The Routledge Companion to Social Theory

Anthony Elliott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135188948
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Companion to Social Theory provides an authoritative, comprehensive and provocative introduction to the key traditions of thought in social theory today. This ground-breaking reference work brings together major contributors, both established and emergent new voices, to reflect on the ways in which social theory sheds light on the contemporary social world. Represented are:

the traditions of classical social thought

symbolic interactionism

psychoanalysis

structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodernism

identity theories

globalization theories.

The Routledge Companion to Social Theory is designed to give a sense of the complexities of both classical and contemporary social theory. Including a helpful glossary of key terms and theorists, this accessible guide is essential reading for students and professionals in social theory, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, women's studies and politics.

Part I

TRADITIONS AND RIDDLES OF SOCIAL THEORY

1

WHAT IS SOCIAL THEORY?

CHARLES LEMERT

WORDS AND THINGS

What is social theory? The question does not abide a ready answer. It is easier to answer other questions of the kind. What is music? What is biology? What is poetry? What is a cow? What is shit? But, what is social theory? This, latter, is far the more complicated question as becomes evident when it is put side by side the others.

What is music? Most people, whether good at it or not, know what music is or, at least, having heard a lot of that sort of thing, they think they do. When it comes to biology, it may to most sound familiar, but saying what biology actually is might be difficult for those without a long history in schools. Biologists and associates of other groups that similarly demand a high degree of technical expertise tend to keep to themselves the right to define their fields. I was a zoology major in college but, soon enough, zoology was absorbed into biology, after which biology split into several fields, including microbiology which, so far as I can tell, is a kind of biochemistry of life, and then came neuroscience, and so on. Who knows where it will end?

Then, continuing, we come to: What is poetry? One would think that poetry is much like music in that people without technical qualification in the subject think they know what it is. Yet it is fair to ask, for example, whether rap is poetry or music of the same order as, say, the Davidic Psalms or Shakespeare’s sonnets? For which the sensible answer is that they are not because there is little evidence that a natural acquaintance with poetry is as common as a native appreciation of music – if only because low-brow musics have qualities of their own, but bad poetry is, well, obviously bad. Then we come to cows. As any parent or minder of small children knows, a cow exists only in certain cultures where the English language is widely practiced. In rural France, where there are many creatures of the kind English speakers refer to as cows, in the fields there are not cows, but vaches. The same critter can be found in both places, but what children learn to call them is different enough that it would be right to wonder what the hell that animal is, when all is said and done.

Finally, what is shit? You might think that the word refers to a thing of the same sort as does ‘cow’. Indeed, it is true that various languages have different slang expressions for this more or less daily excretion from the rearmost orifice of the nether regions of the human body. The difference is that, though cows unembarrassedly will shit in public as human normally do not, ‘shit’ is a word the shock value of which derives from the manners of certain groups that think talk of this common, if malodorous, bodily produce is uncouth. Both cows and the feces they produce have commodity value, yet the one is couth, even when it shits, while the shit itself is unspeakable. Mannered persons may teach their children that a cow is pooping but not, as a rule, that it is shitting.

POETRY AND SHIT

Thus, after music, cows, poetry, biology, cows and shit, we come to the subject with which we are meant to occupy ourselves. What is social theory? There are those, we should say right off, who think it is shit. And some, being of a more generous disposition, would say that ‘social theory’, whatever it is, is like ‘cow’ in that it refers, not to a real thing in the world, but to an activity that requires very different words, depending on local habits.

At the other extreme, there are those (I would be among them) who think of social theory as more like poetry than anything else – as, that is, a song arising from the heart of ordinary life that, when well composed, can tell the story of human good and evil. Yet, in defense of this idea, I should say that to think of social theory as poetry runs up against the fact that some who are professional practitioners of it write, if not like shit, at least like the most egregious bars of experimental music including some popular hip-hop lyrics that make no sense whatsoever outside the community to which the words are addressed. In this respect, what poetry social theory might be is always at risk of degradation by the tin ears of those who do it. Still, even in its earliest days, social theorists sang with an ear to the ground of human feeling and need.

A commodity is a queer thing abounding

In metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties

(Karl Marx, 1867)

No one knows who will live in this cage of the future

Or whether at the end of this tremendous development,

Entirely new prophets will arise,

Or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals,

Or, if neither, mechanized petrifaction,

Embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance

(Max Weber, 1905)

The stranger is near and far at the same time,

As in any relationship based on merely human similarities

(Georg Simmel, 1908)

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,

This sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,

Of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world

That looks on in amused contempt

(W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903)

What a responsibility it is to have the sole management

Of the primal lights and shadows!

Such is the colored woman’s office

(Anna Julia Cooper, 1892)

All fixed, fast-frozen relations,

With their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,

Are swept away […]

All that is solid melts into air,

All that is holy is profaned,

And man is at last

Compelled to face,

With sober senses,

His real conditions of life,

And his relations with his kind

(Marx and Engels, 1848)

One might say that none of these lines is true poetry. The meter is odd or lacking. The tone can be arrhythmic. The phrasing is out of proportion. Yet, there is poetry here in the beat of longings for a purpose higher than the mundane. Social theory can be poetic, if not poetry outright. But when it is, it is because, at its best, it is willing to venture beyond the obvious and factual to the farther reaches of life’s unfathomable shores.

To speak of poetry and shit in one breath may seem an odd way to introduce a book on (and of) a third subject, social theory. Odd or not, the elegant crudity of the allusion has at least the virtue of honesty in respect to the possibilities and limitations of the subject at hand. Like so many creative aspects of human life, much social theory has been known for lacking modesty – a failure that is baggage to all attempts to explore unknown or unspeakable territories. To sail into the seas, long from land, the adventurer comes to terms with the risks she takes. Sailing where no one else has can instill a righteous self-confidence – this being the only true compass she can count on. One sets the trim into the bad winds, ignores the worst that could happen, tolerates the burning sun, the rotting rations, the odors rising up from the hold.

The important virtue in the venture is to keep both aspects in proportion. One never sails alone. Others foul the air. This is the honest truth of creative attempts to imagine the meaning of social things – which is what social theory does.

IMAGINATION AND ARROGANCE

Social theorists, at their best, do something rare among imaginative artists of the species. As persons they are not special, but their labors may be unique. There are, of course, poets and biologists and many others of all walks who come to think of themselves as telling the stories or enunciating the facts of life. When they do it well, one can only stand back in awe.

To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset

A sad gold, of such is Poetry

(Jorge Luis Borges, 1964)

It may metaphorically be said

That natural selection is daily and hourly

Scrutinizing, throughout the world,

The slightest variations;

Rejecting those that are bad,

Preserving and adding up all that are good

(Charles Darwin, 1859)

Humility is not a natural aptitude of the human mind. The mind tempts those who use it to imagine so much more than they can understand. Arrogance in the breed occurs when it is forgotten that the ability to imagine or explain a possible state of affairs is far – very far – from the ability to understand it.

Still, there are those like Borges and Darwin who kept their imaginations within the limits. This is the exceptional genius of the best poets and scientists. Borges grew blind. He labored alone in the basement of a library. Darwin was cautious. He labored for 20 years after the voyage of the Beagle before offering his ideas in public. Composition and scientific work have in common the hard reality that notes and words, like facts, occur to us (as Max Weber once put it) only when they please. All the hard work in the world cannot call forth beauty or truth. In this respect, social theory also must face the hard necessities of its limitations.

Social theorists, like others, can be cautiously daring. Like others they too, being human, can be arrogant. Social theory is at once poetry and science, but it is, in its way, different from both. This difference is what marks social theory off from other acts of the imagination. Still, it must contend with problems inherent in the nature of theory.

Any human endeavor that calls itself ‘theory’ suffers the danger that the one who theorizes will succumb to his humanity. Theories, by nature, are attempts to reach freely for horizons beyond the edge of seas and lands. This is what it is meant to do. Poetry, notwithstanding poetics (the theory of poetry), does not in and off itself claim to be a theory. Yet, it reaches very far beyond the evidence to make statements that may refer to the more universal of human things, but the reach can result in creating a foreboding abstraction.

Those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength/they shall mount up with wings like eagles/they shall run and not be weary/they shall walk and not faint.

This most ancient of verses by the Hebrew prophet Isaiah proclaims not a fact or a logic of human life, but a belief that, over the centuries, has been powerful beyond its ability to document or prove a general idea. When one lives without grasping for power, she is refreshed in ways not available to those who spend their energy seeking to control the things of this world.

Still, poetry may, and probably does, contain a theory of itself. ‘To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset, a sad gold, of such is Poetry.’ This is a theory of poetry. But it is a theory that has an anchor to leeward – death in sleep, gold in sunset’s sadness. Borges, thus, feels his way to the fantastic by touching the daily cycles of human experience. Likewise, by explaining natural selection as a ‘daily and hourly scrutinizing’, Darwin sets his grand theory of natural life in the soil of what he observed in his voyages years before.

But social theory faces a series of problems that may not be as disruptive in the literary arts or the natural sciences. When it comes to social theory, as it has come to be understood it modern times, the drift of popular opinion is that theories of social things are impossibly abstract. Of course, the better ones are not any more abstract than are the best theories of metaphor or nature. Plus which, it needs saying (but should not) that abstractions are part of life. Were we to shut ourselves up in the sunsets and deaths or the daily scrutiny of events that pass before our local ecologies, we would be truly dead, selected out of the higher truths of human meaning and life. Abstractions, in the sense of reaching as far beyond the ordinary as we can, are zest to the humdrum. That this may be true, or even a truism, does not mean that some cooks season their meat to death – reduce, that is, the ordinary to the commonplace.

In the modern world, abstractions are an acquired taste. When it comes to social theory one ought not to ignore the implications of this observation.

SOCIAL THEORY AND THE MODERN

When one speaks of such a thing as ‘the modern world’, he is speaking irrevocably not of life itself, or humankind as such, but of a real and quite specific social arrangement. To the young, the so-called ‘modern world’ may seem impossibly abstract. But, historically, the structures, accords, and patterns of life associated with ‘the modern’ are utterly different from each and every social form that came before and, it seems, different too from what is coming after as a new millennium comes into its surprising own. In fact, social theories might best be defined as those theories of human society unique to the modern era. We can wonder whether some other social assemblage will dominate in the after of the modern. We know, however, that there was nothing like the modern before. Some consider theories of the postmodern helpful in tracing the history of modern. On the other hand, almost no one who attempts a social theory of the modern fails to use a theory of what came before. It is in the nature of the modern to think of itself as different from and better than the past.

There are, of course, many different kinds of theory that think of themselves as having a modern stage. Among physicists, for example, mathematically formulated theories are at the very essence of the work. No field is more serious about formal theory. Modern physics after Newton and since Einstein is a terribly unsettled but powerful theory of the way the small and large in the universe behave. Ancient and traditional cultures had their sciences, much of which still contributes to modern thinking, but physics in the sense we think of it today is entirely modern.

And in none of the sciences is this more true than among the social and cultural sciences. Literature and culture studies, musicology, economics, and politics have long embraced theories appropriate to their domain interests; psychology and history less so, unless you mean psychoanalysis and historiography. In all these cases, however, the best theories, whether grand or tiny, can be called theories to the degree that they concern modern times. And modern things are irrevocably social things. Whether one speaks of modernity, the modern world-system, modern science or culture, modernism, or any of the variants of the ideal of the modern, one is speaking of a particular occurrence in the social history of the species. Social theory itself, if we grant that it came into its own in the nineteenth century, came to be precisely social theory because it aimed to generate theories of this very specific social form.

When exactly the modern emerged or began to emerge from the past is subject to much debate, as are most topics social theorists worry about. Some would say that the modern began in the aftermath of the Renaissance which broke the hold of traditional beliefs and inspired, among other things, the world explorations on either side of 1500. This, of course, identifies the beginnings of the modern with a number of specific advances in European culture and science which made scientific navigation and global thinking rational.

The modern thereby is considered a uniquely Western development that spread over time around the world through a long, sad history of colonizing adventures that exploited the indigenous people and natural resources of Africa and the Americas first; then of the East Indies, ultimately most of the Asias. Yet, it would be another century before, in the 1600s, early modern ideas of consciousness, science, and political rights would emerge – a movement that would come into its own in the revolutions in England and the Netherlands in the 1600s and in France and the Americas in the 1700s. Yet, the Enlightenment, itself a variety of differing philosophies sharply enunciated by English, Scottish, Dutch, German, French and American political thinkers, came to assume the appearance, if not the reality, of a universal culture of human nature.

The Enlightenment is, by its historical nature, a movement of many variants that, oddly, is understood by adherents as a universally true philosophy of humanity. But on the surface this does not make complete sense. To the French in 1789, Enlightenment entailed: liberty, equality, fraternity. A few years before, in 1776, American revolutionaries (who had learned quite a lot from the French) defined their Enlightenment as an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As is evident in the comparison, these famous Enlightenment slogans are similar, but different. Both wanted liberty; the French, however, emphasized equality, while the Americans insisted on ‘life’ (without ever saying what this meant) and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, both doctrines are marked, as are all ideals, by their common failure to achieve what they professed. France is no more equal than is America; nor do the French enjoy high degrees of brotherly love, anymore than Americans can be said to be more happy than, say, the French. The principles they share, like the comparable principles of other modern nation-states, are, as principles, similar, but as national practices they can be quite different. The English and the Scottish, both founders of the Enlightenment are still, after many centuries, at some odds with each other, as they both are with Germans and Americans (who in turn are still divided by Confederate and Yankee values), not to mention th...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ROUTLEDGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
• PART I: TRADITIONS AND RIDDLES OF SOCIAL THEORY
• PART II: CENTRAL TERMS AND THINKERS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY