4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST positivism. According to Comte, it is only by the positive polity that the revolutionary spirit can be restrained ... the positive spirit tends to consolidate order, by the rational (sic) development of a wise (sic) resignation to incurable (sic) political evils ... A true resignation—that is, a permanent disposition to endure, steadily, and without hope ..."1 (emphasis added). Indeed, it was no accident that sociology was sired by the founder of (modern) positivism. Bureaucratic- Mechanistic Appro ach It is this conservative spot which sociology still carries in America. In fact, as Martin Nicolaus aptly observes:"In the United States,sociology originally served primarily as a conduit through which European conservative social thought was introduced into the American academic milieu.2 If anything, the Americans have made sociology an even more insidious ideological weapon against revolutionary mode of social analysis and change through their diversionary stress on f methodological' sophistication, hyper-quantification and what C Wright Mills rightly bewails as "bureaucratic ethos", that is, extreme specialization, unconcern with social philosophy, emphasis on research techniques and procedures, crass careerism, and the (resultant) lack of "sociological imagination" and impoverishment of the social scientist's personality. Needless to say, social researchers of this kind are totally unaware of the fact that problem selection is never quite free; they are also unaware of the fact that data are not simply a matter of data-collecting tools and techniques but also of the perspective, vision or social awareness of the researcher, that methods of data collection are not entirely bias-free or neutral, that the validity of a sample is best learnt not from statistical theory itself but from "reflections about the actual distribution of power within the society",3 that "social facts", though external and constraining in character, are neither (inanimate and static) "things" nor do facts speak for themselves but particular human observers, occupying particular social (class) positions speak for them, and that, as Derek Phillips points out, what is most urgently needed is not new research methods and techniques or new data but "new ways" or perspective of looking at existing data.4 For, indeed, "research without an actively selected point of view", as Lynd observes, "becomes the ditty bag of an idiot, filled with bits of pebbles, straws, feathers, and other random hoardings." In fact it is the very purpose of a "good scientific training" to, among other things, sensitize the scientist to important problems and give him "a selective point of view" or perspective.5 Of this alienated and alienating, that is dehumanized and dehumanizing, sociology, mathematical sociology is perhaps the best example—and the application of mathematics to the study of history by, for example, Fogel and Engerman has led them to the bizarre conclusion that the Negro slavery in America was not such a deplorable and harmful institution after all—harmful neither to the economy nor yet to the Negro slaves!6 This shocking state of the