hiding responsibility, or at least removing it from individuals, which, of course, is the only place it can finally come to rest.

Much in conjunction with this, I have come to understand that we must still live in the world of concrete events, of places and things that we can point to as being "out there," as if somehow separate from what we do, form the ways in which we enact our being in the world and so enact the world itself. This is one of the ways in which we necessarily trivialize our daily world. It is again reflective of those insoluble dilemmas that we mistakenly and necessarily identify universities with classrooms, vocations with job descriptions, marriage with cohabitation, libraries with books and shelves, and the Pentagon with a large, five-sided building in Washington, D.C. Try as we might to do otherwise (which may be seldom), there always and inevitably seems to be a world of things that carries greater ontological conviction than the world of action.

Different people have different experiences of the world; those experiences comprise their reality as much as my experiences comprise mine.
It is in this way, if in no other, that generations will always differ. I did not know the everydayness of the Great Depression in the ways my father did, and it did not affect me in the ways it did him. I did not have to face the hideous choices that the war in Viet Nam forced upon a generation only slightly younger than myself. But to understand my father and my younger friends I must try to understand that world in which they live and those alternatives from which they made choices. It is very difficult to attempt to understand or comprehend someone else's reality, for however much I may think I know it, it does not press in on me with the same immediacy.

To achieve this understanding requires some real effort on my part and it also requires that I accept the other person as the existential authority on his or her reality. Not that I might not disagree, or even that the other person might not be wrong, or that I might not know some things about the other person that they don't know or realize themselves. These are all possible and often true. But in any final analysis, as that person is the only person who dies his or her death, so are he or she the only person who lives his or her life.

I think we must also recognize that different people, and especially different groups of people, are literally born into different symbolic worlds. And when groups of people occupy the same conceptual world, to a large extent sharing similar symbols, meanings, words, and values, that sharing acts to reinforce the human tendency to feel that what we each experience individually is the way the world really is. This easily leads to the ethnocentric feeling that "my" way is right and "theirs" is wrong. Thus "generation gaps" are built into human society.

I remember when my mother, born in Hungary in 1911, told me during my freshman year at a large commuter college that having an automobile was a luxury. This started an argument that was resolved only when I asked her if indoor plumbing was a luxury also. After she replied "no" (which of course I knew she would), I pointed out that it would have been a luxury for her mother. Those things which are built into our worlds when we are young or which are already here when we arrive always seem more natural than those strange and foreign additions which must fight their way into a crowded and more accepted arena later on.

However similar things are, nothing is ever the same; more often than not things are also "more than" and "other than" what they appear to be.
Peter Berger has written, "The first wisdom of sociology is this--things are not what they seem." For me, part of the fascination of sociological thinking centers around this basic idea, and I have had a good deal of fun, as well as some anxiety finding out what things "also" were. This aspect of sociology is one that I think has tended to make people leery of the field and of those who call themselves sociologists.

One of the most literate of contemporary American sociological theorists, Robert Merton has provided a very significant formulation of this idea in his distinction between manifest and latent functions--pointing out that social institutions quite often serve functions and achieve purposes quite other than those for which they were seemingly designed. In fact, many times latent functions end up as more important than, even contrary to those which we all claim to be the reason behind the activities involved. (For remember, an institution is finally a bunch of people behaving in particular ways.)

It is here, as David Matza has pointed out, that we need to exercise our sense of irony, for the thing we do may have even the opposite effect of what we are trying to do or what we believe we are doing. Thus, for example, by not educating children about human reproduction on the assumption that to  do so would promote sexual involvement and so lead to premature marriages, we foster a tremendous amount of sexual ignorance that results in unintentional pregnancies and premature marriages. We make prostitution illegal and promote the spread of venereal disease because prostitutes hide from doctors as well as from police.

To a large extent, what we make illegal gets picked up and made extremely profitable by members of our society willing to traffic in such matters. Thus funds from illicit activities such as gambling and drug abuse are not only denied to the legitimate sector but reduce the tax base of the community and support other criminal activities. Certainly, if we should have learned anything from that very expensive "social experiment" known as prohibition, it should have been this.

But we do not need to look only at the illicit to discover such latent functions. We can look at the university itself; we can look around the classroom and try to understand what is going on in addition to what seems to be going on -- what Berger calls the "unofficial" version of reality. Students do all kinds of things under the title of "going to school," "earning a college degree," or "pursuing knowledge." (I would like to insert here that all too often people feel that there is only one pure motive that will make a particular act legitimate; other reasons seem unacceptable and detract from the merit or worth of ourselves or our behavior. This is to expect too much of the human animal, as well as to misunderstand the nature of motivation. Everything that people do they do for a number of different "reasons," all of them equally real and many of them operating concurrently.)

Returning to the classroom, you and I know that there are a great many other--and often more important--things going on than simply the pursuit of an education. And perhaps there are some you may not be so aware of. For example, some students are looking for husbands or wives, perhaps not too overtly, yet somehow great many of them start off single and end up married. This is not too surprising. But did you ever think that one of the latent functions of colleges and universities in our society is to put people of similar backgrounds and potential into proximity with each other so that as propinquity and chemistry begin to take effect, the unions which are negotiated will be between persons who are compatibly similar in outlook and values. These marriages will hopefully be more lasting than otherwise, and society correspondingly more stable.

Another illustration is provided by our recent past. During the prolonged "Southeast Asian conflict," the Viet Cong helped produce an oversupply of Ph.D.'s and promoted male chauvinism in the United States. How did this happen? Lots of young men, faced with the alternatives of the draft or continuing on to graduate school after completing college, understandably chose the latter. During the last five or six years of that war, many men became Dr. instead of Lt. or Pfc. These men took places that might have otherwise gone to women. No one designed it that way, and the cumulative effect, made up of many private decisions, was, to use another of Merton's terms, an "unintended consequence of purposive social action." (Dr. Merton, I might note, was one of that generation of students who stayed on in graduate school during the bleak job market of the Great Depression.)

In college something else is also going on, of which students may be all too painfully aware -- they are being kept off the job market, at least in terms of fulltime, long range, continuing employment. Most of the 12 million college and university students in this country are needed by society to be both students and temporarily un- or under-employed. There is still no stigma and perhaps some slight prestige attached to being unemployed by virtue of being a student. For the purposes of illustration, let's assume there are 100,000,000 employable adults in the U.S., and that we have about 6% unemployment, which means that for every 100 employable people there are only 94 jobs available in the economy. If all the college students throughout the nation should suddenly decide to quit school and look for work, unemployment would go up over 300% (because countless professors, cafeteria workers, college presidents, and textbook sales representatives, etc., would also be suddenly out of work). Which means that instead of 6%, unemployment would be over 18% very quickly, matching the disastrous unemployment of the Great Depression in the 1930's.

Such re-conceptualizations of the world have led me to a greater appreciation of the complexities of the world. Although my encounter with sociology has provided me with what I find to be a more comprehensible sense of human life, I am forever removed from that simple view which once held my attention. Perhaps this is endemic to growing up and becoming an adult, another of those dilemmas that mark our lives as humans.

There is more that I could share with you; let me somewhat arbitrarily stop here, hoping that what you have read may be instructive about the way in which one sociological consciousness (mine) grasps its reality. My concluding thoughts are both pessimistic and promising. My knowledge of the social sciences, to be forever far from complete, leads me to see human life --the past and future history of people on this singular planet, floating the vast emptiness of space--as expressing a unilinear process, perhaps evolutionary, but certainly inexorably moving in one direction. This development itself has provided one of the basic themes in classical sociological theory, as people have attempted to comprehend and make sense of their own movement from simple to complex, from agrarian to industrial, from rural to urban, from isolated to interdependent, from small to large.

Robert Nisbet, in his book The Sociological Tradition, portrays this concern with great clarity as he describes the major ideas which have preoccupied sociology during the last 150 years. We are always becoming more than we were, and different--as individuals, as groups, as nations, as the human phenomenon. The writings of two such diverse modern thinkers as Teilhard de Chardin and Jean Paul Sartre reflect this emergence. Sometimes I expect myself to be able to extrapolate from this retrospection and look into the future, but I am neither brilliant nor brave enough to do so with any real feeling of assurance. Perhaps collectively we will one day be able to do so.

Although this developmental process, much of it attributable to man's technological prowess, is in many ways a cumulative one, I do not take any great sense of hope from it, because I do not see us -- human society--as inevitably progressing, as inevitably doing better, as inevitably coming out on top. I still see human society as whatever we humans make it, and make of it. Although there are moments of joy and ecstasy and accomplishment and satisfaction, more often we seem to do things rather poorly. The hope and the promise is that we go on, that we keep trying--that you keep trying, and I keep trying. For as I began with me, so I must end with me. My life is what I make it to be, within the constraints of my social being and the potential of my own unique personal qualities.

Writers of fiction are natural and gifted observers of human life from whom social scientists have much to learn, so it seems both poetic and fitting to end my remarks with quotations from two eminent men of American literature: William Faulkner (from his Noble Prize acceptance speech) and William Saroyan (from his Preface to The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze).

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging lifeless in the last red and dying sunset, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit, capable of compassion, and sacrifice, and honor.... Machines endure and animals survive: but only man can prevail.
                                                                                - Faulkner

...in order not to be a fool, you must believe that as much as death is inevitable life is inevitable. That is, the earth is inevitable, and people and other living things on it are inevitable, but that no man can remain on the earth very long. You do not have to be melodramatically tragic about this. As a matter of fact, you can be as amusing as you like about it. It is really one of the basically humorous things, and it has all sorts of possibilities for laughter. If you will remember that living people are as good as dead, you will be able to perceive much that is very funny in their conduct that you perhaps might never have thought of perceiving if you did not believe that they were as good as dead.

The most solid advice, though, for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive. with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.                                             
                                                                                - Saroyan

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Included below is a selection of works by the various authors referred to in the text. I have listed them in the order they appeared, citing only those books or articles that I think are most immediately related to the ideas presented. You might enjoy reading one or more of these books if you wish to pursue any of these ideas in greater depth.

C. Wright Mills: The Sociological Imagination.
A passionate but reasoned statement both critical and supportive of understanding the present moment in history from a sociological perspective, by a fervent supporter of value-committed sociology.

Carl Rogers: On Becoming a Person; The Freedom to Learn.
The first is a classic statement, warm and personal, revealing how a famous psychotherapist has developed his own sense of being human; the second is a challenging and instructive look at the whole process of education, with some suggestions as to how it can be improved.

Max Weber: Basic Concepts in Sociology.
Excerpts from Weber's writings, providing an excellent introduction. Perhaps the best summary of Weber's whole monumental theory can be found in Raymond Aron: Main Currents in Sociological Thought, Volume II.

Alfred Schutz: The Problem of Social Reality: Collected Papers, Volume I.
The introduction to this volume provides an excellent overview of Schutz's sociological theory, but see especially the chapter "On Multiple Realities."

George Herbert Mead: Mind, Self and Society.
This is the most important of Mead's books, but it provides some thought going even while fascinating. If you want to warm up with a summary, try some of the articles in the reader by Jerome G. Manis and Bernard N. Meltzer: Symbolic Interaction.

Charles H. Cooley: Human Nature and the Social Order.
Engaging reading by one of the early theorists in American sociology whose influence is still strongly felt, a founder of the Chicago School, too seldom read even by professional sociologists.

Jack R. Gibb: "Climate for Trust Formation" in L. P. Bradford, J. R. Gibb, & K. D. Benne: T-Group Theory and Laboratory Method.
Gibb's model for human growth, individual and group, has had great influence, is easy to grasp (though harder to apply), and can be found in most of his writings.

Erich Fromm: The Art of Loving; The Sane Society.
These are but two of the many books by the psychoanalyst who brings together the insights of Freud and Marx in an attempt to comprehend the difficulties of modern society and the challenges they present to realizing our own humanity.

Lewis Mumford: The Transformations of Man.
This is perhaps one of the clearest examples of philosophical anthropology, an attempt by one of the most profound social theorists of our historical epoch to picture both the past and future of human life.

Abraham H. Maslow: Toward a Psychology of Being.
One of the major works in the development of humanistic psychology which, together with philosophical anthropology, has attempted to discern human nature by observing current human behavior. Maslow is a key figure in "third stream" psychology.

Jean Paul Sartre: Being and Nothingness.
A very difficult and lengthy work by the major French existentialist. Since this viewpoint is basic to any understanding of the 20th century, I would urge you to become acquainted. For a highly readable summary, try William Barrett: Irrational Man.

Karl Marx: The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844; The Communist Manifesto.
The first is a series of fragments written early in Marx's career (although not published until much later). It can be found, together with a very helpful introduction, in Erich Fromm: Marx's Concept of Man. The second is a classic work, brief and, in places, eloquent. For a good overall summary of Marx's work, see Irving M. Zeitlin: Marxism: A Re-examination.

Emile Durkheim: Suicide.
This work contains an explicit description of Durkheim's philosophy of human nature, but all four of his major works are of great significance. (If you could read one other, try The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.) For a good summary, again see Raymond Aron: Main Currents of Sociological Thought, Volume II.

Georg Simmel: The Sociology of Georg Simmel.
This is the best collection of Simmel's work, which appeared originally in the form of articles. It ranges from a discussion of coquetry, to a description of the significance of numbers for social life, to an examination of the social role of secrecy.

Sigmund Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents.
This is Freud's most sociological work, dealing with effects of the social context in which people must work out their individual psychological problems and which, in some ways, always thwarts their solution.

R. D. Laing: The Politics of Experience; Knots.
Two books by the highly controversial English psychoanalyst who sees mental illness as almost entirely a matter of societal convention. Laing's thinking is complex and provocative and does not lend itself to easy description. For a good introduction, see James S. Gordon: "Who is Mad? Who is Sane? R. D. Laing: In Search of a New Psychiatry", in The Atlantic Monthly, January, 1971.

Kurt Lewin: Field Theory in Social Science.
Lewin's work often looks more difficult than it is, and it has provide a major impetus to much work in current social psychology. A fine overview of Lewin, together with some of his students, can be found in M. Deutsch and R. M. Krauss: Theories in Social Psychology.

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner: Teaching as a Subversive Activity.
After reading this, going to the classroom was never the same for me. A sequel in the form of a handbook of action is The Soft Revolution. More recently, Postman has continued his social criticism with such works as The Disappearance of Childhood (about the impact of mass culture on children) and Amusing Ourselves to Death (about the pervasive influence of television in our lives).

Jerry Farber: The Student as Nigger.
A collection of essays, including the famous one by the same name, this book contains a powerful explanation of the role of education in modern society and how it works, together with some ideas to produce change. See also Farber's The University of Tomorrowland.

Talcott Parsons:
Parsons is so difficult, so prolific, and so important to modern sociology, the best I can recommend is a collection of explanations edited by Max Black: The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons. For a shorter summary, see Alvin Boskoff: Theory in American Sociology.

Robert Theobald: Free Men and Free Markets; An Alternative Future for America.
This British socio-economist continues to be one of the most challenging thinkers in regard to contemporary social change, advocating as early as 1961 a constitutionally guaranteed minimum income.

Herbert Marcuse: Eros and Civilization; One-Dimensional Man.
A highly controversial thinker, reflecting the traditions of both Freud and Marx. The first book offers an alternative to Freud's powerful thesis of cultural repression; the second investigates the causes and suggests the remedies to the alienation of modern man. For a brief introductory summary see Theodore Roszak: The Making of a Counter Culture.

Philip Slater: The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point.
An incisive sociological analysis of contemporary society by an articulate sociologist well grounded in the psychoanalytic tradition. A sequel is titled Earthwalk. Both books demonstrate the sociological imagination in operation.

David Matza: Becoming Deviant.
A cogently reasoned and profound illustration of sociological thought from which you get not only a sense of sociological history and a theory of deviant behavior, but also a demonstration of the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of sociology, and the existential nature of human life.

Vifredo Pareto:
Remembered for one huge work (The Mind and Society) comprising four volumes, which are largely unread, Pareto's influence is still important. A comprehensive summary can be found in Raymond Aron: Main Currents in Sociological Thought, Volume II, which as you may have gathered by now, is a worthwhile book in itself.

Scott Greer: The Logic of Social Inquiry.
An appreciation of the strengths and limits of the scientific approach by a sociologist willing to reveal and accept his humanistic concerns. This book provides a good feel for sociology as the "third culture," halfway between the physical sciences and the liberal arts.

Peter Berger: An Invitation to Sociology.
A delightful and brief introduction by a very literate sociologist, clearly demonstrating the relevance of humanism and existential thought to sociology. If there would be any one book I would recommend to the introductory student, this is it. More comprehensive and more profound is Berger's The Sacred Canopy which, although focused on religion, provides an excellent summary of contemporary theory.

Thomas Luckmann: The Invisible Religion.
This short, dense, and difficult book brings together in masterful synthesis many sociological thinkers previously treated as divergent. Well worth working through. Also recommended is The Social Construction of Reality, co-authored with Peter Berger.

Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life; Behavior in Public Places.
Two of many books by a well-known and stimulating sociologist. The first is perhaps his most famous, but the second is equally good, both dealing with the ways in which everyday people go about creating the everyday worlds in which they live. The first introduces Goffman's dramaturgical theory of social behavior; the second makes use of etiquette guides for analyzing social behavior. Goffman is unique in sociology because he gathered much of his information by direct participation with his subjects in off-beat situations.

Harold Garfinkel: Studies in Ethnomethodology.
Garfinkel is largely credited for introducing this still controversial approach to sociology. Like Goffman, Berger, Luckmann, Schutz, and McHugh, Garfinkel is concerned with people's everyday, taken-for-granted behaviors and, particularly in Chapter Two, he describes some fascinating ways in which these can be studied.

Peter McHugh: Defining the Situation: The Organization of Meaning in Social Interaction.
The account of a fascinating experiment and the elaboration of a complex theory of how people go about making sense of their experience. McHugh's writing illustrates the bringing together of a number of disciplines including sociology, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. For a shorter, but equally stimulating exposure to McHugh's way of thinking, see "A Commonsense Conception of Deviance" in Deviance and Respectability, edited by Jack D. Douglas.

Arnold Gehlen:
At the moment none of this influential German theorist's writings are available in English. For an introduction to his work, see Peter L. Berger and Hansfried Kellner: "Arnold Gehlen and the Theory of Institutions" in Social Research, September, 1965. Gehlen's influence is evident in the works of Berger and Luckmann.

Robert K. Merton: Social Theory and Social Structure.
This volume is a contemporary classic, revised twice since its publication in 1948. Merton is one of the most lucid of sociological theorists and almost all of his major concepts and ideas are contained in this one volume. They continue to exert a tremendous influence on the whole field of sociology. Well worth owning and re-reading.

Teilhard de Chardin: The Phenomenon of Man.
This is the best known work by the controversial Catholic theologian. A good summary is available from Frank T. Severin: "The Humanistic Psychology of Teilhard de Chardin" in Challenges of Humanistic Psychology, edited by James F. T. Bugental.