Sociology: The Departure of ‘Stray Colleagues in a Vaguely Cognate Discipline’

This chapter comes with a health warning: it tells a story of the evolution of sociology in Cambridge, as pieced together by an economist, the act of presumption partially justified by the fact that Cambridge sociology was fostered since its birth, well or poorly, in the twin Faculty and DAE homes of Cambridge economics where it resided till well into adulthood, when the hostility of the orthodox economists’ campaign against the heterodox groups intensified the attraction, and opened up a realistic prospect, for ‘leaving home’ and seeking an independent existence in the institutional melee of the social sciences in Cambridge, hoping at the end to establish a department of its own. The turning point was the university review of the DAE of 1984–1987 in which the Hahn-Matthews camp lobbied vehemently for sociology and sociologists to be shown the door, and so it transpired, despite the almost universal and strongly expressed support for sociology and sociologists by their economist colleagues of various heterodox persuasions, both from within the DAE and the Faculty. This departure further strengthened the numerical hold of the orthodox Hahn-Matthews group over decision making in the Faculty of Economics, the prime, if covert motivation for its ostensibly academic ‘purification’ campaign. This episode is explored, using archival materials, within a wider discussion of the evolution to maturity of sociology as a taught discipline in the face of hostile academic and institutional environments in the UK, dominated by vocal economists and scientists. The heterodox economists of Cambridge, in the DAE and in the Faculty, with their realization of the worth of multidisciplinary research, stand out as exceptions in this regard. The narrative here offers some novel insights into the period of the life of Cambridge sociology spent in the home of Cambridge economics.