What Is To Be Done? 237
out bodies, mopping u~. the casualties. Here lay the promise of
sociology: to get at structure, power, history and politics - the
real stuff of social problems. But Alinsky had a twist to his story:
while the fisherman was so busy running along the bank to find
the ultimate source of the problem, who was going to help those
poor wretches who continued to float down the river? As I moved
further into sociology, this question continued to trouble me, and·
it still does. So I wrote worried and confused papers about why
radical theories of crime and deviance seemed 'right', yet had
undesirable, ambiguous or no implications at all for the individual
business of helping (social work) or punishing (criminal justice).l
The problem seemed to be that the more successfully and radically
social sci~nce changed your view of the world, the more
indifferent it became to the fate of those individual bodies. It was
not that social science did not help understand their fate. Quite
the contrary. Theory and research became .Illore and more sophisticated
and in the areas of social life which interested me
(crime, deviance, law, punishment) there were many sociological
descriptions and explanations which were interesting and perfectly
comprehensible. They made a difference to the way the world
looked. But, as William J ames said, 'a difference that makes no
difference is no difference'. I would deliver the same sort of message
implicit in this book (without the ponderous analysis or the
academic footnotes) to a group of social workers, and depart
knowing that although everything I had said was right, it made no
difference to my audience. Or else that it had made only the sort
of difference which my colleagues assured me should make me
proud: that these poor misguided social workers should now feel
demoralized and frustrated about their work, and start looking
for the 'real' issues (become sociologists?).
To the extent that I ever picked up these feelings (luckily my
audiences were usually too sensible to be much influenced in this
way) I became even more depressed and guilty. What a way to
make a living: going round telling well-meaning people that what
they were doing was no good! This was a shared cognitive experience
for a large part of a generation of sociologists working in
the social-problems area. We could draw on the vast literature
around such issues as 'pure' versus 'applied' or 'committed' versus
'detached' social science, and criminologists arranged themselves
along various axes of these standard debates. Some interpret their
academic role in pure, ~eoretical, and intellectual terms; others
openly align themselves with conservative forces; and yet others
proclaim a committed, critical and radical role. Some stay outside