John Rex's main mistake

Abstract

Science progresses by the discovery and correction of mistakes in the interpretation of data. John Rex sought ‘to distinguish among the various studies made by sociologists those which are distinguishable as race relations studies’. He examined them from the standpoint of classical sociological theory. His main mistake was his continued but unsuccessful attempt to synthesize two quite different kinds of sociological knowledge. He underestimated the importance of differences in the criteria for the validation of causal explanation and for the projection of historical trends.

Keywords:

• colour
• epistemology
• ethnicity
• race
• race relations
• sociological knowledge

Acknowledgements

Herminio Martins, Robert Moore, Richard Jenkins and Satnam Virdee kindly contributed comments on an earlier draft of this text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In 1950, Little wrote a pamphlet for the Bureau of Current Affairs entitled Behind the Colour Bar that opened with the sentence: ‘The expression “colour problem” refers to difficulties arising out of the relations between white and coloured people in countries governed or controlled by members of the white race.’ He used the title Race and Society for his contribution to a conference on ‘Race Problems in the Light of Modern Science’ convened by the British Social Biology Council in that year. In 1958, he was the author of a pamphlet Colour and Commonsense published by the Fabian Society. It looks as if two of these institutions solicited from him contributions using the idiom of colour while others used the idiom of race, and Little was willing to use either.

2. Little's line of argument, and its possible development, is discussed in Banton (2015).

3. My assumption in the early 1950s that sociologists dealt with individuals only insofar as they were representative of groups, was an inference from my studies rather than the result of mistaken reasoning. It was not a particularly interesting mistake.

4. The Epistle of Paul to the Romans 11, 4.

5. My strategy was to contract the meanings given to the word race by differentiating the meanings given to it in different historical periods and in different circumstances. By splitting off the various meanings in ordinary language, it should become easier to question whether in sociology its use could be superseded by expressions that were more fit for purpose. To follow a distinction introduced by Charles Darwin, Rex was a lumper and I am a splitter (‘Lumpers and Splitters’, Wikipedia accessed 14 April 2014).

6. CCCS: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham.

7. For a sympathetic and helpful presentation of this wide-ranging work, see the review by Dennis H. Wrong in the American Journal of Sociology 1979 84(5): 1270–1273. The book must have been based upon much-appreciated lectures to undergraduates, yet Rex, in an interview, curiously affirmed that it ‘received the worst reviews of any sociology book that has ever been written’ (Abbas and Reeves 2007, 40).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Banton

MICHAEL BANTON is Professor Emeritus of Sociology in the University of Bristol.