ABSTRACT
In his Althusserian history of the origins of sociology, Science, Class and Society, Göran Therborn includes Alvin Gouldner with C.Wright Mills, Talcott Parsons, and Robert Friedrichs as leading exponents of what he calls “the American Ideology.”1 Finding common ground between Gouldner and Parsons is no easy task, but Therborn claims that they, like Mills and Friedrichs, shared an indifference to the scientificity of social theory properly understood and an unfortunate reluctance to focus on society as the central object of that theory. Instead, “the American Ideology” exhibits a “tendency to present social revolutions as sociological revolutions, to turn economic and political struggles and transformations into questions of culture and morality.”2 In the specific case of Gouldner, Therborn disapprovingly quotes his advice in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology to focus on “those parts of the social world closest to the sociologist…rather than toward only the remote parts of his social surround,”3 and concludes that Gouldner’s “Reflexive Sociology is more concerned with guiding the personal morality of the social scientist than with the social contradictions and forces of social change he discerns.”4
