Until the 1960s, sociologists had asserted that a willingness to
identify deviance, or what constitutes appropriate behavior, was
indispensable to the process of generating and sustaining cultural
values, clarifying moral boundaries, and promoting social
solidarity. Yet today, after three decades of lacerating debate,
shifts in values and social relations, and questioning social
authority, the subject has virtually disappeared from sociology's
radar screen. Deviance, in the famous phrase of Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, has been "dumbed down." In "The Politics of Deviance,"
Anne Hendershott, a leading sociologist herself, tries to
understand how this major change in the way we see our world
occurred. How did we adopt such different views of human nature and
personal responsibility? How did we "medicalize" what was once
proscribed behavior? While in the past there was a moral consensus
that conditioned our attitudes toward teenage sex, suicide,
substance abuse, and other questionable behaviors, Hendershott
points out that today it is pressure groups that define and
redefine deviance. ("As I write these words," she says at one point
in the narrative, "the advocacy of the North American Man-Boy Love
Association is invisibly changing the way we see pedophilia.") As
they succeed in redefining our attitudes toward their "clients,"
these groups significantly altered our view of each other and of
our world. Arguing against the grain of her own discipline, Anne
Hendershott asserts the value and strength of the most important of
all determinants of behavior--social norms and the commitment to
accept them. "The Politics of Deviance" maintains that definitions
of deviance that rely upon reason, and not emotion or political
advocacy, are indispensable to the process of generating and
sustaining cultural values and reaffirming the moral ties that bind
us together.
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