Social Theory for Today

Making Sense of Social Worlds

Alex Law, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781446209028, 9781446209011
• eBook ISBN: 9781473911147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is distinctive for extending the usual sociological reach, reopening territory that has lain fallow, set aside from the well-ploughed fields of orthodox social theory. In doing so, Law not only produces fresh insight into familiar theorists but guards against collective forgetting of the sociological canon.
- Professor Bridget Fowler, University of Glasgow

"An excellent book, it will be welcomed and read widely by advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars in sociology, cultural studies, social theory and beyond."
- Professor Chris Shilling, University of Kent

Social Theory for Today guides students through the 'turns' of past and present social theory as it attempts to wrestle with a recurring sense of crisis in social relations and social theory. Drawing on both classical and contemporary sources, Alex Law provides readers with a firm grasp of competing perspectives.

Too often social theories attempt to dominate the field by casting rival theorists, past and present, as deluded fools, while the more familiar 'big names' in social theory are subject to ever-increasing commentary that runs in ever-decreasing circles. This survey of social theory and crisis lessens the temptation to engage in internal theoretical polemics and esoteric wordplay. Social theory must become practical and specific if it is to become a means of orientation for uncertain times.

This is a must-read for upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students looking for a vibrant and extended understanding of social theory.

1 Social Theory and Crisis

Crisis is a process, not a fixed condition. It suggests a decisive moment of limited duration. Yet crisis has come to be understood as operating at different levels (psychological, institutional, national, planetary), extending over different time periods and spaces, and with different degrees of intensity. Instead of a moment of exception precipitating a turning point, crisis becomes a normalised, semi-permanent condition. As something latent to modernity, the signs of crisis may be faint enough that they don't register in public discourse and only become manifest as political and economic crises break through the surface of social life at a certain trigger point. Latent crises are rendered visible by theories that make intelligible underlying processes, structures and relations. The difficulty is that the abstractions of theory transform the dynamics of crisis as a process into crisis as a fixed condition.

The Roots of Crisis

Terminologically, crisis is closely related to ‘critical’, ‘critique’ and ‘criticism’, Kritik, of coming to a decision or judgment (Koselleck, 2006). From the ancient Greek term krisis, the modern term ‘crisis’ has three sources: medical, legal-political and religious. Medically, crisis refers to the turning point of a pathological condition identified by the expert judgement and decision making of a medical practitioner. When a body is said to be in a critical condition, it is in mortal danger unless careful prognosis and diagnosis allow the patient to recover. Crisis requires critical knowledge to reverse trauma and entropy.

In terms of legal, social and political crisis the term took on a double meaning: on one side, it refers to the theoretical criteria to diagnose objective conditions; and on the other side, the pathology of illness rests on an ideal of healthy normality to be restored or end in death. Finally, this was translated into the Christian worldview of apocalyptic visions of the Last Judgement that only a decision to seek salvation can remedy.

As the historian Reinhardt Koselleck (2006) argues, the modern meaning of crisis broke from the classical sense of crisis as forcing a change in life. It began to be used less as a concrete diagnosis than as a metaphor in the social sciences in the context of revolution and war. A crisis of social relations is different in kind from a medical crisis. Critically, the concept referred ambiguously to both a chronic, more or less permanent and long-term condition and a more limited, cyclical process. Such ambiguity gives crisis its unique semantic power.

When it was extended to also cover economic imbalances and shortages of trade, finance, consumption and production, ‘crisis’ became a central concept in the lexicon of everyday life. The new modernist historical sensibility recast ‘crisis’ as a break with both blind optimism in human progress and an eternal cycle of change that follows a predetermined historical pattern. Economic crises were reassuringly viewed as cyclical, short-run phenomena from which recovery could soon be expected.

Crisis is redolent of drama, decision and deed. It is not only normative – improving the condition of social suffering by outside intervention; it is also dramaturgical – when human groups actively identify with the power of recovery and renewal and overcome the mythic power of fate with collective resources of their own making. This is when decisions have to be taken ‘for or against’ in legal, political, social and moral judgements. This sense of crisis entered the English language during the English civil war of the 1640s and acquired its modern sense in the French enlightenment of the 1780s (Koselleck, 1988). Connotations of illness, legal judgement and catastrophe lend crisis a considerable metaphorical power to measure the present against some future perfect state. Crisis became the authoritative judgement on historical time. History is pictured as one long crisis or, punctuated by crises, history is forced to take a decisive change in direction (Koselleck, 2006: 371).

Perceptions of the end of an epoch and a transition to a new one can be measured by an increased use of the term ‘crisis’. Crisis authorises a leap into the future based on prophecy, as much as prognosis, to redeem any number of fantasies, hopes and anxieties. When crisis is announced it is cast as the final one, at least once an ultimate decision has been taken to make the future something entirely different from how it had been conceived previously. Increased usage of the term is accompanied by a sense of bringing the old things to an end, whether with triumph or regret (the end of history, the end of ideology, the end of class, the end of modernism, the end of neoliberalism) and the start of the new (‘new times’, ‘new realism’, new social movements) and a move beyond, signified by the transcending prefix ‘post’ post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-history, post-colonialism, post-Fordism.

Crisis and Critique

Crisis itself seems to be so self-evident as a category that it is rarely interrogated by social theory while its counterpart critique is subject to endless commentary. While there is a crisis of critique there is rarely a critique of crisis as a concept. Yet in an important sense, social theory itself is only made possible by crisis. Crisis allows competing theories to identify critical points of dissonance in other theories and in social and political life. Today, however, contemporary critique induces crisis in social theory, not in social or political life itself. Without crisis it seems necessary for social theory to invent one.

Crisis becomes the occasion for social theory to renew itself. This standpoint was stated most famously by Alvin Gouldner in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1971). As far as Gouldner was concerned, ideological disarray rather than empirical anomalies tends to lead sociologists to substitute the more comforting games of Grand Theory for political action. Plato only turned to philosophy after his political ambitions were already in tatters; early positivists like Auguste Comte in France turned to social theory when excluded from political influence; Karl Marx retreated to intensive theoretical study after the defeat of the revolution of 1848; Max Weber's failed bid for political office resulted in deeper specialisation in theoretical and methodological studies.

By the late 1960s the dominant strand of American, or ‘Western’, sociology, as Gouldner put it, was an elaborate theoretical system called ‘functionalism’. Developed by Talcott Parsons under conditions of crisis in the 1930s as an intricate theoretical edifice, functionalism emphasised the self-correcting stability and equilibrium of the ‘social system’ as always able to absorb and nullify the chance emergence of social and political crises, conflict and disorder. For Gouldner and other radical sociologists of the period, Parsons’ construction of a grand theoretical system merely disguised a hidden premise: that social theory's role is to stabilise any crisis of legitimate authority of the kind experienced in the 1930s and later in the 1960s. In trying to ‘professionalise’ social theory, Parsons aimed ‘in the midst of the Great Depression to mend the rift between power and morality and to find new bases of legitimacy for the American elite’ (Gouldner, 1971: 154).

Social theory changes, Gouldner argues, not only through ‘internal’ technical or formal developments within theory itself but also as a result of ‘external’ changes in the social and cultural ‘infrastructure’ that supports the practical life and tacit assumptions of social theorists. When social theory takes on the appearance of a technical ‘finished’ system it no longer depends directly on the support of its social and cultural infrastructure. In turn a more fundamental critique is developed by the infrastructure heralding a crisis of the once-dominant social theory.

In the 1960s this discontent came from the radical culture of young student activists known as the New Left, many drawn to the promise of sociology as an enemy of self-serving illusions. At the same time the rapid expansion of the postwar welfare state supported the enlargement of academic sociology to address social problems and conflicts that functionalism consigned to merely secondary importance in this orderly, best of all possible worlds.

Not only functionalism but also a crisis of theory deeply affected orthodox Marxism as the official ideology of the Soviet Union and its satellites. This was expressed by the proliferating varieties of Marxist theory, some versions coming close to the ‘finished’ system of functionalism, while others stressed the more open-ended possibilities of praxis and cultural sociology. Theoretical proliferation is for Gouldner further evidence of intellectual crisis.

As a way out of professional and theoretical crisis Gouldner advocated what he called ‘reflexive sociology’, a self-conscious sociology of sociology. Unless sociologists take steps to avoid being burdened with doomed social theories and professional conformism they will fall into the tragedy of wasted, life-sapping efforts. All that the sociologist can do is to make a Pascalian wager:

When sociologists commit themselves compulsively to a life-wasting high science model they are making a metaphysical wager. They are wagering that the sacrifice is ‘best for science’. Whether this is really so, they cannot confirm, but they often need no further confirmation than the pain that this self-containment inflicts upon them. (Gouldner, 1971: 506)

The tragedy of social theory can only be overcome, Gouldner claims, by an appeal to the robust individualism of the engaged scholar. Here sociologists ought to follow their own ‘inner impulses’, ‘special bents or aptitudes’, and ‘unique talents’.

Yet the crisis of social theory will not be resolved by placing a bet on the metaphysics of an ‘authentic’ self playing the role of sociologist. For one thing, sociology has and is becoming more ‘worldly’ and integrated with the heterogeneous demands of the neoliberal university and beyond in policy making – the alternative apparently estrangement and irrelevance. In the face of this a determined effort has been made to establish a broader role for ‘public sociology’ and ‘critical’ sociology (Clawson et al., 2007).

Science and Crisis

Gouldner's style of reflexive sociology as a tough-minded independence of thought and intuition is familiar enough from the image of radical American sociologists like C. Wright Mills as ‘outlaws’ fearlessly speaking truth to power. Such calls are symptomatic of what Raymond Boudon (1980) identified as the ‘epistemological uncertainty’ that results from sociology's dependency on external social influences and abrupt theoretical change through periodic crisis rather than cumulative empirical results. A predictable symptom of latent crisis, Boudon argues, is the profusion of epistemological and methodological disputes in sociology, for instance, in the exaggerated opposition between micro-sociology and macro-sociology, or that between quantitative and qualitative research methods.

It is instructive to compare the crisis of social theory to theories of crisis in the natural sciences. Most famously, Thomas Kuhn (2012) in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions identified a crisis in science as occurring when problems or ‘anomalies’ encountered by a dominant ‘paradigm’ mount up, reaching a point where they can no longer be ignored. A paradigm for Kuhn not only concerns the formal or explicit propositions of theory but also includes the underlying assumptions, practices and tacit understandings involved. Paradigms restrict ‘normal science’ to routine problem-solving activities or ‘puzzles’ without needing to address anything more fundamental. In normal conditions paradigms are robust enough to displace, marginalise or eliminate problems and discrepancies, what Kuhn calls ‘anomalies’. With its variety of theories and methods, sociology lacks one dominant paradigm (in Kuhn's sense) that would structure the discipline as a unified field.

Paradigms will protect theories for relatively long periods of time from failure by sacrificing empirical accuracy for increased theoretical complexity. As theories become more and more baroque and increasingly unable to solve routine puzzles they also become vulnerable to critique from rival paradigms. What were once considered routine puzzles may from a rival viewpoint become a source of crisis. An acute sense of explanatory failure and a proliferation of novel theories are what Kuhn recognises as a ‘crisis’ of theory: ‘All crises begin with a blurring of a paradigm and consequent loosening of the rules for normal research’ (2012: 84). As theories proliferate, crisis relaxes the grip of the dominant paradigm and opens a space for alternative theories to not only emerge but also to be more widely recognised and shared as a valid standpoint. With divergent theories, the scientific field is no longer structured by a common source of authority. Attention is increasingly focused on the ‘trouble spots’ of theory.

Outside of crisis conditions novel theories are singularly ill-equipped to challenge dominant paradigms so long as they continue to solve problems that they themselves establish as the core business of scientific practice. Indeed, paradigms structure the very worldview that makes ‘facts’ possible in the first place and are only surrendered after a protracted crisis. Theoretical invention is a more painful process than factual discovery, requiring a severe crisis of theory to conquer normal science. Much more than factual anomalies are needed for a revolution in science to occur. Theories are not discarded lightly and cannot be falsified all in one go by a factual anomaly, as Popper (1992) would have it. Crises either, first, result in the restoration of the dominant paradigm through solving recalcitrant problems, or, second, the problem is put aside and suspended for a later generation; finally, the revolutionary establishment of a new paradigm solves the crisis in a novel way.

Crisis of Sensate Culture

Since sociology is not subject to paradigms in the manner of Kuhn's model of the natural sciences it makes more sense to locate theoretical crisis in historical context. A grand attempt was made by Pitirim Sorokin (1992) to situate crisis in a large-scale social theory. Amassing huge quantities of historical data for his multivolume Social and Cultural Dynamics (1985), Sorokin divided all societies into three stages of knowledge – sensate, ideational and idealistic. A ‘sensate’ epoch in history occurs when the sensible bodily experiences of the empirical world predominate culturally; an ‘ideational’ epoch refers to the predominance of supersensory cultural values; finally, ‘idealistic’ culture is a rational synthesis of the other two. Essentially, Western culture has passed back and forward between these epochs of knowledge since ancient Graeco-Roman culture. From the thirteenth century sensate culture has predominated as the pace of technological invention and scientific discovery intensifies, stimulating empiricism in philosophy, nihilism in culture, and materialism in society.

By the twentieth century, ‘sensate culture’ was in serious crisis. Theoretically, Sorokin claims, sensate culture abandoned the distinction between truth and error, and knowledge was reduced to expedient arbitrary constructs based on the principle that whatever works is useful. Sorokin (1992: 100) protests against the disenchantment that sensate culture produces, making all knowledge and values relative, genius an object of mockery, and moral integrity something to be suspicious about. Sorokin was scathing about the mediocrity of his contemporaries in social theory: ‘Since Comte and Spencer, Hegel and Marx, Le Play and Tarde, Durkheim and Max Weber, Simmel and Dilthey, Pareto and de Roberty [1843– 1915, Russian positivist], there has hardly appeared a name worthy of mention in sociology’ (1992: 104). Intellectual decline was taken as evidence of the crisis in the theoretical system of sensory knowledge. Despite the resources lavished on economics the dismal science singularly failed to prevent recurring crises and declining measures of happiness and security. Sorokin pile up the symptoms of mid-twentieth-century crisis resulting from the empiricism of sensate dogma – war, revolution, crime, suicide, mental illness, tyranny, exploitation, fraud, force, and so on.

Behind the welter of data, Sorokin adopted the role of a prophetic sociologist. Sensate sociology needs to be tempered by ideational sociology. Crisis had put Western culture at a crossroads – either further decline and decadence of human values or the restoration of ideational or idealistic human culture. From his comparative historical analysis of the rise and fall of cultures, Sorokin (1992: 260) delivered a theory of revolution through what he claimed was a ‘sound sociological induction’, summed up in the formula ‘crisis-ordeal-catharsis-charisma-resurrection’.

Initially, the crisis is drawn out as material prosperity declines and the ‘ordeal’ of a brutal, violent period is endured under failing attempts to reform sensate culture. As cultural failure appears irreversible to many people, a collective sense of ‘catharsis’ places greater faith in a higher, eternal spiritual culture in contrast to the ephemera of material culture. This is consolidated by a ‘charismatic’ phase organised around a more stable belief system based on altruism, duty, norms and universal solidarity. Society is ‘resurrected’ as an ‘integral’, stable system that promises a long period of security and belonging. Yet it is not so easy, Sorokin laments, for society to learn from the medical metaphor of crisis and to enter recovery without first experiencing the fiery ordeal of violent disintegration. Sensate cultures stubbornly cling to ‘momentary pleasures’ even as ‘an infinitely greater catastrophe’ awaits (1992: 263).

A late-twentieth-century follower of Sorokin, theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra (1982), in his book The Turning Point, captured the spirit of the alternative ideational system to the ongoing crisis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Narcissism of Minor Differences
• 1 Social Theory and Crisis
• 2 Positivist Turn: Auguste Comte
• 3 Marx's Turn
• 4 Nietzsche's Turn: Max Weber and Georg Simmel
• 5 Ideological Turn: Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs
• 6 Reflexive Turn: Otto Neurath and Empirical Sociology
• 7 Modernist Turn: Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer
• 8 Critical Turn: The Frankfurt School
• 9 Negative Turn: Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas
• 10 Quotidian Turn: Henri Lefebvre
• 11 Corporeal Turn: Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• 12 Pragmatic Turn: Social Theory in the US
• 13 Cultural Turn: Social Theory in France and Britain
• 14 Relational Turn: Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu
• Conclusion
• References
• Index