Environmental Sociology: Capitalism, Sustainability and Social Justice

Paper to Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, ‘History of Postwar Social Science’ Lecture Series

Peter Dickens[1]

Society and Nature: a Developing Sociological Agenda

There is a paradox to environmental sociology. On the one hand it is a discipline that has often used the natural and physical sciences as its model. Auguste Comte, usually recognised as the founder of sociology, referred to the discipline as ‘social physics.’ ‘Physics envy’ continued to be a feature of sociology and other social sciences such as economics; such admiration being in part an attempt to give credibility to the new and still-emergent social sciences. Durkheim’s and Spencer’s analyses of social development from relatively simple towards more complex forms were, in part at least, modelled on a Darwinian idea of evolution in the natural world - from more ‘simple’ organisms such as amoeba to more ‘complex’ organisms such as ‘man.’ The positivist agenda for testing and developing theories were also in part also based on ideas regarding the testing of theories in the natural and physical sciences.

Yet, as Dunlap and Catton (1994) have pointed out, making these new social science disciplines resulted in the disconnection of the social and its natural its ecological conditions. This disconnection may seem surprising but it is perhaps understandable if seen as these disciplines trying to form themselves as distinct entities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But, in light of society’s self-evident contemporary impacts on the environment, it is a split which is clearly no longer acceptable today.

While the relationships between society and environment have become increasingly fraught they have come under increasingly active scrutiny by the social sciences. Perhaps most