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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Social theory is a crucial resource for the social sciences. It provides rich insights into how human beings think and act and how contemporary social life is constructed. But often the key ideas of social theorists are expressed in highly technical and difficult language that can hide more than it reveals.
The new edition of this popular book continues to cut to the core of what social theory is about. Wide-ranging in scope and coverage, it is concise in presentation and free from jargon. Covering key themes and schools of thought from the classical thinkers up to the present, the third edition features a new chapter dedicated to post-colonial sociological theory. With updated literature and examples throughout, the book also includes refreshed pedagogical features to connect theory to readers’ own life experiences.
Showing why social theory matters, and why it is of far-reaching social and political importance, the book is ideal for readers seeking a clear, crisp mapping of a complex but very rewarding area.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Myth-Busting
How to Read the Book
Recurring Themes
Knowledge
Structure and action (or agency)
Modernity
The Location of Social Theory
1 Classical Social Theory
‘Classics’ and ‘Moderns’
A Foundational Thinker: Kant
Another Foundational Thinker: Hegel
Modern Society and Alienation
Varieties of Social Analysis
Conclusion: After the Classics
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking About Alienation and Regaining Control
2 Functionalist and Systems Theory
Classical Evolutionism
Talcott Parsons: Systematizing Functionalism
Parsons After the Second World War
The Pattern Variables
Parsons’ Structural-Functionalism
Beyond Parsons
Luhmann’s Systems Theory
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking About Social Functions and Social Roles
3 Marxist and Critical Theory
Keeping Up with the Times
The Frankfurt School
A New Beginning: Jürgen Habermas
An Alternative: Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking About Critical Awareness and Consuming Popular Culture
4 Phenomenological Theory
Founding Phenomenology
Constructing Reality
Ethnomethodology: Accomplishing Reality
Existential Phenomenology
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking about Habituation and Instigating Change
5 Symbolic Interactionist Theory
The Roots of Symbolic Interactionism in Pragmatist Philosophy
The Development of Symbolic Interactionism
Tales of Goffman
Assessing Symbolic Interactionism
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking About Social Performances and Social Roles
6 Process Sociological Theory
From Simmel to Elias
The Civilizing Process
The Civilizing Process, Rationality and Habitus
Applying Process Sociology: Death and Sport
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking About Social Configurations and Social Pressure
7 Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Theory
Innovations: Durkheim and Saussure
Analysing Myth
Towards Post-Structuralism
Michel Foucault: From Structuralism to Post-Structuralism
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking About Language, Social Theory and Empowerment
8 Post-Modernist Theory
What Are Post-Modernism and Post-Modernity?
The Origins of Post-Modernism
From Politics to Philosophy
Media and the Death of Reality
Back to Marx?
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking About Hyperreality and Social Media
9 Structuration Theory
Bourdieu’s Structuration
Playing Games
Bourdieu and Education
Assessing Bourdieu
Giddens’ Structuration
Assessing Giddens
Giddens and ‘Late Modernity’
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking About Habitus and Education
10 Feminist Theory
Situating Feminisms
From Liberalism to Marxism to Radical Feminism
Towards Post-Modernism
Phenomenological Feminism
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking about Feminist Social Theory and Gender Roles and Relations
11 Actor-Network Theory
What ANT Is Not
What ANT Is (or Might Be)
Against the Classics
Re-Thinking Power
Criticisms and Developments
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking about Humans, Non-Human Actants: Mobile Phones
12 Globalization Theory
Globalization as Economic Processes
Globalization as Political Processes
Globalization as Social Processes
Globalization as Cultural Processes
Globalization From Above and Below
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking About Globalization and Friendship
13 Post-Colonial Theory
What is ‘Post-Colonialism’?
Towards Post-Colonial Sociology
Assessing Post-Colonial Sociological Theory
Theory from West to East and North to South
Conclusion
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking About Post-Colonial Issues and You
Thinking About Northern Theory and Where You Live
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Summary of Kant and Hegel.
Figure 1.2
Ideas of Various Classical Theorists: The Nature of Pre-Modern and Modern Societ...
Figure 1.3
The Enlightenment / Romanticism and Positivism / Interpretivism Divides.
Figure 1.4
Marx on ‘Base’ and ‘Superstructure’.
Figure 1.5
Materialism and Idealism.
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Summary of Classical Evolutionism.
Figure 2.2
Parsons’ Four Systems.
Figure 2.3
The Pattern Variables.
Figure 2.4
The Action System – AGIL Model.
Figure 2.5
The Four Subsystems of the Action System.
Figure 2.6
The Social System as an AGIL System.
Figure 2.7
Luhmann’s Systems Theory.
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Summary of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Critical Theory.
Figure 3.2
Habermas’ Critical Theory.
Figure 3.3
Gramsci’s Marxism.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Summary of Schutz.
Figure 4.2
Summary of Berger and Luckmann.
Figure 4.3
Summary of Ethnomethodology.
Figure 4.4
Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
James’ Selective Interest and Dialogical Self.
Figure 5.2
Mead’s Concepts of ‘Me’, ‘I’ and ‘Gene...
Figure 5.3
Cooley: Self-Idea, Primary Groups and Individuation.
Figure 5.4
Blumer: Self-Indication, Social and Joint Acts.
Figure 5.5
Goffman: The Dramaturgical Model.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Summary of Elias’ Process Sociology.
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
Summary of Saussure’s Linguistics.
Figure 7.2
The Nature of Discourses.
Figure 7.3
Barthes on ‘Myth’.
Figure 7.4
Althusser’s Marxism.
Figure 7.5
Foucault’s Earlier Ideas.
Figure 7.6
Foucault’s Later Ideas.
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1
The Values of Modernism and Post-Modernism – from a Post-Modernist’...
Figure 8.2
The Nature of Modernity and Post-Modernity – from a Post-Modernist’...
Figure 8.3
Summary of Lyotard.
Figure 8.4
Summary of Baudrillard.
Figure 8.5
Summary of Marxist Responses to Post-Modernism.
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1
Bourdieu’s Three Types of Capital.
Figure 9.2
Summary of Bourdieu’s Social Theory.
Figure 9.3
Summary of Giddens’ Social Theory.
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1
Liberal, Marxist and Radical Feminisms.
Figure 10.2
Post-Modernist Feminist Theory.
Figure 10.3
Two Phenomenological Feminists.
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1
Actor-Network Theory.
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1
Four Dimensions of Globalization Processes, and Key Questions About Them.
Figure 12.2
Summary of Wallerstein and World-Systems Analysis.
Figure 12.3
Summary of Giddens on Globalization.
Figure 12.4
Views of Cultural Globalization.
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1
Post-Colonial Theory and Post-Colonial Sociology.
Figure 13.2
Southern Theory.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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An Invitation to Social Theory
Third Edition
DAVID INGLIS
with CHRISTOPHER THORPE
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © David Inglis and Christopher Thorpe 2025
The right of David Inglis and Christopher Thorpe to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition first published in 2012 by Polity Press
Second edition first published in 2019 by Polity Press
This third edition first published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6467-5 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6468-2 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024934209
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Introduction
In this chapter:
Myth-Busting
How to Read the Book
Recurring Themes
The Location of Social Theory
Myth-Busting
Social theory is boring, inaccessible, pointless and difficult, right?
Wrong.
Social theory can be difficult to understand – at least at first. A lot of it is not immediately comprehensible. Theory will be tedious – if you are absolutely convinced it will be tedious. It is sometimes not immediately obvious how it relates to other courses. It can seem to stand in isolation from the ‘real world’. It can seem like eavesdropping on a conversation involving people that you don’t know, can’t understand and therefore don’t like. It can seem to lack relevance to your life.
But social theory, if read in the right way, has many important pluses. Let’s draw a distinction: between ideas and the words they are expressed in. The people who write social theory often express themselves in what, for newcomers, seem like difficult ways. Learning about theory is like learning a new language. You are going to have to put in some effort to work out what is going on initially.
But even if the language is difficult to grasp at first, remember this: the ideas that are being expressed are actually not that difficult. They are about human societies – and you already know a lot about these, even if you don’t fully realize it, because you live in one (or several). Social theories are in many ways just worked-up versions of what we all know anyway, if often in semi-conscious ways. In many ways, social theory is an exercise in telling you what you know already – but it tells you in ways that make your knowledge both deeper and more precise than before.
When they write, social theory authors are not being obscure deliberately (or mostly they are not). They have to write in a kind of code that other social theorists can understand. If they didn’t, they would constantly have to be explaining everything – and that would take up a vast amount of time and energy. To understand social theory, you have to ‘crack’ the code (or number of codes) it is written in. Once you have cracked the codes, you will understand what social theorists are talking about. This will take time, but most people find it is not that difficult to do.
This book gives you a sense of major social theories and theorists. Each of these uses a distinctive type of code. This book is going to help you understand each of them – both what they are saying and how they are saying it. You will see the main ideas and concepts of each type of theory, how they fit together, and how they both differ from and also overlap with the ideas and concepts of other sorts of theory. You will see what their significance is: for social theory, for people in the ‘real world’, and, crucially, for you. As you read the book there should be regular flashes of recognition, when you think ‘so that’s what they are saying!’
Social theory can reveal things to you. Sometimes you will discover things that you were not at all aware of. Sometimes reading the work of a particular theorist will mean you will never look at the world in the same way again. Sometimes theory will point to things that you sort of knew about or were dimly aware of. Because it draws upon and talks about many things you already know in some way, social theory is already part of you.
Reading social theory is ultimately not a chore. It is worth persevering with, even if it is an uphill struggle at first, as it is almost inevitably going to be. Once you develop the capacity to understand what social theorists are saying, there can be a really productive, even exciting, meeting of minds, between yours and theirs. When social theory is really doing its job well, it opens up the reader’s mental horizons, making them see themselves in new ways. Your understanding is deepened of who you are and how the world works. Once you have got to the stage where you can see the general thrust of any specific theory, you will be able to apply it to yourself and see the world around you in novel ways.
Additionally, the more you understand social theory, the more you will understand why you like or dislike certain parts and types of it, why you find some theories appealing and others dull or unconvincing. You will be able to use what you have learned to think about the social (and not just purely ‘individual’) reasons for the particular relationships you have to particular sorts of social theory. The social reasons why you relate to social theory in the specific ways you happen to do – liking some aspects, disliking others – are only fully discernible once you have grasped social theory’s ways of finding and explaining those very reasons themselves. This is what is meant by the ‘reflexive’ powers and capacities of social theory – its ability to help you understand yourself better, including your own relationships to social theory.
How to Read the Book
If social theory is new to you, it will initially seem rather alien. But as you go along the path created by reading this book, it will seem more and more familiar, and you will start to feel comfortable with it. You will begin to see recurrent themes and ideas turning up over and over again. The book has been divided up into different chapters, each covering a major ‘school of thought’ in social theory. In each chapter we have presented the ideas of particular theorists who have a lot in common with each other, often writing explicitly in light of each other’s ideas, engaged in a dialogue of like-minded thinkers.
But although we have arranged the book into chapters dealing with different schools of thought, there is also a great deal of overlap between them. Different thinkers and schools of thought often borrow, take up or criticize the same sorts of ideas and themes. The schools of thought are not self-enclosed and isolated from each other. They should each be seen as quite loose sets of ideas that often have a lot more in common with other viewpoints than it may at first seem.
Social theory is a patchwork of ideas of earlier thinkers being borrowed by later thinkers, and then being transformed for new purposes. Sometimes the debts to earlier thinkers are clear, sometimes they are more hidden. That is why we start the book with a depiction of the ideas of the so-called ‘classical theorists’, those who lived and wrote in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In many ways what is called ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ social theory involves playing around with and transforming the ideas of the classical social theorists. Some new elements that are purely twentieth century in origin – notably the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein – get added into the mix as time goes on. But theory nowadays is still a response to, and involves diverse uses and transformations of, the ideas first created in the nineteenth century by the classical authors, such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel.
These classical thinkers also had their sources from which they took inspiration. At the heart of much social theory are the concepts of the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel. Their work had a huge influence on the classical social theorists. You cannot really understand ‘classical social theory’ unless you understand the basic aspects of Kant’s and Hegel’s thinking. Classical theory is in many ways a set of variations on themes set out by Kant and Hegel. And ‘modern’ social theory – theory written from about the 1930s until today – is largely a set of variations on those variations. Therefore you cannot really understand ‘modern’ social theory unless you understand its ‘classical’ ancestors, and you can’t really understand the latter without a basic knowledge of what Kant and Hegel were talking about. So it is a good idea, however you otherwise use the book, if you read Chapter 1 first, because it contains the seeds of so much that comes later.
Recurring Themes
Almost all social theories have to deal with three key themes. In each chapter we will lay out what the main schools of thought have said about these themes. They are:
Knowledge
Every type of social theory makes claims about what it understands as the ‘real world’. Thus the first key theme that any theory must involve is to do with ‘knowledge’. In social theory, knowledge has two central dimensions. The first is what philosophers refer to as ‘ontology’. The ontology of a particular theory involves its central assumptions about what is ‘real’ and therefore what should be the focus of study. Ontological claims that a particular theory makes involve the assumptions it holds about what the ‘real world’ is like, what is in it and what makes it up. For example, one ‘ontological’ position – which we can roughly call social ‘structuralism’ – claims that the primary elements of the human social world are ‘social structures’. These are ‘real’ and have a strong influence on how individual persons think and act. So structuralism presents ‘structures’ as the basic and most fundamental aspects of human social life. Examples here would include functionalism (Chapter 2) and some kinds of Marxism (Chapters 1, 3 and 8). By contrast, the ontological position we can call ‘individualism’ claims that the ‘real’ things in human life are individual people. From this viewpoint, social structures either do not exist, or are merely the products of individuals acting and interacting in particular ways.
The second central dimension of knowledge for each social theory is the ‘epistemological’ dimension. This involves how the theory intends to study what it thinks of as the ‘real world’. A particular division between different types of social theory involves what they want to model their ‘epistemology’ on. For some schools of thought (e.g. phenomenology, symbolic interactionism and streams within feminism – see Chapters 4, 5 and 10), social theory, and the social science that it guides, should be modelled on the techniques to be found in humanities disciplines, like literary criticism. The means by which we should understand social life is by ‘interpreting’ the meanings to be found in the heads of individuals as they go about acting and interacting with each other.
An alternative epistemological position is that of ‘positivism’, which holds that social theory and the social sciences should be modelled on the natural sciences, which are said to search for general ‘laws’ (e.g. the laws of thermodynamics), and which collect ‘facts’ that are uncontestable if collected properly, these facts often being found in statistics. Both ‘interpretivism’ and ‘positivism’ are explained more in Chapter 1.
The epistemology of a theory is intimately connected to its ontology, the one leading to the other and vice versa. For example, the epistemology of positivism is based on a particular ontology – the claim that there are facts ‘out there’ to be captured, and that they exist ‘outside’ of any particular person’s consciousness. The epistemology of interpretivism involves a very different ontology – that the most important things in the world are the meanings to be found in people’s heads, which are shaped by particular cultural systems or forms. The heart of any theory is what it says about its own ontology and epistemology. This fundamentally underpins any theory’s views of what the world is like and how it is to be studied. A radical critique of the Eurocentric biases and limitations of theory and theory-production is offered by post-colonial thinking (Chapter 13). It demands a move away from Eurocentric theory produced in the Global North alone, and a de-colonizing of theory production, by orienting this much more to previously marginalized voices, including those from the Global South.
Structure and action (or agency)
The second key theme that most social theories deal with has to do with their views on the relative importance of ‘social structure’ or individuals’ ‘actions’ in their analysis of how the social world works. More recent social theory often replaces the term ‘action’ with ‘agency’. This relates to the ontological issues just mentioned, as to whether structures or individuals are the most important aspects of human social existence.
It should be noted, however, that some theories assume there is a fundamental, ontological distinction between ‘structures’ and ‘actions’, while others reject this divide, trying to create a terminology which goes beyond thinking in terms of a stark divide between the two. These issues will be seen particularly acutely in Chapter 6, where we encounter ‘process sociology’, and Chapter 9, where we examine structurationist thinking, both of which reject the division between structure and action, society and individual. All we have to note at the moment is that some theories put more emphasis on the power of individuals to shape their own lives, while others put far more emphasis on the capacity of social structures to influence what people do.
Some positions, like Actor-Network Theory (Chapter 11), reject the division between structure and agency and try to think about the make-up of social worlds in radically different terms. Not all forms of social theory explicitly formulate ‘structure’ and ‘action’ as their focus of concern – these tend to be theories that come from sources most distant from the discipline of sociology, certain brands of structuralism being the obvious case in point, as they are more centrally derived from the discipline of linguistics (see Chapters 7 and 8). These theories are much more centrally concerned with thinking about the nature of ‘subjectivity’ (the ways in which a person’s mind is shaped by social and cultural factors) and ‘identity’ (the ways in which a person thinks about themselves and their place in the world). Some more sociologically oriented theories deal explicitly with these matters too, so we will highlight all instances of thinking about subjectivity and identity where these arise.
Modernity
The third key theme that social theories deal with concerns what they say about contemporary society, how it developed, what it is made up of, how it operates and how it is changing. Social theory generally uses the term ‘modernity’ to describe what it is centrally about. This theme was in large part invented and elaborated by the classical theorists. It is generally taken to refer to the kind of society which arose from about the sixteenth century onwards in Western Europe, which replaced the previous type of social organization (medieval ‘feudalism’) in that part of the world, and which then spread, in all sorts of complicated and uneven ways, to other parts of the world over the next several centuries. The various classical theorists produced ideas about modernity that in some ways shared similar assumptions and in other ways were quite different from each other, especially in terms of how enthusiastic or not they were about the new kind of society they saw as having relatively recently arisen (see Chapter 1). Theorists ever since then have drawn upon these classical ideas in a diverse range of ways, altering them in the process.
Since the 1970s, there has been a widespread sense among many social theorists, reflecting perceptions in wider society, that the version of modernity we have today is in important ways different – perhaps exceptionally different – from the version of modernity the classical theorists tried to understand. A major part of social theory over the last forty years or so has involved trying to determine what this ‘new modernity’ looks like and what it should be called. Terms that have been coined in this regard include post-modernity (Chapter 8), late modernity (Chapter 9), risk society, the network society and globalized modernity (Chapter 12). All these terms reflect the broader epistemological and ontological commitments of the people who have created them, as well as their senses of what structure, action, agency, subjectivity and identity look like in the present day.
Post-colonial theory (Chapter 13) regards both classical theory and the types of more recent theory mentioned above as deeply Eurocentric, unable to grasp the fact that both modernity and they themselves are the results of the violent processes of imperialism and colonialism that still deeply affect life all across the world at the present time.
The Location of Social Theory
This all raises a wider issue, about the social location and uses of social theory. Today social theory is often caught up in the so-called ‘culture wars’, political battles about such matters as sexualities, migration and other political hot topics of this phase of the twenty-first century. For some, mostly on the political right and far right, certain kinds of theory, such as gender theory (Chapter 10) and Marxism and Critical Theory (Chapter 3) are expressions of ‘woke’ ideologies, and therefore to be rejected or silenced.
For those who create or support such sorts of theorizing, who are often liberal or leftist in their politics, these attacks have to be met with more, not less, critical interrogation of the inequalities and inequities of how the world is organized today. That is to say, the world needs social theory, and ever more of it, both to understand how things work and to challenge those attacks on social theory itself.
Social theory has probably never been as politicized as it currently is, nor as publicly visible, even if in simplified or misleading forms. So, it has become ever more pressing for people to understand what it is, and what different sorts of it are saying about the world.
This book is intended to work as a reliable guide to most of the main aspects of social theory as it exists in the present time. With social theory’s increased political presence and importance in mind, let’s begin on the journey through this deeply interesting terrain …
1Classical Social Theory
In this chapter:
‘Classics’ and ‘Moderns’
A Foundational Thinker: Kant
Another Foundational Thinker: Hegel
Modern Society and Alienation
Varieties of Social Analysis
Conclusion: After the Classics
Suggestions for Further Reading
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
Thinking About Alienation and Regaining Control
‘Classics’ and ‘Moderns’
The legacy of the ‘classical’ social theorists looms large in modern social theory. Despite being long dead, the works of the ‘classics’ continue very much to inform present-day theorists and theorizing. Even when contemporary thinkers are unaware of the legacy of the classics on their own thinking, that legacy continues to be important.
No writer of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw themselves as a ‘classical theorist’ – that was a label put onto them later, by particular people for specific reasons. The people we now conventionally define as classical theorists were engaged in debates about specific issues that very much reflected their own periods and social contexts. There is a danger of lifting ideas out of their original social contexts, presenting them as if they were context-free intellectual products, rather than ideas put to use by particular people for particular purposes at particular times (Skinner, 1969). The original uses of those ideas might have been very different from how we use the same ideas today – if in fact they are the ‘same’ ideas, because how we use them now may transform them fundamentally from what they used to mean. Thus any use of classical authors inevitably involves interpretation, and the work of interpretation never ceases (Alexander, 1987). Disputes over the interpretation of the nature of particular authors and their works constitutes one of the distinctive features of social theory. Through debating who our intellectual ancestors were and what they said, we come to new understandings of ourselves as theorists. And as these disputes go on constantly, our senses of what social theory is, and of what it can achieve, change too.
You cannot really understand modern social theory if you do not understand what is defined as ‘classical’ social theory. The very term ‘modern’ only makes sense in contrast to what it is seen not to be, i.e. ‘classical’. Conventionally, classical theory is thought to have ended, and modern theory to have begun, in the 1920s and 1930s. This is because those thinkers defined as the last of the classics, most notably Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, died around the time of the First World War. Their mental universe was one shared with their predecessors of the nineteenth century, whereas the intellectual landscape of the generation after them seemed in certain ways to be very different, involving fundamental breaks with what went before. One important break is that both Durkheim and Weber did not live long enough to engage with the revolutionary ideas of Sigmund Freud, which started to be significant from the 1920s onwards (Elliott, 2004). Classical theorists inhabited a pre-Freudian intellectual universe, whereas those thinkers definable as ‘modern’ theorists came to exist within a world where the ideas of Freud could not be ignored.
So there are some fundamental differences between ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ social theory. The difference was marked by some of the earliest of those we now call ‘modern’ theorists, because they reflected back on their predecessors and defined them as classics. In so doing, these thinkers drew a dividing line between ‘classics’ and ‘moderns’, but also argued that the moderns had a lot to learn from the classics. Perhaps the most major work to do this was Talcott Parsons’ (1937) The Structure of Social Action, published in the late 1930s. Parsons was one of the first to claim explicitly that there was indeed a ‘classical tradition’ in social thought, thus implying that there was now a post-classical (i.e. modern) field that was distinct from, but could take inspiration from, the ideas of the classics, re-working them for new purposes. Parsons included Weber and Durkheim among his classics, but not Georg Simmel and Karl Marx. This shows that what counts as ‘classical social theory’ shifts and changes over time, and varies from place to place. Who and what gets to count as a true ‘classic’ varies according to circumstances, especially as regards which people have the power to define what a classic is or who counts as one.
Really to understand modern social theory, you have to know about what modern theorists have done with classical theories. Classical theories provide many (but not all) of the building-blocks from which modern theories have been assembled. Each modern theoretical position can be understood as – at least in part – a particular combination of specific bits of classical theory, put together in certain ways for distinctive purposes. Modern theorists take certain bits of classical theory, while rejecting, criticizing and ignoring others. They must actively re-interpret the bits that they take, and work out how they have to be transformed in order to make them useful for present-day purposes. Sometimes the selection of bits is done self-consciously and in full awareness of the borrowing from classical theorists, other times semi-consciously or unconsciously. Classical theory very much informs modern theory, but this is not a crushing domination by the old over the new. It is about how the new is constantly using and reconfiguring the old for its own purposes, and this is a creative process. To understand what follows in the rest of the book, one must know the central ideas drawn from the classical theorists that have been taken up and used again and again, by different modern theorists in different ways.
A Foundational Thinker: Kant
Just as modern theorists have constantly drawn upon the ideas of the classics, so too did the classical theorists draw upon and transform earlier ideas. Both classical and modern social theory can be seen as responses to, and transformations of, the ideas of two foundational thinkers: the German philosophers Immanuel Kant [1724–1804] and G. W. F. Hegel [1770–1831]. Both have supplied many (perhaps most) of the central ideas of social theory over the last 200 years. Some familiarity with their ideas is crucial for understanding subsequent theoretical developments.
Kant’s contribution is primarily about the nature of knowledge (epistemology) and reality (ontology). Kant’s philosophy was an attempt to avoid the extremism of two earlier, opposed philosophical positions: realism (the idea that world exists wholly independently of my mind’s perception of it) and idealism (the view that the world is merely a projection of what my mind imagines it to be). Kant’s (1999 [1787]) middle way between these polarized positions involved claiming that each object in the world has two sides. On the one hand, there is its noumenal side, which is its essence and which exists beyond human perception. Human perception is inevitably limited because it cannot grasp the noumenal aspect of things, ‘things in themselves’. On the other hand, each object has is its phenomenal side, which is the object as it appears in human perception. So the world is ‘real’, and exists beyond human perceptions, but we never gain direct access to that world (the world of noumena). This is because the mind plays an active role in organizing the world that the human being sees presented before it. The mind shapes the phenomenal (visible) aspect of things, and so constitutes (or creates) the world as we perceive it. So we only ever have access to the phenomenal world, the world shaped for us by our minds, while the noumenal world – the world of objects ‘in themselves’ – is always out of our grasp. A person only ever experiences the world as their mind constructs it for them. The noumenal world has no form or structure, and so is meaningless. It is the human mind that projects form and structure onto the world, so making sense of the world and rendering it meaningful for us (Bennett, 1966).
Kant assumes that all human minds are alike, and so the world as perceived by me is the same world as perceived by you – or by anyone else – because everyone’s mind is identical and processes the world in the same ways (Korner, 1955). The history of post-Kantian thinking, especially in the social sciences, broke down this view, tending towards the denial of the existence of noumena at all, and seeing the world primarily, or only, as a series of phenomena. Here is the root of the central social theoretical idea that the world and everything in it are ‘socially constructed’. Social theory has kept the Kantian idea that the world is constructed for us by our minds, but adds that how the human brain works varies from one social or cultural context to another. Different groups of people are seen as possessing ‘their own’ unique cultures. Each culture has its own distinctive ways of shaping the minds of the people living within it. Different societies and cultures shape the world differently. It is through culture that the world not only is perceived by people in that cultural context, but is in fact constituted. In other words, different societies create different realities for the people that live within them (Lizardo, 2011).
Classical social theory developed these ideas in multiple directions. Early nineteenth-century thinkers associated with the intellectual movement called ‘Romanticism’ stressed that each particular culture is unique. Thus the experiences of people living in different cultural contexts are so radically different, it is difficult or impossible to argue that there is one single ‘human nature’. There is only a multiplicity of different ways of thinking and acting, all totally divergent from each other (Berlin, 2000). Social theory in France, beginning at the time of Montesquieu [1689–1755], argued that different societies involved different ‘mental structures’, each of these producing radically different experiences of the world. This view was developed much later – just before the First World War – in Émile Durkheim’s [1858–1917] last major work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, which is a sociological reinvention of Kant (Durkheim, 2001 [1912]). It understands the perception of phenomena as rooted not in the individual mind (as Kant argued), but in the classifying structures of particular social groups. These systems of ‘collective classifications’ specify what is perceivable and not perceivable, thinkable and not thinkable, by all members of the group (Durkheim and Mauss, 1969 [1903]).
In Germany, similar claims were developed, but whereas the French tended to talk about how ‘societies’ created systems of ‘classification’, the Germans tended to conceive of ‘cultures’ which were seen to shape human sensory experience. The German classical theoretical tradition reaches its most developed expression in the work of Max Weber [1864– 1920], where the culture of a particular group is understood as projecting ‘meaning and significance’ onto the ‘meaningless infinity’ of the noumenal world (Turner, 1996: 5). Culture makes the world meaningful for the people in it, by selecting from a potentially infinite number of objects and concerns in the noumenal world a finite set of things, and directing people’s attention towards them and not to others. This is how the world comes to have meaning for us, and how we come to feel ‘ontologically secure’, that is, to feel reality is patterned and orderly, and not going to erupt into chaos and meaninglessness at any moment (Giddens, 1991). These ideas have been taken up in a very wide variety of ways in modern social theory, such as in structuralism (see Chapter 7), which derives from primarily French classical sources, and in phenomenology (see Chapter 4), which makes use more of German classical ideas. These various theoretical positions all endeavour to elaborate on the central post-Kantian idea that all forms of ‘reality’ are social (or cultural) fabrications, and that anything that seems to be ‘objective’ is only so from the cultural perspective of a particular social group (Berger and Luckmann, 1991 [1966]).
As the original Kantian ideas were taken in the direction of claims as to society and culture shaping reality, they also had conceptions of social power added to them. The social and cultural forms which shape a particular group’s world for them, are seen themselves to be shaped by power relations. Particularly important here were two innovations: the account of ideologies put forward by Karl Marx [1818–1883], and the philosophy of power created by Friedrich Nietzsche [1844–1900]. Both Marx and Nietzsche – although in different fashions – argued that the ways each group looks at the world are shaped by the power relations that exist both within that group and in its relations with other groups. For Marx, cultural forms are shaped by ideologies, which express the ideas of ruling classes, the groups which control and dominate particular societies. For Nietzsche, cultural forms embody the will to power – the desire for individuals and groups to have control over other people.
Through Marx and Nietzsche, many later theorists came to regard all cultural forms as being thoroughly shot through with power relations, even though the people who lived within the terms set by those forms were often unaware of this fact. While later Marxists have obviously sought to use and transform the ideas of Marx (see Chapter 3), those who have drawn upon the ideas of Max Weber have implicitly also utilized certain themes from Nietzsche, which were taken up by Weber. One of the main tasks of the ‘critical’ wings of social theory, whether Marxist or non-Marxist (e.g. the work of Foucault – see Chapter 7), has been to identify the ways in which power works in and through cultural forms, and how this comes profoundly to affect how people think and how social life is constructed, maintained and altered.
Another Foundational Thinker: Hegel
Just as Kantian ideas were important for the development of subsequent social theory, so too has been the philosophy of Hegel. One could plausibly claim that Hegel is the most influential and important source of subsequent social theorizing, sometimes his ideas being taken up explicitly by later thinkers (most famously, by Marx), but more often his notions having more hidden influences. Hegel’s (1979 [1807]) philosophy comprises an extensive and often difficult body of work, which we will only give brief outlines of. The most important element later thinkers have taken up is the notion of ‘dialectics’. This is itself an idea with various meanings, but at its most elementary it refers to processes of movement and change. It particularly refers to situations where opposing forces clash with each other. The clash transforms both forces, each being reconfigured by the other, such that they come to have new natures, comprising elements of each other. The clash also creates a new situation, which takes elements from each of the opposing forces, but which goes beyond each of them to create something novel. So the clash of opposing forces is ‘dialectical’, and the clash creates new forces and situations that are also themselves dialectical in nature.
Marx concretized these abstract notions by using them to understand how human history changed through the antagonism of opposing social classes (see Arthur, 1986). Ruling and subordinate classes come into conflict, and the conflict changes each of them. The conflict produces a new situation where the previously most powerful class is weakened and disappears, the previously subordinate class becomes the dominant one, and a new class appears which then enters into conflict with the new powerful one – at which point the dialectical movement of conflict and change occurs once again. Hegel believed that dialectical processes in human history would eventually reach an end-point, a final situation where all conflicts had been resolved. Marx extrapolated from this to argue that the final class conflict would occur in modernity between the capitalist class and the revolutionary working class, and when the latter triumphed and the former was defeated and disappeared, this would bring about a new society (communism). This would be a society where there would no longer be any class conflicts, because all people would be in the working class and therefore there would be no class to oppose it. The dialectical irony, as Marx saw it, was that the capitalist class had created a society which produced an enemy class, the working class, which then destroyed that very society.
Beyond Marx’s use of Hegel’s dialectics, many subsequent theorists have argued that social order involves dialectical processes, i.e. processes where certain forces produce effects that come to rebound on those forces themselves, changing them as a result. Social theory built on dialectical thinking has a strong sense of irony: human history involves groups of people engaged in activities which have consequences that no one could foresee or control. On this view, human beings tend to do things that have ‘unintended consequences’ that they did not aim for and that they could not have guessed would happen.
Many thinkers have also stressed the dialectical relationships that pertain between the actions of individuals on the one side, and social structures and institutions on the other. Classical thinkers otherwise as diverse as Marx, Weber and Simmel were all of the (Hegelian) view that the actions of various individuals can over time cohere into fixed patterns of action and interaction – these are what are called ‘social structures’ and ‘institutions’. These then come to seem to the people living within them to be simply ‘real’ and to have an objective existence of their own, even though all they are in fact are routinized patterns of action and interaction that have become habitual and taken-for-granted. The structures and institutions thus come to shape individuals’ further actions and interactions. In this way, a particular social order based around these structures and institutions is reproduced and maintained over time. However, if for whatever reason individuals were to start acting differently, then the structures and institutions would be altered, or even transformed altogether.
On such a view, ‘social structures’ and the ‘actions’ of individuals are dialectically intertwined: each has effects on the other, each could not exist without the other, each makes the other. So once structures and institutions have come to exist, they both constrain and make possible individuals’ actions. This is because they generate, and are centred around, cultural forms which shape the view of the world that people have (here we return to the Kantian ideas above). However, particular structures and institutions may not rigidly dictate what individuals think and do; they may allow space for individual choices, in that the cultural forms may be ambiguous, open to interpretation, allowing individuals more than one course of action. So individuals may engage in actions and interactions which either maintain the current patterns of the structures and institutions, or which transform them. And, thinking dialectically, structures and institutions may produce forces (ways of thinking and acting) which unintentionally come to change or even destroy them. All of these ideas, found throughout this book (see especially Chapter 9), derive ultimately from Hegel.
For most versions of social theory, the division Western philosophy makes between pure individual free will (the capacity to do anything you want) and complete determinism (the power of circumstances to force you to do certain things and not others) is too abstract to grasp what actually goes on in human society. Marx (2000 [1852]) famously phrased the social theoretical view: people ‘make history but not in conditions of their own choosing’. The thoughts and actions of individuals (and groups) make and remake structures and institutions; these in turn make and remake thoughts and actions; thoughts and actions remake structures and institutions; and all of this goes on in never-ending processes (Abrams, 1982). People are neither wholly constrained by social order (if they were, nothing would ever change), nor are they totally free to do as they choose (for then there would be no social order, no relatively stable patterns of thought, action and interaction).
This notion is nowadays called ‘structuration’ (see Chapter 9) – how structure relates to action (or agency, as it is more often called now). The key social theoretical task becomes to find words which more specifically describe this situation. Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel and other classical theorists all endeavoured to do this. All their attempts have subsequently been regarded as flawed in one way or another. If the aim is to provide an account that gives equal due to both ‘structure’ and ‘action’, then different thinkers can be criticized as having given more weight to one side of the equation than the others: Marx and Durkheim are often said to overemphasize ‘structure’ at the expense of ‘action’, whereas Weber is said to have been stronger on understanding action and correspondingly weaker on explaining structure. But the work of the classical theorists is always open to interpretation and creative rethinking. As we will see in Chapter 9, in present-day theory Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis owes a lot to Marx, Weber and Durkheim, whereas Anthony Giddens’ views are closer to those of Simmel, as are those of Norbert Elias (see Chapter 6).
Modern Society and Alienation
Another of Hegel’s ideas, ‘alienation’, has also been very influential in social theory. We have seen that when over time the actions of various individuals cohere into fixed patterns, then social structures and institutions are formed. These then come to seem to those living within them to have an ‘objective’ existence of their own. The implication of Hegel’s thinking – later to be taken up by Marx – is that such a situation is an alienated condition, where people create things that then seem to them to be ‘real’ and can come to have great power over them. Just as Baron Frankenstein created a monster he could not control, so too does human life involve the creation of things (structures, institutions, ideas, cultural forms) that come to control, even enslave, the very people who have made them, and then later on their descendants too. Once a product of human activity is thought to have its own objective reality, and is thought not to be a product of human actions, then the people who made it are alienated from their own product, which comes to stand over and above them.
Figure 1.1 Summary of Kant and Hegel.
Marx (1981 [1844]) applied these Hegelian ideas to religion: the idea of God has been invented by people, but this has been forgotten, such that God seems to have a life of His own and the power to control people. For both Hegel and Marx, the only way to get out of this sort of situation into a non-alienated one is for people to realize that what controls them was in fact made by them themselves. Once they realize that, they can regain control, taming that thing and putting it to their own uses. For Marx, the revolutionary working class would in the near future realize that the institutions and ideologies of capitalist society which oppressed them were not objective, natural or inevitable, but in fact were merely human products that could be altered and disposed of.
Hegel’s notion of alienation was particularly influential in later German social theory, although it has made an impact in all theory influenced by Marx (Liebersohn, 1988). Most classical theory asked this question: what is unique and specifically ‘modern’ about ‘modern society’? All classical social theorists agreed that there were huge differences between modernity in Europe (and North America) and the social order it had replaced, namely medieval feudalism. Feudalism was primarily rural, had small-scale communities, was based around an agricultural economy, and had an aristocratic ruling class and a subordinate class of peasants (agricultural labourers). Modernity was based around huge cities, had a capitalist economy, its ruling class was the class of capitalists (those who owned the big industrial companies) and this class dominated the majority of the population, the working class (‘proletariat’), who mostly worked in factories. As Figure 1.2 shows, the classical theorists invented different binary oppositions to identify more specifically the peculiar nature of modernity, comparing it to the pre-modern society it was seen to have destroyed and replaced (Bendix, 1967).
Some diagnoses of the pre-modern/modern division were more optimistic about the nature and future of modernity, playing up the positives (e.g. Durkheim, Spencer), others were more pessimistic, playing up the negatives (Weber, Tönnies), while others were dialectical, seeing modernity as a mixture of good and bad elements (hence Marx deploring capitalism as an exploitative social order, but praising it for the way it would destroy itself and create the better society called communism).
Ideas as to whether modernity was a good or bad thing were based in different general understandings of social change. Both Herbert Spencer and Durkheim regarded modern society as the result of a long period of social evolution, which involved a transition over thousands of years from small, simple social orders to modernity’s large-scale complexity (Sztompka, 1993) (see Chapter 2). Marx was also an evolutionary thinker of sorts, but one who followed Hegel’s dialectical conception of social change (see above), involving clashing social forces producing ever new, more sophisticated stages of human development. By contrast, Weber rejected evolutionary thought, regarding human history as much more disordered and contingent than evolutionists thought. However, his own criticisms of evolutionary theory were rather contradicted by his emphasis on how, over many centuries, the Western world had become more and more highly rationalized, dominated both by rational forms of thought (particularly exemplified in natural science) and by rational forms of social control (particularly exemplified in bureaucracies). This seemed like an evolutionary story smuggled in by the back door (for the complexities of Weber’s ideas, see Collins [1986]).
These various views of social change in general, and the transition to modernity in particular, were rooted in broader ideas as to what social science was, as we will see below. Almost all the classical thinkers (the main exception being Herbert Spencer, who was not greatly influenced by German philosophy) thought modernity had very alienating aspects to it, and many of them had taken such views from Hegel. So another key question most classical theory wanted answers to was: why is it that modern society is particularly alienating in comparison to others, including the one that came before it?
Many intellectuals in the nineteenth century, of both left-wing and right-wing political viewpoints, regarded modern society (what in the twentieth century would come to be called ‘modernity’) as highly problematic, especially as it seemed to be so alienating. The very large cities it had created seemed to be lonely places, bereft of any real sense of community (a theme pursued by both Tönnies and Simmel). The factories that working people laboured in involved very poor conditions and had taken all creativity and enjoyment out of work (a theme pursued by Marx). Capitalism seemed to have replaced any sense of morality and compassion, with a monomaniacal focus on money and profits (a theme pursued by Marx, Tönnies and Simmel). All previously held values and ways of thinking, including religion, were seen to be extinguished by the kinds of rational thinking promoted by a society increasingly centred around money on the one hand, and scientific knowledge on the other (a theme pursued by Weber and Simmel). So in multiple ways, modern people were alienated by ideas and institutions that they and their ancestors had created. Modernity seemed like a huge machine, that swept up everyone, rich and poor alike, into its workings. To use Weber’s terms, modern people had created a dispiriting, mechanical form of social order, which had become wholly routinized and from which they apparently could not escape.
Figure 1.2 Ideas of Various Classical Theorists: The Nature of Pre-Modern and Modern Society.
Hegel had already anticipated such ideas at the start of the nineteenth century, applying his general notions about alienation to the analysis of modern society, describing it as ‘a vast system of commonality and mutual interdependence, a moving life of the dead. This system moves … in a blind and elementary way … like a wild animal’ (cited in Marcuse, 1999: 40). Hegel had in mind the emergent capitalist system, which is seen to be both completely irrational in its operations, and ‘dead’ in the sense that its mechanisms (the market, stocks and shares, factory production) have been made by human beings, but have come to weigh oppressively upon them. These are social structures created by living human beings but now running mechanically, devoid of any human spirit.
These ideas were developed later by Marx’s (1988 [1865]) analysis of the ‘commodity fetishism’ created by capitalism. Workers make things in factories. These are then sold by capitalists for profit. The workers are thus alienated from their work, and from the things they make. They are in fact alienated from their human nature, because that involves working freely and creatively, for your own benefit, and for that of people in your community. But human nature becomes alienated when work is organized so that none of this is possible, and when the only consideration is the capitalist’s profits, regardless of the negative effect on the workers. When the objects the workers make are sold for money, they become ‘commodities’ in the capitalist market. Transactions in the capitalist market look like
