The “problem of order” has come to be widely recognized as a major, often as the major, perennial issue of social theory. The phrase has become commonplace to such an extent that its meaning is often blurred and broadened to the point of vacuity. Frequently, it is used so generally that it effaces the difference between the social and natural sciences, both of which presuppose a world of orderliness or uniformity as a necessary condition for the acquisition of reliable and useful knowledge. “Order” means regularity, predictability, and system as opposed to randomness, chance, and chaos. All science, even all intellectual inquiry, both implies belief in orderliness and seeks to establish its specific forms in different object domains. The social sciences are in no way distinctive in this respect. It is otiose therefore to identify the problem of order in human society with the search for regularities and recurrences, for at this general level the problem applies to the study of stars, atoms, chemical compounds, or organisms as much as to the understanding of human beings and the groups, societies, and cultures they create. The claim is often made that the social sciences find it harder to discover regularities because their subject matter is vastly more complex and open to the influence of many more “variables” than the subject matter of the natural sciences. But if this is true, the problem of order then differs only in degree, in its greater magnitude, in the social sciences as compared to the natural sciences. Greater complexity does not imply anything qualitatively peculiar to human societies as such.
The familiar claim that human affairs are more complex and variable than natural processes is both unclear and doubtfully true. But even if true, it does not necessarily follow from it that human actions are invariably less predictable than presumptively simpler nonhuman events. Human actions are often quite evidently more repetitive and predictable than some natural processes — the notorious uncertainties plaguing meteorology are the standard example. To refute the idea that human conduct is so variable and capricious as to pose an obstacle to the discovery of the regularities that are the sine qua non of science, Robert K. Merton used to gesture toward the class in front of him and exclaim “Consider the miracle that you are all here!” This was intended to be a dramatic refutation of the notion that their possession of “free will” made the actions of human beings unpredictable; obviously, the fact that everyone present was able to count on the appearance of Merton himself and at least most of the students at exactly the same time and place each week for a specified number of months was evidence of prodigious feats of precise and successful prediction indicating a degree of orderliness in human conduct equaling if not exceeding that reported by the so-called exact sciences.
Merton, a brilliant teacher, wished to impress vividly upon his students the uncharted possibilities of sociology. Accordingly, he did not go on to point out that the “miracle” of our mutually predicted collective presence in the classroom depended in no way whatever on the achievements of social science. His example might just as plausibly have been invoked to argue that since such extraordinary results could be achieved without it, “Who needs social science?” The charge that sociology does no more than proclaim the obvious, that it merely tells us in polysyllabic language what everyone already knows, has always been a much more devastating argument against its scientific pretensions than the wistful belief that free will is a guarantee of unforeseen and possibly liberating eruptions in human conduct. “Astonish me!” is one of our major expectations of “real” science … The failure of sociology to live up to the “revelatory model” of the natural sciences has been a persistent reason for doubting its scientific status, both within and outside of the discipline. The purported technical language of social scientists is often ridiculed as a pathetic aping of the specialized language of natural science in a vain effort to borrow from its prestige, as well as a strategic concealment of the fact that little is being said that could not be expressed just as precisely in ordinary language reflecting the “common sense” of someone quite untutored in the social sciences.
Such complaints used to be the special province of outside critics and debunkers of the claims of the social sciences — “men of affairs”, the clergy, literary intellectuals, professors of the humanities. More recently, they have become widespread among social scientists themselves as “positivism” has fallen into disfavor and been assailed from a variety of perspectives within the social science disciplines. Antipositivists, unfortunately, are not noticeably inclined to use simpler, less specialized, or more precise language. Their preoccupations have usually been epistemological or methodological to just as great an extent as those of the programmatic positivists of whom a French physicist and philosopher of science once famously complained that they always seemed to be packing a suitcase for a journey on which they never set out. It is obviously legitimate to invoke the predictability of everyday human conduct in order to make an epistemological point in the manner of Merton. But even the most ardent and naive believer in the unity of natural and social science would hardly put forward the successful predictions we make as a matter of course in everyday life as candidates for the status of social laws methodologically comparable to the laws formulated by natural scientists. These predictions depend for the most part on the intentional acts of individuals striving to realize their various purposes.
Yet apart from the strictly epistemological significance of the existence of regularities in human conduct, it is worth examining further the fact, whether it is regarded as miraculous or not, that people manage routinely to make successful predictions about one another in ordinary social life. Reflection on the predictability of human conduct can lead to a consideration of the problem of order that synthesizes order as regularity and order as rule, or factual and normative order.
I recall a colleague who suddenly went around asking everyone in a puzzled way, “Why do people interact?” A silly question with an obvious answer was one’s first reaction — after all, the whole field of sociology is premised on the assumption of the universality of interaction, as indeed is social science in general. But on second thought the question is fundamental and inescapable. Man might be a solitary species, a possibility suggested by Hobbes in his imaginary model of the state of nature and by Rousseau who thought that men had kept greater distance from one another in the remote past and were the happier for it. Why should people seek to associate with others? If the need for “social approval” is, as so many sociologists and social psychologists have long contended, the basic motivational force making possible the socialization, or domestication, of human beings, where does this need, evidently not present in infants and animals, come from, and why is it so powerful? Why should people care at all what other people think of them, so long as they are not physically molested by them?
Dennis H. Wrong, The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society, Free Press 1994 [pp. 36-39, 68-69]