I think so too but a lot of the lecturers, some of the publishers and most definitely the students are all so Marxian, and pretty much sixties Marxian, as to make it seriously seem so.
I find this incredibly ironic since when I read Burke, especially "Nasty Burke" when he is singing a hymn to prejudice and the like, and others like him I tend to read it as a massive assault on reformers and revolutionaries for their ignorance of what would today be called sociology or sociological insights.
May be so, I haven't noticed so much myself and I suppose it also depends on how loosely you define Marxists. You could say I'm Marxist because I generally subscribe to conflict theory and Marx essentially invented that. But the very fact that these people could be called sixties
Marxists, if that is credible, reveals the long history of sociology.
Although a lot of sociological text books seem to take Herbert Spencer's functionalism, especially his analogies about the state and society being a body (which is to me a kind of Hobbesian idea) the amelioration of poverty or social distress being akin to physiological treatments resulting in atrophied limbs, as ideology rather than reality.
That's because it
is ideology rather than reality. One can acknowledge society as an ontological thing without going to the extreme, perscriptive lengths that Spencer did.
At the moment I'm unsure about this topic, Thatchers denial of society's existence for instance was based upon staunch Hayekian classical liberalism and an observation of how people practically function. It is, to me, both coherent and plausible.
I never thought Hayek had a particularly useful or accurate view of society. In a sense, he artifically spread open a dichotomy between the most superlative individualism and the most superlative centralization. This dichotomy is neither real, nor are
either end of it practicable, though he of course seemed to think the former was with his over-emphasis on spontaneous order and all of that tosh.
While most people considering society or social reality to be ontologically a priori are going to look at individuality or individualism as a social construction I'm unsure now.
In a way it comes down to is considering individuality as a social construct essentially a chicken and egg scenario, like the Zen riddle, which came first? Sociology definitely deals with how society reproduces itself. Or is suggesting that individuality is a social construct in reality placing the cart before the horse? Does individuality exist a priori and individuals then form families, neighbourhoods, at the most communities (such as an online forum for instance) out of either habit or a desire to share and share alike and this constitutes or is labelled society?
I see no chicken and egg problem. It's blatantly obvious that as a physical thing the individual comes first, and individuals put together create a society, provided that they can influence each other (if you could somehow get a mass of people together, and yet cut them all of from contact with each other, you would not get a society).
However, there is a reciprocal process here. Clearly humans do have malleable and impressionable psychology that is in part determined by the influence of those the individual is exposed to. Once you have a group of people clustered together enough that a new person can be born into the group itself, then you now have the group influence the people who will eventually be consituting the group even as those who influence the individual in the first place have passed away. The whole thing is driven by the exchange of characteristics from one member to another and so forth. So if we are talking strictly about culture, there still isn't a chicken and egg effect. Rather than one following the other, it's more like they co-exist and starting with either one will invoke the other.
It may not seem like it matters or appears very abstract or academic but I tend to think that society as articulated in one sense is more tangible than the other, which is a fable agreed upon by individuals. However, if it is more tangible how can it exist, what invocation brought it forth? How can it be? Without possessing what can really be said to be a consciousness but instead a kind of "Ghost In The Machine"?
How can society exist? I think biological evolution is a much more bizarre and complex idea than society, but I don't refence ghost in machines or higher powers for that, either. Like I said, it's just a more complicateed version of ripples in a pond. Do you have an idea of what I mean?