Sociologists and Social Progress

This book utilizes narratives from U.S. and Caribbean scholars to examine the viability of sociologists changing the world from below through sporadic interdependent networks (Piven 2008). The conclusion reached is that in its current state, the academy can do little to improve conditions in society, as sociologists are themselves embattled by defeating narratives revolving around: poor personal experiences; the recalcitrance of Old World history; European epistemological meta-narratives, and; the multi-paradigmatic criteria for determining sociological knowledge. If sociologists are to finally influence society then the academy has to first overcome its calcified European and Anglo-American principles of domination.

Confronting the discipline of sociology with the eye of a critical journalist, Miller takes a searing look at the dominant western ethnocentric voice that still prevails among Caribbean sociologists located in the US and in the Caribbean Region and advocates for an urgent dismantling of the existing hegemonies of knowledge and power for meaningful breakthroughs in theory and praxis., In this provocative and probing book about social science and social progress, Alex Miller raises many of the most fundamental questions facing sociologists in the modern world. As has usually been the case, the greatest insights about and pressures for change in all academic disciplines often come from scholarly analysts on the "margins" of the status hierarchies of those disciplines. Looking at Euro-dominance in academic worlds from the non-European and Caribbean angle, Miller sees clearly and sharply that the U.S. sociological "emperors" in fact have no defensible intellectual clothes. Their thread-bare intellectual cloth is fabricated from old Eurocentric patterns of positivism and "objectivity" still produced in the academic mills of U.S. and other westernized higher education. Miller shows that, while many U.S. sociologists research societal problems, they studiously ignore more critical perspectives on U.S. society—especially deeper critics of these societal problems found in the black American, Caribbean, and white class-critical and racism-critical traditions. His analysis of West Indian academics' views on these matters, and on West Indian social science, is insightful, provocative, and on target. These academics have a foot in both European-American and Caribbean worlds, and their views reveal what it wrong and what is right about both Caribbean and U.S. social science. While, as Miller shows, Western social science has been hegemonic in the Caribbean, as in most areas colonized by Europeans and European Americans, there has long been a counter-hegemonic, counter-framed tradition of thought and action that has challenged that Euro-dominance, indeed to the present day. Miller presses social scientists to move away from the dominant Euro-centric metanarrative of social science to reassert this strong counter-hegemonic tradition seen in Caribbean sociology, music, and personality, a tradition grounded in the counter-framed elements of Africanness rooted ultimately in five centuries of resistance.

O. Alexander Miller is an independent scholar.