Is Astrology Sociology? 63-year-old French astrology columnist and astrologer to French president Mitterrand has just earned a PhD in sociology at the Sorbonne after successfully defending her controversial 900-page dissertation “The Epistemological Situation of Astrology in

Relation to the Ambivalent Fascination/Rejection of Postmodern Societies”. The news has set off a front-page storm of protest in France between academics concerned about shoddy scholarship and those who feel a maverick discipline is being scapegoated, “… between the followers of Émile Durkheim and followers of Weber. Or, to put it

another way, between positivists who rely on quantitative techniques and

objective measures when assessing social life and phenomenologists who attach

greater importance to subjective experience and emotion. ” New York Times