The Antinomies of Classical Thought: Marx and Durkheim (Theoretical Logic in Sociology)

Jeffrey Alexander

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138997660
• eBook ISBN: 9781317808664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume challenges prevailing understanding of the two great founders of sociological thought. In a detailed and systematic way the author demonstrates how Marx and Durkheim gradually developed the fundamental frameworks for sociological materialism and idealism. While most recent interpreters of Marx have placed alienation and subjectivity at the centre of his work, Professor Alexander suggests that it was the later Marx's very emphasis on alienation that allowed him to avoid conceptualizing subjectivity altogether. In Durkheim's case, by contrast, the author argues that such objectivist theorizing informed the early work alone, and he demonstrates that in his later writings Durkheim elaborated an idealist theory that used religious life as an analytical model for studying the institutions of secular society.

Chapter One

PROLEGOMENA. GENERAL THEORETICAL ARGUMENT AS INTERPRETATION

The Critical Role of “Readings”

In the preceding volume, I have argued for the importance of certain elements of the scientific continuum over others, or at least for the uniquely ramifying effects of particular, “presuppositional” contributions. Within the presuppositional level itself, I argued for the significance of one particular kind of commitment over the others. How, then, shall we now proceed?

I have decided to take what may at first glance seem a rather controversial course: I will continue my theoretical argument by engaging in interpretation, by making “readings” in which I attempt to understand what central texts in the history of sociology actually “mean.” But why engage in readings rather than embark on a more straightforward and contemporary discussion of telling empirical problems, demonstrating, perhaps, the strength of the multidimensional position in relation to such empirical grounds? Why, moreover, devote my interpretive efforts to sociologists of the past, to sociological theorists, indeed, who are no longer even alive, three of whom concluded their contributions more than half a century ago? I do so because, in certain critical respects, it is by interpreting and reinterpreting “classical” works that fundamental argument is conducted in the social sciences. In volume 1, it was noted that a major difference between social and natural science is not the fact of subjective orientation, but the relative lack of consensus in any given phase of social science about what the proper subjective orientations are. This lack of consensus makes communication and mutual understanding difficult. It is for this very reason, indeed, that generalized argument in the social sciences needs “classics,” that despite the undeniable fact of empirical accumulation theoretical argument so often moves “backward” from discussion of contemporary reality to debates over the thought of founding figures. Only in this way can generalized, abstract debates occur on some common ground. Only in this way, too, can “philosophical” debate take a form that is concrete and specific enough to be easily understood. To illustrate this issue, one might, in fact, employ my model of the scientific continuum (fig. 1) as a metaphor. If social scientific argument extends from more general to more specific statements, one may also say that the continuum stretches from debates about current empirical controversies, on the one side, to arguments about the general presuppositions of the founders of social science on the other. In many instances, it is upon the most general presuppositional side of this continuum that critical social scientific development rests, and it is to this most generalized side that I devote the remainder of this work.

The positivist persuasion in sociology would certainly deny to readings of classical works the status of theoretical argument. If they are to have any continuing status at all, classical works must function as “exemplars,” as methodologically and propositionally precise models of how scientific research is to be done.¹† The most articulate and influential statement of this perspective is Robert K. Merton’s argument for the “systematics” over the “history” of sociological theory.² The epigraph Merton chooses for his essay is Whitehead’s statement that “a science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost,” and on the basis of an empiricist and accumulationist understanding of sociology he differentiates between a “scientific” approach to a discipline’s founders and a “humanistic” one. In the humanities, where subjective interpretation is fundamental, the continual rereading of great works is necessary. In science, to the contrary, the sign of maturity is that such earlier great works can be ignored. Science is an objective discipline, and for this reason the kind of “erudition” supplied by rereadings is often in conflict with “originality.” If historical works are still to be studied, in Merton’s view, they should be read only in a truly historical context: to find new factual chronologies in the intellectual prehistory of science. To read historical works in a general interpretive way, however, is “mere commentary.” Interpretive commentary is banal precisely because in trying to straddle scientific and humanistic orientations it merges systematics with history.³ There is, in fact, only one legitimate reason for social scientists to reread the classics, and that is if they can discover new concrete empirical ideas, discoveries that develop as the result of the scientist’s own newly increased empirical knowledge.⁴ The classics may be reread, therefore, because they present “unretrieved information” that may still be “usefully employed” in an explanatory way.⁵

In the preceding volume we have seen how generalized, nonempirical debate is often decisive within natural scientific development itself. In fact, on certain important occasions, it is even true that to make such advances natural science turns to the reinterpretation and reunderstanding of earlier, historical work.^6† In social science, however, generalized reference becomes a much more frequent form of independent argument, and it is in social science that earlier works, therefore, become luminous and classical. Merton tried to extend the model of natural to social science. The best argument against this position is to look at the actual practice of social science itself.

How, indeed, are the central commitments in sociology actually made, and how are other social scientists persuaded to accept them? In the postwar era, every major new form of theoretical argument has been offered, in part, as a pivotal reading of classical works. The arguments for conflict theory, for ideological determinism, for institutional over systems theory, and even for the elimination of theoretical consideration itself—all the reductionist arguments considered in volume 1—have been offered in terms of what Marx, or Durkheim, or Weber, or Parsons “really meant.” These supposedly backward-looking interpretive gestures, moreover, have usually played the critical role in carrying the day.^7† If possible, such reliance on rereading has been even more central at the most general presuppositional level. There has been no more powerful argument for a particular version of general theorizing than to demonstrate that these presuppositions actually informed the theorizing of a venerated classical figure, or conversely that they did not appear in the work of a figure whom the contemporary theorist and his followers consider anathema. Every major mode of presuppositional thought has, of course, been embodied in empirical propositions and exemplars; but each has also rested its case upon highly skillful and often highly tendentious readings of sociology’s founding works. It is for this reason that readings are always, implicitly, polemical statements. They are not simply objective empirical assessments but are launched from presuppositions of their own. Every reading, then, is a critical reading, a theoretical argument written from a particular perspective in order to demonstrate a particular theoretical effect.

If both specific and generalized social-scientific arguments often occur in the context and in the form of reinterpretations, then it should not be surprising that critical shifts in social-scientific opinion involve the same kind of interpretive process. Social-scientific change does not respond simply to empirical anomalies but to shifts in general assumptions. These general assumptions, in their turn, are often challenged by innovative or revolutionary readings of classical works. Just as new empirical critiques may reflect shifts in general assumptions, they may be stimulated by shifts in “historical” interpretation. It is always true, moreover, that they are accompanied and sustained by them. Every attempt at empirical revision in social science will follow one of the generalized presuppositional paths laid out in volume 1. Social-scientific change will be created or legitimated either by “revisionism” within a particular classical tradition or by overthrowing one classical tradition for another.

Finally, if it is structured disagreement that creates social-scientific classics in the first place, then in times of greater and more intense theoretical conflict rereadings become even more intellectually critical. One does not have to accept the totalistic and conflationary notions of “crisis” proposed by Robert W. Friedrichs and Alvin W. Gouldner in the wake of the 1960s to recognize that periodic feelings of crisis are empirical facts of intellectual life. If readings are central to generalized argument, then a crisis in generalized argument can fairly be seen as a crisis of interpretation. In such periods there is even less agreement and mutual understanding about what the classical founders actually said, and perhaps even stronger contention about who the founders actually were. It is not coincidental, therefore, that major works which sought to address themselves to the turbulence of sociology in the late 1960s—Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology (1970), Friedrichs’ A Sociology of Sociology (1970), and Anthony Giddens’ Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1972)—all initiated wide-ranging “revisions” of classical texts even as they portrayed themselves as arguing from social rather than independent intellectual grounds. Friedrichs conducted a revisionist history of postwar sociology as prelude to his polemical reading for the conflict school. Taking explicit issue with Merton’s insistence that “‘history’ offers no instruction regarding the substantive viability of a ‘theoretical’ posture,” he argued that his own enterprise would be “justified by the light it sheds on today’s internecine battles over the discipline’s paradigmatic base.”⁸ Gouldner’s strategy was even more ambitious. He produced a revisionist history of all sociology itself, using this ideological backdrop to reread the entire sociological tradition, and particularly Talcott Parsons, as having a conservative and idealist intent. Polemically justifying a reduction to ideology and the production of a radical social science, Gouldner tried to insist, at the same time, that his critical arguments were rooted in interpretations of classical work.^9† Giddens offered a more neo-Marxist reading of the ideological underpinnings of the classical tradition, explicitly connecting the crisis of sociology to a crisis of interpretation. Reconsidering Marx, Durkheim, and Weber in a strongly anti-Parsonian way, he insisted that such a new reading would be critical to any theoretical resolution.^10†

Any strategy of interpretive readings, of course, leads directly to the question of “history,” that is, to the relation of history and theory as the issues were so precisely defined by Merton’s classic essay. Yet despite the fact that theoretical efforts are directed at historical figures, at classical works rooted in the sociological past, it must be insisted, all the same, that every reading is unhistorical in a fundamental sense. I reject the distinction between history and systematics, for it is based on the false notion of a presuppositionless science and of a presuppositionless history as well. Any attempt to reconstruct the “true” historical meaning of a classical work is bound to be a useless one, for our judgments are and must inevitably be evaluative, inspired by a theoretical goal that is rooted in contemporary time. “History,” indeed, might even be considered a dangerous illusion when combined with theory, for it is too often whiggish history, the account of how past theories converge with the author’s own present position. Arguments for the historical convergence of classical theorizing invariably use “history” merely as legitimation.^11† There is an ironic and latent positivism in such arguments, for they imply that the contemporary, quintessentially “modern” theorist has discovered the truth, which must, perforce, be henceforth undisputed. Convergence arguments inevitably undermine the possibility for a full consideration of general theoretical questions, for the assertion of contemporary historical agreement allows the writer to avoid facing those theoretical positions which have been historically defeated.

The problem, of course, is that history is not itself objective, and it can be invoked in radically different ways. H. Stuart Hughes and Parsons describe the triumphant emergence of normative and psychological theorizing in the generation of the 1890s; Robert N. Nisbet asserts the same triumph in the reaction to modernity more than fifty years before.^12† Yet normative theory surely cannot be historically inevitable if it can be effectively demonstrated as having arisen at two very different historical times. Even more revealing, there is an argument for convergence that reads intellectual history in precisely the opposite way. For Halévy and Horkheimer, for example, what characterized “modern” theorizing was its drastic break with Romantic ideas, its embrace of instrumental and technical modes of analysis.¹³ As the very existence of such contradictory arguments suggests, there has, in fact, been no linear historical development. To argue for any such convergence—in either positive or negative terms—is to reduce theoretical to empirical argument. Historical evidence cannot substitute for theoretical argument. Theoretical debates have not been settled once and for all with the emergence of this most modern of times. Presuppositional conflicts continue to provide the axes of dispute throughout different historical periods. Although one position may be stronger at one point in time, there are usually sufficient historical carriers to assure the survival of every theoretical strand.^14†

Behind theoretical arguments for convergence, then, there is a vulgar kind of consensus history. For my part, I believe no consensus exists, and I intend in the following chapters to illustrate the origins of the conflicting sociological traditions. In this sense, I do not reject history at all, only “history.” An honest and truly historical understanding of the circumstances of social theory will reveal strong conflicts, and strong points of agreement as well. We must know something about the historical context within which a theory was constructed if we are to understand that theoretical language itself, yet that language cannot be understood simply by knowledge of its history alone.

But just as I must reject the convergence argument, I must argue against the equally distorted use of history that presents theory as in unprecedented crisis. In a strange way, “crisis” theory is actually the other side of the convergence argument, its mirror image. Where convergence is optimistic and whiggish history, crisis argument is apocalyptic. It foresees the imminent transformation of theoretical debate, a transformation which will leave nothing familiar, a millenium in which theoretical disagreement will be no more. In fact, however, while theoretical crises may indicate greater analytic disagreement, this is not the actual source for the acute feelings of distress. What a “crisis” suggests, rather, is that these analytic disagreements have become superimposed on ideological ones. It is this superimposition that creates the sense of fissure and fragmentation throughout a discipline. Proponents of crisis theory argue that this empirical fact of superimposition is actually a structural inevitability: “history” has produced ideological configurations whose respective theories are bound to talk past one another. But this dramatic narrative distorts the true nature of sociological thought, creating a much tighter relationship between cognitive and ideological elements than theoretical logic actually allows.^15† Crisis arguments, then, actually undermine further the possibilities for common communication, rational argument, and critique. As in the misuse of history presented by the convergence school, the effect of “crisis theory” is to divert intellectual attention from the actual theoretical issues involved and to focus it on the social origins of the crisis itself. If social and historical developments have created theoretical crisis, then it is only natural that they will provide the map for their resolution. But like any other interpretive reading, crisis theorists have a polemical bias of their own. They refer to the forces of history, but history is always on their own analytical side. If “history” were actually so decisive, after all, why should they engage in such vigorous reinterpretations of texts?

I have earlier laid out the grounds upon which one can hope to engage in more objective argument (vol. 1, ch. 4). I approach interpretation in terms of the distinctive presuppositional criteria established above. I will try to demonstrate that it is these very generalized questions which have informed the basic structures of classical thought, that it was by virtue of certain presuppositional decisions that the founding fathers achieved what they regarded as their greatest contributions, and that it was the limitations of their presuppositional insight that created the problems they could not resolve. These classical theorists, I will demonstrate, were far from the objective fact-mongerers which the positivist persuasion has portrayed. Nor did they focus only on the more specific levels of scientific commitment, as other reductionist arguments would contend. These theorists searched also for answers to general questions, for “solutions” to the enigma of human action and the riddle of social order. They studied the empirical world, I contend, in part to document and specify the answers they developed and presupposed.

My readings of classical sociology will not hinge on. new discoveries of buried texts, or translations of heretofore untranslated works, or rely on “recent scholarship” to justify claims—though I do hope to make some textual “discoveries,” to offer new translations if they are warranted, and certainly to utilize recent scholarship whenever I can.^16† My contribution, rather, rests upon the nature of theoretical argument itself...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to Volume Two
• Chapter One: Prolegomena. General Theoretical Argument as Interpretation: The Critical Role of “Readings”
• Part One Collective Order and the Ambiguity about Action
• Part Two Two Different Paths to Collective Order
• Part Three One-Dimensional Theory and Its Discontents
• Notes
• Works of Marx and Durkheim
• Author-Citation Index
• Subject Index