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Says Yale's Wendell Bell: "There's a feeling that traditional social engineering doesn't really matter. Whatever it does—curriculum planning, neighborhood studies, compensatory social factoring—doesn't really work." Such notions have been characterized by New York University Sociologist S.M. Miller and his colleague Ronnie Ratner as symptoms of "the American Resignation," the tag they give to the Nixon years. One of this resignation's principal themes is that many social problems are insoluble "because they have their roots in immutable individual characteristics." Miller and others stoutly deny this and point out that what the "resigned" theoreticians are really saying is that "nothing is wrong with America that lowering our objectives won't solve." Columbia University Sociologist Herbert Gans believes that it is not that the programs of the '60s failed so much as that they were never really tried. Nevertheless, the '70s are not promising years for reformers.
Sociologist Alvin Gouldner agrees: "The period of radical criticism in sociology has, for the moment, come to a halt. Criticism needs energy, and it needs courage, but people are getting tired. Today the radicals are licking their wounds."
In the '60s, Gouldner writes, it became the role of the "sunshine sociologist" to "foster the optimistic image of American society as a system whose major problems are deemed altogether soluble, if only enough technical skills and financial resources are appropriated." This image included a vision of men "as the passive raw materials of society and culture." This is a false view that does not take into account man's reason or his passion, says Gouldner. In The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, Gouldner also argues that in the future sociologists should be more aware of themselves as a part of society, instead of pretending to objectivity. "The social world is to be known not simply by 'discovery' of some external fact, not only by looking outward, but also by opening oneself inward," he maintains.
A similar conclusion has been reached by a former Harvard professor of government. "We have tended to suppose that every problem must have a solution and that good intentions should somehow guarantee good results," philosophized Henry Kissinger not long ago. "Utopia was seen not as a dream but as our logical destination if we only traveled the right road. Our generation is the first to find that the road is endless, that in traveling it we will find not utopia but ourselves."
Many sociologists are making the same discovery. For them, and for some anthropologists and psychologists as well, a long-held vision of a utopia engineered by human minds has begun to fade. The new mood is one of bitter resignation for many. Others are hopeful that man can apply his newly found will to the realization of his limited but inherent potential. To these optimistic pragmatists, the idea that man is made by society is giving way to the notion that society has to be made by men, with all the personal responsibility and travail that the task entails.