Why Fascists Hate Sociology

Fascists hate sociology, and not without cause: Some of the discipline’s most basic lessons can impede the authoritarian control fascists aim to exert over the state, the economy and society as a whole. The extent to which the architects of fascism consciously grasp sociology’s threat isn’t clear, nor is it clear how much it matters. Even if Florida’s (to take the most egregious example) anti-sociology politicians are acting on instinct, the results are the same. In their bones they know sociology is the enemy and must be neutralized.

Fascist efforts to control a populace employ a familiar set of strategies: Establish the purity of a people—white Christians, in the case of the U.S.—as under threat by outsiders; undermine empathy for outsiders by dehumanizing them; create a mythical past of national greatness; deny that injustice can be perpetuated by the routine workings of societal institutions; define present social arrangements as naturally or divinely ordained; and undermine, as much as possible, growth of the kind of self-knowledge that exposes the moral corruption of fascism.

The ultimate goal of fascism—anyone still squeamish about applying this term to the contemporary U.S. hasn’t been paying attention—is to align economic power with state power, in the interest of profits and wealth accumulation. To make this possible, a populace must be led to subordinate reason to emotion. At root, that’s how fascist control works: Offer relief from feelings of insignificance and powerlessness in exchange for obedience. Sociology is about nurturing, on the contrary, capacities for critical self-reflection and rational self-government. Which is, of course, a danger to oligarchs and their hangers-on.

So, what does sociology teach that so incenses fascists? For one thing, that we share a common humanity with others whose beliefs and ways of living are different. Most people, everywhere, struggle to get through life safely, in reasonable material comfort, while caring for those around them. They are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, romantic partners, workers of all kinds. If their culture or social organization is different from ours, sociology teaches us to study these differences as adaptations to history and circumstance. Sociology makes human variation, built atop our species kinship, fascinating, not threatening.

This lesson, of course, upsets fascists, who would rather their followers adopt an us-versus-them mentality, seeing difference as something to fear, something to stamp out. Likewise, fascists want to restrict the circle of empathy among their followers to only those who are not different, who look, talk and act the same. Sociology moves minds in the opposite direction; it widens the circle of empathy. When we recognize our common humanity and treat difference as something to be understood, it becomes harder to harm others. Sociology, in short, opposes the dehumanization fascism relies on to divide and weaken the masses of people who have no stake in exploiting others for profit, let alone harming them in the service of would-be dominators.

Another lesson sociology teaches is that change is made by people and is happening all the time. No set of social arrangements—political, economic, cultural—is immutable or eternal. We can look at how humans try to solve one set of problems and thereby create new conditions and new problems and in trying to solve these new problems keep making change happen. Sociology studies this process, over longer and shorter periods of time. It rejects any claim that we have reached the end of history.

This lesson threatens fascists, who use fear of change to mobilize followers, pretending that it’s possible to reverse or halt change or that current arrangements are the only ones possible. Sociology says that’s not how the social world works; what humans have made, they can change. We’ve seen it again and again and can see it now. The world as it exists is just one historically contingent possibility; we can, collectively, create new possibilities and new social worlds. That’s not a radical postmodernist idea. It’s Max Weber.

On a concrete level, sociology teaches that the social world—what it consists of, how it works—can be truthfully known. This is both the great strength of sociology and cause for fascist alarm. The notions that difference is a threat, that there exists a golden past that can be returned to, that capitalism and inequality are eternal, all depend on lies. To merely say, as is often the starting point for sociological inquiry, “That might not be true; we need to investigate and find out,” is to put lies at risk of exposure. To study the social world with empirical rigor is, potentially, to puncture the fascist version of reality upon which control depends. If sociology taught no other lessons, it would still pose a threat to fascist control if only because of its commitment to telling facts about the social world. Fascist control abhors truth.

Given its focus on the world outside us, sociology isn’t often seen as a discipline that fosters self-knowledge. But as C. Wright Mills said, biography and society are two sides of the same coin. The lesson here is that by studying society we can learn important things about ourselves, about the people we’ve become as a result of social conditioning. One thing we can learn—or get on track to learning—is how our beliefs, attitudes and values originate outside us, in a social world that is awash in prejudice, fears and ideologies that sustain inequality. When it teaches this, sociology offers the possibility of undertaking a critical self-examination that can lead to new self-knowledge.

The threat to fascism is that this self-knowledge can include seeing how one has been instilled with beliefs that engender fear, hatred, feelings of superiority, cruelty, selfishness and a willingness to be led by venal elites. It can be a hard realization. But when it takes hold, fascist leaders lose power. “Why am I acting contrary to my best moral values?” a sociologically self-reflective person might ask. “Where did these beliefs inside me come from? Who benefits if I embrace them?” Such a line of thought is the beginning of resistance. Or perhaps it is best to say that sociology offers a path to the kind of critical self-reflection that can kindle resistance. In the longer run, sociology can reduce the supply of manipulable followers, without which fascism can’t thrive.

Reflecting on how the social world has shaped oneself leads naturally to considering how one helps shape the social world. A basic lesson of sociology here is that intentions matter less than consequences. What reproduces the social world, for better or worse, is people going about their daily business in patterned ways—in other words, following institutional routines. People’s conscious intentions and what they collectively make happen are different things. The tobacco industry is a paradigm example.

No tobacco farmer, production worker, accountant, marketer or executive goes to work in the morning intending to cause nearly half a million people to suffer and die from tobacco-related disease. Yet that’s the result—in the U.S. alone, every year—from their collective efforts. It couldn’t happen without their participation. The accountant intends only to do a good job, get paid for it and enjoy life—all as a matter of following institutional routine. Sociology studies this kind of process and says, “This is how the social world works, and if we want it to work differently, we have to participate in it differently.” That’s another potentially dangerous lesson for those who benefit disproportionately from how existing institutions function and don’t want to see them change.

The tobacco industry example resonated, often uncomfortably, with the North Carolina students I taught for 34 years. So did another example, because many students had lived it: school resegregation. As some studies have found, many public schools in the country have grown more racially segregated over recent decades. Why is this? How could it have happened?

Conscious racism had much to do with it—via the creation of private white academies to circumvent public school integration in the South, for example—in the first decades after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. But in recent decades we’ve seen residential resegregation occur, as well as a new phenomenon: internal or “hidden” resegregation.

What happened is that middle-class white parents used their greater economic resources, which were the result of historical anti-Black discrimination, to move to the whiter suburbs and gain access to better schools. Those who didn’t move were able to get their kids into Advanced Placement classes, leaving the working-class Black kids in lower-quality classes. Were middle-class white parents motivated by a racist desire to keep Black people down? No. They just wanted, naturally enough in a competitive economy, to help their own kids do as well as possible. Here again, conscious intentions matter less than consequences. When sociologists study these processes, the results can upset those who fear losing the advantages, even small ones, afforded by how institutions routinely operate.

One time a student in one of my social inequality classes asked if studying sociology obligated him to become an activist and oppose inequality. No, I said. It obligated him, or anyone, only to examine inequality analytically, in an honest and empirically rigorous way. But then suppose, I added, that before studying sociology you thought inequality was the inevitable result of processes over which no one had any control. Yet by looking at inequality sociologically you came to see it as the result of institutions designed and managed to benefit groups that had historically achieved dominance over other groups. Maybe you’d learn that inequality was worse than you thought, or that it caused more damage than you realized. Maybe that would change your thinking. You’d still have to decide, I said, based on your moral principles, whether to oppose inequality or not. But you’d have more knowledge on which to base a decision. That’s what studying sociology can do for you.

Fascist leaders mobilize followers by denigrating this kind of knowledge. They misrepresent it as an accusation of malicious intent. “Sociologists accuse you of being racists,” they say, “and being the good people you are, you have every right to resent this and tell sociologists to take a hike.” This is gross manipulation based on ignorance about what sociology really tells us. Manipulation works by offering absolution from a fictional accusation: Don’t listen to the sociologists who say you are racists. You’re not; you’re good people. But a proper understanding of sociology’s basic lesson is this: As fallible beings, we often try to do the right things but get tripped up by how institutions work in ways we don’t ordinarily see—and as an empirical discipline, sociology can show us what needs to be changed to turn our best intentions into reality. That sort of understanding, hopefully conveyed even in an intro course, can counteract the manipulation.

The lessons of sociology that I’ve highlighted are indeed basic, in the sense that anyone encountering sociology in a serious way will pick them up. They’re not all taught explicitly in every course, though they might be made explicit, depending on an instructor’s approach and whether the lean is toward the humanistic or the scientific side of the discipline. Some of the lessons are simply part of how sociology teaches us to see the social world and thus often remain implicit. I suspect that the attack on the introductory curriculum, as we’ve seen in Florida, is motivated in part by fear—not that Sociology 101 is a call to arms but that it is a possible first step toward intellectual resistance. Fascism cannot allow such a possibility to get far afoot.

I’ve foregrounded sociology because sociology is my discipline and I know it best. Attacks on sociology also have been highly visible in the last few years, so the fascist reaction to sociology should be fresh in mind. But these lessons are not the sole province of sociology. Some of the same lessons are taught in other social science and humanities disciplines: anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, education, law, literature and so on. Which is why they’ve all been assailed, to greater or lesser degrees, for a long time. Any disciplines with the potential to transform 18-year-olds into morally responsible, less pliant members of humanity—people less likely to seek entry into what has been called the “Epstein class” of elites who are indifferent to the suffering they cause—is a threat. Sociology is just a prime target right now.

Once upon a time it would have been a point of pride for sociologists to be seen as part of an antifascist discipline. But today it seems that too many of us have tried to keep our heads down, understandably. We are vulnerable to right-wing legislators who control university purse strings, to politically appointed boards of governors and trustees, to complicit administrators. Even so, I hope we can do better. We need to model for our students what intellectual freedom in the face of reaction looks like, redoubling our efforts to teach the basic humanistic and scientific lessons of sociology. We can’t wait for things to get better; we need to take our own lessons to heart and try to make them so.