The Social Evolution of Quebec Reconsidered

Extract

Any attempt to assess the direction of social change in a particular society is a risky business at best. Yet, inasmuch as sociology, in its official texts on method, rests its claim to scientific status on its predictive capacities, it must somehow, sometimes, take this risk and say something about what are the significant changes occurring in the social organization of a society. In order to achieve any such general assessment the social analyst needs, it seems to me, to consider the society as a whole, and through time.

Sociologists are generally reluctant to view the whole of a society as a proper subject of study and reluctant also to study social phenomena through time. Indeed, what is at present felt to be adequate methodology, or should we say prestigeful methodology, requires living respondents whose answers can be given statistical treatment, and therefore becomes largely irrelevant for studies with historical dimensions; and while it may be quite useful in measuring change it is quite helpless of itself to account for it. Furthermore its preference for piecemeal and detailed verifications makes it a rather awkward instrument to use when dealing with general analyses. Anthropologists, by tradition, have commonly achieved such analyses in the case of less complex cultures. Even they, however, when confronted with large societies, have tended either to adopt the sociological habit of narrow investigation or to postulate that an image of the larger whole can be gleaned through the minute study of a particular instance, a particular cell such as a village, or a town. In choosing the first alternative, they abdicate what seems to have been a traditional objective of anthropology. In the second case, they stand in danger of missing the target through oversimplification.