THE DANGERS OF PURITY: ON THE INCOMPATIBILITY OF “PURE SOCIOLOGY” AND SCIENCE Douglas A. Marshall* University of South Alabama Donald Black insists that sociology must be purged of its psychological elements in order to become a genuinely distinct and scientific discipline. But such “purification” is simultaneously unnecessary, undesirable, and unattainable. It is unnecessary because the scientific shortcomings of sociology are indigenous and have nothing to do with psychologism. Indeed, a more scientific sociology would look more, not less, like psychology. Purity is undesirable in that it is not only not a scientific virtue, but is antithetical to the very scientific values that Black invokes to justify it. His systems are neither theories nor laws, but heuristics, more akin to common sense than to scientific theory. Finally, purity is unattainable because though society is indeed discontinuous with the individuals who make it up, it and all theorizing about it, are ontologically and conceptually dependent upon them. For 30 years now, Donald Black has been fomenting revolution in sociology, urging the discipline to purify itself “. . . of the unsociological elements that now contaminate and spoil it as a science”(Black 2000b:705). Beginning with the sociology of law, but intending nothing less than a discipline-wide transformation (Black 2002a), Black seeks to recon- struct the field upon a “pure sociology” framework. While no revolution has transpired, his message has attracted widespread attention, appeared in major journals (Black 1995, 2000a, 2000b, 2002a, 2004), and garnered American Sociological Association awards. Unlike those critics offended by his positivism, universalism, or eschewing of agency (e.g., Frankford 1995; Vaughan 1998), I share and welcome Black’s conviction that sociology can and should be a scientific discipline. But contra Black, I contend that his vision of “pure sociology” not only fails to make the discipline more scientific, but is contrary to that goal. THE DUBIOUS CASE FOR PURITY As Black (1995:848) sees it, psychologism is the bane of sociology’s scientific aspirations. Citing the social psychology that pervades the work of the discipline’s founders, he laments that “Despite endless protests to the contrary, sociology is saturated with psy- chology,” the chief offenses of which are its purported teleology and subjectivity (via its invocation of internal and hence directly unobservable states, events, and constructs). Although he is partially correct on both counts when he declares that “sociology is actually not so different from psychology, and it is not so scientific either” (Black *Direct all correspondence to Doug Marshall, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, HUMB 34. University of South Alabama. Mobile, AL 36688; e-mail: damarshall@usouthal.edu The Sociological Quarterly ISSN 0038-0253 The Sociological Quarterly 49 (2008) 209–235 © 2008 Midwest Sociological Society 209