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Sociology 105
ing of values, social division of labour, ritual and ceremonial enactments, etc.).
Basic Query: What is the presently available inventory of social mechanisms corre-
sponding, say, to the large inventory of psychological mechanisms? What methodolog-
ical problems are entailed in discerning the operation of these social mechanisms?
The paradigm also introduced the notion of ‘dysfunction’ - observed con-
sequences which lessen the adaption of the system (No. 3).62
At this point a digression may be helpful. Why do publications of function-
alism continue to appear with such frequency and what is the role of
functionalism for sociologists? Two reasons come to mind. First, it unifies their
subject matter. The family, the market, the political party, the nation, all be-
come systems. The second reason is more subtle and intimated by the title of
Merton’s essay. A manifest function is one which is intended and recognized by
all people concerned: the Sanitation Department exists to keep the streets clean.
A latent function is one of which the participants in the system are not aware
and which they have not engineered. Suggesting latent functions is the main
glory of functionalist literature. They come in all sizes. Religious ceremonies
have the function of providing the community with a feeling of integration;
inmates of prisons and concentration camps are assigned numbers to strip them
of their individuality.
The parallel with the psychoanalytical distinction between conscious and
unconscious wishes is obvious. In addition to the parallel, however, there is
here an interesting symmetry. The idea of unconscious wishes is of scientific
importance: it moves psychological thinking from the easily observed to a deep-
er level of abstraction and discovery .which goes beyond collecting facts and
computing their correlations. For sociology to reach a corresponding level of
theory two avenues stand open. One is reductionism: explaining social facts as a
complex of individual psychological experiences, a move from which the large
majority of contemporary sociologists have shied away. The second way to go
beyond the observable is to assume that much of what people do is controlled
by the social system in which they live and which exercises its imperatives by
childhood training, sanctions which society imposes on deviants and rewards
for conformity. One sometimes feels that the psychoanalytical and sociological
formula might be reduced to the following imagery: the task of true scientific
analysis is to show what animates people without their knowing it. They are
driven from within - the unconscious, and they are driven from without - the
social system.
If all this correctly explains the attraction of functionalism, one can derive an
expectation as to its more recent development. Its formulations are so general
that they do not really give guidance to specific inquiries or to the interpretation
of empirical findings. Therefore, the effort of functionalists must necessarily
strive toward specification. But these specifications are bound to refer only to
aspects of the general formula which happen to be relevant for an individual
author when he discusses a concrete case. He wil introduce his ideas by im-
proving what he is likely to call traditional functionalism, that is last year’s
publication. The criticized earlier author in turn will usually state that he himself
had this innovation in mind but did not make it quite explicit. Occasionally