Sociology's Pervasively Dubious Assumptions

Welcome to Joshua Murray’s inaugural Unsafe Science post. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. His research centers on labor movements and class conflict, with particular attention to how organizational design, institutional constraints, and strategic choices shape collective action outcomes. He is the coauthor of Wrecked: How the American Automobile Industry Destroyed Its Capacity to Compete (Russell Sage Foundation, 2019), which analyzes how long-run industry decline emerged from internally rational but collectively damaging decisions. His work has appeared in leading journals such as the American Journal of Sociology and Social Problems. His broader work examines how collective action emerges, succeeds, or fails under varying structural and organizational conditions.

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Joshua Murray

Sociology is overwhelmingly leftwing, and this is well documented. Surveys and analyses consistently show that large majorities of sociology faculty support the Democratic Party, that conservatives are vanishingly rare, and that explicitly Marxist or neo-Marxist orientations are unusually common relative to other disciplines. In practical terms, moderate liberals function as the right-most boundary of acceptable views within the field.

Ratio of Democrats to Republicans at 51 of the of the top liberal arts institutions as rated by US News and World Report. Source: Langbert, 2018.

However, this political imbalance is better understood as the outcome of a deeper and more consequential problem. The core issue in sociology is not partisan identity but a highly constrained set of theoretical assumptions that structure the discipline across all subfields.

At present, sociology is organized around the assumption that social forces are the primary, and often exclusive drivers of social outcomes. This orientation is visible across the entire American Sociological Association section structure. If one asks what the dominant conclusions of a given subfield are, the answer is almost always that the phenomenon in question is socially constructed, shaped by power relations, and maintained through inequality. The Sociology of Aging emphasizes that aging and the life course are socially organized. Crime, Law, and Deviance assumes that deviance is socially constructed and that law reflects power and inequality. Even the section devoted to Biology and Society largely focuses on how biology is shaped by politics and social forces, rather than on how biological constraints shape social organization. In effect, no subfield treats non-social causes as significant.

These orientations rest on a deeper and largely unexamined assumption about human nature: the blank slate view. This view treats human beings as born without meaningful innate differences and assumes that the default state of humanity is sameness and full malleability. Once this assumption is in place, differences in behavior or outcomes—whether between individuals or groups—are interpreted as unnatural products of social structure rather than as the result of mixed causal processes involving biology, psychology, culture, institutions, and environment.

Pinker’s classic, The Blank Slate, utterly debunked the blank slate assumption. It has been duly ignored by the vast majority of social scientists, and not just sociologists.

From this foundation, a predictable set of further assumptions follows. If differences are socially constructed, then unequal outcomes are taken to be inherently unjust. If there are no meaningful natural constraints, then all social arrangements are presumed to be fully alterable. Social change therefore becomes normatively good rather than empirically contingent. Finally, because inequality is understood as socially produced, social identity categories become the primary lens through which reality is interpreted, and through which claims to authority and moral priority are adjudicated.

Together, these assumptions—social constructionism, the moral privileging of social change, and identity-based epistemology—shape the research agendas and intellectual boundaries of the discipline. Rather than studying how biological constraints or universal human tendencies shape social organization, sociology focuses on demonstrating how categories are constructed. Rather than examining how social stability supports economic coordination, mental health, and social trust, the dominant orientation is to treat existing order as presumptively oppressive and in need of transformation. This represents a sharp departure from classical sociology, where figures such as Durkheim treated social order as a fragile achievement requiring explanation rather than a pathology requiring dismantling.

There is no disciplinary necessity for sociology to be organized in this way. Sociology is, at its core, the study of society. Its explanatory frameworks should therefore be open to any combination of causes—biological, psychological, cultural, institutional, geographic, or relational—so long as they improve our understanding of social reality. A healthy discipline should be able to study social stability as well as social change, biological constraints as well as social construction, and the tension between individual human nature and collective organization.

Singleton, 1790. The Storming of the Bastille.

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