Stanislav Andreski is no believer in what he calls "the principle that dog does not eat dog," the unwritten code that keeps members of the same profession from attacking each other in public even if attack is justified. A professor of sociology at England's Reading University, Andreski has just written a new book that is certain to enrage his colleagues. In Social Sciences as Sorcery (Andre Deutsch; London; £2.95), he accuses the world's rapidly increasing population of social scientists of writing more and more about less and less. Their work, he says, is boring, misleading, pseudoscientific and trivial, and amounts to little more than "ponderous restatements of the obvious" masked by a "smoke screen of jargon." In fact, Andreski suggests, little has been added to man's knowledge about himself since the death in 1903 of the English social philosopher Herbert Spencer.
Andreski does not linger long in generalities; he documents his charges and spares few of the luminaries of social science in the process. For instance, he finds the patriarch of modern sociology, Talcott Parsons, guilty of "monumental muddleheadedness" and of making "the simplest truth appear unfathomably obscure." What particularly riles Andreski about Parsons is his "voluntaristic theory of action," which in essence states that to understand behavior it is necessary to take into account men's wishes, beliefs, resources and decisions. This idea, writes Andreski, represents "an important step in the mental development of mankind, but it must have occurred some time during the Paleolithic Age, as Homer and the Biblical prophets knew all about it."
Critical Eye. Also taken roundly to task are such respected men as Paul Lazarsfeld (a co-author of Personal Influence) and his colleagues. "After wading through mounds of tables and formulae," Andreski complains, "we come to the general finding (expressed of course in the most abstruse manner possible) that people enjoy being in the centre of attention, or that they are influenced by those with whom they associate...which I can well believe, as my grandmother told me that many times when I was a child."
No one escapes Andreski's critical eye. He believes that experimental psychologists like Harvard's B.F. Skinner are seriously misinterpreting human nature: "When the psychologists refuse to study anything but the most mechanical forms of behaviour—often so mechanical that even rats have no chance to show their higher faculties—and then present their most trivial findings as the true picture of the human mind, they prompt people to regard themselves as automata, devoid of responsibility or worth, which can hardly remain without effect upon the tenor of social life." Freud, Adler and Jung? Although psychoanalysts "offer many fundamental insights into real-life situations" and cannot be accused of banality or irrelevance, Andreski says, they lack "a sense of proportion." Thus, he concludes, "we are left in the void between quantified trivialities and fascinating but entirely undisciplined flights of fantasy."