The New Sociology Of Scotland

David McCrone

(Sage, £32.99)

Review by Iain Macwhirter

PROFESSOR David McCrone, one of Scotland's leading academics and social commentators, was among the first in the country ever to graduate in the new science of sociology. In 1970, his professor at Edinburgh University, Tom Burns, told him loftily that “there could never be a sociology of Scotland”. McCrone has spent the last 47 years proving Burns wrong.

Few people read social science books for fun, but McCrone's unique selling point is that he can write. Unlike so many in his profession, he avoids the temptation to bury his meaning under dense layers of structuralist abstraction. When he uses paradox, it is to illuminate not obfuscate. “A Scottish way of doing sociology,” he says, “deals in the language of universals while doing so in the grammar of the particular.”

Scotland is interesting for students of society because, to use one of his own phrases from an earlier work, it is a “stateless nation” (though it has been acquiring a bit more state in recent decades since the creation of the Scottish Parliament). But even in its statelessness, Scotland possessed a distinct society in terms of its social structure, its institutions and its image of itself. Anyway, as he points out, for half a millennium Scotland was an independent country.

This is a work of reference that also presents a vivid picture of how Scottish society has evolved since the Second World War. Most of the themes are fairly familiar. Scotland is a land of emigrants, and its greatest export continues to be its people. Religion used to play a leading role in Scottish society, the Kirk occupying the space vacated by political institutions, and its decline has coincided with the re-appropriation of political autonomy.

Scotland is an ageing society, because of the falling birth rate as much as longevity. It remains an inegalitarian society despite having an egalitarian ethos, and the distribution of wealth and social mobility mirrors that of the UK as a whole. It is a service economy that still thinks of itself as a manufacturing one. The assumption that Scotland is a male chauvinist society is, McCrone says, “often asserted, and less reliably proven”. Scotland's reputation for violent crime, since the days of No Mean City, is no longer justified by the crime statistics, if it ever was.

The chapters on culture and identity are the strongest and amount to a book within a book. McCrone has little time for the miserablists for whom “Scotland is not so much a country as a psychological condition”. Nor does he buy the claim – most recently from Ruth Davidson – that Scotland has lapsed into the irrationalism of “identity politics”. Scots have been relaxed about their culture, even the silly tourist versions of it. What has driven the rise of the SNP has been political and social discontent. Scotland is less obviously prone to racism than England, McCrone believes, “because of the lack of political oxygen for 'race politics' to flourish and the fact that the political system squeezes out ethnic politics”.

There are some omissions. Homophobia, for example, gets little discussion, even though one of the most striking changes in social attitudes has been towards sexual minorities. Less than 20 years ago Scotland was nearly torn apart over the homophobic Keep The Clause campaign. Now, three party leaders in Holyrood are openly gay, and both Labour and the Conservatives are led by lesbians. Scotland's embrace of diversity has been little short of astonishing to anyone who remembers male culture in the last century.

The decline of the Scottish press, which used to be one of the main transmitters of Scottish national identity, is well examined by McCrone. However, the rise of digital media, in particular social media, is neglected. Yet the Yes Scotland campaign could not have been half as successful as it was in 2014 had it not been for social media and Nationalist blogs like Wings Over Scotland. The internet counterbalanced the uniformly unionist stance of the mainstream media.

But these are minor points. Any book that aims to be comprehensive sets itself up for quibbles. The New Sociology went to print before the revival of the Scottish Conservative Party put a minor dent in Scotland's self-image as a social democratic “Tory-free zone”. The sociology of Scotland is always going to be a work in progress; indeed, this is McCrone's third attempt.

For the aid of school and university students he includes questions for discussion at the end of each chapter. These are often provocative commentaries in themselves, as in “are Scots 90-minute nationalists?” and “are globalisation and nationalism opposites or complements?”. McCrone could do a service to Scottish democracy by gathering these queries together and emailing them to Holyrood's political leaders.