/lit/ - Literature

>>13557602
What is it about sociology in particular as a discipline which attracts such a combination of stupid and insufferable people? All the memes about humanities majors seem to be true with these guys

Sociology is an unfortunate discipline in that it tends toward various fads of hyperpositivism and quantification fetishism. As a discipline it is more like economics, political science, and other "I'm only getting this degree as a prelude to being a shallow public intellectual or government bureaucrat" studies, and far less like history or anthropology.

Its history begins with the ultraconfident Auguste Comte and his Mill-esque positivist 'nomothetic' science of humanity, whose methods are tempered by (the still overconfident) Durkheim, then it slumps from its isolation, then it resurges through a methodological fusion with anthropology (born around the same time) and history (notably Weber). It gets infusions from some interesting Italian guys. In France and Germany, it is then mostly eaten and subsumed by those various other disciplines (history+anthro especially). In the Anglosphere, it becomes an overbearing tyrant of quantification fetishism, becoming difficult to distinguish from economics, and monolithically structural-functionalist under Talcott Parsons.

Nowadays if you "study Sociology" what you mean is "I should have gone into economics so I could at least be rich being a soulless cultureless retard; instead, I am writing a ten-year PhD thesis on the rigorously quantified social stratification of how many people ride certain kinds of buses, so I can maybe try to get a public policy job or something (also historians and anthropologists would laugh at my thesis as naive and atavistic)"

His idea live on, nobody has monopoly of truth