In Memory of Donald Black
A guest post by Bradley Campbell
Sociologist Donald Black recently passed away. If you’ve been reading this blog you’ve seen his name mentioned frequently — he provided the foundations to my corner of the intellectual world. Those of us who worked with his ideas, and especially those of us who had the privilege of knowing him personally, are still reeling from the loss.
My friend and collaborator Bradley Campbell prepared an excellent statement on Donald’s legacy, and has given permission to share it here:
I first encountered Donald Black as a student in his Sociology of Law class in the Fall of 2000. It was my first class in my first semester as a graduate student in sociology at the University of Virginia, and he began the class by writing “Law varies directly with relational distance” on the chalkboard. I was immediately intrigued and eventually blown away by Black’s brand of sociology.
This short statement on the board, just one part of his theory, was so general it could explain facts as seemingly unconnected as the absence of law in hunter-gatherer societies and variation in the application of the death penalty in modern America.
To be introduced to the statement was like being introduced to a unicorn (or to the Minotaur) — something I’d been told didn’t exist. Sociology that was this scientific was supposed to be impossible, but there it was — general, simple, testable, valid, and value free.
However exciting it was for me to hear about these ideas, though, Donald was even more excited to share them. It might be hard for those who didn’t know Donald personally or who didn’t talk with him extensively to get a sense of the joy he got out of developing new ways of thinking about and explaining social reality.
In an interview for the Oral History of Criminology Project, he spoke about falling to the floor with excitement when the phrase “the behavior of law” first came to him. “I sensed right then,” he said, “that I was in the grip of something that was going to probably dominate the rest of my life. I felt that I had the beginning of a new kind of sociology….”
Donald later called this new kind of sociology “pure sociology.” He had come up with a new way of thinking about social reality. To explain variation in law was to explain the behavior of law itself — the behavior of social life rather than the behavior of people as such.
In that moment of discovery, Donald was right in thinking he was developing a new kind of sociology, and he was also right in thinking it was going to dominate the rest of his life. Donald was one of the most idealistic people I’ve ever known — completely committed to developing new ideas about social life and committed to doing it well. And in this he succeeded.
He gave us not just a general theory of law, but also theories of social control more broadly — theories of partisanship and settlement, terrorism, feuding, domestic violence, and much more. And he gave us a general theory of conflict that identifies the cause of all human conflict and explains why deviant behavior is deviant.
I’m grateful to have known Donald. I’m grateful for his supervision of my dissertation, for his mentorship throughout my career, and for his infectious enthusiasm about the science of social life. And I’m grateful for his many contributions to that science, which have been essential for my own work.
And I’m hopeful that his work can still serve to demonstrate to sociologists what sociology can be. The discipline seems to be entering a Dark Age, where even the American Sociological Association (ASA) sees sociology as a kind of activism. “Liberatory praxis,” they call it — “an effort to not only understand structural inequities, but to intervene in socio-political struggles.”
But while the ASA may have given up on actual sociology, Donald had not. The ASA may want to take sides in moral conflicts, but Donald knew that the point of sociology is to explain those conflicts, along with all other forms of social life.
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