Sociological Theory and the Capability Approach

Spiros Gangas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138488694
• eBook ISBN: 9781351039642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sociological Theory and the Capability Approach connects normative strands of sociological theory to the fusion of ethics and economics proposed by Amartya Sen's and Martha Nussbaum's capability approach. Spanning classical (Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Scheler, Weber) and contemporary debates (Parsons, Giddens, Luhmann) it identifies areas that bridge the current gap between sociology and capability approach. It thus builds on explanatory and normative concerns shared by both traditions.

Engaging readers from sociology and capability approach, Spiros Gangas suggests that the proposed dialogue should be layered along the main areas of value theory, economy and society, extending this inquiry into the normative meaning attached to being human. To this end, the book reconstructs the notion of agency along the tracks of Nussbaum's central human capabilities, considering also alienation and the sociology of emotions. It concludes by addressing the capability approach through the lens of social institutions before it takes up the challenge of ideological fundamentalism and how it can be effectively confronted by capability approach.

This original book provides a fresh perspective on capability approach as it embeds it in the rich pool of sociological theory's accomplishments. As an exercise in theoretical and normative convergence, it will be required reading for academics and students in social theory, cultural theory, philosophy and human development studies.

Part I

Values, economy and society

1 Valuing values in sociology and the Capability Approach

Methodological preamble

Having sketched the major tenets of CA and precisely because this paradigm holds fast to its normative thrust, it is important, before we disentangle the suspension of the ‘fact/value’ dichotomy (Putnam 2002) endorsed by Sen and Nussbaum, to revisit the controversy over values and how it figures in the sociological positions that concern us here. The following account is by no means exhaustive. I only address the standpoints about values in sociological arguments that I believe capture better the strengths, the deficits and the potential of CA. The main focus of the ensuing discussion is the question if a priori principles of valuation are defensible in a multidimensional social reality. Is an a priori value discernible, and can it generate a value-oriented social theory and a new form of social ethics (like Hegel’s Sittlichkeit or Durkheim’s organic solidarity)? At the same time the question of rationality will be taken up as we need to assess CA by recourse to problems of value-relevance in research. Because the latter research requirement can be implicated in a tension with the ‘interests’ of society and its conflicting constituencies, the problem of value will buttress the epistemological justification of CA and its overarching ethical approach to human agency. This is more pressing, as the explanatory inadequacies generated by value-dogmatism and relativism still have an impact in moral philosophy and sociology. Thus, a return to the role of values in social theory deserves reexamination.

Before I discuss how CA is coupled to important traditions in sociology on the problem of values, it is appropriate early at this point to clear the ground from potential hazards of interpretation and hidden agendas. This methodological prescription I take from Gunnar Myrdal (1958). Although I do not share all of Myrdal’s arguments about values I follow him in at least two assumptions:

1 First, that there is no disinterested approach to social scientific inquiry as Weber’s methodological writings about value-relevance have shown. To select a slice of reality and pose questions in need of answers presupposes an interest in it. The latter is mixed with valuations about the worth (or the worthlessness) of social reality. What Myrdal, following Weber, adds is that value-relevance stands or falls in terms of validity; in other words, if it is formulated in terms appropriate to the scientific community and to the subjects whose perspective and life is in question.

2 Second, because of the need for analytical distinctions in identifying a problem area and selecting relevant question, social science is inevitably entangled in some a priori assumptions, which qualify as valuations. For Myrdal there is no exit from an a priori assumption about the totality called reality that forms social science’s subject-matter even if we approach it through diverse theoretical and policy lenses depending on criteria of value-relevance.

For all its merits Myrdal’s account is, I think, incomplete. Two standpoints require qualification: The first issue has to do with selection itself. In selecting from social reality according to my value-relevant interests I presuppose some knowledge of what I omit from the delineated object. The latter is, of course, society in its complex and richly textured historical permutations. As Hegel has shown in the systematic transposition of philosophy to a social theory oriented to institutional shapes of freedom, value-relevant problem areas are not sliced off from a chaotic reality (since, totality includes also, for Hegel, its own negation, namely, ‘nothingness’) but from points of view, already placed within the object and its movement (i.e. humanity, its conceptual categories and the value of freedom implicated in the realization of human potential under and through institutional spheres of justice). This was the task of his, still in many ways unsurpassed, Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit ( (1807) 1977). Somewhere, in our value-relevant selections, totality is accompanying our perceptions, interests and data-collections. This totality is not some sort of hubristic methodological or ontological presumption about Absolute Knowledge. Rather, and in Hegel’s footsteps, it has more to do with the shared and internal criteria according to which human beings freely comprehend and fashion the world they inhabit. In other words, the cryptic a priori that Myrdal is forced to attach to social scientific explanation as a binding (value-relevant) elimination of irrelevant causal sequences, and as a requirement that can initiate the scientific observation itself, appears now in different light.

The second standpoint aims to highlight this a priori. Myrdal’s judgment is important in recognizing the position of values in social science, especially if we consider that his theses address economics. However, something more is needed in explanation and I think it is Herbert Marcuse who supplies it. Marcuse likens social theory to two cardinal value-judgments:

1 The judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can be and ought to be made worth living. This judgment underlines all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself;

2 The judgment that, in a given society, specific possibilities exist for the amelioration of human life and specific ways and means of realizing these possibilities. Critical analysis has to demonstrate the objective validity of these judgments and the demonstration has to proceed on empirical grounds. The established society has available an ascertainable quantity and quality of intellectual and material resources. How can these resources be used for the optimal development and satisfaction of individual needs and faculties with a minimum of toil and misery? Social theory is historical theory, and history is the realm of chance in the realm of necessity. Therefore, among the various possible and actual modes of organizing and utilizing the available resources, which ones offer the greatest chance of an optimal development?

(1964, 10)¹

Marcuse tells us here that social theory even when functioning under the auspices of particular value-relevant prescriptions is nonetheless attached to some universally valid value-principle, which for Marcuse is condensed in the moral recognition of life’s freedom and intrinsic worth (human dignity). Positivism or historicism cut off, arbitrarily, this chord to the universal values that social science is called to serve. As we shall discuss in Chapters 3 and 4 this natural law irreducibility of human dignity, although in need of contemporary reconstruction due to the historical conditions of social science itself, forms the ‘unconditional’ a priori judgment form which all science springs forth. With respect to the first a priori then, both sociological theory and CA are in concert. For example, in a report co-authored with Stiglitz and Fitoussi, Amartya Sen writes: ‘Quality of life includes the full range of factors that make life worth living, including those that are not traded in markets and not captured by monetary measures’ (Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi 2009, 216 [emphasis added] ).²

With respect to the second of Marcuse’s prerequisites, both social theory and CA fulfil it, albeit partially. If we consider Marcuse’s Hegelian Marxism and Sen or Nussbaum’s Kantian and liberal starting points, these two normative narratives intersect significantly and this overlap is predicated also on the Adam Smith–Karl Marx fusion that Sen’s texts carefully deploy. For its part, sociology sought to explain capitalist modernity and to grasp the moment of its failure to deliver lives of plenitude for all its members; however, it acknowledged (including by Marxists) that the amelioration of human life has hardly reached similar heights in non-capitalist social formations. Thus, depending on the degree of deficits of capitalist markets and their ability to influence (and be influenced by) other institutional spheres of democratic societies, sociologists embraced a gamut of positions, which sought – at least explicitly – to forge workable solutions within shared and sharable democratic ideals, even if they opted for liberal or socialist configurations of how these ideals align with the force of markets. We can surmise that CA would recognize the potential of democratic societies (even those that are minimally democratic) but, unlike sociology, it would refrain from licensing the institutional spheres of modernity as reliable and universally valid matrices of freedom – even at those points where it accepts their validity – or from deciphering the intermediate spaces that couple ethical spaces of interaction and social memberships into a relatively coherent systemic whole. In other words, modernity as an ‘unfinished’ but binding project of intrinsically valuable modes of social membership geared to freedom and justice requires further reconstruction.

Weber, Scheler and the collective validity of values

In aiming to respond to the historical shift from tradition to modernity sociologists sought to explain how values hold societies together. At the same time, the historical nature of sociology’s subject-matter raised all sorts of methodological concerns over the role of values in the sociologist’s selection, description and explanation of a problem. Values and questions of normative validity and value-relevance became a cardinal issue dividing the discipline between mutually exclusive strands: some sociologists opted for value-free, disinterested research and others embraced a value-laden approach to explaining society. Classical sociology’s controversy over values took shape under the umbrella of the complex and persistent debate over values in late-nineteenth century neo-Kantian philosophy. Thus, a newly founded sociology was set within irrevocable axiological and normative parameters.³

Following a long gestation of ideas, axiology (the then appropriate field of philosophy that dealt with the validity of values and value-judgments) oscillated, eventually, between a subjectivist and an objectivist theory of values. We can briefly note that subjectivists considered value-judgments to inhere in the subject’s emotional and psychological needs as the latter were stirred by the perception and cognition of objects of ‘value’ (see, for example, Eaton 1930). It is thus the subject who confers value(s) to the world. Interests were also held to account for the attachment of value into objects and it was only a matter of time before the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, since the mid-1920s, sought to purge analytical philosophy and logic from all ‘metaphysical’ assumptions including values and value-judgments. Not all logical positivists though felt eager to provide the ballast for logical rigour by tossing out values. Viktor Kraft, quite ingeniously, preserved the ‘collective’ as the realm that is most appropriate for seeking the validity of values. For Kraft values attain validity and thus become binding only under the aegis ‘of an impersonal authority’ ( (1951) 1981, 144). As if in Durkheimian ‘thought-style’ Kraft claimed that:

[t]he ground of their universal validity lies in their indispensability for civilization, in which the abilities specific to man are developed. In this way it is possible to establish the universal validity of the value of commerce and technology, of justice and morality, of education and instruction, of art and science (177).

The recognition on Kraft’s part that the evaluative dimension must bear on the foundations of human civilization and the abilities best suited for human flourishing paves the way, unexpectedly perhaps, to considering this argument in light of how CA is situated in the complicated discussion over values.

A major figure in the value-controversy in sociology is of course Max Weber. Weber’s complicated theory of values cannot be addressed in detail here but it will be taken up again shortly, once we complete the exposition of the objectivist value-theory. It suffices to recall that Weber’s position entails a value-perspectivism with regard to the relevance of the problems that the sociologist is called to select. Value-relevance configures reality as a culturally conditioned object. Typified constructs, known as ideal-types, construct a phenomenon’s essential features and operate as a methodological prerequisite for sociological interpretations of action. Their heuristic function (i.e. to abstract from reality logically interrelated features of a phenomenon and to enable the scientist to dwell in culturally specific, logically ‘impure’, historical understanding) is raised to a condition of possibility for social science in grasping subjective meanings in their richly textured cultural manifestations. Weber, thus, aligns himself with the epistemological position that imputes to reality infinite contingency. He concedes that social reality is indeed configured (and grasped by historical agents) on the basis of values, but these values are now ‘founded’ on ultimate and irrational decisions, even if they are routinely reproduced by the (individual and collective) actors in question. This methodological standpoint has its roots in Weber’s ontology, which holds life (and, particularly, the rationalized differentiated modernity) to be marked by incommensurable value-spheres (religious, political, economic, aesthetic, erotic). For Weber, the ordinary consciousness caught up in ‘routinized daily existence’ cannot ‘become aware, of this partly psychologically, partly pragmatically conditioned motley of irreconcilably antagonistic values’ (Weber (1904) 1949, 18).⁴ On how values are coordinated on the level of system integration is beyond the scope of Weber’s argument; the dire political consequences of this subordination of values to a non-collective ground of validity are corroborated by the sympathy with which Weber’s reactionary followers, like Carl Schmitt, or Marxist ‘disciples’, like Georg Lukács, enveloped his value-theory in order to extend it to a politics grounded in decisionism. This radicalization of value-pluralism against a normative explanation of values is accomplished, as we shall see later (Chapter 7), by Luhmann’s systems theory. The fact remains that Weber’s groundbreaking epistemology is thus, inevitably, coupled with the level of modernity’s autonomous value-spheres and any effort on our part to address this problematic in a contemporary context of normativity must necessarily incorporate systemic and institutional dimensions of a differentiated process of value-formation in modernity’s multiple spheres of social life.

Beyond the subjective theories of values which Kraft sought to weaken in a characteristically sociological mode, the objectivist approach to values held that values hold an ‘eternal’ status (this is the neo-Kantian and neo-Platonic strand from Lotze to Rickert and Scheler). In contrast to value-incommensurability (Weber), it was Max Scheler who sought to reinvigorate the possibility of conceiving the human being as the bearer of values. Scheler’s philosophical anthropology radicalized the neo-Kantian postulate of the ideal validity of values. Scheler ( (1916) 1973) sought to put values back onto solid foundations and thus inaugurated a phenomenological anthropology. He thus conceived the constitution of the person through the lens of a phenomenologically deduced hierarchical set of a priori values (those that Weber had relegated to the residual category of ‘life’ and Rickert had elevated to the ideal realm of timeless validity). These values (or value-modalities of man’s openness to the world) cover the spectrum of values of pleasure, vitality, utility, justice, aesthetics to the value of the holy, which if translated in terms of forms of social togetherness culminate in an ecumenical cosmopolitan solidarity. It thus takes little imagination to convert Scheler’s table into a phenomenological deduction of natural law. Sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: Values, economy and society
• PART II: Agency, alienation and emotions
• PART III: Institutions, modernity and fundamentalism
• Epilogue
• Index