I recently finished a disappointing book, a poorly conceived and executed study on the significance of the number three in sociology (Bálint Balla, Die Zahl Drei und die Soziologie, Hamburg: Krämer, 2008). What made the book especially frustrating was not its lack of editorial quality, its murky epistemology, or its unjustifiably high price (almost 23 euros for a 150-page paperback), but that it could have been a decent book. Although it may not sound that way, I respect Professor Balla for acting on his idiosyncratic research interest. That takes guts. I just wanted him to push further.

First off, I realize that “here’s the book I would have written”-style reviews are unhelpful. My excuse? This is not a review; I’m merely riffing off Professor Balla’s book.

In the last section of the book, the author recapitulates (rather clumsily) the points that he drew out in the course of his slipshod analysis of sociological triads, trying in vain to come to some kind of conclusion. I suspect that many who have been in academia long enough have found themselves in a situation like that: After spending significant time and energy on a research project that seemed fascinating and fruitful at the time, the diligent researcher starts writing up the findings and grapples in vain to come up with a conclusion. What remains, finally, is the famous conclusion that there is no conclusion. (The parallel in summit politics would be, “We agreed to disagree.”) I know I’ve been in that situation. Like me, most probably commit these inconclusive projects to the proverbial desk drawer. Professor Balla, however, decided to publish his in book form. Bad move.

Why could this still have been a decent book? Because in the very last pages, he does go on tiny step further than his inconclusive conclusion:

A third reason for this deficit could be that sociology is fundamentally unable to work through certain thematic areas, such as numbers. The “unlocking of secrets” of numbers requires a different theoretical approach … Particularly, it requires a different understanding of data [Empirieverständnis], which is inadequately circumscribed by catchwords such as “qualitative” versus “quantitative.” Investigations of the unconscious, the archetypal, even the extra-rational—where we may assume the cryptic aspects of the number three to lie—should be given more space.

In order to give more space to such investigations, we need to develop new instruments.

If successful, this would be another step in the “disenchantment of the world,” as Max Weber on several occasions called the processes of rationalization, intellectualization and technification. He especially took this to mean that basically “all things could be mastered through calculation,” that there were “no secretive incalculable forces.” …

Should sociology not succeed in mastering the world of numbers, and should its mysteries and secrets continue to confound us, then we would have to conclude that certain areas of life are exempt from the process of disenchantment [Entzauberung; literally “the removal of magic”], and that the world of numbers—perhaps along with others—is such an area.

If I had read Professor Balla’s manuscript prior to publication, I would have told him what every college instructor has told an undergraduate upon reading his or her draft term paper: Take your last paragraph and make it your first, then rewrite your paper to flow from there. You’re not writing a film script; you don’t have to save the denouement for last. The Number Three and Sociology should have been a book about the unexamined presuppositions (dare I say: ideological commitments) of the discipline of sociology, the limitations of secular reason and the repressed continuities between premodern and modern forms of understanding. Instead, it submits to disciplinary boundaries, condemning itself to discover nothing new. Too bad.

  10:45 pm  ❦   16 July 2010