Dennis Hume Wrong was a Canadian-born American sociologist and emeritus professor in the Department of Sociology at New York University. Wrong was the author of several books, including two essay collections containing articles first published in cultural, intellectual, political and scholarly journals in the United States, Canada, and Britain.
Wrong is best known for a 1961 article, "The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology." This summarized his critique of the limitations of structural functionalism employed by Talcott Parsons. In 1968 Wrong began to write on power with a contribution to American Journal of Sociology. The article argued that power is not asymmetrical except in cases of physical violence. It distinguished power from control and potential from possible powers. He cited Bertrand RussellPower: a new social analysis and Nelson W. Polsby Community Power and Social Theory. In 1979, he published Power: its forms, bases, and uses which was widely reviewed. For example, Jennie M. Hornosty criticized the book for its lack of discussion of class conflict, digression into peripheral issues, and weakness on the social-structural variants of power. Michael Mann criticized it for incompleteness, though he praised the first 159 pages. In Mann's view Wrong's view descends into an analysis of aggregates of individuals at the end. He expected more description of the complex and interpenetrating relations between classes, states, churches, communities, and bureaucracies. Wrong described his 1994 book The Problem of Order as "a sequel to, or enlargement upon" his 1961 article. The book considers a number of theorists and writers, including Hobbes, Rousseau, Freud, and Parsons. In his discussion of Freud and in particular Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, Wrong observes that one may "accept the substance of Freud's emphasis on conflict and ambivalence" while rejecting some of Freud's formulations in Civilization about "nature" versus "culture." Nature and culture are both "riven with conflicts that cut across one another, so the simple dichotomy of nature versus culture so often represented as the essence of Freud's social theory is not tenable."
Quotes
In his book Power... Wrong argued:
It has been argued that, like "freedom" or "justice" – those "big words which make us so unhappy", as Stephen Dedalus called them – "power" is an "essentially contested concept", meaning that people with different values and beliefs are bound to disagree over its nature and definition. It is claimed therefore that there cannot be any commonly accepted or even preferred meaning so long as people differ on normative issues as they are likely to do indefinitely, if not forever. "Power", however, does not seem to me to be an inherently normative concept. its scope and pervasiveness, its involvement in any and all spheres of social life, give it almost unavoidable evaluative overtones. Positive or negative, benign or malign, auras come to envelop it, linking it still more closely to ideological controversy. Yet power as a generic attribute of social life is surely more like the concepts of "society", "group" or "social norm" than like such essentially and inescapably normative notions as "justice", "democracy" or "human rights".
