The Over-Socialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology*

Gertrude Stein, bed-ridden with her fatal illness, is reported to have suddenly muttered, “What, then, is the answer?” Pausing, she raised her head, murmured “—but what is the question?” and died. Miss Stein presumably was pondering the ultimate meaning of human life, but her brief final soliloquy has a broader and humbler relevance. Its point is that answers are meaningless apart from questions. If we forget the questions even while remembering the answers, our knowledge of them will subtly deteriorate, becoming rigid, formal and catechistic as the sense of indeterminacy, of rival possibilities implied by the very putting of a question, is lost.

Social theory must be seen primarily as a set of answers to questions we ask of social reality. If the initiating questions are forgotten, we readily misconstrue the task of theory, while the answers previous thinkers have given become narrowly confining conceptual prisons, degenerating into little more than a special, professional vocabulary applied to situations and events that can be described with equal or greater precision in ordinary language. Forgetfulness of the questions that are the starting points of inquiry leads us to ignore the substantive assumptions “buried” in our concepts and commits us to a one-sided view of reality.

Perhaps this is simply an elaborate way of saying that sociological theory can never afford to lose what is usually called a “sense of