#11 Coleman on the new constructivist social science
The constructed social environment, the purposive social organization that now surrounds and penetrates most persons’ lives, also generates a demand for new bodies of knowledge, disciplines that can provide a foundation and superstructure of knowledge to aid in constructing the future. A new kind of social science has begun to emerge to meet that demand. This social science is not only a search for knowledge for the aesthetic pleasure of discovery or for the sake of knowing, but a search for knowledge for the reconstruction of society. As horizons become wider and possible directions of social progress multiply, knowledge about self and society, and their relation, gains a new importance and immediacy.
Demand for the new social science arises in part from the vacuum created as primordial social organization withers away. Primordial social organization has depended on a vast supply of social capital, on a normative structure which enforced obligations, guaranteed trustworthiness, induced efforts on behalf of others and on behalf of the primordial corporate bodies themselves, and suppressed free riding. That social capital has been eroded, leaving many lacunae. The new social science is necessary, then, not as an accomplice of dark forces that would undermine traditional society, but as an aid in the reconstructive task of filling the voids created by the erosion of social capital and the mode of social organization it supported.
Conceived too narrowly, this new social science becomes science in the service of the powerful—which in modern society means large corporate actors, including but not limited to the state itself. Conceived more broadly, this new social science becomes science that extends its knowledge to the understanding of how power comes to be distributed and accumulated in society, and to the understanding of how natural persons can best satisfy their interests in a social system populated with large corporate actors.
James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory, Harvard 1990
A year after the publication of this book Coleman was elected president of the American Sociological Association. He died in 1995.