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.
