Dennis Wrong

Dennis Hume Wrong (born November 15, 1923^[1]) is a Canadian-born American sociologist, and emeritus professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology at New York University.^[2]

The grandson of George Mackinnon Wrong, Canadian historian, and son of Humphrey Hume Wrong, Canadian Ambassador to the United States. He is also the father of documentary filmmaker Terence Wrong.

Wrong is the author of several books, including two essay collections containing articles first published in cultural, intellectual, political and scholarly journals in the United States, Canada, and Britain.

He taught sociology at Princeton University, Rutgers, Brown University, the University of Toronto, the New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty, and for most of his career at New York University. Wrong is a permanent editor at Dissent (magazine). He is currently retired and lives in Princeton.

The Dennis Wrong Award is given for the best graduate paper of the year by New York University's sociology department.^[3]

Work

In 1968 Wrong began to write on power (social and political) with a contribution to American Journal of Sociology.^[4] The article argued that power is not asymmetrical except in cases of physical violence. It distinguished power from control and potential from possible powers. He cited Bertrand Russell (1938) Power: a new social analysis and Nelson W. Polsby (1963) Community Power and Social Theory.

In 1979, he published Power: its forms, bases, and uses which was widely reviewed. For example, Jennie M. Hornosty criticized the book for its lack of discussion of class conflict, digression into peripheral issues, and weakness on the social-structural variants of power.^[5]

Michael Mann criticized it for incompleteness, though he praised the first 159 pages. In Mann's view Wrong's view descends into an analysis of aggregates of individuals at the end. He expected more description of the complex and interpenetrating relations between classes, states, churches, communities, and bureaucracies.^[6]

Wrong is best known for the introduction of a journal piece "Oversocialized conception of Man in Modern sociology". This summarized his critique of the limitations of structural functionalism employed by Talcott Parsons.

Quotes

In his book Power... Wrong argued:

It has been argued that, like "freedom" or "justice" – those "big words which make us so unhappy", as Stephen Dedalus called them – "power" is an "essentially contested concept", meaning that people with different values and beliefs are bound to disagree over its nature and definition. It is claimed therefore that there cannot be any commonly accepted or even preferred meaning so long as people differ on normative issues as they are likely to do indefinitely, if not forever. "Power", however, does not seem to me to be an inherently normative concept. […] its scope and pervasiveness, its involvement in any and all spheres of social life, give it almost unavoidable evaluative overtones. Positive or negative, benign or malign, auras come to envelop it, linking it still more closely to ideological controversy. Yet power as a generic attribute of social life is surely more like the concepts of "society", "group" or "social norm" than like such essentially and inescapably normative notions as "justice", "democracy" or "human rights". (Wrong 2002: viii)

Bibliography

• The Persistence of the Particular, 2005
• Reflections on a Politically Skeptical Era, 2003, Transaction Publishers
• The Oversocialized Conception of Man, 1999, Transaction Publishers ^[7]
• The Modern Condition: Essays at Century’s End, 1998, Stanford UP
• The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society, 1995
• Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses, 1995,1980 Transaction Publishers ^[8]
• Skeptical Sociology, 1976
• Makers of Modern Social Science: Max Weber, 1970
• Readings in Introductory Sociology,

Journals

• The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology, 1961, American Sociological Review, Vol. 26, No. 2 (pp. 183–193)

See also

• Zero-sum game - a concept discussed in "Power..."

References