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Penetrating analyses of how sociological factors affect legal processes and outcomes in America and subcultures within the general society

Law and Society brings together for the first time the works of one of America’s foremost social scientists on the relationship between law and society. This volume provides a valuable resource for everyone interested in how sociological factors have affected legal processes and outcomes throughout the twentieth century in the United States, on both a national and a local level. This collection defines and illustrates how social scientists both conceptualize and analyze the intersection of law and society, with important implications for the disciplines of sociology, economics, political science, law, education, demography, anthropology, history, and social psychology.
Among the many topics discussed are equality and inequality before the law; clans, secret societies, and other institutions for judicial settlement; community power, group cohesion, and conflict; legitimacy, consensus, and Watergate; Chinatown and Little Tokyo, subcultures built on conflict; jurisprudence and juridical cultures; law and sociology; mediation, conciliation, and conflict resolution; community development and immigration legislation in America; racial and ethnic prejudice and juridical interpretation; and affirmative action, reparations, and the Constitution.

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From the Book:

It has become commonplace to speak of “crisis” as a contemporary characteristic of both society and social science. In recent years a., sense of “crisis” has been apprehended in “late” or “advanced”’ capitalism,1 Marxism,2 Western sociology,3 and in the basis for authority in general.4 With such a plethora of crises, it is only inevitable that—among the radicals, at any rate—a politics-of-crisis theory5 would also develop, and that both radical and moderate sociologists would begin to search for the sources and causes of error in their predecessors’ and their own work.6 In fact “crisis” is a complex and ambiguous term, less than adequately suited for conceptual usage in the social sciences.7 Moreover, the basic sociological ideas of most of the “crisis” theorists are not much different from those of their more conventional opponents. Precisely because of this, it is useful to reexamine the concerns of conventional social science with the structure and dynamics of society and more especially with the political sector. Such a review can throw light on certain persistent problems in conceptualization and theorizing.

There can be little doubt that social science in general and sociology in particular have been dominated by progressively more elaborated versions of the structural-functional orientation. So pervasive has been this approach that, despite effective criticism8 and a much vaunted premature burial,9 the fundamental ideas still survive. Indeed, although certain sociologists have insisted that structural-functionalism is peculiarly suited to provide subtle ideological support to the status quo in American society or for capitalism,10 it has been espoused by East European theorists11 and for a time was the basis for socioeconomic and political reorganization is societies claiming Marx as their forebear.12 The near universality of functionalist ideas in sociology led Kingsley Davis to dispute its critics’ claim that it is a special variant of the discipline;13 while Kenneth E. Bock treats its persistence in the face of such extensive criticism as constituting in itself something of a crisis for sociology.14

Despite their warnings and alarms, the bulk of the new crisis theorists in sociology are failing to provide any more effective solutions to the problems in sociology or society than those offered by Lipset and other structural-functionalists. The basic reason for this failure is that crisis theorists adhere to essentially the same paradigm that animated original structural-functionalism. As self-selected heirs of Marx, crisis theorists have adapted the developmentalist, evolutionist, and systemic elements of that theorist’s work to an analysis of modern industrial societies and especially of the United States.15 Thus critiques of domination, exultation over the coming crises of legitimation in capitalist societies, and the general “critical” theory of society do little more than replace the rhetoric of a Parsonian evolutionist-functionalism with that of neo-Marxian systemic developmental-ism. A good example is the recent analysis of the “legitimation crisis” by Jürgen Habermas.16 Not only do we find the familiar evolutionist stage theory of development resuscitated in the form of preclass, class, and postclass societies (with class societies divided into traditional and modern civilizations, the latter subdivided into capitalist and postcapitalist societies, and the capitalist societies further classified into liberal capitalist and organized or advanced capitalist types), but also an unabashed affiliation with the substance of the ideas usually associated with the systemic writings of Parsons. Indeed, the debate with Niklas Luhmann, Germany’s leading exponent of Parsonian thought, which closes and in fact epitomizes the current intellectual direction of the “critical” theorists, is a squabble among scholars who share the same basic paradigm but disagree on internal technical elements, points of emphasis, and specification of functional significance. Old wine is poured into older bottles. New labels are attached.

“From ‘Legitimacy and Consensus in Lipset’s, America: From Washington to Watergate’”

STANFORD M. LYMAN, Ph.D., was Robert R. Morrow Eminent Scholar in Social Science at Florida Atlantic University, where he was on the faculty of the Holocaust and Judaic Studies Program. He also was a Fulbright lecturer, with a lifetime appointment to the faculty of Oxford University, and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research, in New York. Dr. Lyman authored 25 books and more than 100 articles published in numerous professional journals. Five of his books have been recognized as distinguished contributions to sociological scholarship by the Mid-South Sociological Association, and he has received both the Certificate of Recognition from the National Association for Ethnic Studies and the Herbert Mead Award for lifetime contributions to the study of social psychology, given by the Society for Symbolic Interaction.

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