Despite the tendency for easy answers this is a difficult question, partly because there is no simple distinction between left and right. There can be hard distinctions between, fascist, conservative and pro-corporate thought for example, or the utilitarian liberal and socialist trends of the left.
In general (but not always) the right is pro-existing-hierarchies and authority, and the left is against those hierarchies and authorities. As I’ve said before, parties can switch position, depending upon who is winning, or how radical they wish to appear. Trumpism for example did not challenge corporate dominance in general, the capitalist system, the power of wealthy people, the sense of hierarchy in the US, or the idea of authoritarianism – it just challenged the power of corporations who were not wildly pro-Trump, ‘elites’ who were not pro-Trump, wealthy people who were not pro-Trump, media which was not pro-Trump, attacked protest by non-Trump supporters, and excused racial and sexual discrimination. On the other hand, a non-US citizen might say that the US democrats are largely a party of the Center-Right. In terms of the questions, there is also a real distinction between social theories such as sociology and economics.
It is reasonably obvious that mainstream economics is dominated by pro-corporate thought and aims to justify corporate power- and we could say, “well that is the type of thinking the corporate sector pays for, approves of, and that’s what it gets.” As a result, we end up with ‘social policies’ that reduce social life to a particular type of economics only, which make business the only relevant part of social life, naturalises corporate power and wealth, and aims to break up any opposition to corporate dominance – partly by suppressing consideration of any power or structural dimensions or, if you prefer, by the suppression of any ‘social considerations’ at all. In my view, Libertarian social thought tends to be of this type, although there are libertarians who don’t fall for that particular trap all the time (see C4ss), but they are rare. As opposed to standard economics, there is also political economy which tends to be more left in orientation, but it is extremely marginalised in mainstream thinking, even if it describes economic processes much more accurately (again in my opinion), and refuses to arbitrarily separate economic from political and social processes.
Given right-wing dominance of economics, then why is sociology, by comparison, more left-wing in orientation? Why is it not almost completely bought out like economics?
Partly because it is really hard to study corporate, or wealth elites, without being part of them or just flattering them. Even a person who has worked for years to be a trusted servant will be left out of all kinds of events. And the wealthy can take revenge, if they don’t like what is said about them.
As a result, historically, sociology and anthropology have developed studying people who are workers, marginalised, ‘colonised’ and so on. Given this happenstance, you would expect the studiers to develop a degree of sympathy for the people being marginalised, oppressed, impoverished or subject to arbitrary authority. This sympathy is intensified because the dominant groups rarely, if ever say they are being oppressive; they say they are carrying out their oppression and theft in the name of a greater good, because they are more talented, because God placed them there, or because they are looking after the oppressed. This tends to make the studiers somewhat cynical about the dominating classes, and any social ideology which asserts all is well and that the powerful deserve their power and privilege (which means the researchers tend to be leftish or centerist).
One response to this in the early days of anthropology was to argue for a derivative of conservatism, which was called ‘functionalism’. This asserted that no matter how irrational some indigenous behaviour looked to the colonisers and the military and western business, it was actually really important to the functionality of the society. You could not go around disrupting things and expect people to remain happy, content, or accepting of colonial domination. You really needed to understand people and respect them, to rule well. The best form of rule was largely to leave people alone.
We can see such conservative thinking in Edmund Burke – the idea is that society develops customs, traditions and behaviours which have a social use and contribute to social stability. With this attitude, Burke could also see the oppression and criminality of the East India Company in India and fight against it for years. This kind of conservatism does not take a pro-corporate position, because on the whole corporations will profit wherever they can, and if that profit is destructive of society or environment that consequence becomes entirely secondary – something no real conservative would believe.
Indeed, we might need to explain why it is that destructiveness has become so acceptable to pro-corporate people, especially when in some cases it seems suicidal.
Interestingly enough in the early to mid 20th century there were many social analyses which were conservative – things like ‘social credit’ (Douglas), ‘distributism’ (Chesteron, Belloc), ‘guild theory’ (Penty) and so on, but they were not pro-corporate and got wiped – although the people introducing GK Chesterton’s collected works for the Ignatius Press, pretend Chesterton would have approved of modern US capitalism – which is not at all likely. These movements stretch back to nineteenth century ‘patriarchal conservatives’ like Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin; the latter of whom insisted that a socio-economic system which did not increase wealth of the soul and beauty as part of its values and processes would be destructive. Ruskin seems to have ended up more influential on the left than on the pro-corporate right for what seem like reasonably obvious reasons… but Ruskin does tend to be a bit patronising and this gets in the way of reading him sometimes.
There is also the conservative social thought which argues that an elite or aristocracy should be trained to rule, because most people are not capable or interested in ruling. Once you have started to argue who this elite should be, and what they are protecting, the interest is more or less over, and this position is hard to justify to outsiders. Louis Dumont argued that Western Sociology was inadequate because it took equality as its starting point (which is disputable) while human beings are naturally hierarchical. I’d agree humans tend to be hierarchical; the question is how different the levels of hierarchy are, how immobile they are and what kind of conditions reinforce extreme authoritarian, exploitative or harmful hierarchies – which I guess are leftist questions, although they seem neutral enough 🙂
Sociology has been more left in orientation because the dominant pro-corporate form of the right, wishes to deny relevant social facts such as class, oppression, misery and so on, and claim that the current form of social life, only needs less control by the people over ‘the market’, together with more corporate power and all will be well again….. Sociologists tend also to be suspicious of ‘nationalist’ social theory because there is a documented tendency for ‘the nation’ to be a historical construct rather than an eternal reality, and because nationalisms have tended in the past to lead to authoritarianisms (proto fascisms), victimisation of outgroups, and war, because most nationalisms seem to need to construct outgroups, who can be slandered, or treated with contempt, in order to reinforce the idea of the national race being an important and superior group.
You could simply say that on the Right, pro-corporate social thought is false and only aims at building and justifying corporate dominance; conservative social thought was taken over by the left, or largely abandoned by conservatives; and fascist social thought is oriented towards getting people to follow the leader and attack some approved out-groups to make ingroup loyalty. That is it.
Despite this, there are many varieties of social thought in sociology and anthropology departments. My original professor in Anthropology was a well known anti-Marxist, an ideational functionalist and an early explorer of network theory, before it had been named. He was also a source of great encouragement to me.
One of my thesis markers was also a conservative expert in the work of Norbert Elias whose work I deeply respect. There are plenty of other people I have no idea of their political voting patterns, but they do tend to sympathise with people who are ripped off by the system.
So the reason why sociology tends to be leftist, is because of history, because of who they work with, and because right-wing social thought tends to support established authorities, the suppression of those people studied by sociologists and anthropologists, or is abandoned and rarely thought out persuasively in the Anglosphere because it conflicts with corporate power.
Tags: social theory
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