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Modern Social Theory
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Modern Social Theory
An Introduction
Edited by
Austin Harrington
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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■ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is the product of fourteen chapter contributions by prominent international

scholars and teachers of social theory,edited by Austin Harrington. The contributing
authors are Austin Harrington (Introduction, Chapter l, Conclusion), Antonino Palumbo
and Alan Scott (Chapter 2), Gianfranco Poggi (Chapter 3), John Holmwood (Chapter 4),
William Outhwaite (Chapter 5), Dennis Smith (Chapter 6), Douglas Kellner (Chapter 7),
Anthony Elliott (Chapter 8), Samantha Ashenden (Chapter 9), Anthony King (Chapter 10),
Lisa Adkins (Chapter 11), Barry Smart (Chapter 12), Gerard Delanty (Chapter 13), and
Robert Holton (Chapter 14). With the agreement of the contributors, each chapter has
been extensively adapted by Austin Harrington for the purposes of creating a unified
textbook entity, consistent in structure, style, and form.
As coordinator of the project, I would like to thank the contributors for their assistance
in some of the additional editorial features that went into the making of this book,
including the Glossary and the short factual biographies of theorists. I also thank three
anonymous reviewers for comments in the initial stages of the project, and especially
John Scott of the University of Essex for valuable guidance in the final stages. I am
grateful to my two commissioning editors at OUP, Patrick Brindle and Angela Adams, for
their support and encouragement. Lastly I particularly thank Mark Davis, a doctoral
candidate at the University of Leeds, for vital final assistance in the preparation of the
bibliography, the guidance on website links, and the referencing system.
A.H.
■ OUTLINE CONTENTS
DETAILEDCONTENTS IX
LIST OF BOXES xvi

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii
A NOTE TO THE READER: THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK xx
Introduction:What is Social Theory?
Austin Harrington
1. Classical Social Theory, I:Contexts and Beginnings 16

Austin Harrington
2. Classical Social Theory, II:Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim 40

Antonino Palumbo and Alan Scott
3. Classical Social Theory, Ill:Max Weber and Georg Simmel 63

Gianfranco Poggi
4. Functionalism and its Critics 87

John Holmwood
5. lnterpretivism and lnteractionism 110

William Outhwaite
6. Historical Social Theory 132

Dennis Smith
7. Western Marxism 154

Douglas Kellner
8. Psychoanalytic Social Theory 175

Anthony Elliott
9. Structuralism and Post-structuralism 196

Samantha Ashenden
10. Structure and Agency 215

Anthony King
11. Feminist Social Theory 233

Lisa Adkins
12. Modernity and Postmodernity: Part I 252

Barry Smart
13. Modernity and Postmodernity:Part II 273

Gerard Delanty
14. Globalization 292

Robert Holton
viii UTLIN ONHNTS
Conclusion: Social Theory for the Twenty-First Century

Austin Harrington 313
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
BIOGRAPHIES OF THEORISTS
317
REFERENCES
331
INDEX
345
365
DETAILED CONTENTS
LIST OF BOXES
xvi
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xvii
A NOTE TO THE READER: THE SCOPE OF THISBOOK
xx
Introduction:What is Social Theory?
Austin Harrington
The meaning of 'theory'

2
Science and social science
3
Method and methodology in social research
4
Social theory and 'common sense'
6
'Facts', 'values', and 'objectivity'
7
Social theory and other domains of theory
9
Social theory and political theory
9
Social theory and psychology
10
Social theory and the humanities
11
Conclusion
12
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
12
GENERAL FURTHER READING IN SOCIAL THEORY
12
SOURCES IN THE PUBLIC MEDIA
14
WEBSITES
15
1. Classical Social Theory, I: Contexts and Beginnings 16

Austin Harrington
Modernity and tradition: what is 'modern'? what is 'traditional'? 17
Western modernity 20
Cultural modernity: science and the decline of religion 20
Political modernity: law, democracy, and the state 21
Socio-economic modernity: capitalism, industry, and the rise of cities 23
Social theory in the nineteenth century 24
Political economyand utilitarianism:Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham 24
Liberalism and civil society: John Stuart Mill andAlexis de Tocqueville 25
Positivism: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer 27
Theories of elites: Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels 28
Community and society: Ferdinand Tiinnies 30
Challenges to Western modernity: reason and the claims of science 31
Eurocentnsm in social theory 32
Thedarker sides of Enlightenment 33
Conclusion 36
QUESTIONSFORCHAPTER 1 37
x DETAILED CONTENYS
FURTHER READING 38
WEBSITES 39
2. Classical Social Theory, II: Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim 40

Antonino Palumbo and Alan Scott
Karl Marx: historical materialism and the critique of idealist philosophy 41

Marx, Hegel, and Feuerbach 42
Political economy and the critiqueof capitalism 43
Feudalism and capitalism 44
Use value, exchange value, and the commodity form 45
Labour, exploitation. and commodity fetishism 46
Capitalist expansion and self-destruction 47
Thecritiqueof political liberalism 48
The state, civil society, and religion 48
Privateproperty, reform, and revolution 49
tmileDurkheim: sociology as an autonomous science 51
Durkheim's The Rules of Sociolog1cal Method 51
Solidarityand social differentiation:Durkheim's The Division of Labour in Society 53
Solutions to anomie: occupational groups and intermediary agencies 54
Morality and civil society 56
Trust, contracts, and moral individualism 56
Thestate and secular education 57
Religionand social evolution: Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life 58
Conclusion 59
QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 2 60

FURTHER READING 61
WEBSITES 62
3. Classical Social Theory, Ill: Max Weber and Georg Simmel 63

Giantranco Poggi
Max Weber: the idea of interpretive sociology 64

'Explanation' and 'understanding':the meaning of verstehen 65
The role of values and ideal types 65
Religion,capitalism, and modernity 66
Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 67
World religions and socio-economic change 70
Power, stratification, and domination 71
Power, class, status, and parties 72
Dominationand legitimacy 72
Rationalization and the rise of 'occidental rationalism' 75
Georg Simmel: the 'sociology of forms' 76
Interaction and exchange:Simrnel'sSociology of 1908 77
Sociability and social process 78
Ambivalence and reciprocity 79
Money and modernity: Simmel's The Philosophy of Money 80
The 'tragedyof culture' 81
DETAILED CONTENTS xi
The tragic consciousness in Weber and Simmel: links with Nietzsche and Freud 82
Conclusion 84
FURTHER READING 85
WEBSITES 86
4. Functionalism and its Critics 87

John Hclmwood
Functionalism in anthropology 88
Robert Merton: manifest and latent functions 90
Talcott Parsons: functionalism as unified general theory 92
Parsons's 'voluntaristic theory of action' 93
Social systems and the 'problem of order' 93
Power, values, and norms 95
Structural differentiation 97
Criticisms of functionalism: objections and alternatives 100
Conflicttheorv 100
Marxist criticisms 101
Rational actor approaches 104
'Neo-functional1sm' 105
Conclusion 107
FURTHER READING 108
WEBSITES 109
5. lnterpretivism and lnteractionism 110

William Outhwaite
The idea of interpretation: understanding from the inside 111

Alfred Schutz and phenomenological sociology 112
George Herbert Mead and American pragmatism 114
Symbolic interactionism and the Chicago School 115
Erving Goffman and the 'presentation of self in everyday life' 116
Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodology 117
The sociology of knowledge 119
Karl Mannheim's sociologyof knowledge 120
Anthropological approaches to knowledge 121
Social studies of science: the rise of social constructionism 123
Language and hermeneutics 125
Peter Winch, Hans Georg Gadamer, and the early Jurgen Habermas 125
Conclusion 127

FURTHERREADING 129
WEBSITES 131
xii DETAILED CONTENTS
6. Historical Social Theory 132

Dennis Smith
Historical thinking in social theory 133

Mid-century American historical sociology: the influence of functionalism 135
The Parsonian school: Neil Smelser and Shmuel Eisenstadt on long-term social processes 135
Mid-century European historical sociology: the crisis in liberal democracy 138
T. H. Marshall on social citizenship 138
Joseph Schumpeter on capitalism, socialism, and democracy 139
Friedrich Hayek on the free market 140
Norbert Elias and the 'civilizing process' 141
The rise of nation-states: revolution and violence 144
Barrington Moore: modernity and the agrarian power base 145
Charles TIiiy: capital and coercion in the rise of states 145
Theda Skocpol on social revolutions 146
Explaining the rise of theWest 147
Perry Anderson: feudalism and {he transition to capitalism in Europe 147
Immanuel Wallerstein's world systems theory 149
Conclusion 150
FURTHER READING 151
WEBSITES 152
7. Western Marxism 154
Douglas Kellner
Western Marxism and the critique of ideology 155

Gyorgy Lukacs and Karl Korsch: reification and the standpoint of the proletariat 156
Antonio Gramsci: the theory of hegemony 157
Critical theory of society: the Frankfurt School 160
Theories of the 'culture industry' 160
Walter Benjamin: mass culture and the decline of 'aura' 162
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment 162
JUrgen Habermas: emancipation and the public sphere 164
Western Marxism from the 1960s-to the present 165
Herbert Marcuse's One-D1mens1ona/ Man 165
French and Italian Marxism 166
Structural and analyt1cal Marxism 167
Cultural studies in Britain and the USA: the influence of Marxism 168
Conclusion 170
FURTHER READING 172
WEBSITES 174
8. Psychoanalytic Social Theory 175
Anthony Elliott
Sigmund Freud's legacy for sociology 176

Repression, civilization, and the Oedipus complex 176
Psychoanalysis after Freud: developments in social theory 179
DETAILED COtHENTS xiii
French structuralist psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan and his school 179

Problems with Lacan 183
Lacan, Althusser, and Slavoj Zizek 183
Psychoanalysis in feminist social theory 185
Nancy Chodorow: the mother-child relationship and male domination 186
Jessica Benjamin: gender and agency 188
Julia Kristeva: subversion and the feminine semiotic 189
Postmodernism and psychoanalysis: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 191
Conclusion 193

FURTHER READING 194
WEBSITES 195
9. Structuralism and Post-structuralism 196

Samantha Ashenden
Ferdinand de Saussure and structural linguistics 197

Structuralism in anthropology: Claude Levi-Strauss 200
Difference and deconstruction: Jacques Derrida 202
Speech, writing, and logocentrism 203
Difference, decentring, and the deconstruction of the subject 204
Discourse, knowledge, and power: Michel Foucault 206
'Epistemes', discursive practices, and the 'end of man' 207
Genealogy, subjectivity, and power-knowledge 209
Conclusion 212

FURTHER READING 213
WEBSITES 214
10. Structure and Agency 215

Anthony King
What are 'structure' and 'agency'? 216
Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu: differences and similarities 217
Giddens's structuration theory 217
Structure, system, and 'tacit knowledge' 218
Bourdieu and the idea of reflexive sociology 221
Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice 221
The habitus and the field 222
Cultural capital 224
Realist social theory: Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer 227
Problems of determinism and individualism in structure-agency thinking 228
Resolving the dilemma 230
Conclusion 230

FURTHER READING 231
WEBSITES 232
xiv DETAILED CONTENTS
11. Feminist Social Theory 233

Lisa Adkins
Women in classical social theory: the exclusion of women from the social 234
Feminist perspectives on Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel 235
The body as an 'absent presence' in classical and contemporary theory 236
Women and socialization: labour, reproduction, and sexuality 237
Feminism and Marxism 238
Modernity as a gendered construct 239
Constructions of femininity and masculinity 240
The sex-gender distinction 243
Heterosexualityand homosexuality 245
Gender and its relation to exclusion 246
Feminism and postcolonial theory 247
Conclusion 249

FURTHER READING 250
WEBSITES 251
12. Modernity and Postmodernity: Part I 252

Barry Smart
Postmodernism and postmodernity as terms of debate 253
Which theorists are 'postmodernist'? 253
Precursors to postmodernism 254
Postmodernism since the 1980s 256
Helpful and unhelpful uses of the terms 'postmodern' and 'postmodernist' 258
Jean-Fran ois Lyotard: legitimation and the 'end of grand narratives' 259
Crises of scientific knowledge 260
Capitalism and technocracy 261
Jean Baudrillard: the consumer society and cultural analysis 263
Simulation, simulacra, and the mass media 264
Fredric Jameson: postmodernism and 'the cultural logic of late capitalism' 265
Zygmunt Bauman: ambivalence, contingency, and 'postmodern ethics' 266
Conclusion 268
FURTHER READING 271
WEBSITES 271
13. Modernity and Postmodernity: Part II 273

Gerard Delanty
Three problems with postmodernism 274
Modernity and the radical imagination: Cornelius Castoriadis and Agnes Heller 275
Modernity and the growth of communicative reason: Jurgen Habermas 279
Habermas's Theory of Communicatwe Action 279
Colonization of the lifeworld by the system 281
DETAILED CONTENTS n,
Discursive democracy and the rule of law 281

Criticisms of Habermas 283
Niklas Luhmann's systems theory of modernity 283
Reflexive modernization 286
Ulrich Beck on reflexive modernity and the risk society 286
Anthony Giddens on reflexivity and individualization 287
Conclusion 289

FURTHER READING 290
WEBSITES 291
14. Globalization 292

Robert Holton
What is globalization?Towards a working definition 293

Globalizing trends: the idea of the 'transnational' 294
Processes of globalization 296
Globalized markets 296
Time-space compression and global cities 296
Networks, flows, and 'disembedding' 297
Governance and regulation 298
Is the nation-state being weakened? 298
Problems of economic determinism 300
Legal, political, and cultural globalization 300
Is legal and political globalization driven by economic globalization? 301
Two case examples: global business regulation and the development of the Internet 303
Global culture and 'glocalization' 304
Universalism and particularism 305
Differentiation and integration in globalization theory 307
How new is globalization? Some historical contexts 308
Conclusion 310
FURTHERREADING 311
WEBSITES 312
Conclusion: Social Theory for the Twenty-First Century 313

Austin Harrington
GLOSSARY OF TERMS 317

BIOGRAPHIES OF THEORISTS 331
REFERENCES 345
INDEX 365
LIST OF BOXES
1. Modernity and the capitalist economy: Albert Hirschman, Karl Polanyi, and Eric Hobsbawm 25
2. Postcolonial criticism and 'Orientalism': Frantz Fanon and Edward Said 34
3. Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman on totalitarianism and the Holocaust 36
4. Karl Marx's concept of alienation 47
5. tmile Durkheim on suicide: a sociological case study 52
6. tmile Durkheim's concept of anomie 55
7. Max Weber on bureaucracy and the modern state 74
8. Georg Simmel on fashioo and the Stranger 78
9. Georg Simmel's essay 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' 82
10. Talcott Parsons on the nuclear family: a functionalist approach 99
11. David Lockwood on 'social integration' and 'system integration' 102
12. Feminist criticisms of Parsons 103
13. David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd 119
14. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality 121
15. Seymour Martin Upset on political stability and instability 138
16. Reinhard Bendix on power and conflict 142
17. Michael Mann on the sources of social power 148
18. Ernst Bloch on hope, ideology, and utopia 158
19. Max Horkheimer's essay 'Critical and Traditional Theory' 161
20. Marxism in the 1980s: responses to the collapse of communism 171
21. Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents 178
22. Psychoanalysis in Marxism and functionalism: socialization and the 'authoritarian personality' 180
23. Roland Barthes on myth and the 'death of the author' 199
24. Michel Foucault on surveillance, biopower, and the Panopticon 210
25. Anthony Giddens and international relations theory 720
26. Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction.· A Sooal Critique of the Judgement of Taste 225
27. Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology ofeducation 226
28. Nancy Fraser on Habermas and the public sphere 242
29. Judith Butler on discourse and the sex-gender distinction 244
30. Anne Mclintock on feminism and 'commodity racism' 249
31. Daniel Bell on post-industrial society 257
32. Scott Lash on postmodernization and the information society 262
33. Postmodernity, fragmentation, and religious fundamentalism 269
34. Social theory and the revolutions of 1989 278
35. Alain Touraine on social movements and collective agency 282
36. George Ritzer on 'McDonaldization' 299
37. The Eurovision Song Contest: cultural imperialism or local syncretism? 306
. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Lisa Adkins is Reader in Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of
Gendered Work: Sexuality, Family and the Labour Market (Open University Press, 1995) and Revisions:
Gender and Sexuality in Late Modernity (Open University Press, 2002). She is co-editor of Sex in
Question: French Materialist Feminism (Routledge, 1996), Sex, Sensibility and the Gendered Body
(Macmillan, 1996), and Sexualizing the Social: Power and the Organization of Sexuality (Macmillan,
1996). She has published articles on gender, sexuality, and feminist social theory.
Samantha Ashenden is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.
She is the author of Governing Child Sexual Abuse: Negotiating the Boundaries of Public and Private,
Law and Science (Routledge, 2004) and co-editor of Foucault contra Habermas: Recasting the
Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory (Sage, 1999). She has published articles on feminist
theory, child sexual abuse, and the work of]iirgcn Habermas.
Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology at the University of Liverpool, UK. His books include
Inventing Europe (Macmillan, 1995), Social Science beyond Constructivism and Realism (Open
University Press, 1997), Social Theory in a Changing World (Polity Press, 1998), Modernity and
Postmodemity (Sage, 2000), Citizenship in a Global Age (Open University Press, 2000), Challenging
Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society (Open University Press, 2001), Community
(Routledge, 2003), and Nationalism and Social Theory (Sage, 2002) (with Patrick O'Mahony). He is
the editor of the European Journal of Social Theory and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of
Historical Sociology (Sage, 2003).
Anthony Elliott is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. His books
include Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition (Blackwell, 1992), Psychoanalytic Theory:
An Introduction (Blackwell, 1994), The Mourning of John Lennon (University of California Press,
1999), Concepts of the Self (Polity Press, 2001), Critical Visions: New Directions in Social Theory
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Subject to Ourselves (Polity Press, 1996), and Social Theory since
Freud (Routledge, 2004). He is editor of The Blackwell Reader in Contemporary Social Theory
(Blackwell, 1999).
Austin Harrington is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of
Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science: A Critique of Gadamer and Habermas (Routledge, 2001), Art
and Social Theory: Sociological Arguments in Aesthetics (Polity Press, 2004), and Concepts of Europe in
Classical Sociology (Routledge, 2006) (forthcoming). He is co-editor and translator of The Protestant
Ethic Debate: Max Weber's Replies to his Critics, 1907-1910 (Liverpool University Press, 2001) and
co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Social Theory (Routledge, 2005) (forthcoming). He has
published articles on hermeneutics, aesthetics, and German social thought.
John Holmwood is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of
Founding Sociology? Talcott Parsons and the Idea of General Theory (Longman, 1996) and co-author of
Hxplanation and Social Theory (Macmillan, 1991) (with Alexander Stewart). He is editor of Social
Stratification (Edward Elgar, 1996) (three volumes) and co-editor of Constructing the New Consumer
Society (Macmillan, 1997). He has published articles on functionalism and evolutionary theory,
theories of the welfare state, feminist epistemology, and gender and critical realism.
Robert Holton is Professor of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of The
Transition from Feudalism toCapitalism (Macmillan, 1985), Cities, Capitalism and Civilisation (Allen &
Unwin, 1986), Economy and Society (Routledge, 1992), Talcott Parsons on Economy and Society
(Routledge, 1986), and Globalization and the Nation-State (Macmillan, 1998), and co-author of Max
Weber on Economy and Society (Routledge, 1989) (with Bryan Turner). He has published articles on
xviii OHS 01\i COtHRIBUTOR<;
migration, class, global networks, historical sociology, and rational choice theory. His research
on globalization is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Douglas Kellner is George F. Kneller Professor for the Philosophy of Education at the University of
California, Los Angeles, USA. His books include Herbe,t Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (University
of California Press, 1984), Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity (Johns Hopkins University Press,
1989), Jean Baudril/ard (Stanford University Press, 1989), Television and the Crisis of Democracy
(Westview Press, 1990), The Persian Gulf TV War (Westview Press, 1992), Media Culture (Routledge,
1995), Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and the Theft o(a11 Election (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001),
From 9/11 to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Media Spectacle
(Routledge, 2003), and co-author of Postmodern Theory (Macmillan, 1991) (with Steven Best).
Anthony King is Reader in Sociology at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the author of The End of
the Terraces: The Transformation of English Football in the 1990s (Leicester University Press, 1998),
The European Ritual: Football in the New Europe (Ashgate, 2003), and The Structure of Social
Theory (Routledge, 2004). He has published articles on the work of Talcott Parsons, Pierre Bourdieu,
and Anthony Giddens.
William Outhwaite is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of
Understanding Social Life: The Method Called Verstehen (Allen & Unwin, 1975), Concept Formation
in Social Science (Routledge, 1983), New Philosophies of Social Science: Realism, Hermeneutics and
Critical Theory (Macmillan, 1987), llabermas (Polity Press, 1994), and co-author of Social Theory,
Communism and Beyond (Blackwell, 2005) (with Larry Ray). He is editor of The Habemias
Reader(Polity Press, 1996) and co-editor of The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social
Thought (Blackwell, 1993).
Antonino Palumbo is Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Palermo, Italy. He is the
author of Etica egovernance (Ila Palma-Athena, 2003). His publications also include 'Weber, Durkheim
and the Sociology of the Modern State', in R. Bellamy and T. Ball (eds.), The Cambridge History of
Twentieth Century Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and 'Administration, Civil
Service and Bureaucracy', in K. Nash and A. Scott (eds.), The Rlackwe/1 Companion to Political
Sociology (Blackwell, 2001).
Gianfranco Poggi is Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento, Italy. He is the author of
Images of Society: Essays on the Sociological Theories of Tocqueville, Marx and Durkheim
(Stanford University Press, 1972), Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Mt1x Weber's Protestant Ethic
(University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Polity
Press, 1990), Money and the Modern Mind: George Simmel's Philosophy o( Money (University of
California Press, 1993), Durkheim (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Forms of Power (Polity Press,
2001).
Alan Scott is Professor of Sociology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He is the author of
Ideology and New Social Movements (Unwin Hyman, 1990) and co-author of The Uncertain
Science: Criticism of Sociological Formalism (Routledge, 1992). He is editor of The Limits of
Globalization (Routledge, 1997), co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology
(Blackwell, 2001), and co editor and transl;-1tor of (;cOIS Si111111d 1111 lie111/Jra11dt: An Ls.1<1;: in the
l'hilosophy of Art (Routledge, 2005). He has published articles on protest, labour contracts, trust, and
the works of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Karl Polanyi.
Barry Smart is Professor of Sociology at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His books include Michel
Foucault (Tavistock, 1985), Modern Conditions: Postmodern Controversies (Routledge, 1992),
Postmodemity (Routledge, 1993), Facing Modernity (Sage, 1999), Econom>j Culture and Society: A
Sociological Critique of Neo-liberalism (Open University Press, 2003), and The Sports Star: ACultural and
Fco1w111ic 1\1111/y5is of .\p11rt111s,'c< /c/11ity (Sag,', 200.S). Hl' is co-,·ditor of the fh111dbook o(Social
Thea,y (Sage, 2001) and Resisting McDona/dization (Sage, 1999).
" xix
Dennis Smith is Professor of Sociology at the University of Loughborough, UK. He is the author of
Conflict and Compromise: Class Formation in 1:nglish Society 1830-1914 (Routledge, 1982), Barrington
Moore (Macmillan, 1983), The Chicago School: A Liberal Critique of Capitalism (Macmillan, 1988),
Capitalist Democracy on Trial: Tile Transatlantic Debate from Tocqueville to the Present
(Routledge, 1990), The Rise of Historical Sociology (Polity Press, 1991), Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of
Postmodernity (Polity Press, 1999), and Norbert Elias and Modern Social Tl1eory (Sage, 2001). He is
the editor of the journal Current Sociology.
A NOTE TO THE READER: THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to leading topics, theorists, and debates
in modern social theory. It is suitable for undergraduate foundational courses in sociology
and cultural studies and related disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, as well
as for the general reader. The book is not primarily an introduction to social research
methods or to empirical sociology. It has been designed as a guide to problems and
traditions of analysis in modern social thought. ft is appropriate for introductory courses in
the prin ciples of sociological enquiry, or for what is often called the 'sociological
imagination'.
Topics and theorists I:ave been chosen for their relevance to the most frequently dis
cussed themes in contemporary social and cultural studies.While it is true that many of the
most influential figures in modern social theory have been male European or North
American authors, a particular c;onsideration of the book has been to incorporate the
many important challenges to mainstream social science that have arisen in recent decades
from the sides of feminist, postcolonial, and multicultural criticism. Social theory is by
defini tion a pluralistic discipline which must reflect the diversity of cultural, political, and
methodological standpoints characterizing debate about society today.
The book begins with a short Introduction to the most important questions of method
ology in social theory. Chapter 1 introduces the theme of modernity in social theory,
together with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century currents of social thought. Chapters 2
and 3 expound the cJassical sociological legacies of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max
Weber, and Georg Simmel. Chapters 4 to 14 trace the development of concepts, problems,
debates, and research programmes in sociology and social theory from the early twentieth
century to the present day. Separate chapters cover functionalism and its critics (Chapter
4), interpretive and interactionist theory (Chapter 5), historical social theory ( hapter 6),
Western Marxism (Chapter 7), psychoanalyticsocial theory (Chapter 8), French structural
ist and post-structuralist theory (Chapter 9), theories of structure and agency (Chapter 10),
feminist social theory (Chapter 11), postmodernism and its critics (Chapters 12 and 13),
and theories of globalization (Chapter 14). Much of the emphasis of the book falls on
later twentieth- and twenty-first-century social theory as the more classical period of
1890-1920 is amply covered in numerous currently available guides. The book does,
however, also include three key chapters on the foundational ideas of Marx, Durkheim,
Weber, and Simmel and their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual forebears.
The reader should note that the book is dedicated to theoretical thinking about social life
in its broadest sense. It is not only concerned with technical concepts and vocabularies in
the discipline of sociology. Social theory is closely related to the discipline of soc10logy
and is usually studied as a subsection of this discipline. Indeed social theory is often also
thought of as synonymous with the term 'sociological theory'. However, a slight difference
of nuance should be noted between these two terms. 'Sociological theory' generally refers
to theories propounded solely within sociology as an established discipline. 'Social the
ory', in contrast, generally refers not only to theories propounded within sociology but also
to more general contexts of social thought to be found in other disciplines. Social theory is
A NOH TO THi: RfADti< THI: :;(OPE' OF TH''. 0001' xxi
thus a wider term of reference It encompasses contexts of thought about society to

be found in subjects such as history, politics, economics, anthropology, philosophy, and
cultural and Iiterary criticism, as well as in sociology in the strict disciplinary sense. It is
this broader understanding of the scope of social thought that the present textbook is
designed to convey.
Only two areas have received relatively marginal treatment in this book. The first is
what is called the 'philosophy of social science'. The philosophy of social science
encompasses debates about the status of knowledge in the social sciences compared with
knowledge in the natural sciences. Substantive social theory, on the other hand, refers
more broadly and concretely to theories of social trends and historical legacies in
contemporary society. It overlaps significantly with the philosophy of social science but is
not the same as the latter. Thus this book is mostly concerned with substantive theoretical
topics in social science, rather than with more purely philosophical issues.
The second area of omission is political theory. This book is an introduction
specifically to social theory, rather than to political theory. The relevant difference
between 'social' and 'political' in this context can be understood roughly as the difference
between theories of social behaviour on the one hand and theories of appropriate
forms of government on the other. This distinction is by no means hard and fast.
Social and political theory overlap with and depend on one another in important
ways; but political theory is more directly concerned with what are often referred to
as 'normative' questions about the meaning of ideas of justice, liberty, equality, and
democracy. These more specifically political debates have important applications in
sociology and social policy, but they are not conventionally the primary topics of the
subject areas termed 'social theory' or 'sociological theory'.
Each chapter of this book has been written by specialists in the field. Each chapter ends
with questions for discussion, guidance on further reading, and relevant website
addresses. Some sections of the discussions have been arranged in boxed case study form
for added focus on particular issues.
At the end of the book can be found a Glossary of the more unfamiliar technical terms
used by authors of the chapters. This Glossary is by no means exhaustive, but it aims to
provide a few points of clarification for occasional words and phrases. All terms in the
Glossary are marked with an asterisk(*) on their first relevant appearance in each chapter
of the book. The Glossary is followed by a comprehensive list of short factual biographies
of the major theorists and historical personalities discussed in this book, containing brief
reference information. Names of listed theorists and personalities are also marked with an
asterisk on their first relevant appearance in each chapter.
Lastly the reader should note that all sources cited in this book are referenced according
to their first historical dates of publication in the original languages in which they were
written. The purpose of this is to reinforce a sense of the historical chronology of develop
ments in modern social thought since the nineteenth century. However, the reader should
note that all references to page numbers of cited texts are to the recent translated and/or
reprinted editions in English. Full details of the translated and/or reprinted editions appear
in the bibliography at the end of the book. For example, 'Marx and Engels 1848: 50' refers
to page 50 of the 1967 Penguin English edition of The Communist Manifesto, first
published in German in 1848.
Introduction. What is
Social Theory?
Austin Harrington
TOPICS DISCUSSED IN THIS INTRODUCTION

The meaning of 'theory' 2
Science and social science 3
Method and methodology in social research 4
Social theory and 'common sense' 6
'Facts', 'values', and 'objectivity' 7
Social theory and other domains of theory 9
Social theory and political theory 9
SociaI theory and psychology 10
Social theory and the humanities 11
Conclusion 12
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 12

GENERAL FURTHER READING IN SOCIAL THEORY 12
SOURCES IN THE PUBLIC MEDIA 14
WEBSITES 15
Social theory can bedefined as the study of scientific ways of thinking about social life. It
encompasses ideas about how societies change and develop, about methods of
explain ing social behaviour, about power and social structure, class, gender and
ethnicity, modernity and 'civilization', revolutions and utopias, and numerous other
concepts and problems in social life. This Introduction addresses some of the leading
questions that arise when we start to think about the very idea of a 'science of society'.
We begin by discussing the meaning of the word 'theory' and its various implications
for 'method' and 'methodology' in social research. We also consider questions about
the relationship of social theory to 'common sense', about the role of 'facts', 'values',
and 'objectivity' in social research, and about the relation of sociology to other
disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities such as political theory,
psychology, anthropology, history, and philosophy.
2
The meaning of 'theory'

As a term of art, 'social theory' is a distinctly recent invention. No such term exists in
English or in any other language before the twentieth century, and even in the twentieth
century it is not common before about the 1940s. Auguste *Comte coined the term
sociolo gie in France in the 1840s, but 'sociology' too did not gain widespread currency as
a term until after 1900. However, the two separate words 'social' and 'theory' are very
ancient in origin. An initial look at their etymologies will give us some clues to their
meaning as a con joined pair.
Our words 'social' and 'society' derive from the Latin words socius and societas. For the
Romans, a socius was a member of a trading partnership. A socius was a merchant
cooperat ing with other merchants as a partner, fellow, or 'associate'. A partnership or
'association' between merchants was a societas, which is the origin of our modern English
word 'com pany' or 'business firm', as well as our keyword society. The commercial
meaning of societas is directly preserved in other modern European languages such as in
the French and Italian societe and societa and the German Gesellscha . In this sense we
can say that sociology and social theory are concerned with relations of 'sociation'
between 'members' or 'partners', including not only business partners but a great many
other kinds and processes of 'socia tion' and 'socialization' between individuals.
Our modern word 'theory' derives from the ancient Greek word *theoria. T!leoria for
the Greeks meant 'contemplation'. In the writings of the philosopher Aristotle, theoria
referred to contemplation of the cosmos. It contrasted with*praxis, from which our word
'practice' derives. Praxis for the Greeks referred to human beings' way of acting and
conducting their llves on this earth, in the immediate everyday world. Clearly, this ancient
Greek under standing of theoria differs from most common uses of the word 'theory'
today. The Greek word theoria had a different set of connotations from most modern
linkages of theory with 'scientific construction'. Today we tend to think of 'a theory' as
being a 'scientific con struct' or a 'scientific model'. In contrast, theoria for the Greeks did
not itself mean science. Rather, it meant reflection on science: reflection on the value of
science, as one mode of con templating the cosmos among others-alongside art, myth,
religion, and the most general discipline of thinking that the Gr eks called 'philosophy', or
'love of wisdom'.
The ancient Greek meaning of theoria might not seem particularly relevant to us in the
present day. Jt might seem to reinforce the rather widespread view that theory lacks rel
evance to daily life. Yet this would be to fail to appreciate the significance of the idea.
Theoria for the Greeks was an indispensable aid to making sense of their lives in the
ordinary world of society, in the world of the 'city' or what they called the polis, from
which our word 'pol itics' derives. Th_ry believed that people who did not pause to engage in
contemplation an_g. reflection had no points of.orientation for conducting their lives in
practice;rn the.politi al world of actions and interactions with other people. Thus lhcoria
for the Greeks remained i dispensable to everyone who sought wisdom, happiness, and
the good life inthe-r-;;:alm ofpraxis..-
It can be said that a recurrent tendency of modern times has been for theory to be
equated with scientific knowledge per se and to lose its original additional connotation of
critical reflective questioning about the value and meaning of science-in the context of
3
politics, in the context of other modes of understanding, and in the context of the finitude
and mortality of human life. The neglect of theoria in modern times was a particularly
important concern for the Jewish-German philosopher Edmund *Husserl, founder of the
movement of philosophical thought known as *phenomenology. Writing in the 1930s,
Husserl argued that inless tht:: s<.:ienu:sxernllected their source of origin-ation ;-nd m_ ;;-;
ing for everyday life,_ in t_t:1e *'lifeworL<L.as..h.c.calledit,.they would be doomed.to extinction
(Husserl 1936). Either the ciences would become wholly absorbed into the production of
technologies of mastery_Q:'.e_ Jure qr_ they would (fo olve in a \,y<,IVe of r vqlt gainst ;ir ..
ra_tional think_in_g_t (!t C(!U'!: Unfortunately, the rise of fascism and militarism in Europe
in the 1930s and 1940s confirmed Husserl's fears, and the only remaining role for science in
European society in this period remained as an instrument in the production of machines
of war and persecution.
In a similar spirit, the Jewish-German emigre philosopher Hannah*Arendt argued that
theory in the modern age comes to be increasingly subordinated to the search for techno
logical control over physical and social life (Arendt 1958). Writing in the 1950s, Arendt
suggested that where the original vita contemplativa or 'contemplative life' of the ancient
Greeks had been intimately bound up with what the Greeks saw as the vita activa or
'active life' of public political participation, the 'active life' of the modem age no longer
has the sense of practice and deliberation informed by contemplative reflection. Instead,
modern consciousness of the world becomes increasingly oriented to control and
productivity, where science serves the development of technology and where theory and
philosophy serve at most as 'handmaidens' to science. In contrast, 8-_!en<!t wanted to see
a world in which theory and philosophy not only assist science hut also remind science of
its moral and political responsibilities., in..tbe face o.f the fragility of the.earth's. r
smuces and the human_li
mortality of
Science and social science

This ancient context of theoria suggests clues for ways of thinking about the relationship
of social theory to science today. If social theory is the study of ways of thinking about
society scientifically, we can also say that it is a way of thinking about how far it is
possible to study society scientifically. We can say that social theory is a practice of
thinking about what science and 'being scientific' mean with respect to the social world.
The word 'science' in English has close connections with the natural sciences and is
often used synonymously with them. However, the natural sciences a re not the only
disciplines of human enquiry with a claim to the title of science. In a general sense, to
think scientifically is to apply a method or methods to the study of something and to
follow these methods consistently and transparently. Usually it involves an effort to
distinguish systematically between things that exist independently of the person observing
them-what we call 'data' or 'evidence'-and ideas that are supplied by the person observing
them as a way of order ing what he or she observes. Defined in this general sense, it is
clear that physics, chemistry, or biology arc not the only subjects of enquiry with a claim
to the title of being sciences. Other subjects of study, such as history, archaeology, or art
criticism, can also be sciences. In
French, the subjects known in English as the 'humanities' are called /es sciences humaines,
while in German the humanities are known as the *Geisteswissenschaften-'sciences of the
mind', or 'sciences of the works of the human mind'.
The particular association between science and natural science in English reflects a series
of developments in early modem European history in which a number of precedents were
set by the emergence of physics and astronomy in the seventeenth century and the emer
gence of chemistry and biology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From around
the late eighteenth century, a variety of attempts were made to emulate the achievements
of these natural sciences with the establishment of disciplines devoted·to thestudy of
human social and historical affairs. These included economics, philology and linguistics,
history and art history, and notably 'sociology'. For a long time, it was believed that the
new disciplines were only sciences if they copied or imitated the methods of the natural
sciences. According to A guste *Comte, who is the originator both of our word 'sociology'
and of the concept of *'positive science' or *positivism, only one fundamental principle
of science existed, and all particular sciences had to be unified under this principle. This
principle was set by the science of physics, which Comte believed to proceed by pure
observation, undistorted by any prior conceptions of the observer.
Virtually all social theorists and philosophers reject this nineteenth-century
positivist conception of science today. Almost all commentators accept today that
human affairs cannot be studied by imitation of the natural sciences, and they also
reject Comte's rather simplistic characterization of the natural sciences themselves.
Sociology is not a science in the sense in which physics is a science. The 'human
sciences'-the humanities and the social sciences-study meanings, values, intentions,
beliefs, and ideas realized in human social behaviour and ip socially created
institutions, events, and symbolic objects such as texts and images. These embodied
meanings, values, intentions, beliefs, and ideas are products of contexts of intentional
*agency by human actors in definite cultural and historical situations. Therefore they
cannot be subsumed under general principles of regular cause and effect relations in
the way that physical elements are treated by natural scientists, through repeatable
experiments. Although natural scientists also, up to a point, deal with symbolic constructs
that require *interpretive skills of various kinds, a scientific way of proceeding in
biochemistry remains significantly different from a scientific way of proceeding in a
subject such as literary criticism or religious studies.
This question of differences between the human sciences and the natural sciences raises
a more general question about the role of what is called 'method' and 'methodology' in
social research. It is to this that we now turn.
Method and methodology in social research
To be 'methodical' is to be systematic in the pursuit of something. To apply a 'method' or

'methods' is to use some particular technique or techniques in the pursuit or study of some
thing. ln social science we speak of 'qualitative methods', such as a programme of inter
views, and of 'quantitative methods', such as the use of statistics. ro have a 'methodology'
is to follow a rationale that justifies one's selection of these particular methods for a given
5
topic of study. Methodology thus refers to a theoretical principle or principles governing

the application of a set of methods. The '-ology' in 'methodology' refers to a theory of
methodical practice.
The central issue for any group of researchers who want to think about the
methodology of their research project concerns the relationship between the pieces of
evidence or data at their disposal and the theories governing the way in which they apply
methods in order to produce and analyse this evidence or data. Here the word 'theory' is
used in its more mod ern and familiar sense of 'scientific model' or 'scientific
construction'. l'wo very general and basic questions we can ask in this connection are the
following. What would research be like if it consisted only of acts of data collection and no
theories? And conversely, what would research be like if it consisted only of theories and
no data collection?
Let us look at the second question first. If research consisted only of theories, it would
Jack reference to the real world. Researchers would have no reason to go out into the field
and interview people or analyse sources. If research consisted only of constructions in the
imaginations of researchers, it would be empty of content; and it would be incapable of
being validated or tested in any way. Any piece of speculation would have to be deemed
as good as another.
But now let us look at the first question. If research consisted only of data collection, it
would lack all order and sense. If research consisted only of heaps of information, it would
be no more than a chaotic bundle of statements, impossible to decipher or evaluate or to
apply to any meaningful purpose. It would be useless and pointless.
We can conclude from this that theory is impossible without *empirical
observation, and equally that empirical observation is impossible without theory. To
paraphrase a famous statement in the thought of the eighteenth-century
*Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel *Kant, we can say that theories without data are
empty; data without theories are blind (Kant originally wrote: 'Concepts without
perceptions are empty; perceptions with out concepts are blind') (Kant 1781: edition B,
para. 76).
In reality, it never happens that a researcher's theoretical reflections entirely lack
empirical content or that a researcher's empirical observations entirely lack theoretical
construction. In every actual instance of research, a researcher's theoretical reflections are
guided towards finding out some piece of evidence about an object of experience, and
a researcher's observations of this object are always structured by his or her theoretical
reflections. We can say that theories ought not to dictate or dogmatically constrain a
researcher's field of observations; but we have to accept that theoretical thinking of some
kind always underlies the researcher's observations.
Theoretical thinking supplies criteria for selections and discriminations of things
that deserve investigation, and it is the only way in which researchers can produce
ordered accounts and evaluations of their data. Thus theoretical thought is always
presupposed in research; there are no observations that are not 'theory-laden'. There is
no such thing as pure observation or pure reception of data. At a most basic level,
theoretical thought refers simply to any ordinary person's mental ordering of his or her
sense-impressions in everyday life.
One key implication of this connection between theoretical thought and ordinary
everyday thought is that social theory relates in an important way to what is called
'common sense'.
6 ·,,·'
Social theory and 'common sense'

Social theory is trained reflection on ways of knowing social life. But it is not only this,
and it never begins purely as trained reflection. Social theory arises first and foremost
from everyday life, from an enormous variety of contexts of conversation, discussion, and
inter action between ordinary people. These are the same contexts that lead to the
formation of such things as social movements, political parties, trade unions, and
organized mass actions such as strikes and revolutions. Social theory emerges from these
contexts and is only a more reflective expression of the disputes and agendas that
dominate ordinary com munication about social and political issues. It is itself a social
product with a multitude of everyday contexts of origination.
The Italian Marxist wii\er Antonio *Gramsci once wrote that every ordinary person is,
in principle, a theorist. Writing under imprisonment by the Italian fascist regime in the
1920s and 1930s, Gramsci wrote that 'everyone is a philosopher' (Gramsci 1926-37: 323).
Gramsci meant that social theory is not something reserved for experts. Social theory is,
and ought to be, the organic extension of social debates in which every ordinary person
has a say and a capacity to contribute-and in the cases where it ceases to be the
organic extension of such debates, it loses touch with its roots and is not worthy of its
name. Gramsci's remark has its origins in the ideas of the nineteenth-century German
philosopher G. W. F. *Hegel, who exercised a major influence on the early Karl
*Marx. Hegel held that all philosophy develops progressively out of ordinary everyday
consciousness, by a process of reflection on lived experience. A further source of
inspiration for Gramsci was the eighteenth century Italian historical philosopher
Giambattista *Vico, who argued that all human beings have a capacity for
understanding history because human beings make history. Vico held that where God
made nature, man alone makes history, and that it is man's making of history which
gives him his power to understand history. In this senses_ay t t_!! is our action
and participation in the social world that is the source of our abiljty tQ.ga.in
_E1owledge of bistory ancb lproc 'i.es. ·-· - - --·· · ···
It can be said that the only important difference between social theory and common
sense is that social theory seeks to systematize and clarify debate about goals and
problems of social life through well-defined concepts and techniques of analysis. Building
on common sense, social theory tries io draw distinctions between different ways of
reacting to social life. It tries to distinguish emotional and moral ways of reacting from
impartial reactions. It tries to discern reliable observations in contrast to prejudices and
stereotypes, and it tries to untangle attitudes of detachment from attitudes of partisanship
and vested interest.
In this sense, a thesis in social theory tries to do more than the typical lead article or
editorial of a tabloid newspaper. ln the tabloid article, information, emotions, moral
judgements, and prescriptions for change are very frequently mixed up together.
Similarly, a thesis in social theory tries to distinguish itself from a party-political
manifesto or a state ideology or a nationalist myth or an interest-group platform. Although
its motives of inception are frequently overtly political, social theory differs from
political activism in an important sense. While many schools of social theory retain close
links to political protest, the activity of theorizing and researching problems such as
labour exploitation,
II 7
environmental destruction, or sexism or racism remains a different activity from the

activity of campaigning for policies to abolish them. The two kinds of activity depend
on each other in very real and practical ways; but they remain distinct from each
other. Social theory is not activism and cannot be turned into activism; it depends on
practice and is guided by practice but is not the same as practice. This is at once its
strength and its limitation.
To appreciate these ways in which social theory entails both an attitude of
involvement in social life and an attitude of detachment from social life, we need to turn
now to a range of issues bound up with the role of 'facts', 'values,' and 'objectivity' in
social science.
'Facts', 'values', and 'objectivity'
On one level, all social science is a search for facts, for 'social facts'. The Latin root of our
word 'fact' means 'something made' or 'something done', from factum, the participle of
the verb facere, 'to make'. In addition, our modern sense of the word 'fact' refers to any
state of affairs that is real, definite, and incontrovertible.
In these two senses of the word 'fact', it is a fact that six million Jews died in the
Holocaust; and it is also a fact that ten thousand Palestinians died in the founding of
the state of Israel in 1948. What is important in these two historical facts is less the
exact numerical statistic than the fact that something real, definite, and
incontrovertible happened and was made to happen by human agency. The Shoah and
the Nakba (the evacuation of Palestine) are not legends, myths, or fantasies; they are
facts. They did not happen of their own accord or by the agency of supernatural forces
or spirits; they were done and made by real human actors acting in definite social-
historical conditions which can be documented, observed, analysed, and interpreted.
However, the problem of facts for social science is that facts only ever appear to us
laden with values. The Shoah and the Nakba are significant to us from the standpoint of
moral and political values: they stand out to us precisely because they are an affront to
human values. They concern us because they are events involving sufferings and crimes
which ought not to have occurred. Here the difference between facts and values can be
under stood as the difference between the world as it is, or was, and the world as we
would like it to be,or not to be. How the world is is one thing; how the world ought to be,
or how it might be made better, is another. One way of responding to the world is
'descriptive'; the other way of responding is 'prescriptive'.
But the problem for social science in the real world is that facts cannot be separated
from values. If we had no values, if we had no interest in value in the world, we would
not be interested in any particular facts. We would not be struck by any particular facts as
calling out for attention and demanding investigation. Although we are generally able to
distin guish statements that claim to 'describe' how the world is from statements that
'prescribe' how the world ought to be, we cannot extract facts from values in any pure
way. We cannot put all our values to one side in order to observe the world purely as a set
of facts, undis torted by our frames of perception and feeling about what is right and
wrong with the
world. _Social facts are meaningful to us only insofar they are valuecladen, and we only
come to be engaged with these facts insofar as we have values about how the world ought
to be or ought not to be.
This explains why researching social facts almost always produces a diversity of points
of view, which compete and often conflict with one another. Different social parties have
different and often conflicting values about how the world should be, and different parties
struggle with one another for the most authoritative account of the events and issues of
the day. In the case at hand, numerous accounts exist of the causes of the Holocaust, and
a broad spectrum of contested views reign about the causes and consequences of the
found ing of the state of Israel. Social science therefore has to consider a diversity of
accounts, which very frequently turn out to be backed up by different sets of reasons
worthy of consideration in their own right. In consequence, it is often very difficult, if not
imposs ible, to speak of any one 'fight answer' in the study of social affairs.
This raises a profound problem. If all research is possible only from value-laden points
of view, how can research be 'objective'? How can there be agreement about the accuracy,
validity, or insight of any particular piece of research?
There are ways of answering this question which need not lead us to think that
value conflict is fatal for the possibility of validity in research. If facts cannot be
separated from values, it does not follow that evidence about social life cannot be
collected, analysed, and interpreted in transparent and methodical ways. The events of
the Holocaust and the Nakba are both capable of being submitted to transparent
techniques of scrutiny-for example: techniques of analysing documents and statistics,
interviewing of witnesses, and the like-and although many different accounts of these
events still remain, and are still bound to remain, it does not follow that no valid
knowledge can be established about them. Furthermore, the impossibility of
separating facts from values does not mean that researchers cannot realistically aim to
work out procedures by which disagreements can be hammered out and rationally
debated. Ifl am able to show you how I arrive at my position, giving reasons for each step
and explaining to you how I believe these reasons to account for the matter under
consideration, and if you are able to do the same, we at least have a minimal basis for
discussion, which we can develop further through continued critical communication.
Value conflict need not therefore entail that any statement by a party to a discussion has
to be deemed as good as another, or that no agreement or no mutual critical discussion of
any kind is possible. And it certainly does not follow that someone who denies that the
Holocaust or the Nakba took place maintains as valid a position as someone who
demonstrates that they did, by adducing evidence and methodically examining and
explaining this evidence.
Objectivity therefore remains a realistic and rationally desirable goal for research. But it
is important to emphasize that o ectivity need not be seen as the only or ultimate goal or
motive of research. Different schools of social theory take differing views about the
purpose and relative importance of objectivity. Some schools view it as an end in itself,
while others tend to view it as -a means towards o h_er1 mo_re practical ends-such as
social justice and *emancipation, or liberation from oppression. In general, schools that
emphatically subordinate objectivity to the pursuit of moral and political ends of social life
are usually described as having a *normative orientation of thought. The word 'normative'
here refers to attitudes that give priority to the 'ought' above the 'is', to determining how
the world
g
should be made better, rather than solely to observing how it is. We will encounter many
examples of such attitudes in the course of this book. But it should be stressed that numer
ous midway positions exist between the attitude of normative engagement on the one
hand and the attitude of objective detachment on the other hand. All schools of social the
ory in fact advocate combinations of involvement and detachment, of both practical
moral-political dedication and scientific distance. Social theory remains distinct from
political activism but it is not a purely disinterested affair of reflection. As the German
theorist Norbert *Elias (1983) counsels, pure involvement without detachment would be
dogmatic and moralistic; but pure detachment without involvement would be pointless
and meaningless.
Social theory and other domains of theory
We have now discussed a range of issues with a broad general relevance to all disciplines
of the humanities and social sciences. These issues are particularly prominent in
sociology and social theory but they are not, in principle, ones that only social theorists
and sociolo gists are concerned with. The remaining sections of this Introduction will
therefore try to provide some further characterization of the specific subject matters that
social theorists and sociologists are concerned with. We end by looking at three main
areas of overlap and difference between social theory and other domains: first, social
theory and political theory; second, the relation of social theory to psychology; and third,
the relation of social theory to humanities disciplines, such as anthropology, history,
literary and art criticism, philosophy, and theology.
Social theory and political theory

Probably the closest cousin of social theory is political theory. Political theory has a
long-standing position in the history of Western thought, reaching back to the writings of
the ancient Greek philosophers, as well as the Roman statesmen, the Christian medieval
theologians, and the political philosophers of early modern Europe. Political theory is
closely related to the equally long-standing discipline of jurisprudence, defined as the
study of the just administration of law in civil affairs, or legal theory. And political theory
is also the father of the discipline of economics, or 'political economy' as it was known in
the eighteenth century.
Political theory tends to be concerned with questions of a more overtly normative
character than those most often addressed in social theory. It is typically concerned
with questions such as: which systems of government best sponsor freedom, justice, and
equal ity in social life? Or: when is obedience to a ruling power justified, and when is
obedience to a ruling power not justified? In contrast, social theory tends to be more
interested in issues about how the kinds of people who ask such questions first come to be
constituted as social groups. That is, it is more directly concerned with the social
behaviour of such groups and their structures and dynamics of organization.
Some schools of social theory accord a more central place to political questions than
others. Hannah Arendt is one writer who held that social thought has genuine value
only
when it places political questions at the forefront of its agenda. Arendt emphasized the
significance of the ancient Greek view of man as a 'political animal' (Arendt 1958). The
philosopher*Aristotle wrote: 'Man is by nature a political animal' (Aristotle, The Politics,
c.335 nc, para. 1253a1-3). Arendt's writings demonstrate the continuing importance of the
idea in Greek thought that human beings are not fully human unless and until they take
part in the life of the polis, in the political space. People who are excluded from the
political space by privation of civil rights are prevented from realizing their human
capacities-and by the same token, people who voluntarily exempt themselves from the
political space by taking no interest in politics diminish their own human qualities of
existence, at their peril. (And we may also note the ancient Greek word for a private-
minded citizen who takes no interest in public political affairs was idiotes-the origin of
our modern word 'idiot'.) This insight remains a vital consideration for social theory,
despite a general academic division of labour between the two domains. Social theory is
nothing if it is not relevant to politics.
Social theory and psychology

A second discipline closely related to social theory is psychology. The history of social
thought shows many examples of close cooperation between psychology and sociology.
In addition, the sub-discipline of psychoanalysis founded by Sigmund *Freud has been
a pervasive source of influences in all the humanities and social sciences, as is discussed
in Chapter 8 of this book.
But we must note some important differences between sociology and psychology.
Psychology is mostly concerned with the emotional and affective behaviour of
individuals, treated as physiologically conditioned actors who respond to sensory stimuli
from an environment. In contrast, social theorists and sociologists are mostly concerned
with the structure of material and symbolic relations between individuals, treated as
members of collective groups in definite cultural and historical contexts. Although an
important sub-discipline of psychology is 'social psychology', concerned with individual
behaviour in social situations, psychology is generally less well equipped to deal with
collectivities of actors and with the meaningful self-definitions of these collectivities in
specific cultures. A further key difference in this onnection is that unlike sociology,
psychology retains close links with the natural sciences. Up to a point, psychologists are
capable of testing their hypotheses through repeatable experiments. This is not possible in
sociology, except in a very limited way.
One of the strongest impulses of the french sociological thinker Emile *Durkheim was
to demonstrate that society consists of a region of reality in its own right-a sui generis
reality, as he called it-which could not be explained entirely by the methods of
psychology (Durkheim 1895). In his famous study of suicide, Durkheim (1897) sought to
show that the reasons for people taking their lives could not be referred purely to
psychological states in individual persons, such as a person's feelings of depression or
despair. Psychological states necessarily depend on sociological factors, to do with the
extent to which social collectivities provide resources of *integration for their constituent
members. Durkheim's vision of sociology is discussed at length in Chapter 2 of this
book.
11
Social theory and the humanities

We have already mentioned several general commonalities between social theory and
humanities disciplines. It is now worth looking at some more specific areas of interaction.
A first important area is anthropology.
Anthropology means literally the 'study of man'. As a discipline today,
anthropology usually encompasses the study of human cultures and societies
variously described as 'primitive', 'tribal', 'agrarian', or 'non-Western' in origin. These
adjectives are notoriously difficult to apply, not least because very few cultures still exist
today that are not affected in some way by developed socio-economic forms, typically
originating from the West. Nevertheless, the distinctive concern of anthropologists is
usually with societies showing more or less direct forms of interaction with a natural
environment or ecology, based on elementary practices of cultivation of natural
resources. Social theorists and sociologists share these interests, but they mostly
concern themselves with the social structures of more technologically developed
urban societies, with more complex political and eco nomic infrastructures. They are
generally less concerned with relatively isolated agrarian communities. Later chapters of
this bo()k_discuss links between social theory and anthro pology ip rela nctiO!]QLlS.t!
hc_ory and its critics (Chapter 4), in relation to sociolo gical *ethnography (Cha_p_t!"r
5), and in relation to French *structuralist theory (Chapter 9). Interactions bet en hist; y-
and social theory have always been central to sociology and were particularly important
for classical social thinkers such as Karl Marx and Max *Weber.
The key areas of difference and cooperation between his.tory and sociology are discussed at
l:ngt1:: in!_his b9_ k in_c .
Interaction between social theory and the arts and cultural critidsm has also been very
prominent in modern Western intellectual culture. In recent decades, renewed investiga
tion of the meanings of 'high culture' and 'popular culture' in the context of consumer
practices and new media technologies has led to a flourishing of academic subdivisions
such as cultural studies, film studies, and media and communications studies. Many of th
i11!QIB1Jng the.ories of the? _s,!_u_ s are disc_1-1ssed in this book under_ the cl1apters for
*Western Marxism (Chapter_7), *structuralism and *post-structuralism (Chapter 9), feminist
social theCJry (Chapter.11), and.tpo.s.tm_QQ rnism and its critics (Chapters 12 and 13). For a
detailed overview of debates about art and aesthetics in social theory, see Harrington (2004).
Another key conversation partner in social theory is philosophy. We have seen that social
theorists share with philosophers a basic interest in critical thinking about the way things
appear to be with the world. They share the same spirit of 'reflective wondering' that the
Greek philosophers held to be the origin of all theoria. Reflection on the meanings of our lives
as historical, social, and political beings is as important to social theorists as it hasalways been
to philosophers. But social theory differs from the traditional central domains of philosophy,
such as logic, *metaphysics, and *epistemology.Social theorists are more concerned with the
contributions of empirical social research to our understanding of human ways of thinking,
sensing, and behaving. They are not as centrally concerned as philosophers with the logical
status and coherence of concepts, arguments, and belief systems.
Lastly, we should note some differences between social theory and theology. Theology
is the study of the principles of belief in God. Sociologists certainly share with theologians
an
12
interest in religion in society. But sociologists are not centrally concerned with the internal
propositions of religious belief systems or with the ways in which religious beliefs express
contexts of scripture and sacred writing. Mostly they are concerned with the ways in
which religious beliefs interact with social and political institutions and powers.
Consequently, social theorists and sociologists are not as well equipped as theologians to
deal with questions of the meaning of ideas of the absolute or transcendental or infinite in
human experience. The question of whether God exists, or of how God exists, or of why
evil exists, or why the universe exists, are not questions that can be adequately framed or
pursued (let alone answered!) from the standpoint of social-scientific enquiry alone.
Conclusion
We have seen that social theory is the study of ways of thinking about society
scientifically. Further, we have also seen that it is the discipline of thinking about how far
it is possible for society to be studied scientifically. Social theory is at once a source of
explanatory concepts in social science and a source of ways of evaluating the point or use
or meaning of such concepts. To theorize about social life is not only to develop scientific
models of observable social processes. It is also to think critically about the conditions of
possibility of scientific constructs. If all social analysis were purely theoretical, it would
be merely speculative. But if all social analysis were purely empirical, it would be
forgetful of its relationship to questions of meaning and practical purpose in human social
life. In the most basic and ancient of senses, we can say that theory is reflection on the
place and function of science in human existence.
-:" QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
In what sense is there, or can there be, a 'science of society'7
2 How much does social science hol9 in common with natural science7
3 Are there any acts of social research that can be carried out without the aid of theories or
theorizing?
4 If all facts relevant to social research are value-laden, what does it mean for social research to
seek to be objective? Can there be any social research that does not seek to be objective?
5 How important are objectivity and detachment in relation to practical values of liberation and
emancipation in social knowledge and social life7
GENERAL FURTHER READING IN SOCIAL THEORY
All chapters of this book contain guidance on further reading for specific topics. In addition, various
general reading sources can be recommended. These can be grouped into the following categories.
13
Textbooks in empirical sociology and cultural studies
Among some of the most tried and tested textbooks in empirical sociology are James Fulcher and
John Scott's Sociology (Oxford University Press, 1999), Anthony Giddens's Sociology (Polity Press,
4th edn. 2001), Tony Hilton's Introductory Sociology (Palgrave, 4th edn. 2002), Mike Haralambos
and Martin Holborn's Sociology: Themes and Perspectives (Collins Educational, 6th edn. 2004), and
Peter Kivisto's Key Ideas in Sociology (Pine Forge Press, 1998). Some useful textbooks concentrating
on cultural studies are Chris Barker's Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (Sage, 2000). Other useful
textbooks combining sociology and cultural studies are the following four books in the
'Understanding Modern Societies' series of the Open University Press: Stuart Hall and Bram
Gieben's Formations of Modernity (1992), John Allen, Peter Braham, and Paul Lewis's Political and
Economic Forms of Modernity (1992), Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson's Social and Cultural
Forms of Modernity (1992), and Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew's Modernity and
its Futures (1992). Books designed as introductions to empirical social research with accessible
theoretical elements include Tim May's Social Research (Open University Press, 3rd edn. 2001),
Zygmunt Bauman's Thinking Sociologically (Blackwell, 1990; 2nd edn. with Tim May 2001), MarkJ.
Smith's Social Science in Question (Sage, 1998), and David Goldblatt's Knowledge and the Social
Sciences (Routledge, 2000).
Other guides to social theory
Other guides to social theory that overlap with the present book in various ways include George
Ritzer's Sociological Theory (McGraw-Hill Education, 6th edn. 2003), Classical Sociological Theory
(Higher Education, 4th edn. 2003), and Modern Sociological Theory (McGraw-Hill Education, 6th
edn. 2003), Bryan Turner's Companion to Social Theory (Blackwell, 2000), George Ritzer's Companion
to Major Classical Social Theorists (Blackwell, 2003) and his Companion to Major Contemporary Social
Theorists (Blackwell, 2003), George Ritzer and Barry Smart's Handbook of Social Theory (Sage, 2001),
Ian Craib's two volumes Classical Social Theory (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Modern Social
Theory (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 2nd edn. 1992), John Hughes, Peter Martin, and Wes Sharrock's two
volumes Understanding Classical Sociology (Sage, 1995) and Understanding Modern Sociology (Sage,
2003), Bert Adams and Rosalind Sydie's two volumes Classical Sociological Theory (Pine Forge, 2002)
and Contemporary Sociological Theory (Pine Forge, 2002), Patrick Baert's Social Theory in the Twentieth
Century (Polity Press, 1998), Alex Callinicos's Social Theory: A Historical Introduction (Polity Press,
1999), and Pip Jones's Introducing Social Theory (Polity Press, 2003). Edited collections of profiles of
individual theorists include Anthony Elliott and Bryan Turner's Profiles in Contemporary Social
Theory (Sage, 2001), Anthony Elliott and Larry Ray's Key Contemporary Social Theorist (Blackwell,
2003), and Rob Stone's Key Sociological Thinkers (Macmillan, 1998). Books concentrating solely on
the classical social theories of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel are Ken Morrison's Marx,
Durkheim, Weber (Sage, 1995), Larry Ray's Theorizing Classical Sociology (Open University Press,
1999), and Anthony Giddens's Capitalism and Modern Social 11ieory (Cambridge University Press,
1971), as well as the already mentioned volumes by Craib (1997), Ritzer (2003), Hughes, Sharrock,
and Martin (1995), and Adams and Sydie (2002).
Collections of readings
Some useful edited collections of extracts from the famous primary texts of major social theorists
known as 'readers'-include Anthony Elliott's The Blackwell Reader in Contemporary Social Theory
(Blackwell, 1999), Charles Lemert's Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (Westview
Press, 1999), The Polity Reader in Social Theory (Polity Press, 1994), The Polity Reader in Cultural
Theory (Polity Press, 1994), James Farganis's Readings in Social Theory (McGraw-Hill, 1993),
Jeffrey Alexander's Mainstream and Critical Social Theory (Sage, 2001), Jeffrey Alexander and Steven
Seidman's The New Social Theory Reader (Routledge, 2001), and Roberta Garner's Social Theory:
Continuity and Confrontation: A Reader (Broadview Press, 2000).
14
Guides to the philosophy of social science
Some useful books treating epistemological and methodological issues not usually addressed at
length in textbooks on social research methods are MarkJ. Smith's Soda/ Science in Question (Sage,
1998), Malcolm Williams and Tim May's Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Research (University
College London Press, 1996), Norman Blaikie's Approaches to Social Enquiry (Polity Press, 1993),
Gerard Dclanty's Social Science beyond Constructivism and Realism (Open University Press, 1997),
and William Outhwaite's New Philosophies ofSocial Science (Macmillan, 1987). A useful collection of
read ings in this area is Gerard Delanty and Piet Strydom's Philosophies of Social Science: The Classic
and Contemporary Readings (Open University Press, 2003).
Guides to political theory
Some good introductions to the neighbouring field of political theory are Will Kymlicka's
Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2002), Jean Hampton's Political
Philosophy (Westview Press, 1997), Jonathan Wolff's An Introduction to Political Philosophy
(Oxford University Press, 1996), Raymond Plant's Modern Political Thought (Blackwell, 1991), and
Robert Goodin and Philip Pettit's edited A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy
(Blackwell, 1993).
Reference sources in A-Z format
Useful reference sources in A-Z format include William Outhwaite (ed.), The Blackwell Dictionary of
Modern Social Thought (Blackwell, 2002), David Jary and Julia Jary (eds.), The Collins Dictionary of
Sociology (HarperCollins, 3rd edn. 2000), George Ritzer (ed.), The Sage Encyclopedia of Social Theory
(Sage, 2004), Austin Harrington, Barbara Marshall, and Hans-Peter Mi.iller (eds.), The Routledge
Encyclopedia of Social Theory (Routledge, 2005), Edward Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Routledge, 1999), and Neil Smelser et al. (eds.), The International Encyclopaedia of the
Social and Behavioural Sciences (Elsevier, 2002), also accessible on-line by institutional subscription
and free of charge in partial form at www.ie bs.com
SOURCES IN THE PUBLIC MEDIA
A few recommendations can be made about sources in the non-specialized public media.
Academic books and journals are not the only relevant sources. In the English-language media,
this author particularly recommends the Landan Review of Books (fortnightly), the New York
Review of Books (fortnightly), Le Monde diplomatique (monthly) (available in English as well as
French, and other languages), Radical Philosophy (bi-monthly), and New Left Review (bi
monthly). In Europe and North America, some of the more independent-minded newspapers
and magazines which regularly publish interviews and articles by leading world intellectuals on
social and political affairs are Le Monde (in France), El Pais (in Spain), Die Zeit (in Germany,
weekly), Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (in Germany), La Repubblica (in Italy), The Guardian (in
Rritain), and The Nation (in the USA, weekly). The British weekly magazine The Economist is also
useful for information on world economic affairs. A further general piece of advice to the reader
is that wherever you are able to read a publication that is not written in the English language, it is
generally good to do so. The English language currently enjoys a glohal intellectual hegemony
which it is often good to resist, wherever you are able to do so. There are thousands of excellent
books, journals, magazines, newspapers, and websites which never find their way into English
translation, partly as a consequence of the cultural domination of Anglo-Saxon business inter
ests in the global publishing market.
15
■ WEBSITES
The Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG) at www.sosig.ac.uk/ Provides links to a

database of over 50,000 social-science web pages.
Sociology On-line Homepage at http://cgi.sociologyonline.eo.uk/News/news.html Contains an
on-line work package in sociology, aimed at students and teachers.
Wikipedia Free On-line Encyclopaedia at www.wikipedia.org
Offers links to the history of sociology, covering key topics, terms, methods, and theorists.
Dead Sociologists' Society at www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/DEADS0C.HTML Provides useful
accounts of key sociologists with biographical information and summaries of their work.
Sociological Research On-line at www.socresonline.org.uk/ Displays an on-line journal in
sociology, containing articles on current empirical and theoretical topics.
Classical Social Theory, I:
Contexts and Beginnings
Austin Harrington
TOPICS DISCUSSED IN THIS CHAPTER
Modernity and tradition: what is 'modern'? What is 'traditional'? 17

Western modernity 20
Cultural modernity: science and the decline of religion 20
Political modernity: law, democracy, and the state 21
Socio-economic modernity: capitalism, industry, and the riseof cities 23
Social theory in the nineteenth century 24
Political economy and utilitarianism:Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham 24
Liberalismand civil society: John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville 25
Positivism:Auguste Comteand Herbert Spencer 27
Theories of elites: Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and Robert Michels 28
Community and society: Ferdinand Tiinnies 30
Challenges to Western modernity: reason and the claims of science 31
Eurocentrism in social theory 32
The darker sides of Enlightenment 33
Conclusion 36
FURTHER READING 38
WEBSITES 39
The emergence of social theory as a distinctive way of thinking about society is

concurrent with the rise of modernity. The rise of a scientific way of studying society is
itself a product of the particular kinds of social conditions called 'modern'. In
consequence, to come to grips with the concepts of social theory, we need to have an
understanding of modernity, and to gain an understanding of modernity we need to have a
grasp of the concepts of social theory.
This chapter introduces some of the foundational contexts of social thought in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe that led to the emergence of sociology as a dis
cipline in the twentieth century. The chapter sets out the fundamental characteristics
of modernity as a condition of social life and the ways in which this condition is
interpreted
17
by writers belonging to the earliest waves of recognizably theoreticalsocial thought. First we

consider some key meaningsof the terms 'modern','modernity', 'tradition', and 'traditional'.
Then we look at the chief historical dynamics of the development of recognizably modern
social conditions and the various explanations given to these dynamics by eighteenth
and nineteenth-centurysocial thinkers.
In the last part of the chapter we turn to two basic questions which will be of concern
throughout this book. The first is the question of how far the specifically Western
European experiences of modernity and modernization that interested the first genera
tions of social theorists have relevance and validity for all cultures of the world.The second is
the complex question of whether the rise of modem scientific structures of consciousness
is in every sense good for social life, or whether there are darker, more destructive sides
of science and reason which we must consider.
We begin with some leading meanings of the terms 'modem' and 'traditional'.
Modernity and tradition: what is •modern'?

what is •traditional'?
Our word 'modern' derives from the Latin modus, from which we also derive our word
'mode'. In a most basic sense, modernity is the mode of our time: that which is 'here and
now', rather than 'then' or 'past'.
It has been remarked that our word 'modern' has its roots in the late fifth century AD,
after the fall of the Roman Empire, when the Latin w_prd modernus came to be used to
refer to a new present era of Christianity, in contrast to a pagan past under the tutelage of
the Romans. However, the first known occurrence of the word 'modernity' as an abstract
noun is to be found in much more recent times. It appears in an article by the French poet
Charles Baudelaire for the newspaper Le Figaro in 1863. Baudelaire here wrote of the
experience of modernity in modem art and literature and the modern city as the
impression of 'the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent' (le transitoire, le filgitif, le
contingent) (Baudelaire 1863: 12). Baudelaire imagined the modern artist as someone
who experiences time as a line rushing inexorably forward into the future. As each
moment of the present is cast into the past, the modem artist tries to save the present
from its obsolescence as the present becomes immediately past and 'outmoded'.
Modernity in this sense evokes the idea of radically changing times.*Modernism
usually refers to specific cultural and intellectual movements of modernity that dramatize
this experience in various ways. Modernization usually refers to the process of
emergence of modernity.
Modernity is often thought of as a period, with a heginning at a certain point in time. For
some, modernity begins in the late eighteenth century with the onset of the Industrial
Revolution in European ountries a_rJd the spread of the ideas of the French Revolution and
:of
------
the S0:caifed-Age *EJ1Jightenment. For others, modernity begins earlier, with the
_ Renaissance in Italy in the fifte,cnth century, or with the Protestant Reformat_ion of the
--, -- -
- -- - --
sixteenth century, or with the revolutions in science and mathematics of the seventeenth
18 !\USTHJ !iAr
century. For still others, modernity is a more diffuse term that cannot be located in any
definite period and is not limited to European historical developments.
Disagreements about when exactly modernity might be thought of as beginning suggest
that modernity is not always best thought of solely as a 'period'. It is also possible, and in
many ways more desirable, to think of modernity in a more open sense as a distinctive
kind pf a_tJjJude.lo...ti.me-. In this sense modernity refers to an attitude of critical reflection
on the past and critical distance from the past. It encompasses an orientation toward active
shap ing of the future through forms of collectively determined, rationally intended
action. According to the historical theorist Reinhardt Koselleck (1979), modernity is the
attitude in which society comes to objectify its past as 'history'. Modernity is the time in
which society reflects on its past as a definite sequence of events culminating in the
present, not as a rep etitious cycle. 'Our time' becomes 'new time'; and 'new time' becomes
that which places the 'Middle Ages' in between 'our time' and 'antiquity'. Time thus
becomes something that society seeks to master and to make its own 'project'. In the
words of Koselleck, modernity sees itself as determining its own future, as continually
expanding its 'space of experience' under more and more ambitious 'horizons of
expectation'.
Modernity is frequently contrasted with what is called 'tradition' or 'traditional' ways
of living, or 'traditionalism'. Ou!. worg_t!ad_ition com s_Jr()m the Latir1:verb_tz:adere. 'to
hand over' to 'to hand down'. It signifies the idea of accepted, taken-for-granted ways of
thiriking and acting. Appropriate ways of behaving tend to be set by precedent and
example, by the way things have 'always been', by what the priest or the father says or by
what the ancestors did.
One of the most influential ways of distinguishing between 'modern' and 'traditional'
societies in social theory was established in the middle decades of the twentieth century
by the American *functionalist theorist Talcott *Parsons. Parsons distinguished between
tra ditional social structures based on what he called 'ascription' and modern social
structures based on 'achievement'. By 'ascription', Parsons sought to refer to the way in
which social advantages of wealth, power, and status in traditional settings are for the
most part ascribed to individuals at birth, by inheritance and by upbringing in a
particular *social class or social 'stratum', in which for the most part remain for the rest
of their lives. In contrast, by 'achievement', Parsons sought to refer to the way in which
social advantages of wealth, power, and status in modern settings are increasingly
achieved by individuals, irrespective of the initial privileges or lack of privileges with
which they begin at birth. In modern settings, the positions of individuals in the *stratified
structures of advantages and disadvantages are by no means entirely determined by
achievement: ascription through inheritance of a privileged or non-privileged class
background still plays a major role. But the tendency in modern settings is increasingly
towards greater social mobility as individuals gain or lose their positions in the distribution
of advantages by intended planned action oriented to formal education and a professional
career (see Parsons 1951).
Traditional societies are often vaguely thought of as being 'undeveloped' in various senses.
A traditional society might be one with a simple subsistence-based economy, or one with
no advanced uses of production technology, or one with no complex political institutions.
Traditionalism is often associated with so-called 'primitive' or tribal social forms, or with
medieval society, or with the societies of the 'dark ages'. Sometimes traditional ways of
I. 19
living are blandly and problematically associated with all 'non-Western' cultures. There
are, however, at least two reasons for being careful with the word traditional in these
instances.
First, it is not really the case that traditional societies show no particularly developed
uses of production technology. It is quite possible for societies to possess developed sys
tems of material production and transportation and still to remain traditional in most
important respects. According to the influential view of Max *Weber, societies do not neces
sarily cease to be traditional when they start to produce large quantities of material goods
or to create armies or develop technical inventions. Rather, according to Weber, societies
only cease to be traditional when they acquire a particular ethos of methodical conduct of
life, when they acquire a distinctly calculative, planning, and *rationalizing attitude to
ways of organizing and ethically justifying and codifying social life (Weber 1920a,
1920h). In this sense, Weber argued that the civilization of ancient China remained for the
most part traditional in its ways of life, even though ancient Chinese civilization already
possessed many of the technical inventions that the West only acquired over a thousand
years later in the Middle Ages (notably gunpowder). In Weber's view, the distinctive
feature of Western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was that it began to
adopt a pecu liarly rationalizing attitude to ways of defining moral and political values,
even though it did not start to produce large quantities of goods or to invent machines of
production until much later.
Secondly, it is important to note that societies can very often possess both traditional
attitudes in some respects and modern or modernizing attitudes in other respects, at
one and the same time. Societies and social forms can, for example, have both
modern or modernizing attitudes toward legal, political, and economic organization
and distinctly traditional attitudes toward interpersonal relations of authority and
toward gender roles. We might think today of the mafia business family, operating by
*patriarchal codes of honour and subordination and at the same time remaining
entirely in touch with mod ern technology and the modern economy. Many
contemporary nation-states also go to considerable lengths to preserve what they believe
to be their 'cultural traditions', such as elements of their religious institutions-the
Catholic Church in many countries-or their political institutions (the monarchy in
Britain, for example) (compare Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson 1983). We
can also say that many contemporary Islamic societies are both modern in some
respects and traditional in others; and we can say the same of American society in the
1950s, and of]apanese society in the nineteenth century, and soon.
lt is difficult, therefore, to speak confidently of any definite period of time when all or
most cultures of the world ceased to be 'traditional' and became, entirely and
unequivoc ally, 'modern'. Both the word traditional and the word modern refer
primarily to attitudes and habits of mind and behaviour, rather than simply, or solely, to
clearly definable periods and regions of world history. The social transformations that
took place in Europe after the fifteenth century give us an exemplary insight into the
ways in which social relations can become modem. But they are not the only contexts
in which modem and modernizing processes can be observed; and European
developments are hy no means in themselves unambiguous cases of what is called
'modernity'.
20 AUSTIN HARRINGTON
With these points in mind, we can turn now in detail to the exemplary case of European
modernity from the fifteenth century onwards. It is this case that most preoccupied the
founding figures in sociological analysis in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It
is possible to refer to this case as the prototype of Western modernity or ocddental
modernity.
Western modernity
It is helpful to approach the structure of Western modernity in terms of three more or
less distinct dimensions of social change: first a cultural dimension, encompassing the
rise of science and the decline ofreligion; secondly a political dimension, encompassing the
rise of the state, civil law, and ideas of democracy; and thirdly a socio-economic
dimension, encompassing the rise of an international capitalist economy, bound up with
processes of industrialization and urbanization.
Cultural modernity: science and the decline of religion

The rise of the natural sciences and the rediscovery of mathematics in the seventeenth
century are central events in the intellectual development of Western modernity. They
find dramatic expression in such famous episodes as Galileo's confrontation with the
papacy in 1616. Galileo sought to demonstrate the truth of the theory that the earth
revolved around the sun and that the earth was not the centre of the universe. This helio
centric theory had first been mooted by the Polish astronomer Copernicus in the sixteenth
century, but was at odds with the traditional teachings of the Church. Galileo invented the
telescope in order to prove the theory. He sought to show that knowledge was genuine
only if it had a basis in demonstrable *empirical observation. Similarly, Francis *Bacon in
England asserted that true knowledge arose solely from the authority of experience and
experiment and personal individual enquiry, not from traditions and precedents. In Bacon's
famous phrase, knowledge had to be free of such 'idols of the mind' as myth, superstition,
and church dogma.
The eventeenth-century philosophers and scientists rejected the long-standing teaching
of medieval Christianity that all creatures and things on the earth had a innate purpose
in nature preordained by God. They rejected the Church's *teleological view of the
universe and replaced it with a mec/Janisticone. Creatures and things were regarded as
subject to laws of nature that could be scientifically discovered and rationally
deduced. God was the guarantor of laws that man could discover for himself and put to
his own use. In this sense, Isaac Newton set out to determine the laws of gravity and
motion, which God had set down in nature, by 'pre-established harmony'-in the phrase
of the rationalist philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. Similarly Rene
*Descartes set out to prove-purely by
*deductive philosophical reasoning, without appeal to any external authority-that con
sciousness cannot be deceptive. My existence is real, Descartes argued, because I think my
existence: 'I think, therefore I am'; cogito ergo sum. Methodical thinking alone provides
a basis for knowledge of the world, not scripture or revelation. God must exist, not
because
· · :: ,, : OCIAL HiEORY. I 21
the Church or the Bible says that heexists, but because God's non-existence is not
logically conceivable. In this regard, the fundamental intellectual feature of Western
modernity is that the rationally thinking 'I', the ego, or the *Subject, comes to occupy the
centre of the universe. In the development of European philosophy after Descartes,
the 'Subject' becomes the last instance of authority before God.
The fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance and the sixteenth-century Protestant
Reformation in northern Europe are significant because they set in motion the rise of the
idea of *autonomously thinking individuals, who are personally responsible for their own
destinies and their own salvation. Renaissance artists and scientists such as Michelangelo
and Leonardo da Vinci, together with the Protestant religious teachers Martin *Luther
and Jean *Calvin and humanist political writers such as Thomas *More, *Erasmus of
Rotterdam, and Michel de *Montaigne, all played their part in the generation of a
sequence of developments lasting over several centuries to which we today refer by the
name of *secularization.
Secularization denotes the diminishing power and influenceof formal religious institutions
over social and political life. From the sixteenth century onwards, a distinction gradually
comes to be introduced in Western European society between precepts set down by the
Church and precepts gained through independent reading of scripture by individuals or
through science and philosophy. It is this gradual process of separation between different
sources of cultural authority that leads to the slow retreat of religion from the realms
of education, art, philosophy, politics, and public discourse during the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in Europe. In the nineteenth century, Charles
*Darwin's Origin of Species of 1859 represents one of the most emblematic moments of
this process of secularization.
Although religious beliefs today may not appear to have diminished in prominence in
public life, religion in the Western world no longer possesses anything like the same
legally and politically sanctioned sovereignty over social organization that it enjoyed five
hundred years ago. In the Western world today, despite the reversion to Creationism in
the teaching curricula of some US high schools, the intellectual authority of religion over
definitions of the physical universe and of the social world has been replaced,
definitively, by that of science.
Elements of cultural and intellectual modernity and the spread of secularization are
closely bound up with aspects of political modernity. It is to these concurrent political
dimensions of modernity in Europe that we now turn.
Political modernity:law, democracy, and the state

During the period of the sixteenth-century Protestant conversions in northern Europe,
notably in England, Holland, parts of Germany, and parts of Switzerland, the Catholic
Church centred in Rome became increasingly subordinate to a new political agency in
European history. This new political agency is the state, and especially the nation-state.
The rise of the state was a leading consideration for numerous legal and political writers
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These figures wrote in the wake of wars of
religion and deep factional conflicts driven by parties claiming divine warrant for
their
22 AUSTIN HARRHJGTOi\l
actions-notably the Civil War in England and the Thirty Years War in Germany, as well
as the Dutch Protestant revolt against the Spanish empire at the end of the sixteenth
century. It was in reaction to these kinds of events that a conception of the highest
sovereignty of the state in maintaining law and order came to be developed in the writings
of political philosophers such as Niccolo *Machiavelli and Thomas *Hobbes. This
conception is often known as the doctrine of 'reason of state'. A conception of toleration,
or state protection for freedom of religious conscience, in return for obedience to the laws
of the state, occurred later in the writings of]ohn *Locke. In eighteenth-century France,
Locke's influence joined with increasing calls in public life for constitutional reform and
for limitation of the pow ers of both the monarchy and the Church. These calls eventually
culminated in revolution in 1789, abolition of the monarchy, and an attempt by Napoleon
to spread the revolution to the rest of Europe in the early years of the nineteenth century.
In the New World, the men who met in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution in 1787
appealed to these same principles of separation between Church and state, and between
the powers of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. They invoked the principles
of representative democracy, of popular sovereignty and 'rights of man'. A key political
idea of Western modernity is here that the state receives its authority to rule not by divine
sanction-descending through a monarch, an emperor or a pope-but solely from the
collective will of the people, or the 'nation'. According to this world-view, the people are
endowed with inalienable rights, and the people alone resolve to vest authority in a sover
eign power. In this connection, the French revolutionary slogan 'liberty, equality, and
fraternity' finds its counterpart in Thomas *Jefferson's 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness'.
Ideas of representative democracy and popular sovereignty emerged from the 'Age of
Reason' or 'Age of Enlightenment' in eighteenth-century Europe. The writers of the
*Enlightenment saw themselves as standing for rational scrutiny, enquiry, and, above all,
'critique'. In Prussia in the 1780s, the philosopher Immanuel *Kant titled his three chief
works of philosophy The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), The Critique of Practical Reason (1788),
and The Critique offudgement (1790). In an essay of 1784, 'An Answer to the Question: What
is Enlightenment', Kant spoke of 'man's *emancipation from his self-incurred immaturity'
r- -(Kant 1784). By 'immaturity' Kant meant uncritical submission to authority, at the
expense of individual reflection, responsibility, and autonomy. Man's immaturity was
'self-incurred' because man had not yet found the courage to use his own innate faculties
of reason. M_ii_n
had instead surrendered control of his life to powers of questionable legitimacy=-to
t, -..monarchs and priests.
The ideas of French Enlightenment philosophers such as *Voltaire, *Montesquieu,
*Rousseau, and *Diderot included the precept that all people are equal before the law
and are innocent until proved guilty. They also included the insistence that illness and
misfortune are not symptoms of divine malediction but have natural and social causes,
and that religious and *metaphysical ideas develop from definite historical customs, not
from timeless essences. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these ideas
led to numerous projects of reform and rational administration of the institutions of social
life, including the foundation of state schools, hospitals, prisons, and police forces.
We now turn to the last feature of processes of modernization in the West concerning
changes in the economic structures of society.
23
Socio-economic modernity:capitalism, industry,

and the rise of cities
The rise of science as an intellectual force in Western modernity would not have been
possible without at least two further factors. These included, first, the emergence of a
social methodicalethos oriented to technical applications of scientific knowledge, and,
second the emergence of a capitalist economy that stood to profit from the kinds of
controlled experi mental thinking that science represented. ln this connection, many
cultural historians have pointed out that while both the ancient Greeks and the early
medieval Arab philo sophers possessed virtually all the science and mathematics that
early modern Europe possessed, what the Greeks and the A!a\:>_2_.<ii.dnot share was the
early modem Europeans'
<lriveto separ_'.1te science andmathemat_ics_fr9m _myt_l) and re)igion and to seek
redemption for science solely: t"ii rough its this- oriiiy technical and economic
application·s..- . ..
·Tue existence of a continuous this-worldly demand for science was crucial for Western
Europe's massive political and economic expansion from the fifteenth century onwards.
Growths in merchant shipping trade, voyages of exploration across land and sea, to the
East and to the West, and the discovery and colonization of the two continents of North
and South America, were all crucial socio-economic developments. The cultural and
political dimensions of Western modernity are fundamentally bound up with the spread of
an inter national capitalistic trading system that continually sought and gained new
markets, new sources of raw materials, and notably new sources of labour in the case of
the slave trade.
It has been argued that the growth of an international trading system emanating from
medieval European seaports such as Genoa, Pisa, Venice, London, Lisbon, and
Amsterdam arose from some key changes in the practices of individual merchants.
Merchants came to operate less and less on an ad hoc basis and more and more as
organized trading companies, or 'societies'. They began to separate assets deemed to
belong to the family household from assets deemed to belong independently to the
business. Merchants acquired salaried employees, made use of accounting systems, and
increasingly forged deals through inter mediary partners or middlemen. Another important
factor in this process was the greatly increased ability of moneylenders to lend capital to
merchants and to charge interest on loans without the constraint of the traditional
teachings of the Catholic Church against interest as a manifestation of the sin of greed.
Later, the emergence of a complex capitalist economy was consolidated by the
foundation of national banks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and by the
development of private property laws designed to protect property against arbitrary
taxation. National banks and property laws helped merchants and industrialists to make
reliable estimates of prices, to calculate necessary quantities of supplies, and hence to
make predictable long-term investments of capital.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is possible to single out five basic factors
accounting for the emergence of an advanced industrial capitalist economy in Europe.
These are:
1. Enclosure and conversion of portions of common land into private estates,
making possible concentrated large-scale farming and industrial development.
2. Industrialization, marked by replacement of artisans' workshops by factories
employing systematically organized labour forces and machine technologies involved
in both energy extraction and the manufacturing process.
24 AlJSTrn HARRINGTON
:I. Free-trade policies, based on the removal of state tariffs on imported goods. These
mark the definitive end of all barter trading and the universal use of money as an
abstract bearer of exchange value. Wealth is seen as increasing not by hoarding within
the confines of a nation-state (a doctrine known as 'mercantilism'), but by its
continual free circulation as capita!.
4. Urbanization, marked by large industrial cities linked to trading ports and tied
into a global economy. The cities grew from influxes of migrants from Lhe
countryside unable to find work on the land after processes of enclosure.
S. Population growth, arising from the demand for large industrial labour forces. Low wage
levels meant that nuclear family units needed to rear greater numbers of working
children to ensure a family's survival.
Processes of industrialization and urbanization and ideas of democracy and enlightenment
were all central considerations for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social critics and
thinkers. In the next section we tum to the ways in which these eighteenth- and
nineteenth century writers developed ideas that were to become key objects of attention
for canonical figures in social thought such as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber and thus
helped to lay some of the foundations for the discipline we know today as 'sociology'.
Social theory in the nineteenth century
Social thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is represented by a number

of key movements and a number of influential thinkers. In the following, we consider
the movements of political economy and utilitarianism, liberalism, positivism, socialism, and
theories of social elites. These are represented by the names-among others-of Adam
Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Auguste Comte, Herbert
Spencer, Karl Marx, Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, and Ferdinand
Tonnies. We begin by looking at political economy and utilitarianism.
Political economy and utilitarianism:Adam Smith

and Jeremy Bentham
Political economy refers to a succession of writers active from the late eighteenth century
onwards, mostly in England and Scotland. Of all thr works of British political economy,
Adam *Smith's The Wealth of Nations of 1776 is widely recognized as the founding text
of modern economic analysis. Smith and his disciples saw themselves as discovering law
of social behaviour that had universalapplication. These laws famously included the
theorem that prices rise when goods are in short supply and drop when goods are
abundant; and rise when goods are in demand and drop when they are not in demand. The
political economists saw market theory as a solution to the moral problems of society.
They proposed that egoistic action by individuals in private in fact had beneficial
consequences in public. If each individual specialized in a particular trade and sold
the products of this trade while purchasing the products of another, all individuals would
help each other
CLASSICAL SOCIAL THEORY. I 25
to satisfy their own interests. Adam Smith famously spoke of a 'hidden hand' of the
market that coordinates private individual action through a collective mechanism of
wealth distribution.
A little later, mostly in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the movement known
as *utilitarianism developed out of the ideas of the political economists and the French
Enlightenment critics, gaining currency mostly in early nineteenth-century Britain. ·1 he
utilitarians maintained that traditional forms of philosophy and theology re,ted on irra
tional and unscientific assumptions. They believed that if ,ociety wa, to make progre,, ,m d
find practical benefit in its intellectual pursuits, it had to replace philmophical '>peculation
by the scientific study of utility. Utilitarianism is chiefly associated with the writings of
the English philosopher Jeremy *Bentham, who contributed to the foundation of the
Univer,ity of London as England's first entirely secular university. Bentham
famomly ,tated that the purpose of government was to guarantee 'the greatest happine,, of
the greates.t numher' (Bentham 1789). A rational society was one that maximized the
aggregate weirheTriio(it, members by dispensing with wasteful or luxury pursuits for the
few (such as high art and classical learning) and using the proceeds of these savings to
satisfy the material needs of the greatest mass in society. Bentham and the utilitarians
also emphasized that the purpose of the treatment of criminals by the state should be not
only to pun hh hut al,o to reform them. Bentham desi th m- d -p;:{; n-
;;_,hich- lie caTlecl (he 'Pa;;-ptiZc;n', allowing all prisoners to be surveyed and
supposedly cared for by pri,on guards from the same vantage point. In addition, the
utilitarians placed particular import ance in medicine and the scientific study of health and
illness. They insisted that society had to rid itself of all association of disease, deformity,
and insanity with religious and superstitious notions of punishment for sin or demonic
possession.
Closely linked to political economy and utilitarianism was the spread of the movement
throughout the nineteenth century known in very broad terms as liberalism.
Liberalism and civil society: John Stuart Mill and

Alexis de Tocqueville
Liberalism in nineteenth-century Europe and North America encompassed the belief that
progress lay in the development of parliamentary democracy and constitutional law. Aho
important to nineteenth-century liberalism was the separation of religious affiliation from
affairs of state, and especially from the provision of education. All the essential principles
of nineteenth-century liberalism are succinctly formulated in the writings of the English
Victorian philosopher John Stuart *Mill, most notably in his On Liberty of 1859. As a 'domin
ant ideology', liberalism in the nineteenth century meant freedom to own property and to
trade in property and commodities without excessive taxation and arbitrary interference by
the state. The defence of liberty was construed in 'negative' terms as the protection of
each person's freedom to do as he or she pleases without harm to the freedom of another
per\on to do the same. Government had to be 'limited', and it had to be 'representative' of
the interests of the society it served. The state was to be the faithful servant of *civil
society.
The term 'civil society' in social thought-a term first developed by the eighteenth-
century English and Scottish political economists-has come to refer to imtitutiom in
society that mediate between the laws and actions of the state and the private ,elf-
interested actiom of
individuals and famil1l' . In thl' contl'xt of 11 i rll'tL·entIi-century liberal ideology, civil

society essentially encompassed all those who owned property, all those who owned a
stake in the wealth of the nation, and who therefore held an entitlement to the vote. Civil
society thus referred predominantly to the social and political agency of the middle
classes. The German term for civil society, biirger/iche Gesellschaft, expressed in its very
semantic form this key social fact that civil society is the society of the burghers or the
bourgeoisie, the people of the towns. The bourgeoisie referred to those people whose
wealth derived not from long standing rent on inherited land-as with the aristocracy-but
from trade and industry. Civil society in this respect also included the Jews among the
European middle classes, many of whom held banking interests and who gained various
civil rights in the nineteenth century, but who had previously been excluded from political
and legal representation.
Recent decades have seen several influential historical studies of the relationship
between liberal political ideology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the
growth of an international capitalist economy. Three important examples of these are the
works of the historians Albert *Hirschman, Karl *Polanyi, and Eric *Hobsbawm. These
historians' writings are discussed in Box 1.
The British Marxist historian Eric *Hobsbawm provides an illuminating periodization of modern social history in his four books
The Age of Revolution 1789-1848, The Age of Capital 1848-1875, The Age of Empire 1875-1914, and TheAgeofExtremes 1914-
1991 (Hobsbawm 1962, 1975, 1987, 1994). First
comes a period of highly charged political agitation between the first French Revolution of 1789 and
the defeated European revolutions of 1848. Then comes a period of both capitalist expansion and
colonial aggrandizement in which the European states increasingly turned toward colonial market
places for the products of their industrial economies. This created the series of imperial rivalries which
exploded in the outbreak of the First World War. Hobsbawm characterizes the period 1914 to 1991 as
the 'short twent ieth century', in contrast to the 'long nineteenth century'. In his synopsis, the twentieth
century effectively came to a close with the fall of the communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc and the
end of the Cold War.
27
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the right to vote was slowly extended to less
wealthy sections of the population in various parts of Europe, based on a lower
property franchise. We must, however, bear in mind that truly universal suffrage,
including crucially the extension of the vote to women, did not arrive until the
twentieth century. And we must not forget that in the nineteenth-century USA, where
European immigrants enjoyed more rights than they had done in the Old World, black
Americans remained slaves until the Civil War and did not gain full civil rights until
the 1960s.
In France in the 1830s, in the period of the Restoration of the monarchy after the 1789
revolution and the defeat of Napoleon, one of the most influential political commentators
on liberalism was Ale_xis de*IarqueyiLle..Tocqueville was a civil servant of the French state
under the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Today he is chiefly celebrated for his
book Democrqcy i!1 ne_'-irn of 1835, as well as for a later study Tile Ancien Regime and the
Causeso[Riv lutio11.infrance of 1856. Tocqueville's main concern in his treatise on
America was to evaluate the factors contributing to social stability in the New World
compared with old Europe. Tocqueville reflected on calls for democracy and reform in
eighteenth-century French society. These calls never found realization in France until the
turbulent years of the 1790s when they soon degenerated into dictatorship under the terror
of the despotic revo lutionary Robespierre. Tocqueville contrasted this violent
introduction of democracy in France with the more peaceful society of the United States.
Because American society pos sessed no *stratified structure led by aristocratic elites with
high status and no monarchy, it was less vulnerable to violent overthrow by mob rule. In
Tocqueville's observation, *solidar: ity in American society arose from the presence of
'voluntary associations' based on small dusters of individuaJs abte to triist and cooperate
with one another for mutual interests. He saw these voluntary associations as having their
roots in the Protestant s ns of th(;.uriginal English settlers. They provided the basis for
the spirit of *egalitarianism and personal self-
-reTiarice in nineteenth-century American life.
Tocqueville's writings have been influential for contemporary liberal thinking about
pluralism and mutual cooperation in civil society (compare Putnam 2000). However, it is
important to note that Tocqueville's view of American society was not uniformly positive.
Tocqueville conjectured that as the American economy and population grew larger
and more complex, Americans would forfeit the safeguards that had once protected them
from
problems of masspopular dlctat rsh.ip based on a 'tyranny of the majority'. His fears have
not be;;:;-p o ed i:-o-be wfioTiy misplaced in the more recent twentieth- and twenty-first
century history of the USA.
Alongside liberalism, a further predominant intellectual movement in nineteenth
century society was *positivism. Positivism is particularly represented by the thought of
Auguste *Comte and Herbert *Spencer.
Positivism: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer

Auguste Comte is not only the originator of the term 'sociology'. He is also the progenitor
of the conception of science known as positivism. In his Cours de philosophie positive of 1830
a_lld his Systeme de politique positive of 1851, Comte held that genuine knowledge arose
purely from *empirical sense-observation, free of distorting *metaphysical
preconceptions. In Comte's view, disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and history
had to follow the
28
same principles set down by the already established natural sciences. Comte believed that
empirical positive science would serve definite social purposes. Once human beings had
found scientific answers to the world, they would be able to apply these answers to the
removal of suffering, violence, and conflict.
Comte claimed to show that all societies evolved over time by laws of progress. Societies
evolved towards higher stages of *integration in which social arrangements were reached
by peaceful and rational means. Comte spoke of a 'law of three stages'. First r_ri_e a
'theological stc1ge.' in which human beings mistake. the natural world for themselves. The
theological stage is characterized by beliefs in spirits and supernatural forces, where
human beings project onto the natural world their own habits of thought, like children who
treat inan imate objects as though they are animate creatures. Second came a 'metaphysical
stage' which humanity overcomes superstitious habits and mystical images of its world
by means of abstract concepts. Thirdly and finally came a 'scientific stage' in which
humanity replaces abstract speculative concepts with empirical knowledge based on
unbiased obser vation. In his late writings Comte spoke of the overcoming of traditional
religions through a new 'religion of humanity'. This was to be a secular civil religion in
which human beings would recognize themselves as the authors of their own existence.
Human beings would find ethical communion with one another not in the Church but only
in the state as the most authentic representation of their social belonging.
Herbert *Spencer in England developed similar ideas in the later nineteenth century. In
his The Principles of Sociology of 1882-98, Spencer propounded a theory of social
evolution influenced partly by the writings of Charles *Darwin. Spencer held that liberal
demo.c.@fY and limited government were the best adapted systems of resolving conflict
in soci ty and of distributing goods to its members. Tyrannies or oligarchies were vulnerable
in relation to their social environments. Democracy, in contrast, was more stable in the long
run. Democracy was better adapted and therefore more likely to survive, to be 'selected'
through history.
Spencer's ideas did not directly reproduce Darwin's theory of the 'survival of the fittest'.
Darwin had developed this theory strictly with reference to biological reproduction in the
animal and plant kingdoms and had never thought to apply it to historical-social
affairs. Nevertheless, Spencer's suppositions reflected many popular misconceptions and
prejud ices of the time about the social implications of Darwin's theory and the
evolutionary superiority of European society. Both Spencer's and Comte's
philosophies are in these respects shot through with chauvinistic prejudice. Their
writings are read today mostly for historical interest and are no longer taken seriously as
social theories. Nevertheless, their various concepts of 'evolution', 'adaptation',
*'differentiation', and *'integration' later came to be developed by more sophisticated
theorists in rigorous and non-chauvinistic ways. These notably included *Durkheim
around the turn of the nineteenth century and Talcott *Parsons in the 1930s.
Theories of elites: Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto,

and Robert Michels
The most influential nineteenth-century social writers active before about the 1870s were
all liberal in their basic political views. Liberalism remained for the most part the
dominant ideology of all nineteenth-century social thought until the outbreak of the First
World War.
29
However, over the course of the century, written defences of liberalism show increasing
signs of response to the rising tide of socialism as a political current. Karl *Marx and
Friedrich *Engels were later to emerge as the most dynamic spokesmen of this movement
with a massive impact on politics and society in the twentieth century-even though Marx
himself did not establish a hegemonic movement around himself in his own lifetime.
An increasingly vociferous claim of the period is that the purely formal concepts of
liberty, citizenship, and rights upheld by liberalism had to be made substantive. Several
socialist writers argued that political equality of persons before the law had to become
real social and economic relations of equality, through abolition of exploitation of the
poor and reform of a state that served only the interests of the rich. This critique was
central to the socialist view of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution serving
the interests of the middle classes. In the socialist view, civil society essentially meant the
rule of the bour geoisie. In France, the Comte de *Saint-Simon and Pierre-Joseph
*Proudhon as well as the English Chartists took similar views in the 1830s and 1840s, and
there were kindred voices in Russian social thought, notably in the writings of the
anarchist writer Mikhail Bakunin.
Nineteenth-centurysocial consciousness became increasingly marked by emergent class
tensions and conflicts as a result of processes of industrialization and expanding interna
tional trade. Much nineteenth-century social thought can consequently be read in terms
of an attempt to preserve the framework of liberal politics in response to rising fears of
the breakdown of social order and the claims of socialism. Yet at the very end of the
century, both liberalism and socialism began to receive a series of highly sceptical
diagnoses in the works of three writers chiefly recognized today as theorists of social
elites. These are the Italian-born writers Gaetano *Mosca, Vilfredo *Pareto, and Robert
*Michels.
Mosca, Pareto, and Michels wrote at a time that saw many challenges to the nineteenth
century system of liberal political consensus. These include the emergence of workers'
movements and trade union movements, as well as conservative religious movements.
The three elite theorists questioned the ability of civil society to contain and resolve these
movements' mutually conflicting claims. They also doubted the sincerity and integrity
of the moral and political ideologies governing these movements' representatives. Taking
their cue from *Machiavelli, they speculated that it was the drive for power that
explained the repeated failure of workers' parties to maintain an egalitarian structure and
constantly to relapse into hierarchical structures led by elites and oligarchies.
In his book The Ruling Class, publish d QJ:iginally in 1896, Gaetano *Mosca analysed the
ways-fri. which members of certain narrow social strata manage to reproduce themselves
as seffperpetuapngruling cliques, while at the same time passing themselves off as
represent atives of the 'people' and of popular interests. Mosca subjected Marx's principles
of histor ical *materialist explanatio·n based on 'class struggle' to an analysis of the
behaviour of socialist groups and parties themselves. He concluded that social-democratic
and popular
ment move s such as socialism never achiev their- objectives ithout the
certai
-
--
leadership
n elit of a
e class of intellectuals who speak on behalf of the mass but who at the same time
... -
stand estra rom t
,Jlli.lSS-.
_Michels, in his study Political Parties (1911), applied this analysis directly to
th; organizati--;;-n of tricte u ioris an.cf socialist parties. Mjchels spoke of an 'iron law of
olig_a_r 'Jn_vyhich political organizations, through the internal necessities of discipline
-;nd ad111inistrative cout_inuity, i evita_!:,ly become closed self-perpetuating cliques.
IJO
Vilfredo Pareto, in his treatise The Mind and Society_(:Jf 1916 (originally titled Trattato
di sociologia generale), claimed to discern two basic propensities of human social group
behaviour. The first propensity of social groups was to optimize their pursuit of material
interests, even at the cost of conflict with other groups. The second propensity of social
·groups was always to be led by small dynamic elites, however egalitarian the groups may
feel themselves to be in their initial aspirations. Pareto claimed that all human social
behaviour is driven by certain basic dynamics that he called 'residues' and 'derivations'.
These essentially stemmed from the pursuit of power and material intere;;t, dressed up in
the language of morality. Following Machiavelli, Pareto classified some social movements
as 'foxes' and some as 'lions'. 'Foxes' were short-term opportunist movements skilled at
combining diverse interests and seizing power through cunning strategies. 'Lions' were
long-term movements based on a principle of persistent 'aggregation', either of a conserv
ative religious kind or of..a revolutionary socialist kind.
Pareto's theories are the arguments of a speculative cynic.They rest on a certain
stubborn idea of the basic dynamics of 'human nature'. They lack sensitivity to different
self descriptions of human actors in-changing cultural and historical contexts. They also
bear a certain intellectual complicity with the rise of fascism in Italy after 1920. However,
there are certain elements in his work, together with that of Mosca and Michels, which
find more sophisticated expression in other early twentieth-century theorists. Max Weber
in particular is close to their work and was himself a teacher of the young Michels.
Despite their conservative and sceptical outlook, the elite theorists also left a mark on the
thinking of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio *Gramsci; and they have had a wide-
ranging impact in con temporary political science, especially in *rational choice theory.
The last sociological thinker we must now consider in this overview is the German writer
Ferdinand *Tonnies.
Community and society: Ferdinand Tennies

A slightly older contemporary of Max Weber and Georg *Simmel, Ferdinand Tonnies
is chiefly celebrated today for his treatise of 1887, Gemeinschaft und Geseliscf-iaft;·
u-;;_.ally translated as Community and Society. In this work, Tonnies argued that what he
called 'communal relations' (*Gemeinsc_ha ) had increasingly come to be replaced by what
he called *'societal relations' (*Gesellscha ), through processes of industrialization,
urbaniza tion, and the spread of a differentiated capitalist economy. Unlike Mill,
Tocqueville, or Marx, Tonnies did not write explicitly from a position of political
advocacy for a particular type of government or social order. He saw himself as a
sociological commentator, rather than a political critic. But his famous book in fact makes
clear a number of quite striking
*normative assumptions about the cohesiveness of the past and the breakdown of social
glue with the coming of mpdern industrialism.
By\ommunal relations' Tonnies meant a type of relations between individuals found in
economies mostly dependent on agriculture in rural contexts, where small population
units are typically congregated in villages. Families would be extended and members of
kin would reside in close proximity. Means of livelihood would tend to be by subsistence,
by direct economy from the land or small-scale craftsmanship. Exchange would largeiy
take- place by payments in kind or services without extensive mediation by money.
Relations of
,111th()rily would lw ( ),f 1 rnci\tly p<.:r\011al kind i11 traditionally dd1n<.:d rule:,. lraditional
heliefs and skills would be transmitted orally and by example. This created a sens qf ongoing
<:ontjntillY_ over time and _g_enerations.
By ( id11T..n:_l<1t_1,n'1 l"1H1111t·\ rr1c,1nt a typv CJI c r,rHliti()ll 111 which rc·lati<il1\ arc·
char H tu1nd hy c rimmc·rual l'Xlhangl' o! g()r>ch and \l"rviu·\ (,ooch Mc· not produn·cl and
imm('cliat('ly c rin,IJfll(·d f r,im th(' land hut iifc• c·xcl1,lflgl'CI for money La hour and ,l'rvicl',
IJn r iml' f()rrnal11.ul, through wage< 011 t rac h. '>ocial n·lation, dividl' hl'twu·n puhlic pro
/r·,,ir,nal rrilc.·\ r,n tht· c,nc· hand ,rnd privatl' pc·r\rJnal ,phnc·\ on thl' fJthl'r. lklation,
lw1wcTn individual\ arl' incrl'a,ingly nwdiakd IJy ar1 intc·rvc·ning world of impcr,onal
..and...anunymous ubjects,..,codes,. and institutions. With the rise of money economies,
commun_i i('.s become fuscd together as a 'mass' in the same places, in the cities, and
con
,1-q11t·nt ly IH_g1n tri irJ\l' thc·ir d1,t1nll idcnlilic.,. Diffcrl'nt partil', intcract with one
another primarily for definite purposes, without preserving a continuous personal
acquaintance of one another over time Social change thus moves faster and becomes
more discontinuous.
Tcjnnies's account of the two types of relationship is somewhat simplistic and suffers
from a certain implicit nostalgia for lost community life. Nevertheless, it resonates with
many of the centrally accepted analytical categories of classical social theory. These
rategories came to be developed in more technical ways by Durkheim, Weber, and
Simmel at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Challenges to Western modernity: reason and

the claims of science
We have now explored two basic aspects of the theme of modernity in social theory.
first, we have discussed some leading substantive dimensions of modernizing processes
in Western society, grouped around the three analytical areas of 'cultural modernity',
'political modernity', and 'socio-economic modernity'. Second we have looked at some
leading theories and discourses of modernity in nineteenth-century European social
thought, represented by the movements of political economy, utilitarianism, liberalism,
positivism, and socialism and by the names of Smith, Mill, Tocqueville, Comte, and
othcrs.
We now turn to the two complex questions signalled at the outset of this chapter. The
first is the question of how far these Western aspects of modernity have applicability to
all cultures and societies of the globe Is there one general paradigm of modernity that can
be applied to all societies, or are there many different ways in which societies can be
modern? The second question concerns whether there are any darker sides to the claims
of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social thinkers about 'progress', 'science',
'reason', and 'enlightenment'. We have already referred to some notable ideologies and
prejudices of nineteenth-century thought, and we must now took at these more closely.
Put simply, can the application of rational and scientific principles to social life and social
organization
be regarded as in every respect a 'good thing'?
We take up these questions in turn, beginning with the issue of Western-centred bias.
32
Eurocentrism in social theory

To address the problem of *'Eurocentrism' and general Western-centredness in social the
ory, it is worth first noting some ways in which sociology came to be institutionalized as a
scientific discipline in Western universities in the twentieth century. Some of the most
influential figures in mid-century American sociology were European emigres, and
several were also Jewish exiles from Nazi Germany. As Europe descended into chaos in
the 1930s and 1940s, sociology and social theory-like many other academic subjects-
found a flourishing home in the USA. The relative prosperity and stability of American
society in the 1940s and 1950s suggested that America's political and economic system
represented a model for the global study of processes of social modernization. It was
in the USA that many of the canonical concepts of scientific sociology came to be
defined. These concepts had been mooted by nineteenth-century European writers, but not
always in systematic ways. They included the concepts of social 'evolution' and
'organization', social
*'differentiation', *'integration' and 'adaptation', 'structure', 'action' and *'interaction', as
well as *'stratification', power, -democratization, and the 'mass society'. These concepts
received intense analytical discussions in the USA in academic journals such as the
American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review, as well as at
conferences and subsection committees of the American Sociological Association (founded
in 1905) and the International Sociological Association (founded in 1949).
All the leading figures of this generation wanted to discard what they perceived as the
ideological dogmas of nineteenth-century European thought. Norbert *Elias, for example,
who emigrated to Britain, devoted his life's work to showing how the concept of 'civiliza
tion', or the *'civilizing process', had validity as a technical sociological concept only
when it was rigorously distinguished from notions of cultural superiority (Elias 1939).
It is, however, fair to say that not all mid-twentieth-century social theorists overcame
the Eurocentric and Western-centred prejudices of earlier generations of social
though(Many tended to take it as a matter of course that 'modern society' found its clearest
and most paradigmatic form in the specific course of industrial development undertaken
by European and North American society:10ther world regions were often assumed to be
still traditional or not-yet-modern societies. Furthermore, it was believed that insofar as
other regions of the world became mo ern, they would necessarily take on the same
features as those manifested in the history of the West. In the influential words of Max
Weber, penned in 1920 and first translated into English by Talcott Parsons in 1930:
A product of modern European civilization studying the problem of universal history is bound
to ask himself, and rightly so, to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed
that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared
which (as we like to think) lie on a line of development having universal significance and validity.
(Weber 1920c 13)
( These words of Weber should be treated with some care. Weber himself did not believe
that other regions of the world either should or would necessarily develop in the same
way as the WestJ·-le was fascinated by the sociologically relative position of the West in
world history, devoting a significant part of his work to comparing intrinsic differences
between the West and other civilizations of the world, including notably the ancient
civilizations of
33
India and China. But in his concern with non-Western civilizations, Weber was to some
extent exceptional among the canonical sociological theorists of the early twentieth
century. By the time of the emergence of American modernization theory in the 1950s in
the *structural-functionalist school developed by Talcott Parsons, the possibility that
other cultures beside the European-North American bloc might represent alternative
instances of modernity and modernizing processes was not seriously considered.
The assumption that only one basic paradigm of modernity exists, that this paradigm is
represented by Europe and North America, and that all other societies of the world can
and must reproduce this paradigm insofar as they become modern at all, has been
challenged in recent decades by new generations of scholars concerned with problems of
ethnocentrism in social theory and research) Since the withdrawal of the European powers
from their former colonies in the 1950s and 1960s and the rise of increasingly
multicultural societies, new sensitivities have arisen toward the relevance of different
sociological explanations for different regions of the world. Sociologists have shown how
different cultures and civiliza tions can be modern in different ways, at different times,
and in different combinations of the features invoked by classical social thought. It need
not follow that largely agrarian societies-such as large parts of India, Asia, and Africa-fall
squarely outside the framework of modernity, or that the only respect in which they might
enter processes of modernization is by undergoing industrialization processes on the
model of nineteenth- and twentieth century Europe and North America. There are many
ways in which societies become modern, and some of these may share features in
common with Europe, while others may not. There are no fixed certainties in theories of
social change, and tpere is no nni)ine r
s:-9u..r2e..thxol,lg_h, .""..hkh aJl_soch::.ti.e.s...ncrd-µass in .order to becomi;...DJ..Qggrn. To borrow a
phrase developed in recent years by the Israeli historical sociologist S. N. *Eisenstadt,
there can be multiple trajectories of modernization, or 'multiple modernities' (Eisenstadt
2002). From the side of *postcolonial, or anti-colonial, interventions in dominant
Western discourses about modernity and rationality, two significant writers have been the
Algerian writer Frantz *Fanon and the Palestinian writer Edward *Said. Their works are
discussed
in Box 2.
The darker sides of Enlightenment

We turn now finally to the second question about darker sides to the idea of
*Enlightenment. This issue is also relevant to the question of the nature of Western
modernity and Western rationalism. The men of the eighteenth-century European
Enlightenment believed confidently not only that their theories were true but also that
their theories would be beneficial for social life when put into practice. Many of them
believed that enlightened exploration and exploitation of the laws of nature and of the
laws of society would naturally increase the sum of human happiness. In their view, the
application of reason and science to society necessarily meant progress.
Today, from the standpoint of the end of the most violent century in human history, it is
possible to give only limited endorsement to such assumptions. On the one hand, there are
certainly some principles we can and should endorse. We cannot turn our back on the
philosophy of the Enlightenment when we think of developments in medicine and of
some technical inventions that facilitate human purposes by reducing dependency on
34
BOX 2. POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM AND 'ORIENTALISM': FRANTZ FANON AND

EDWARD SAID
A new area of intellectual partisanship in recent decades has been what is loosely termed *'postcolonial
studies'. Postcolonial criticism has influenced many aspects of contemporary historical, literary, social,
and cultural studies. It has arisen partly as a consequence of ongoing ethnic diversification in both
Western and non-Western societies after European decolonalizat1on and increasing globalization in
world affairs. Two influential postcolonial theorists have been Frantz *Fanon and Edward *Said.
Frantz Fanon was active in the 1950s as a black Algerian writer In the war of independence for his
country against French occupation. In Wretched of the Earth (1961) Fanon wrote of the effects of col
onization and racism on the material welfare and the psychological health and mental outlook of
African people. In this work, Fanon demonstrates the oppressiveness of colonialism not only in terms
of its control over territory but also in its hold over indigenous African contexts of self-expression. Fanon
shows how Western societies have enjoyed *hegemony not only In respect of political and economic political power but als
The Palestinian writer Edward Said develops a similar position in his influential book Orienta/ism (1978), a study of the i
physically exhausting manual labour. We also cannot forget that our modern idea of
a rationally organized state, guaranteeing universal education, health care, and social
security for the elderly, the infirm, the young, and those in the process of seeking work,
owes its inception to the ideas of the Enlightenment. A fundamental principle of modern
criminal and civil justice systems is that the function of laws of state is not to wreak
vengeance on guilty parties but to reprimand and reform them and to compensate the
victims or injured partie . This too we owe to the social philosophers of the eighteenth
century. Likewise, all modern ideas of 'civil rights' and 'human rights' derive entirely from
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In all these respects, the idea of the value of apply
ing enlightened scientific enquiry to political and socio-economic organization is not
something we can lightly dismiss. It is the linchpin, the governing presupposition, of our
modern civilization.
On the other hand, many sinister consequences of this confidence in reason and science
have become evident to us over the past century. Today we realize that technological
Clf S<;IC-Al f'CIAL HiEOR'f, i 35
invention-, are not emancipatory for human beings in every respc<.t or in any um quivo<.al
,cnse. Western medicine has been beneficial for society in many respects but not in every
H''-pcct The rnmmerual application of bi<Khemical scilme to agriculture and industry
has not alleviated hunger, malnutrition, and ill health in any unambiguously positive way.
',<1t/J'f'h•. .,,,,lf,111·',ldl! fJ<,rth, fr(·( flldfk1·t l1,1\lw1·r1dlJi'r)('fJ(J;tliJw·11cyr,!ll1JmiJflW\'ll
being in all regards. Hospitals, clinics, prisons, and s<.hools have not in every respect fur
the•ed <,ecurity, health, education, and knowledge for society. In some respects these
imtitut1om have served fumtions of control, <focipline, rc.gimentation, and surveillance in
modern societies. Projects to realize utilitarian ideals of the 'greatest happiness of the
greatest number' have fr<:quently endangered rather than safeguarded values of freedom
of thought, enquiry, belief, expression, and creativity in modern social history. )
As wil. bec.:ome clear in latn chapters of this book, numerous modern social theorists
ha·1e heavily cri ized the more optimistic assumptions of cighte:enth- and nineteenth
century soc.ial thought. Many writers point to ways in whi<.h ideas that appear rational
can aho be deeply irrat10nal. Many emphasize that what is healthy and normal from one
point of view can also be deeply pathological from another point of view. Many writers
demon ',trate that soence does not necessarily contribute to the increase of human
happiness and is n<1t neceHanly superior to myth or religion as a system of
understanding.
< >nt of the mo<,t horrific <..ase of the inc.r1tical social acceptance of science and techno
logy that has been of repeated interest to twentieth-century social theorists and philo
-,r,r,iir-r-,1, t Ii< rn<,·<-rit 1r,n a/Jc! U'>l'. r,f th,- n tH lc·ar hrJmh. I ,Jday tht prw,1h1lity rJf hum an gtnetic
, 1oning may represent a new case of defective moral public restraint of the uses of science
;,,,,; t,-, hr.,,J, ,g::_ Ji,,t ht tJ,.-,,. c ,1,1·, rqir<:'>(·r1t dtepl y pr<Jblemat1, 1 n,tantt'> oft hl·application
of natural -science knowledge to social and political life But social theorists have also been
intt're<,ted in num€'rous misuses and misapplicat10ns specifically of social-science know
J,-d,-s<·tr,·,,,, 1;;/ anrJ P' ;l1t Jr.al lif<·. r ,r it 1c, hav(· fl'Jlflttd trJ tht way, in which g(Jvern mtnh and
•,1;,1,-·, r,ur·,,m1,-s pr,Jir ir·, rJ<-rivr·rl di rte tly frr,m rJi,uplin(·<, ,uch a tumr1mi,,, p,ychology,
rr- r,;,;z,·rri<·rit ·,t 1di•·,, and f1u,; n<·,, ,t urJi(:'> tan v,muimt, IJ\.'. rl'.'>J)'Jn,iblt lr,r dehumanizing
,,r •1,-,hn1,rruf1r, uit1u,-, ,,f ;,;,,- urianu· 1r1 vAi<:ty. \\'h<:n govunm<:nt, and ,tatt, exploit
-,,,r);J! r)r-ri, ,. h11,•:,l<·rlg•· fr,r fJ'Jlir ie:, ,,ril'.ntuJ rJV<:rwhclmingly trJ <Jbje,tivt, of rfficiency,
proriurtiv1ry, rmkriirw,\, anrJ ,y\/ernutir ity-at the: txpeme: ,,f open mrJral and political
public debate-ther( is a danger that social members become treated as pure objects of
admin
istratirin. fhert 1s a danger that social citizens become treated like patients of a social
'/ Jl:r, t iii, , /. pr·r mwri' in · r,, 1a) tngrntermg', t<J bt umtr<Jlled in fltd'>'> numh(•r . Lat tr chapttr
of this brJOk will discu s the development of such critiques of science, modernity, and
w ,-,,-r 1i;;1,,, 1 r1 t rw ,,-;r,rk ,,/ .\11 ax \'.'<:!Ju!( J1aptu - ;,Ill "v\ e,t<:rn \1Mxi ,m (< ,hapttr 7 ), JrJ
th<: 1,J,·c1', ,,f '>1;,;rnund 'I r<:urJ l(,h;iptn ½;, in thi: wrJrk 1Jf \1ilhe:I •1-,,ucault /Chapter 9),
in ftm ir,1-,1 -,r,r i;;I I fwr,r:, II ,haptr-r J l /, JrJ 'pr,,tJTHJ(Jernhm /(_haptu, 12 ;ind 1 ). and
,tvcral other
context .
/ J ,,r rri;.,11 v -,,,, i:J! t hr:r,r J ',h, r ,m: r,f m, ,,t drc:adful in ,tanll'> <Jf th l'. unre,tfili ncd applicatifJn
./ nf 5cient1f:c rationalizing principles to social organization is the rise of *totalitarianism)
in £Jropt in the 1930s, and in particular in the "-azi Holocaust of the Jews. This case is
;;,., ,, :,1·11 brir-fly 111 B,,x . •Mth rduu,u t<J the \\1,rk ,,f Hannah ',\rtndt and Zygmunt
Bauman.
BOX 3. HANNAH ARENDT AND ZYGMUNT BAUMAN ON TOTALITARIANISM AND

THE HOLOCAUST
The Holocaust has preoccupied numerous social theorists not only for the Nazis' barbaric use of chem
ical technology-lethal gas as a method of mass extermination. It has also concerned social
theorists for the Nazis' use of planned, calculated, and scientific methods of controlling and
organizing social agents. For many critics, the Holocaust is a terrible case of the misuse of both
natural science and social science-specifically of social science perverted into the science of
mastery Over people. Two notable theorists in this regard have been Hannah * Arendt and
Zygmunt *Bauman.
In her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, secretary of the planning commission for the Final
Solution, published as Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, and also in her larger book The Origins of
Totalitarianism of 1951, Arendt argues that the Holocaust was more than a purely contingent historical
crime perpetrated in Germany in the 1940s against the Jewish people. Without diminishing the enorm
ity and historical specificity of the Jewish people's suffering, Arendt argues that the Holocaust demon
strates a universal tendency towards barbarism latent in all modern mass societies. Her thesis is that
when science and technology and rational techniques of planning and calculation are used for the sole
and overwhelming purpose of gaining political and commercial control over mass numbers of people,
society descends into barbarism. In her view, the two cardinal types of totalitarian regime represented
by Hitler's fascism and Stalin's Soviet communism are only the most virulent examples of a tendency
toward totalizing technical control over human beings latent in all modernity-including our own
allegedly 'free' societies oriented to liberal democracy and market capitalism. Arendt argued that
when violence is routinized, sanitized, and taken for granted in any society, the possibility of the
perpetration of evil acts becomes banal. To the extent that Eichmann routinely followed orders and
fulfilled the duties of hig office, he behaved in principle no differently from any ordinary functionary
of the modern state or of the modern business corporation. According to Arendt, Eichmann's shared
personal responsibility for the Holocaust gives us a lesson in the 'banality of evil'.
Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) develops Arendt's thesis in notable
ways Bauman argues that 'civilization' and the *'civilizing process' do not mean the removal of
violence.
They mean only the control of violence, its concentration in the hands of a sovereign power. In this
sense, it was the Nazis' highly 'civilized' use of rational bureaucratic principles of organizational
Conclusion
Modernity canbecharacterized as a distinctive kind of social attitude to time. Modem atti
tudes to time tend to involve processes of critical reflection on the past with a view to pro
jects of collective determination of the future. Traditional attitudes tend to be marked by
forms of acceptance and preservation of the past, without a developed belief in rational
social agency over the future.
ClASSICAl SOCIAL TiffORV. I 37
Real historical contexts give us examples of many different combinations of modern

and traditional attitudes across cultures and civilizations.The particular concentration of
mod ern attitudes and modernizing processes in European society from around the
fifteenth century onwards has been very influential in the development of modern social
theory. Many nineteenth- and many early twentieth-century social theorists regarded the
European and North American experience of modernity as paradigmatic for all societies.
This Western-centred assumption of classical social theory is difficult to sustain today
because it ignores many different possible trajectories of modernizing experiences in
different regions of the world.
However, once we bear in mind this limitation, it is possible, and important, to
underline a few key features of the Western experience of modernity. These features
include the rise of an international capitalist economy, which is bound up with processes
of industrialization and urbanization and the rise of the nation-state. Also important to the
Western experi ence are ideas of democracy and representative government, together with
the rise of science and technology. With the declining political power of religious
institutions come processes of secularization and scepticism toward myth and traditional
authority.
In the classical terms of Ferdinand Tonnies, modernizing processes tend to demonstrate
a preponderance oi 'societal relations' of impersonal instrumental exchange over 'communal
relations' of personal localized interaction. Unlike most agrarian and tribal social forms,
modernizing societies are typically extensively differentiated in their systems of political
and economic organization.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European social writers frequently saw these kinds
of developments in an unambiguously positive light. Although some writers, such as
Tocqueville, took a more sceptical and nuanced view, others, such as Comte and Spencer,
equated reason and science unequivocally with progress. Today we are less inclined to be
optimistic. Today we recognize that reason, science and enlightenment are all two-sided
affairs. As constructs of the mind and constructs of society, science, and enlightenment are
implicated in ome of the worst excesses of the modern world, including fascism, totalitari
anism, and capitalistic industrial exploitation of the earth. But we should also recognize that
reason, science, and the pursuit of enlightenment remain indispensable to the conduct of our
lives. To think critically and responsibly about reason and science is itself to think reasonably
and scientifically. Therefore it is advisable not simply to think of the follies of modernity as
consequences of the use of reason. It is more appropriate to think of them as consequences of
the neglect of reason, as consequences of a certain forgetting of the moral intelligence of
reason. As will become clear in the remaining chapters of this book, this is an insight of
cardinal importance to many of the leading themes and debates of modern social theory.
■ QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 1
What is a 'modern' attitude to life? What is a 'traditional' attitude to life? Are there any
'modern' forms of life that can at the same time be described as 'traditional'?
2 What features of social-historical change best characterize the Western experience of
modernity' In what sense is it appropriate to speak of 'the West'? Are there any experiences of
modernity which are not Western?
38 ; usn,J rlAll RINCTO N
3 How informative is Ferdinand Ti:innies's characterization of modernity in terms of the

replacement of 'communal relations' by 'societal relations' 7
4 What are some of the strengths and weaknesses of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
European social thought for discussion today?
5 What is meant by 'the Enlightenment'? Is the Enlightenment a legacy for which we should
be thankful?
6 Is it possible to speak of reason and progress in history? Is it possible not to speak of reason
and progress in history?
FURTHER READING
For some good overviews of the makings of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century
European social thought, the following titles can be recommended: Stuart Hughes's Consciousness
and Sodety: The Re-orientation of European Social Thought (Knopf, 1958), Geoffrey Hawthorn's
Enlightenment and Despair: The Making of Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 1976), Donald
Levine's Visions of the Sociological Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Wolf Lepenies's
Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Johan
Heilbron's The Rise of Social Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Steven Seidman's
Liberalism and the Origins of European Soda/ Theory (Blackwell, 1983), John Burrow's The Crisis of
Reason: European Thought 1848-1914 (Yale University Press, 2000), and Raymond Aron's Main
Currents in Sociological Thought (Penguin, 1965; 1968) (in two volumes).
An accessible encyclopedic introduction to European history and civilization is Norman Davies's
Europe: A History (Oxford ,University Press, 1996). For an introduction to the culture of the
European Renaissance, try Peter Burke's The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (Blackwell,
1998). For sur veys of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a good reference source is Alan C.
Kors's Encyclopaedia of the Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2002). For more in-depth
discussion of debates about the rise of the West and the emergence of capitalism, industrialization,
and the nation-state, see Chapter 6 of this book by Dennis Smith. See also the titles cited in the
further reading for Chapter 6. For Max Weber's views on the rise of the West, see Chapter 3 of
this book by Gianfranco Poggi, and also Wolfgang Schluchter's The Rise of Occidental Rationalism
(University of California Press, 1981).
The further debates mentioned in this chapter about modernity, science, myth, civilization,
tech nocracy, rationality, and irrationality are developed at length in this book in Chapter 7 by
Douglas Kellner (on Western Marxism), in Chapter 8 by Anthony Elliott (on psychoanalysis), in
Chapter 9 by Samantha Ashenden (on structuralism and post-structuralism), in Chapter 11 by
Lisa Adkins (on feminist theory), in Chapter 12 by Barry Smart (on postmodernism), and in
Chapter 13 by Gerard Delanty (on modernity after postmodernism).
For an introduction to the work of Hannah Arendt, see Phillip Hansen's Hannah Arendt (Polity
Press, 1993). For a collection of extracts from Arendt's writings, try The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter
Baehr (Penguin, 2000). For an introduction to postcolonial studies, see Robert J. C. Young's
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2001). See also Henry Schwartz and Sangeeta
Ray (eds.), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Blackwell, 2000), and Henry Louis Gates and
Kwame Anthony Appiah's Dictionary of Global Culture (Penguin, 1998).
39
- WEBSITES
SocioSite at www2.fmg.uva.nl/sociosite/index.html Contains links to numerous sociology-related

sites.
A Sociological Tour Through Cyberspace at www.trinity.edu/-mkearl/index.html Displays links
to areas of sociology, with a section on theorists.
Virtual Library of Sociology, at http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/w3virtsoclib/ Provides a search
engine with a useful theory section devoted to key thinkers.
Modernity at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity Offers a comprehensive overview of the
concept of modernity with links to related terms and historical events.
The European Enlightenment at www.wsu.edu/-dee/ENLIGHT Displays useful accounts of the
culture of the Enlightenment.
Classical Social Theory, II:
Karl Marx and Emile
Durkheim
Antonino Palumboand Alan Scott
Karl Marx: historical materialism and the critique of idealist philosophy 41

Marx, Hegel, and Feuerbach 42
Political economy and the critique of capitalism 43
Feudalismand capitalism 44
Use value, exchange value, and the commodity form 45
Labour, exploitation, and commodity fetishism 46
Capitalist expansion and self-destruction 47
Thecritiqueof political liberalism 48
The state, civil society, and religion 48
Private property, reform, and revolution 49
tmileDurkheim: sociologyas an autonomous science 51
Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method 51
Solidarity and social differentiation:Durkheim's The Division
of Labour in Society 53
Solutionsto anomie: occupational groups and intermediaryagencies 54
Morality and civil society 56
Trust, contracts, and moral individualism 56
The state and secular education 57
Religion and social evolution:Durkheim's The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life 58
Conclusion 59
FURTHER READING 61
WEBSITES 62
CLASSICAL SOCIAL THEORY, II 41
Karl *Marx and Emile *Durkheim differ profoundly in their views about society.
Durkheim was 24 on Marx's death in 1883 and rarely refers explicitly to the earlier
thinker. Marx, for his part, did not subscribe to Durkheim's later nineteenth-century vision
of a liberal impartial study of society, and on the few occasions where he used August
*Comte's term 'sociology', which had limited currency in the mid- to late nineteenth
century, it was to pour scorn on the pretensions of a bourgeois science of society. Yet
despite these profound differences of outlook, Marx and Durkheim were both centrally
concerned with the emergence of modern capitalism, and in particular with the rise of the
modern system of the *division of labour and the evolution of a market society. Both
approach these devel opments by focusing on the effects that the spread of market
relations had on *solidarity and on society's ability to reproduce itself. Both therefore had
to engage with the causes and implications of key developments-the Industrial Revolution
in particular-as well as key events such as the French Revolution. Both sought to revise
the simplistic and apolo getic accounts of capitalist society commonly found in
nineteenth-century social thought. Where they differ most strikingly is in the conclusions-
the lessons-they draw from their intellectual engagement with modernity.
This chapter provides an overview of the main intellectual projects of Marx and
Durkheim, treating each thinker in turn. We consider how both Marx and Durkheim
produce accounts of the nature of the modern division oflabour and the nature of the
state and *civil society that in some respects are comparable and in other respects
radically divergent. We begin with Marx.
Karl Marx: historical materialism and the

critique of idealist philosophy
Karl Marx was born in Trier in Germany into a middle-classJewish family, his father
having converted to Protestantism to protect his position as a lawyer. Marx studied law,
philoso phy, and history at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, where he became one of
the 'Young Hegelians', a movement of left-leaning followers of the philosopher G. W. F.
Hegel. His radicalism having barred him from an academic career, Marx turned to
journalism in 1842 when he became editor of the liberal newspaper the Rheinische
Zeitung. The Prussian authorities soon forced the paper to close, and in the following year
Marx emigrated to Paris where he became involved in the radical politics of German
emigres and French socialists. There he met Friedrich *Engels, the son of a German
industrialist with textile manufacturing interests in Manchester.
In 1844 Marx worked on his Economics and Philornphical Manuscripts which developed
a philosophical critique of capitalism. In the same year he and Engels moved to Brussels
on their expulsion from france. In this period Marx published The German Ideology, co-
written with Engels. Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto, which announced the
appear ance of a 'spectre' of communism that would haunt Europe, appeared in 1848, the
year of revolutions throughout continental Europe. In that year Marx was able to return to
Germany in order to found the radical Neue Rhcinische Zeitung in Cologne, but this too
was suppressed, forcing Marx to emigrate to London where he was to spend the rest of his
life.
42 /:NTONiNO PiHUMB0 AND,'HAN SCOTT
In Britain, Marx and Engels continued to involve themselves in the politics of the
Communist League with the aim of convincing the communist movement to adopt their
scientific approach. It was in London that Marx devoted himself to historical and
economic research, famously in the British Library. His mature works are marked by a
shift away from the philosophical influences of his youth-of which he had already been
critical-towards economic theories. His attention focused increasingly on Scottish and
English political economy, notably the theories of Adam *Smith and David *Ricardo. It
was his engagement with political economy that was to mark the highpoint of his
thought and enable him to develop a general theory of capitalism. The 1850s and 1860s
saw the publication of the key works of Marx's economic theory, including the much
delayed publication of n)lume 1of C1pit<1/ (Di1s K,1pit,1/) in 1Sb7. \Lin.\ health decli1wd in
the 1s:-o and it was only after his death in 1883 that the second and third volumes of
C.1pital appeared, edited by Engels.
The first important event in the development of Marx's thinking is his engagement with
German idealist philosophy. It is with this that we begin.
Marx, Hegel, and Feuerbach

Marx's thinking developed at first in response to the *idealist philosophy of G. W. F. *Hegel,
and especially the version subscribed to by the Young Hegelians. Hegel had \iewed the
course of history as a process in which the human species obtains ever-increasing know
ledge of itself. Hegel had held that history developed through 'contradictions' between
ideas of reason and given realities. These contradictions necessarily resolwd themselves
bY a process of rational development which he called *dialectic. This logical pro ression
or dialectic had as its goal a condition of freedom and 'absolute knowledge', consisting in
the reconciliation of mind and matter, or of 'spirit' and 'nature', or of 'subject' and 'object'.
History moved logically from stages of 'thesis' to stages of 'antithesis' and then to stages
of 'synthesis'. In his own time, Hegel saw the modern state as the highest expression of
community, and he saw Christianity as the highest religion.
In contrast to Hegel, Marx adopted a stridently *materialist,iew of history. 1farx insisted
that all mental or spiritual life is fundamentally dependent on, and ret1ective of, the
search of the human species for material survival. In the later development of larxist
thinking, this came to be known as Marx's *historical materialism. It was for this reason
that larx initially turned to the philosopher Ludwig *Feuerbach, who had also criticized
Hegel in favour of a radical materialism. Feuerbach summed up his philosophy in a now
famous, if rather facile, pun: 'Man ist, was er isst': 'one is what one eats'. Feuerbach saw
religion as a projection of human qualities onto the infinite. Religion was a symptom of
man's alienated state. Man was not the creation of God; God was the creation of man.
Traditional religion had presented the world upside down in an illusory, inverted image.
Thus armed, Marx was to mount scathing attacks on central Hegelian themes and other
ideas in the history of philosophy. According to Marx, religion, the state, and bourgeois
society were not to be seen as the embodiment of Hegel's idea of reason. Rather, they were
to be seen as *ideological reflexes of society's material structure. Histor} was not an account
of the long march of reason in human affairs. It was a chronicle of the ongoing struggle of
exploiters and exploited, of the ruling classes and the subjugated classes. In his Economic
,111d I'/1ilowplih M,11111saipts of IS-H l\larx argued that capitalism destwYs \\·hat feuerbach
.r S',ICA SO'"li,L THEOKY ii 43
had called the *'species-being' of humanity. Capitalism degrades the essentially social
nature of human beings into a merely selfish, egmstic nature. From Hegel and Feuerbach,
Marx quickly moved to a who) sale critique of philosophy as a potential instrument
of social change and emancipation. In his 'Theses on Feuerbach' of 1845, he famously
stated that 'philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
change it' (1845: 423).
Yet despite his antagonistic relation to Hegel, Marx was to remain deeply indebted to
German idealist philosophy. From Hegel, Marx retained a *teleological conception of his
tory in which historical facts are connected to each other in a scheme driven by an
ultimate goal or 'telos'. Marx's thinking consistently embodied Hegel's conception of a
dialectic in which social change is seen as the outcome of attempts to solve inherent
contradictions between opposing historical forces. Similarly, Marx also incorporated
important elements of the philosophy of Hegel's main intellectual predecessor, Immanuel
*Kant. When Marx insisted that science is the work of aitique, he borrowed the concept of
'critique' from Kant. 'Critique' for Kant had meant examination of the 'conditions of the
possibility of experi ence'. In Marx's view these 'conditions of the possibility of
experience' were not only logical or intellectual; they were also material and social.
We now consider how Marx elaborates these ideas in the context of economic theory
and the critique of capitalism.
Political economy and the critique of capitalism

Marx's thinking about economics develops as an attempt to undermine the assumption
that market society is the spontaneous outcome of natural human tendencies to produce
and exchange. That assumption found a famous theoretical elaboration in the early pages
of Adam Smith's TheWealth o(Nations (1776). According to *Smith, the *division
oflabour is the unintended consequence of multiple individual actions, each of which is
driven by self-seeking natural drives. It is the market's 'invisible hand' that ensures that the
public good is secured at the same time that each individual pursues his or her own private
interests. In the market society, public and private interests coincide with one another.
Marx's lifelong objective was to refute what he saw as this simplistic and apologetic
narrative of capitalism. To this end, he advanced an account of social change that rejected
what he saw as the naive *individualism underlying classical economic theory, or
'political economy'.
Marx saw himself as uncovering the scientific laws underpinning the capitalist bour
geois society of his time. Those laws were to be arrived at through the application of a
general theory of social change, based on the idea of a sequence of transitions from differ
ent modes of production through hi,tory. The three mo\t ,ignificant modes of production in
Marx's theory of history were:
• feudalism, based on relations of bondage between owners of land and landless serfs
or peasants;
• capitalism, based on relations of exploitation between owners of property and
propertyless workers; and
44 ANTONINO PALUMBO AiliO ALAN SCOTT
• communism, based ultimately on a classless society marked by abolition of

private property and a withering away of the state.
Marx described social change as a succession of 'stages of development' each of which is
part of a well-defined sequence or pattern. Each of these modes of production consists in a
configuration of forces of production, comprising technology, and raw materials, and
relations of production, encompassing forms of ocial organization of labour based on laws of
ownership. In a key passage in his 1859 'Preface to the Critique of Political Economy',
Marx describes these forces and relations of production as making up the economic
*'base' of society. On top of this 'base' arises a 'superstructure', consisting of political
institutions encompassing the monarchy, Church, and state and cultural ideas based on
received customs and values, including religion, art, and philosophy. In the later
development of Marxist thought. especially among the more reductive and dogmatic
popularizers of Marx, which also included Engels, this 'superstructure' is said to have the
function of ideologically
*legitimizing the existing economic 'base' of society. It is said to be little more than a
reflec tion of the material interests of the dominant class in society (for further
discussion, see Chapter 7 of this book, pp. 155-6). In Marx's original words:
In the social production of their life, men inevitably enter into definite relations that are
indispen sable and independent of their will, relations of production that correspond to a definite
stage in the development of their material productive forces. The sum of these relations of
production consti tutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a
legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and
intellectual life process in general. It is not the consliousness of men that determines their being,
but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. (Marx 1859: 389)
Marx believed that the inherently exploitative nature of capitalism and its inevitable
self-destruction could be demonstrated from within the standpoint of political economy
itself. His refutation of political economy and his more general critique of received social
thought were to crystallize around six key themes:
• the transition from *feudalism to capitalism;

• use value, exchange value, and the commodity form;
• Jabour, exploitation, and *commodity fetishism;
• capitalist expansion and self-destruction;
• the role of the state, *civil society, and religion;
• private property, reform, and revolution.
We look at these six key elements of Marx's analysis in turn.
Feudalism and capitalism

Marx maintains that the individual producer depicted by political economy is the product
of a market society, not its starting point. All notion of the isolated individual in
political economy is incoherent: 'the human being is ... ananimal which can
individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual
outside society ... is as
45
much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living

together and talking to each other' (1858: 84). Marx's idea of the essentially social and
historical nature of man leads him to connect individual action to the role it plays in given
systems of production and the class division it engenders and reproduces. He takes similar
steps in relation to the central categories of political economy: labour, production,
exchange, market, money, and ownership.
Marx argues that the social nature of labour, production, and exchange means that
individuals face historically given productive forces as an external objective reality. No
change can occur in this objective reality except through the dissolution of the system of
social relations that underpins a historically given mode of production. In this connection,
Marx points out that the genesis of the capitalist system of production is to be found in
the disintegration of *feudalism and of the system of social relations supporting it:
The historical movement which changes the producers into wage-labourers, appears, on the
one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds ... On the other
hand, these new freemen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all
their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal
arrangements.
(1867: 875)
The developments that made the rise of capitalism possible were acts of confiscation of
church land and property by the state, enclosure of common lands into private estates,
dismantling of the medieval system of *guild occupations, and sy ematic destructi of_
!ra_ditional customs and relations qf authority. These changes had the effect of creating a
n w system in whi h s of the ited class in society are left with virtually
no direct access to the means necessary to ensure their material well-being, or to what
Marx called the 'means of production'. Where peasants in the feudal system had access to
land by which to feed themselves, the new type of worker under capitalism possesses only
a sum of money, a wage. *Exploitation based upon principles of personal subjugation and
obligation has been replaced by the seeming obj>ctivity of the labour contract and by the
'cash nexus'. Marx thus sought to show that class relations are inherently conflictual
and that the capitalist mode of production rested on the systemic exploitation of one
class by another class-the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. This explanatory framework
was then used to unmask the ideological nature of bourgeois social, legal, and
political arrangements. Marx's hope was that theory would contribute to the
development of a revolutionary political movement that would, eventually, abolish
class divisions and *emancipate the
individual.
Use value, exchange value, and the commodity form

Capitalism for Marx is that mode of production which uniquely combines private owner
ship of the means of production with commodity production and the profit principle in a
competitive, dynamic, and expanding market. In this definition, Marx follows the English
political economist David *Ricardo in distinguishing between an object's use value and
its exchange value. Where the use value of an object or substance lies in its suitability for
a particular practical purpose, the exchange value of an object lies in the value acquired by
this object as an article of trade-which can be seen as the object's price (although Marx
does not see exchange value as technically the same as price). Commodities are items that
are produced with the sole purpose of being sold. They arc produced exclusively for their
exchange value, for the market, and for profit.
Marx argues that while commodity production existed in pre-capitalist societies,
capitalism is unique because commodity production becomes the dominant organizing
principle for all of society's productive activitie All production becomes production
for the market. Under capitalism, commodity production becomes a circular process in
which value is realized in the market as profit and reinvested into production. In this
sense, capitalism must be sharply distinguislwd from lw,mling .ind piLll\". l lrnkr
cc1p1talis111. tht' embodiment of equivalent values in the medium of 111011er becomes
crucial to this expand ing cycle. The past and future development of capitalism for \-larx
is synon) mous with the extension of the commodification of goods and services and
the absorption of more and more productive activity into the money economy Forms
of production and exchange that exist outside the money economy such as barter are
gradually displaced by market relations. Capitalism tends toward a condition in which all
production becomes commodity production and money becomes the sole medium of
transaction.
Labour, exploitation, and commodity fetishism

An important corollary of this account of commodity production is what Marx defines as
the 'labour theory of value'. In marked opposition to Ricardo and classical political
econom), Marx proposes that the fundamental source of all value is human labour. Human
labour bas the unique capacity to generate more value than it expends in reproducing
itself. On the one hand, Marx speaks of the labour, alue that is expended in any act of
production: this is the value that is necessary for labour power to reproduce itself-Le. the
quantity of energv that a worker expends each day which must be replaced through food
and rest in order that the worker be able to work again on the next day. On the other hand,
Marx speaks of 'surplus value': this is the value that is added by labour bevond that \.\hich
is expended in the act of production-Le. the extra value that inheres in the object the
worker has produced. Marx points out that the profit that the capitalist realizes when the
product is brought to market ultimately depends on the ratio of this 'surplus' to 'necessary'
labour power. This ratio can be increased in a number of ways, either simply through
suppressing or cutting wages or through substitution of machines for humans. Crucially, Marx
argues that labour power under capital ism becomes itself a commodity like any other.
Labour power under capitalism becomes something to be bought and sold on the market at a
given price. Therefore, Marx characterizes capitalism as a system of exploitation in which
surplus, alue is e\.tracted from wage labour and in which the commodity form comes to
dominate over the life of the worker. Workers are exploited for their capacity to produce
commodities and to generate surplus value, and their labour power is itself turned into a
commoditv. Thus the commodit} form comes to exercise an external compulsion over the
human subject. In early works, Marx descriues this proces in terms of nlienation. Marx's
conception of alienation is discussed in Box 4.
Marx argues that under conditions of exploitation and alienation, social life is experi
enced as a world dominated by the exchange of things in the medium of mone). fonev
in arx's phrase is 'an objectified relation between persons' (1858: 160). Under the rule
of money, 'the social character of activity ... appears as something alien and
objective, confronting the individuals, not as their relation to one another, but as their
subordination to relations which subsist independently of them ... The social
connection between
47
BOX 4. KARL MARX'S CONCEPT OF ALIENATION
Marx describes 'alienation' (Entfremdung in German) as a social-psychological condition based on

estrangement of individuals from their natural and social environments. The term Is derived from
Hegel, who employed It to describe a process of inwardness In the self. For both Hegel and Marx,
individuals are alienated or estranged from their world when they experience this world as
something that has become 'externalized' (entauBert) or 'objectified' (vergegenstandlicht) or *'re1fied'
(verdinglicht). Where Hegel thought that a certain process of externalization was necessary tor the
constitution of the self, as a dialectic of 'subject and object', Marx argued that under capitalism
individualscannot 'reappropriate' this externalized aspect of themselves. The essence of their sense of
self, which consists in their socia bility and communality, has been removed from them. In the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Marx writes that
estrangement appears not only in the fact that the means of my life belong to another and that my desire is
the inaccessible possession of another, but also in the fact that all things are other than themselves,
that my activity is other than itself, and that finally-and this goes for capitalists too-an inhuman power
rules over everything. (1844b: 366)
In particular, Marx distinguishes four main types of alienation:

• alienation from the product of labour: 'The worker places his life in the object; but now it no longer
belongs to him, but to the object' (1844b: 324);
• alienation from labour: 'His labour is ... not voluntary, but forced; it is forced labour' (1844b: 326);
• alienation from oneself: 'Estranged labour ... tears away from him [the worker] his species-
life, his true species-objectivity' (1844b: 329); and
• alienation from other people: 'Each man ... regards the other In accordance with the
standard and the situation in which he as a worker finds himself' (1844b: 330).
Marx's conception of alienation has exercised a profound influence in modern social theory. It
has found many echoes in the neo-Hegel1an thinking of figures such as Gyorgy *Lukacs and Ernst
*Bloch and the *existentialist Marxism of Jean-Paul *Sartre. To a certain extent, it can also be
compared with Max *Weber's and Georg *Simmel's writing on the 'iron cage' of modern
capitalism, bureaucracy, industry, and technology.
persons is transformed into a social relation between things' (1858: 157). In volume 1 of
Capital, Marx refers to this transformation of relations between persons into relations
between things as*'commodity fetishism'. In a society that comes to fetishize the objects
of its production as objects of consumption, the workings of human *agency are mystified
and *'reified'. It is this pseudo-objectivity that gives capitalism its opaque quality and
makes it seem incapable of abolition or transformation.
Capitalist expansion and self-destruction

Marx argues that thedrive for efficiency in capitalism is rein forced by the fact that ca pita!ism
is a competitive system, which means that it has an inbuilt dynamism. Capitalism must
constantly revolutionize the 'forces of production', and failure to modernize will be
punished by the market's competitive mechanisms. The individual capitalist is faced with a
simple alternative: either growth and change or bankruptcy. Capitalists must therefore
look
48 t NTONiNO PALUMBO A!'JD Al ArJ sron
constantly tor new markets and cheaper and more efficient sourcesof labour, and new
means of reducing labour costs. 'Modern industry never views or treats the existing form
of a production process as the definitive one,' Marx writes (1867: 617). Capitalism
remains in a constant state of flux. Modern capitalist societies generate change,
innovation, and develop ment as their very mode of social reproduction. Once the energies
of modern industrial capitalism have been unleashed, vigorous development of the means
of production and destruction of the old and creation of the new all constantly transform
bourgeois society. In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels declare:
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, ever

lasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed,
fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are
swept away, all new-formed ones·become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts
into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real
conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (1848: 83)
At the earliest stage of its development, capitalism is characterized by the workshop: it

brings together workers in the factory where specialization of skills and tasks can then
develop. Large-scale industry and the development of machine-led manufacturing are an
the realization of an inner logic that has driven it from the start. But this internal dynamic,
what Marx calls 'the immanent law of capitalistic production' (1867: 929), will also be
responsible for a spiralling cycle of crises of overproduction, amidst the generalized
pauperization of the working class. Due to constant devaluations in the wages paid by
capitalists to their exploited workforces, the great mass of the population will no longer
be able to afford the very products that they themselves have produced. By this point,
capitalism will have created the conditions for its self-destruction and for the
revolutionary advent of a classless communist society. Capitalism will have dug its own
grave by a 'dialectical contradiction' internal to the very principles of its working.
The critique of political liberalism
We have now considered most of the essential components of Marx's contributions to

economic theory and the idea of historical materialism as a philosophy of history. At this
point, it is appropriate to move to the more specifically political aspects of Max's thought
which concern his conception of the role of the state and *civil society under capitalism
and their relationship to reform, revolution, and religion. These sides of Marx's thought
are important because here we find a less *deterministic Marx. We find a thinker who
emphasizes the role of class struggle and the interplay between objective and subjective
dimensions of class consciousness.
The state, civil society, andreligion

One of the most systematic statements of Marx's views on the state and civil society
under capitalism is to be found in his early essay from 1843, On the fewish Question. Here
Marx
considers the demand of the Jews for political emancipation, i.e. for full civil rights. Marx
considers what civil political *emancipation might mean in practice in a capitalist society.
He argues that the question of]ewish emancipation can only be resolved by being
subsumed under the question of real human emancipation, which must be more than
merely political emancipation, defined as acquisition of formal rights. He points out that
political emanci pation for the Jews-or for any other oppressed religious community-
means practically not their emancipation at all but only the emancipation of the state
from religion, only the separation of the state from the Church, involving a
liftingofrestrictionson qualitication to positions of public office based on religion. This
is not substantive emancipation, in the sense of liberation from structural economic
causes of oppression and inequality. Political freedom here merely stands in for real
human freedom as a weak substitute, serving to keep individuals in thrall to one of the
instruments of their unfreedom.
Marx further argues that in the discourse of civil political emancipation, the state
becomes a kind of secular church. He writes that
Where the political state has attained its full degree of development man leads a double life, a life
in heaven and a life on earth, not only in his mind, in his consciousness, but in reality. He lives in
the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society,
where he is active as a private individual, regards other men as means and becomes the plaything
of alien powers. (Marx 1843: 220)
,-In thebourgeois political state, individuals live out their desire for freedom and sociability,
which in fact remain beyond earthly reach under the capitalist system. The secular
state
1 appears to be a sort of pathway to Heaven, but is just as illusory as the ideas of Heaven
propagated by traditional religion. -4
Marx's more general thought about religion here epitomizes the militant side of
enlightenment. Marx argues that by shedding light on the actual workings of this world,
historical materialism will expose the illusion of a life beyond death. Marx maintains that
since religion represents an 'ideological reflex' of actual economic relations, its critique
represents the necessary precondition for the unmasking of all other ideological forms. In
the short 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right', Marx famously
refers to religion as the 'opium of the people' (1844a: 244). Like a misused drug, religion
administers to true needs in false ways. Religion promises something that the system it
serves has no ability ever to deliver. Religion is at once 'the expression of real suffering
and a protest against real suffering'. It is 'the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of
a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions':
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real
happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give
up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism
of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. (1844a: 244)
Private property, reform, and revolution

Marx considers that the demand for political emancipation often takes the form of
demand for the lifting of property qualifications on franchise. The state is expected to
annul private property as a condition of political participation. Marx argues that this
creates the
50 f r-TO'-ITO PA. UM"O !\ND ALAN 5COTT
illusion that the state is the opposite of prh ate property, or that it is a means for the
revoca tion of property in general. Political freedom here becomes merely freedom of
pri\·ate individuals from social constraints on their right 'to pursue their own interests
in their own ways', in.John Stuart *Mill's phrase. Political liberalism perpetuates a
situatwn in \\·hid1 communal life is confined to an ideal political realm. ll'hile merely
freeing pri\·,1te indi\·idu als to pursue their egotistic interests without thought of others as
members of a communitr. This leads Marx to a more general critique of the discourse of
rights, of both chi! rights and human rights. He comments that 'the so-called rights of
man, as distinct from the rights of the citizen, are quite simply the rights of the
members of chi! societ), i.e. of egotistic man, and man separated from other men and
from the community' (1843: 229). Marx concludes that the 'practical application of the
right of man to freedom is of man to private property' (1843: 229). In this picture,
security or 'police' (Polizei) be omes 'the supreme concept of civif society', ensuring that
'society is only there to guarantee each of its members the conservation of his person,
his right to property' (1843: 230). In The Communist Manifesto Marx goes so far as
to describe the state as little more than a 'committee for managing the common affairs
of the whole bourgeoisie' (Marx and Engels 1848: 82). In Tile Eishteenth Br11111,1ire
o(Louis Bo11t1pt1rte \1852) :\larx oh\erwd the pl)puli t dictatorship of the French leader of
the Second Empire, Napoleon III. He demonstrated
how the imperial French state dedicated itself to the defence of the property interests of the
French middle classes. Thus in Marx's view, the state remains intimately im·ol\·ect in the
reproduction of property relations. It does not represent the general public interest but
only the particular propertied interests of the ruling class. Marx argues that true human
emancipation will occur only with the dissolution of the distinction between state and
civil society and with it the rights of the private individual.
Marx also voices similar objections against all socialist movements whose goal is not
the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism but merely its political reform. Marx ,;ees
revolu tionary processes as having the function of making individuals aware of their
ondition as members of an exploited social class. This awareness entails a transition from
what fan: calls the 'class-in-itself to the 'class-for-itself', that is, to a class with a
co11scio11sncss of itself as a class (Marx 1858: 177-8). This idea comes to the fore in
TheGerman Ideolog)', where he proclaims that,
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the
cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can ontv
take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessar), therefore, not on!)
because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other wav, but also because the class
ovrrthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and
become fitted to found society anew. (Marx and Engels 1846: 94-5)
It is this revolutionary consciousness which assures the spontaneous harmony between

individual and collective interest and makes the communist society 'an association in
which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all' (Marx
and Engels 1848: 105).
We shall shortly return to some remarks about Marx's theory of society in compari on
\Vith the work of Emile Durkheim. It is to Durkheim's work that we now turn.
51
Emile Durkheim: sociology as an autonomous science

Emile *Durkheim was born in the Lorraine district of France to a Jewish family. In 1887 he
acquired a post at the University of Bordeaux and became Professor of Education at the
Sorbonne in Paris after 1902. His most important works are The Division of Labour in Society
(1893), Tile Rules of Sociological Met/Jod (18??), :'iu{ci c, (1897), and The FlementaryForms ,of
Rel§i_ou. -( 19121, as well as Moral Education (1_922) and _Professional Ethics and Civic Morals
·u9so) published aft rh.is·cfo;i"th · In i898h -iiso· f u ded the journal L'Annee sociologique,
which has played a major role in the development of French sociology. By the time of his
death, Durkheim established a formidable reputation, not only for himself but also for the
integrity of sociology as a discipline. He influenced a generation of French social thinkers
from Marcel *Mauss to Maurice *Halbwachs, Claude *Levi-Strauss, Georges *Bataille, and
many others.
In the following account, we look first at Durkheim's methodological conception of
sociology as an autonomous science devoted to the study of 'social facts'. We then turn to
Durkheim's subtle analyses of the dynamics and problems of social integration in modern
societies, his conception of *'anomie', morality, and *individualism, and his view of the
state and the role ofreligion in social evolution, all of which stand in a distinctively
critical relationship to the work of Marx.
Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method

Durkheim's work is driven by a concern to establish sociology as an autonomous scientific
discipline. This entailed two major undertakings: g_rst, _identifying a peculiar set of
ph_ .!:omena calling for genuinely sociologica_l investigation; and second, defining a
methodology adequate to the investigation. Both these undertakings are succinctly spelled
out .in'burkheim's early methodological treatise The Rules o{Sociological Method (1895).
Durkheim's text sought to place sociology on the same footing as biology, but with an
object of investigation entirely its own. Durkheim defined this as the study of 'social facts'.
The Rules starts with the claim that 'social facts are things' and must be studied as such.
This claim entails two assertions. First Durkheim maintains that social phenomena are
distinct from physical phenomena but no less real than physical phenomena. Second
Durkheim contends that social facts are external to, and exercise coercive power over, the
individual. Therefore, social facts cannot be reduced to purely psychological facts about
the interior life of an individual person. Social facts consist of 'manners of acting and
thinking ... capable of exercising a coercive influence on the consciousness of individuals'
(Durkheim 1895: 43). As such, 'the determining cause of a social fact must be
sought among antecedent social facts and not among the states of individual
consciousness' (Durkheim 1895: 134). The independent nature of social facts justifies the
existence of sociology as an autonomous discipline and calls for a distinctive sociological
method. This method can imitate the rigour of the natural sciences in its
concentration on the study of causal relations between observable phenomena in the
social world.
Durkheim saw sociology as providing impartial and universally valid knowledge of the
social world. In this sense, he regarded sociology as a *'positive science' in the spirit of
52 ANTONINO PAlUMBO ANO ALAN SCOTT
Auguste *Comte, although he did not share Comte's implicit *metaphysical and *teleolog
ical assumptions about morally superior stages of civilization. In The Rules, Durkheim
attempted to bridge the gap opened up within positivism between prescriptive and
descriptive statements by suggesting a distinction between 'normal' and 'pathological'
dimensions of social life. This distinction found a practical application in Durkheim's
work on suicide, which can be seen as a showcase of Durkheim's principles of empirical
method. It is discussed in Box 5.
In addition to methodology, a general concern of Durkheim's early work was to formu
late a theory of social change capable of supplying sound scientific analyses of features of
modern industrial societies and of suggesting adequate solutions to problems of social
conflict and inequality. In this regard, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the confident
BOX 5. EMILE DURKHEIM ON SUICIDE: A SOCIOLOGICAL CASE STUDY
Durkheim's monograph Suicide of 1897 combines a focus on problems of *solidarity in modern

societies with the elaboration of a rigorous empirical sociological method. Durkheim distinguishes
between four basic types of suicide: what he calls 'altruistic suicide', 'anomic suicide', 'egoistic suicide',
and 'fatalistic suicide'. For each of these four types he seeks the social determinants that describe the
causes of these apparently purely private acts of individuals. These determinants not only enable him
to classify different types of suicide but also to specify certain related 'pathologies' or 'morbidities' in
the social
fabric. Examples of altrUJ:St1c suicide include the captain who feels morally obliged to 'go down with his
ship', or statesmen forced to 'fall on their swords' out of shame for failures of public duty. Durkheim
states that altruistic suidde occurs when the bonds that tie individuals to membership of social
groups are too strong-too intense or too claustrophobic. Examples of anomic SUJcide are those that
occur when individuals feel isolated and cut off from the social group. Anomic suicide occurs when
the bonds that tie individuals to membership of social groups are too weak or too distant.
Durkheim speaks of degrees of the presence or absence of social *integration and degrees of the
presence or absence of social regulation, where 'regulation' refers to the morally binding effect of social
*norms. Altruistic suicide is the consequence of too much integration, while egoistic suicide is the
consequence of too little integration. Fatalistic suicide is the outcome of too much regulation, while
anomic suicide is the outcome of too little regulation.
Durkheim's aim is to explain not individual suicides but correlations between suicide rates and
different forms and degrees of social solidarity. Thus he argues that the fact that Catholic countries
generally have lower rates of suicide than Protestant ones is not so much a reflection of the fact that
for Catholicism suicide is a cardinal sin. Rather, it is an index of the extent to which Protestantism
encourages *individualism and self-reliance and thus tends to foster both greater personal egoism and
greater personal anxiety in individuals. Durkheim also notes that rapid economic growth frequently
correlates with relatively high suicide rates because periods of economic growth tend to produce
structural social changes of a kind that can bring about 'anomic' conditions of social life. In this context
we may think of the successful but emotionally isolated stockbroker or financial services executive in
the big metropolis.
In his monograph on suicide Durkheim demonstrated the scientific uses of his injunction to 'treat
social facts as things'. Using a wide range of statistical data, he demonstrated that even suicide, even
this most individual and lonely of acts, lends itself to systematic sociological analysis.
53
*utilitarian agendas and methodologies of figures such as John Stuart *Mill and Herbert
*Spencer. He sought to adhere to scientific principles of detachment in a way that might
also yield moral advice for attempts at improving social life. 'Because what we propose
to study is above all reality', he wrote, 'it does not follow that we should give up the idea
of improving it' (Durkheim 1893: p. xxvi). This concern underpins his first major work of
substantive sociology, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), to which we now turn.
Solidarity and social differentiation:Durkheim'sThe Division

of Labour in Society
In the same spirit as Marx's distinction between feudal and capitalist modes of
production and Ferdinand ""Tonnies's distinction between 'communal' and 'societal'
relations, Durkheim distinguishes between two basic forms of social life, or between two
kinds of
*solidarity in the evolution of societies: between what he terms mechanical solidarity and
what he terms organic solidarity.
By mechanic_ ! solidarity Durkheim means a condition of social life characteriz d by a
strong sen e of commonality or 'collective consciousness' (conscience collective). It is
typical of societies with a segmentaiy struct;:;r c posed ;fg!: ups lacking any
significant degree of_l!lterna! differentiation, notably in the case of 'primitiv..e' societies
made u°pof t ibes or clans. It is a cond-ition marked by the absence of any developed
system of division oflabour. Social members have a ':"eak n _o_fp !_s r; l ide1Jtity or self,
hut a correspondingly strong s nse_of c<;>mmunity. Durkheim comments that in the
condition of mechanical solidarity 'Every consciousness beats as one' (1893: 106). Each
component element or segment of the society is more or less identical to the others and is
joined to the whole society not by a relation of mutual economic interdependence but
only in an 'external' 'mechanical' way, by a strong assertion of collective identity and
through a highly visible system of punish ment for deviants or breakers of rules. In
traditional pre-modern societies marked by mechanical solidarity, justice systems have a
*retributive character in which the tire ommunity take _rev Dge on.individuals
who.Yiol_ate its rule_s ip order to rea_ssert itself.\.!}. the face of the violation. ·
By ic solid..'.!_rity Durkheim means a condition of social life characterized by big!}_
degrees of economic interdepen9.tnce between ,individuals, involving an advanced
system-of*9lvisicin ofiab ;and advanced processes of professional specialization.
Social
members have a stronger sense of individual uniqueness and a correspondingly weaker
identification .wit.b. the community. For Durkheim, organic solidarity is the authentic
condition of modern societies. In the modern age, solidarity is, or ought to be, 'organic' in
the sense that, like a complex living organism, societies consist of interdependent systems
or 'organs', each of which performs certain distinct functions in cooperation with other
?.rgans or systems. The component parts of the society are r:ot replications of eac]:J other
hut mutually differentiated links within a chain of mutually cooperating economic
actors. Modern societies are more.culturally diverse and internally differentiated, but have
a proportionally lower sense of conscience collective. Justice systems in societies marked
by organic solidarity evince a *restitutive character where disputes are resolved by
impartial third authorities rather than in the form of vendetta by the injured party or in
the form of visible public exposure and shaming. Modern societies seek t9 restore deviant
members
54
to a normal way of life, where normality refers to a functioning role in the division of
labour. --- -- _, ··· - ·· ·· -
Echoing Marx, Durkheim presents the modem division of labour as an epoch-making
event. The passage from the old order to the new entails a process of liberation of the
individual from tradition and the emergence of a new kind of consciousness affirming the
primacy of individual personal identity. Like Marx, Durkheim argues that the modern
division of Jabour was possible onJy because of the collapse of the previous
so.c;Jal.Ql.d.cr. What pushed people to specialize was the increase in 'social density'
caused by the disinte gration of older segmentary forms of society and the struggle for
survival that this higher density generated. Durkheim postulates that 'the progress of
labour is in direct proportion to the moral or dynamic density of society' (1893: 201). The
increase in social density is not due to simple demographic growth but to the fact that
people belonging to separate social groups come to interact more frequently and on a more
permanent basis-most notably in the city and in every larger urban spaces.
In disagreement with Marx, however, Durkheim !11 i_ntains that.the.divisiQn of labour is
not a _vehicle o_f class exploitation. Rather, it is to be viewed as a source of solidarity that
is better adapted to modern conditions. Durkheim secs class division and conflict only as a
side effect of the pace of social change, as a pathological product of modern society, but
not as a fundamental contradiction inherent in modernity. This leads Durkheim to
advocate a different course of action from that of Marx's proletarian revolution.
In The Division of Labour in Society and throughout his later works, Durkheim
suggests that while the old world is dying, if not dead, the new world has not yet been
born. He sees Europe as still standing at the point of transition between the pre-modern
and the modern worlds, and such times of transition are times of hazard. The speed of
social change creates the danger that pre-modern mechanical solidarity might
disappear before modern organic solidarity is fully in place. Durkheim wrote that
'over a very short space of time very profound changes have occurred in the structure of
our societies. They have liberated themselves from the segmentary model with a speed
and in proportions without precedent in history. Thus the morality corresponding to
this type of society has lost influence, but without its successor developing quickly
enough to occupy the space left vacant in our consciousness' (1893: 339). The major
problems Durkheim sees in this shortfall of solidarity in modern societies lie in what
he calls anomie, which is discussed here in Box 6.
Solutions to anomie:occupational groups and intermediary agencies

Durkheim's response to anomie is not to embrace nostalgia for a lost world. Durkheim
insists that modern societies must face the danger of anomie and solve it in uniquely
modern ways. He warns that 'the remedy for the ill is nevertheless not to seek to revive
traditions and prac tices that no longer correspond to present-day social conditions ... We
need ... to find ways of harmonious cooperation between those organs that still dash
discordantly together. We need to introduce into their relationship a greater justice by
diminishing those external inequalities that are the source of our ills' (1893: 340).
Durkheim is less interested in social order per se than in the forms of social solidarity and
integration best adapted to specifically modern conditions. He concludes that only
organic solidarity based on an increased
55
BOX 6. EMILE DURKHEIM'S CONCEPT OF ANOMIE
Durkheim defines :,a _ffile..as a state of *normlessness_arising from.social fragmentation and lack of
!ut o itat1ve social institutions capable of regulating social interaction. He writes that anomie, 'this malady of infiniteness which we
Civic Morals (1950), he deals with problems of anomie affecting the modern nation-state and
secular societies in general
What Durkheim calls anomie derives from the fact that the division of labour can have Qegative
eff_ ot only for th.e working classes but also for all those involved in the productive process and for
society 1n general. What he calls 'forced division of labour' is more specifically comparable to Marx's
conception of alienated labour. Forced division of labour consists in 'the fact that the working classes
do not really desire the status assigned to them and too often accept it only under constraint and force,
not having any means of gaining any other status' (1893: 293). In large-scale industry this imposition
goes together with two further constraints: the regimentation of workers and their physical separation
from the social environment and the routinization of working practices that transforms the worker into
·a lifeless cog'.
awareness and appreciation of interdependence can solve the modern anomic crisis; and
that only those rules and roles that are felt to be just and fair will provide the necessary
restraints on individual passions and desires. He particularly stresses the_!9le of *norIT!S. fl.
9
moral dl cipl I_;:! . !ructuring individual action and fostering healthy perSO!Hlities.
D-tirkheim's proposed remedies for anomic consist in the creation of institutions capable
of establishing common goals and identities by reinforcing channels of communication
between individuals and coordinating social functions. Durkheim looks especially to
the role of occupational groups, to the role of a corporatist state, and to the role of a
secular
moral education system as possible solutions. He sees two vital functions played by these c\.,'.'-(\ · ,·
>'
intermediary agencies: that of mediating between the individual and the state or _the · · ,c
ollefQ e b?dy, and th.i!t-Qf,s;p_ cating people into recognizing interests prior to and more
g neri:ll_t_han their own St;'lfi IJ i.rl.! !" sts. By 'occupational groups' Durkheim means
such things as trade unions and other professional associations. He argues that such
groups must have a democratic internal structure allowing people direct participation in
decision making at the local level and a well-defined constitutional role assuring them
direct influence in the public sphere. In contrast to the medieval *guilds or the fascist
system of corporations, Durkheim views these occupationally based social arrangements
as inherently democratic. They represent social spaces where people with common
interests and con cerns can gather together, cstahlish direct lines of communication, and
form collective identities. They are not markets in which agents meet with competing
preferences.
56 ANTONINO PALUMBO AND ALAN SCOTT
Morality and civil society
Durkheim viewed the division of labour as a source of solidarity capable of attenuating

the atomistic forces generated by an increasing individualistic and pluralistic society. He
particularly found inspiration in the French mutualist tradition which Marx had dismissed
as 'petty-bourgeois socialism'. His concern was to find ways of moderating the
pathological side effects of market societies through moral and political regulation, seeing
the aim of such regulation as being to inhibit the spread of rabid economic individualism.
Here we need to consider Durkheim's interest in the question of what value system is best
suited for an increasingly differentiated and pluralistic modern society. Durkheim
particularly concentrated on the role of contracts, trust, and moral *individualism,as well as
on the role of the state and secular education. We now look at these key elements of
Durkheim's political sociology.
Trust, contracts, and moral individualism

In contrast to Ferdinand *Tonnies and Henry *Maine, Durkheim rejects the idea that
modern society is solely founded on relations of contract. Durkheim argues that contracts
generally rest upon conditions that are themselves moral; that is, on non-contractuafrela
tions. Contracts must be-respected, but the clause that they must be respected cannot be
written into the contract itself without an infinite logical regress. Contr unden !itten
solely by the moral force of society: by relations of trust and mutual-respect. Durkheim's
argu ment here is echoed in a number of themes in contemporary social theory: in debates
about 'trust', about 'social capital' and about the socially 'embedded' nature of economic
relations (compare Gambetta 1988; Portes 1998; Granovetter 1985). What all these themes
have in common, and what they share with Durkheim, is the view that economic
relations-like the contract-are notself-sufficient but presuppose a context of social
relations, networks, ties, and trust in order to function properly. Durkheim feared that
without this moral basis of trust in economic exchange, civil society would decay into the
mutual antagonisms of self-seeking individuals. Here he differed from Marx in two vital
respects: cted Mar clairr.iJb..at.d'4Lsociety is.necessarily asoci nd he looked
not to abolition of the state but to the emergence of intermediate associations in civil
society as a way of re-entrenching solidarity. Durkheim argues that the Marxian critique of
liberalism confuses two different forms of individualism: particularistic egoistic
individualism (associated with *utilitarian philosophy) and murully universalizing
individualism (associated with the philosophy of
*Kant). Durkheim argues that it is not the particularistic individualism of the egoist that is
celebrated in the doctrine of the Righh of Man but rather the idea of the moral
responsibil ity and *autonomy of the individual: the idea of the individual as the moral
embodiment of universal humanity. He emphasizes that 'individualism thus understood is
the glorification not of the self, but of the individual in general. Its motive force is not
egoism but sympathy for all that is human, a wider pity for all suffering, for all human
miseries, a more ardent desire to combat and alleviate them, a greater thirst for justice'
(Durkheim 1898: 48).
Durkheim argues that moral individualism is capable of preserving social solidarity at a
time in which conventional theistic religion no longer holds a grip on society. He asserts
57
that 'not only is individualism not anarchical, but it henceforth is the only system of
beliefs which can ensure the moral unity of the country' (1898: 50). As society
becomes more differentiated, less bound to territory and to tradition, its values have to
become more un_r ersaL People cannot hold on to local traditions in a context in
which horizontdl differentiation breaks down locality and *particularistic values.
Durkheim writes that 'we make our way, little by little, towards a state, nearly achieved
by now, where the members of a single social group will have nothing in common
among themselves except their humanity' (1898: 51). If the universal is all that people
have in common, they must treat this as the sacred source of social cohesion. In what are
today called'multicultural societies', people cannot hope to find common agreement on the
basis of purely particularistic belief systems. But they may, according to Durkheim, hope
to find agreement on matters that are
t.h C J!l._1:1_?-01: property of all t.he compqnt;nt eJements, even though these of necessity
will J2e.s_,f an abstract aml.highly general nature. Durkheim is thus committed to a
form of
*cosmopolitan *universalism.
The state and secular education

It should be noted that Durkheim does not regard individualism and rights as fully suffi
cient for the rebuilding of civil society. In addition, he stipulates that solidarity requires a
pluralistic social milieu in which people are addressed neither simply as bearers of
universal humanity nor as self-interested egoists but also as bearers of particular group
identities. This leads to the important role of the state in Durkheim's social and political
thought.
Durkheim views the state as the highest expression of social life within a multi-levelled
He
systerri"i:iT rules arid roies. maintai s that regulation by the state is enabling rather than
merely constraining. The word ' s t a tc't·o·r him is short fo/the set of institti'tions that
corYsti- tute a political society: -'we
= apply
- the term "state"
. more especially to the agents
of the
sovereign authority, and "political society" to the complex group of which the state is the
highest organ' (Durkheim 1950: 48). In this respect Durkheim's conception of the state
strikingly differs both from that of Marx and from that of classical economic theory.
Durkheim holds that the state is inherently connected to a political society and cannot be
abolished without undermining the political nature of society, and further that 'far from
being in opposition to social groups ... the state presupposes their existence' (1950: 45).
It is in this connection that ri:_edialiflg public institutions have their importance: they
are the medium through which the state.isanchored in civil society. In the absence of
linking instances such as occupational groups, rational governance is difficult and an
unbridge able distance opens up between the state and the individual. Durkheim therefore
envisages a form of 'subsidiarity' in which each level of association-the level of tl1e
in_divid_ual, t!J
level of the group, md th level 9f tJle. t;;;:Js-e pFes e }_hro h mt1tual educat)o!:. Civil
society for Durkheim is thus more than Marx's realm of private competition. It
includes groups which gather the interests of individuals into a higher instance, and the
plurality of these groupings feeds societal demands into the political process. Durkheim
thus describes the state as an agent whose duty is to call the individual to a 'moral way
of life' (1950: 75) and to set the 'particularism of each corporation' in relation to 'the
sentiment of general utility and the need for organic equilibrium' (1897: 384). The state
acts as 'a special organ whose responsibility it is to work out certain representations
which hold good for the
58
collectivity' (1950: 50). It depends on a civil society consisting of active citizens

contributing to democratic pluralism. Only an educated public respecting the sacred nature
of univer salist individualism and negotiating their differences in a pluralistic political
society can realize the principles of the French Revolution of 1789 (Durkheim 1890).
Mediating associations and the state mmt address the tendency of a modern market-based
division of labour to deteriorate into conditions of blind anomie.
Where in his earlier work Durkheim saw this danger as restricted to the economic
sector, he became increasingly preoccupied with its pervasive and structural nature . He
thus implicitly acknowledged Marx'sview of confiict as endemic but did not draw Marx's
revolu tionary conclusions. He increasingly came to look for value systems and institutions
capable of accomplishing what he called a 'refashioning of the moral constitution of
society' (1897: 142). This interest is notably reflected in his late work on religion, to which
we now turn.
Religion and social evolution:Durkheim's

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
In his last great work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life of 1912, Durkheim criticizes
those currents of thought typified by Marx which reduce religion to *ideology or to meta
physical nonsense. In this work, he states that 'it is unthinkable that systems of ideas
like religions ... could be mere fabrics of illusion' (1912: 66). Durkheim here sets
himself the task of demonstrating not only that religious phenomena are partially
independent of ma terial relations but alsb-remarkably-that religious beliefs and rites
are at the root of
scientific thinking and practice. Durkheim argues for the view that religion is
i:1.an.import1 n s 7.:._e_ ational, rath_etr!1an irrational.. He defines religion as 'a unTf
§ !!l.- l !.51
:and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden-beliefs I
i and practices-which unfre-intoorie"slngle and moral community called a'c: h rch all those)
\ o adhere to them' (1912: 44). Religious beliefs engender a 'bipartite division of the
'·universe' (1912: 38) into the sacred and the profane. These two worlds are to be conceived of
'not only as separate but alsoa ·t10stile and j;al us rivals' (1912: 37).
Drawing on research on *totemist practices among the Australian aboriginal and native
American peoples, Durkheim considers the role of the totem as'first and foremost, a name
...
,:--.rn emblem' (1912: 108). In aboriginal societies, small kinship groups are given the name of a
, }. .·J. · totem-usually a plant or an animal-which is often transmitted down the maternal
or y paternal line. Larger communities have names that incorporate a number of totemic
groups
known as 'phratries'. In the same way as a person can today bebotha French and an EU citizen,
so an aborigine can have more than one totemic identity. In the contemporary world we
may also see aspects of totemic identity in such phenomena as football fandom, where a
team and its supporters all associate with a distinct colour of shirt and a distinct set of
symbols and slogans. for Durkheim, latter-day totemism is in principle no less rational or
more mysterious than the 'primitive' kind of totemism.
Durkheim states that the rationality of these 'primitive' religions lies in their function for
society. As emblems or names, totems and phratries not only define the group; they are
also its source of cohesion and solidarity, expressed through religious practices, rituals,
and code
t,i. THEORY. II 59
of dress. We are aware of our supra-individuality only in exceptional circumstances; but

it is precisely these collective occasions that shape our identity and lend meaning to our
mundane existence. Durkheim writes that in religious festivals and collective gatherings
'the result of that heightened activity is a general stimulation of individual energies. People
live differently and more intensely than in normal times ... Man becomes something other
than what he was' (1912: 213). Religious experiences and revolution are instances of such
mobilizations of collective energies whose significance often outlives the event of their
occasion. Heightened emotions become transferred to religious images and collective repre
sentations which continue 'calling forth those emotions even after the assembly is over'
(1912: 222). Durkheim here describes nothing less than the birth and rebirth of society in
ecstatic collective experiences. God is seen as the image of society-.- !Jgig .1 _symbols-_s11ch
as sai_n. , '!..ng !s_, a_11d _spirit_s--:::.ar.e_tl:i:..e2x.m\:.>9!iSc r<J./trs::JiY.f..lfl!If.S. !!.lrJ.Lious..thmugh wh.i\:h.s.udaL
grout'J!! ure to. thei:nse'.:v.e1.ths:irnw11jJJY.i.2.¼!s:.m.o.ralldentity.
Durkheim's text was to exercise a profound influence on anthropological research in the
twentieth century, in the work of figures such as Marcel *Mauss, Maurice *Halbwachs,
Claude *Levi-Strauss, Mary *Douglas, and many others (for further discussion, see Chapter 5
of this book, pp. 121-2 and Chapter 9, pp. 200-2).
Conclusion
Although they share more in common than is often recognized-especially by those who
falsely identify Durkheim with conservatism-we must be aware that Marx and Durkheim
arrive ultimately at very different conclusions from one another. Marx's goal throughout
his life's work was to expose the underlying logic of capitalism from its birth to what he
saw as its inevitable self-destruction. Durkheim does not share this orientation.
Durkheim's understanding of the relationship between science and politics remains
wholly different. His liberal political views are illustrated by his stance in the *Dreyfus
affair in France in the 1890s, where he aligned himself with the progressive liberals, as
well as in his essays on socialism and his patriotic response to the First World War in
which he lost his only son. If Marx is the representative figure of the social theorist as
firebrand, Durkheim represents the social theorist as moral educator.
In the history of sociology, Durkheim's conception of society as a complex whole com
posed of interdependent social facts has led him sometimes to be aligned with
*functionalism; that is, with the doctrine that societies are more than the sum of their parts
and that social integration is achieved through mutual dependencies characterizinga complex,
differentiated social system (for full discussion of functionalism see Chapter 4 of this
book).
In this general respect, Durkheim shares with Marx an interest in analysing society as a
*totality of material forces vastly greater and more powerful than the beliefs that any
given individual may entertain about his or her world. It should, however, be noted
that when Marx's thought is compared to that of Durkheim-and even more so when it
is compared to that of Max Weber-Marx tends to underestimate the significance of
cultural and mental practices beyond the sphere of purely material economic relations.
It can be said that Marx retained some of the prejudices of political economy
concerning the
60 . NTOIIJINO PALUMBO AND ALAN SCOT'!
primacy of economic determinants over social, cultural, and historical differences. In

contrast, Durkheim's late work on religion in The t:lementary Forms illustrates the
import ance of collective beliefs, representatiom, identities, and cultural practices in
sociological explanation. Where Marx tends to bind social theory to economics, Durkheim
draws it more in the direction of cultural anthropology.
Marx and Durkheim particularly differ in their view of the status and consequences of
social differentiation and the division of labour in the rise of modern capitalism. Marx
views the division of labour as the instrument of a subtle and pervasive system of class
exploitation. Durkheim, in contrast, sees the division of labour as a novel and effective
source of solidarity. Durkheim maintains that to seek to abolish the division of labour is to
escape from reality into an idyllic past or into an impossible utopian future. While
Durkheim appreciates the force of 'social currents' and 'collective representations', hedoes
not share Marx's trust tn the emancipatory powers of revolution. He certainly did not
adopt Marx's view of the Paris Commune of 1870 as a foretaste of the future communist
society. Where Marx considered capitalism's problems to be inherent in it and only capable
of resolution in a post-capitalist order, Durkheim identified tendencies to both self
destruction and self-regeneration in modern capitalism. For Durkheim, Marx's conception
of class conflict and revolutionary overcoming rested on a mystical epistemology. Yet
Marx, on the other hand, if he had lived to read Durkheim's works, might well have seen
Durkheim's appeal to morality as ignoring certain basic inequalities of power and
resources under capitalism, together with the ubiquity of exploitation.
Both Marx's and Durkheim's social theories possess a special urgency today, in different
respects and for different reasons. Certainly it would be foolish to deny that the collapse of
twentieth-century communism raises serious questions about the validity of Marx's ideas
today. But numerous contemporary developments relating to the ever-widening spread of
*neo-liberal capitalistic expansion and ever-increasing global inequalities point to the con
tinuing relevance and validity of at least some elements of Marx's analysis (for further dis
cussion, see Chapters 7 and 14 of this book). At the same time, Durkheim's concern with
the growing gap between the state and the individual, with the remoteness of decision
making from thme affected, and with the hollowing out of communities under poorly reg
ulated market systems has lost little of its relevance.
QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 2
How compatible are the accounts of the modern division of labour given by Marx and
Durkheim? Where do they agree and where do they diverge?
2 How does Durkheim's concept of anomie differ from Marx's concept of alienation?
3 Marx and Durkheim both criticize individualist explanations of social phenomena. Where do
their critiques differ?
4 Is religion anything more than the 'the opium of the people', in Marx's phrase?
5 Is civil society merely a sphere of competing self-seeking individuals (Marx), or is it a necessary
component of a democratic and pluralistic society (Durkheim)?
Ci.A5SiCAl SOCIAL JHEOIW. I' 61
6 Is the state a 'committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie' (Marx), or
a regulative moral authority in which social interests can, and should, attain their highest
expression (Durkheim)?
■ FURTHER READING
The best starting point for reading Marx is The Communist Manifesto, available in Penguin (1967), or
in a new edition with an introduction by Eric Hobsbawm (Verso, 1998). There are excellent selec
tions from Marx in David McLellan's Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford University Press, 2nd edn.
2000) and Jon Elster's Karl Marx: A Reader (Cambridge University Press, 1986). The essential source
for Marx's economic theories is volume 1 of Capital (available in Penguin, 1976), especially chapter
1 on 'The Commodity'. Also important is the chapter in Marx's Grw1drisse (available in Penguin,
1973), titled 'Chapter on money'. (Note that Marx's German word Grundrisse, meaning 'founda
tions' or 'outlines', is usually left untranslated in references to this book.) The best insight into
Marx's early philosophical ideas can be found in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1844, which is available in Penguin under the title Karl Marx: Early Writings (1975). An excellent
straight forward account of Marx is David McLellan's Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (Papermac,
1987). A more entertaining account is by the journalist Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (Fourth Estate,
1999). A good analytical discussion is Shlomo Avineri's The Social and Political Thought of Karl
Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1968). For Marxian terminology, see Tom Bottomore et al.
(eds.), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Blackwell, 1985). For a survey of recent academic thinking
about Marx, see Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought: Critical Assessments, in four volumes, ed.
BobJessop and Charlie Malcolm-Brown (Routledge, 1990).
Four influential studies in 'analytical Marxism' (discussed further in this book, Chapter 7, pp. 168)
are G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense (Oxford University Press, 1978), Jon
Elster's Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1985), John Roemer's Analytical
Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Alex Callinicos's
edited Marxist Theory (Oxford University Press, 1989).
For an introduction to Hegel, try Raymond Plant's Hegel: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1983), or
Charles Taylor's Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge University Press, 1979) and Shlomo Avineri's
Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge University Press, 1972).
The four core works of Durkheim are The Division of Labour, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide,
and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (to be read roughly in this order). Try to use the newer
and better translations by W. D. Halls of Rules (Macmillan 1982) and Division of Labour (Free Press,
1984), and Karen Fields's translation for Elementary Forms (Free Press, 1995). Some well-chosen
collections of extracts from all four of these books with other notable texts by Durkheim are Emile
Durkheim: Selected Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1972) and Durkheim on Politics and the
State (Polity Press, 1986), both edited by Anthony Giddens, as well as Emile Durkheim: Sociologist
of Modernity, ed. Mustafa Emirbayer (Blackwell, 2003). Durkheim's political concerns can be seen
in his article 'Individualism and the Intellectuals', in Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, ed.
R. N. Bellah (University of Chicago Press, 1973).
The standard intellectual biography of Durkheim is Steven Lukes's Emile Durkheim: His Life and
Work (Penguin, 1973). At a more basic level, try Kenneth Thompson's Emile Durkheim (Ellis
Horwood, 1982), Anthony Giddcns's Durkheim (Fontana, 1978), or R. A. Jones's Emile Durklieim: An
Introduction to Four Major Works (Sage, 1986). Also useful are Gianfranco Poggi's Durkheim (Oxford
University Press, 2000) and Stephen P. Turner (ed.), Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Moralist
(Routledge, 1993). See also The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss, ed. Mike Gane and Keith
Tribe (Routledge, 1992). Durkheim's political sociology is discussed by Antonino Palumbo and Alan
Scott in 'Weber, Durkheim and the Sociology of the Modern State', in The Cambridge History of
Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2003). For the French reception of
Durkheim, see Philippe Besnard (ed.), The Sociological Domain (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
for instructive applications of Durkheim's analyses in the field of anthropology, see Jeffrey
Alexander's edited volume Durkheimian Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 1988). For compar
isons of Marx and Durkheim at a high analytical level, sec David Lockwood's Solidarity and Schism
(Oxford University Press, 1992) and Albert Hirschman's article 'Rival Interpretations of Market
Society' in the Journal of Economic Literature, 20/2 (1982).
WEBSITES
The Marxist Internet Archive (MIA) at www.marxists.org Display numerous excerpts from
writings by Marx, with commentaries and accounts of debates.
Marxism Page at www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/ Presents texts by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and
others.
The Durkheim Pages at www.relst.uiuc.edu/durkheim/ Contains a useful biography with
summaries of Durkheim's key texts and a glossary of terms.
Emile Durkheim Page at www.emiledurkheim.com Provides a good biography, pre enting parts
of Durkheim's major works (in the original French), a few quotations (in English), and a
bibliography.
The Emile Durkheim Archive at http://durkheim.itgo.com/main.html Contains sections on key
Durkheimian concepts, with a glossary and links to similar sites.
3 Classical Social Theory, Ill:
Max Weber and
Georg Simmel
Gianfranco Poggi

Max Weber: the idea of interpretive sociology
64
'Explanation' and 'understanding': the meaning of verstehen
6',
The role of values and ideal types
65
Religion, capitalism, and modernity
6G
Weber's The Protestant EthJC and the Spirit of Capitalism
67
World religions and socio-economic change
70
Power, stratification, and domination
11
Power, class, status, and parties
72
Domination and legitimacy
72
Rationalization and the rise of 'occidental rationalism'
15
Georg Simmel: the 'sociology of forms'
76
Interaction and exchange: Simmel's Sociology of 1908
II
Sociability and social process
78
Ambivalence and reciprocity
79
Money and modernity: Simmel's The Philosophy of Money
80
The 'tragedy of culture'
81
The tragic consciousness in Weber and Simmel: links
with Nietzsche and Freud
87
Conclusion
84
84
FURTHER READING
85
WEBSITES
86
Max *Weber and Georg *Simmel lived in Germany in the period of the rise of the
Prussian empire under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Both experienced the tragedy of the Great War,
and both knew and appreciated each other. Together they sought to establish in their
country the discipline of sociology, though both had a somewhat aloof relationship to it.
Weber, trained as a lawyer and an economic historian, was appointed early to a chair in
economics and remained identified with this discipline to end of his life. However, he
remained primarily interested in economic history and in the relationship between the
economic sphere of society and other spheres, especially religion, politics, *stratification,
and law. Weber suffered a nervous breakdown in 1897 and remained seriously ill until
1903, but was widely recognized throughout his life as an academic scholar of the first
rank. He held a professorship at Heidelberg University and published in specialist journals
a number of extensive, thoroughly researched essays, each focused on a problem of
acknowledged significance.
Simmcl, a philosopher, identified himself with sociology only during a phase of his life.
He taught for most of his life in Berlin and gained a professorial chair only toward the end
of his career. Born to Jewish parents, he suffered from the persistent anti-Semitism of
Wilhelmine Germany. In his intellectual style, he was, as one of his students put it, 'a
philo sophical squirrel', publishing many of his lectures in periodicals addressed to the
broad cultured public. His lectures were brilliantly written but often had no systematic
relation to one another.
In their different domains of engagement and styles of analysis, Weber and Simmel
have exerted a profound influence on the development of sociological thinking in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This chapter outlines the leading intellectual
contributions of the two thinkers, treating each in turn. At the end of the chapter we also
discuss a few parallels between Weber and Simmel and the philosophy of Friedrich
*Nietzsche and the psychoanalytic thought of Sigmund *Freud. We turn first of all to the
work of Weber.
Max Weber: the idea of interpretive sociology
In the early 1890s Weber devoted his first major writings to the study of Roman law,
dealing with agricultural estates and commercial partnerships and companies in medieval
Italy. His doctoral dissertation examined directly the meanings of the terms socius and
societas 'commercial partner' and 'commercial partnership',or 'company', or 'society'-in
medieval trading law (Weber 1889). Sub equently, he entered the field ol sociology proper
(at first without naming it so) by analysing in depth the data yielded by empirical
enquiries into the conditions of agricultural workers in the eastern parts of Germany.
After 1900, Weber entered the so-called Metflodenstreit, or 'methodological dispute', a
lively and protracted dispute among German scholars active in various 'sciences of
culture'-chiefly history, theology, law, psychology, philosophy, and economics (Weber
1903, 1903-6). The dispute concerned the appropriate ways to conceive and practise those
disciplines. The basic issue was whether, how, and to what extent such practice should
model itself on that of the natural sciences.The central dispute was: Can human events
and arrangements be the object of general laws? Can the scholars studying them produce
objectively grounded results, given that as human beings they are unavoidably implicated
THEORY ill 65
in the subject matter of their researches? Three key ideas informed Weber's thinking
on this question, which we explore in turn. The first concerned the concept of
'understand ing' or *verstehen; the second concerned the role of values in research;
and the third concerned the role of what Weber was to term *'ideal types'.
'Explanation' and 'understanding': the meaning of verstehen

We may begin by considering Weber's conception of what makes human beings unique.
Weber chiefly characterizes 'man' (as such arguments are generally phrased) as an
*interpretive animal (Weber 1922b). That is, human beings are so constituted that in order
to survive they must make sense of the world by selecting some of the innumerable,
contradictory aspects which reality presents to them, and attaching meaning to them.
Only in this manner can human beings order reality and orient themselves toward it in a
coherent and productive manner, both in their judgements and in their related practices.
Weber here aligns himself with an intellectual tendency known as *'hermeneutics'
which deals expressly with interpretation and which had a significant tradition in
Germany, culminating, a generation before Weber's, in the thought of Wilhelm *Dilthey.
Following Dilthey, Weber conveys this approach to historical cultural phenomena with
the expression verstehen, meaning 'to understand' or 'to comprehend'. It suggests that the
practitioner of a science of culture must seek to capture the mental processes presiding
over the courses of action taken by individuals, and particularly those processes in which
individuals orient themselves to others' actions. This theme of individual action in
Weber's thinking has been called 'methodological *individualism'. It implies that accounts
of socio-historical affairs must as far as possible refer to the states of mind of individuals
involved in producing social arrangements and accommodating to them.
Weber also stresses, however, that the fact that those cultivating the 'sciences of culture'
must seek to capture the subjective processes of human actors does not imply that they
surrender the goal of explaining those phenomena. It does not mean that they limit
themselves merely to describing and narrating social phenomena. A proper scientific
account of any phenomenon must involve an attempt to explain its causes-even though
any such attempt is necessarily selective and partial, and can be countered by and com
pared with other attempts. Evoking the subjective processes of human actors is an aspect
of such an attempt, not an alternative to it. In this sense Weber defined sociology as a
'science which attempts the interpretive understanding of human action in order thereby to
arrive at a causal explanation of its course and consequences' (1922b: 4) (emphasis
added).
The role of values and ideal types

Weber was also very concerned about a possible short-circuit between the scholar's
subjective make-up and the constitution of the object of study. In particular he was
concerned that the value preferences of scholars might interfere in certain ways with their
reconstruction of the facts-on-the-ground (Weber 1903, 1915). Weber emphasized that all
research-about natural or about human affairs-is itself a form of motivated action which
is oriented by the researchers' values or 'value ideas', by their sense of what is worth
studying. But he also insisted that this legitimate connectedness, or 'value relevance'
(Wertbeziehung), between scholars' values and their activity of research, should stop
there.
66 (It NFRAi\i•O POGGI
It should not lead to an interference between the scholar's value judgement (Werturteil)
and the judgements of fact to he construed from the data of the matter at hand. These data
must he established in such a manner that the relative judgements can also command the
assent of other agents who do not share the researcher's value position.
If this distinction is observed (but its observance is always a matter of degree), then the
results of the research can become a public reality and serve as background and
inspiration for establishing further facts and attempting new interpretations of them. In
this manner one can, on one hand, recognize that the 'sciences of culture' involve a
particular, un avoidably value-laden relation between the scholar and the object of study,
and on the other hand demand of them, as from the 'sciences of nature', a commitment to
producing results which can be publicly recognized as valid.
Weber confronts in the same manner a related issue: to what extent does the practice of
the sciences of culture involve the formation and employment of general concepts?
Weber rejects the view that significant human phenomena are always and exclusively
'historical'; that is, that they gain their significance only from the precise where, when,
and how of their one-off occurrence. Instead Weber argues that all scientific discourse
employs more or less general concepts, such that individual cases can be examples of
general recurrent phe nomena. But as concerns the sciences of culture, he adds two
significant qualifications. First, concepts used in the cultural sciences do not aim at the
formulation of general laws of human conduct, much less of laws of historical
development. Secondly, the concepts appropriate to the sciences of culture differ from
those employed in the sciences of nature. Concepts in the cultural sciences are*ideal-
typical concepts. Weber states that ideal-typical concepts, or 'ideal types', make up
possible bunches of concepts or typologies, which can be used by the scholar to analyse
and categorize particular features of the subject matter under consideration. Ideal types in
this sense are tools for ordering information and for drawing out comparisons and
differences between observed phenomena. They are, however, merely tools of
analysis:they do not expressa judgement about what is 'ideal' in a phenomenon in the
sense of intrinsically worthy and admirable. With respect to the typology of forms of
social action, Weber employs an ideal type of 'traditional action' (action motivated by
received customs and traditions), an ideal type of 'affective action' (action motivated by
emotions and impulses), and an ideal type of 'purposive-rational action' or action motiva
ted by conscious methodical calculation of available means for achieving desired ends.
The point of Weber's ideal types is to provide conceptual benchmarks for the analysis of
individual situations, where components of contrasting types are often mixed. They
convey what could be called the bounded variety of cultural phenomena, allowing schol
ars to 'compare and contrast' systematically whole ranges of diverse yet interrelated
aspects of social experience.
Religion, capitalism, and modernity

We now turn to Weber's substantive contributions to social theory. These are laid out in a
number of now classic works. They include his famous study The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904-5 and in a second revised edition in 1920,
as well
67
as his last unfinished magnum opus Economy and Society, published posthumously in
1922, and several other key texts which will occupy us shortly. The discussion that
follows concentrates first on Weber's writings on capitalism, religion, and modernity.
Then we turn to his contributions to the theory of politics, power, *stratification,
bureaucracy, and
*rationalization.
The governing principle behind Weber's massive and creative work on the sociology of
religion is the following. Until relatively recent history, one of the most powerful agencies of
social bonding and social transformation has been religion. Generally, Weber says, religion
has a 'stereotyping' effect. That is, it stabilizes social arrangements, sustains the identity
of social groups, and maintains the structure of the contexts in which groups contend with
one another. In this manner, different religions can play a role in constituting and preserv
ing different cultures and civilizations, as well as in changing and transforming them.
One can connect this theme with Weber's argument about the necessarily 'interpretive'
posture of the human being. Although interpretive processes necessarily take place in the
minds of individuals, individuals are normally induced by social arrangements to accept
as valid certain pre-existent schemes and understandings of the world and its patterns of
activity. World-views and institutions align the practices of discrete individuals with those
of one another. In this manner, a plurality of such individuals may turn into a collectivity,
a social entity capable of joint action on behalf of shared interests of whatever kind.
Weber's generic expression for such an entity is Stand, generally translated in English as
*'status group'.
The concern of Weber's Protestant Ethic study is primarily with the role of a particular
religious world-view in 'authorizing' major social change. In most of his other main essays
on the sociology of religion, his concern is primarily with the role of religion in grounding
long-run differences between civilizations. But it is important to note that in neither of
these cases does Weber assume the role of religion to be the only decisive factor. On the con
trary, he argues that religious factors always interact "INith other cultural and social factors,
including the important material factors of military and political power, economic and
technological change, and legal relations, as well as the physical environment.
Weber'sThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

The basic argument of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit o(Capitalism can be summarized
in the following five key steps:
1. Weber argues that the advent of modern capitalism-a complex and protracted
event the beginnings of which he places in the late seventeenth century-was assisted not
only by material and institutional conditions of various kinds, such as those emphasized
by Marx. It was also assisted by an ideological one: by the development of what he calls
the spirit of capitalism. The capitalist 'spirit' is a historically peculiar way of disciplining
and justifying an individual's pursuit of gain through commercial and productive
operations conducted peaceably and legally on the market. It encourages individuals to
seek such gain through a particular kind of psychological commitment. It enjoins
individuals to devote to their project not only their available capital and technical
knowledge and skills but also, crucially, their capacity for sustained work, their sense of
-· ::-- .::- • - : ':?' """"'?:-:,. -.::"C .::--;:s-.;.· of 1:a.i...;y g ir.fu.l operations in
: --:;-::ss
" L - "1::r::-3sr TI'i
rr ,r :h.1: wa: they "">rganize tht:
-::.·;·-- , ::·c J..::".:-.:.:"":.:....i::.-" "2:'-.:..L--c.- n .. f ..·-m..1:::::i::..dizI.r!g::he :c:ioti·vations of

: ";'. ..-,_'::•·. - _ ... 1r •--' rt t e-:;•_'i--ric material advantage-is
-! -·~s:: - . .: - i: .,; 1...i:' .:-n ar·::- '"es to s;icJ.- inJi'-iduals a more
_- r-c!.::..::...... 'l .!rr.i-,.!...5u.,;!_'kThis motif !5

v.1."- ,,. _..," ,, ::ir: ,, ~t a.scet:il7'i-::!l' er d_scplined
-;;: -: ._.;.,.. 2- ..:1 :::_ _ 'I'. - ._:: .i;'riear r-0 be a totally arehgious
- .-.. -:ic_,_-_ ; _,..1 _1 _:-_£"" "!. ::5 ..: w d ti" ities 1,;vh1ch
1 :-:J1...
-.: r- JS t: ? CT1.. <lcm Eu:·Jpe re!igiou.s

- ---- :-c.i. ="- L :...._.-: s-r t ...... \...::.p·tLsm c---u1'1 morally
.:..k;. ·::.: .. 1-::.:-:

..!.:. ; - - -- :r-11- SC...,\-, ..L - Tr _5 .:l c_ rn-n irtp..ce n \\-eb€r 5 da that
_..
---c.-.:--: --_:,-""_._=.; ·•"· i- ·::\..c'"1:l .. B:;.n"h.!..:1:: 1:....-tarr!''io:reliotosity
·_-· 1 ,:. ._ . L :-... _:-,_.:: -,. : _;:-:-s::u;.: · r.- ">;:'"'"'.L::!CI.! .l.." lL.';.5ettle<l qc. or'. 1Seb€r
:
.:::: : .l :-.,,'""'- .-L
.: .:- --::- '\:--:. .L• ..L ice t., :. >t-,:·. ·_ 1.c. w;:,·c'l 1::.e dcn::,mstrated m an
· .. .1. -:- • l c '\.......:t.L.'1.i Y" r _,·

jed the spin:: of capi:alism
,-:i.:_.- , .-..:. :·c:m ·•cr::-erttha.ttCXJk.tsnJ.IDefrom
w:;s. 1-"
.. t±:..cC. '· ,: . .. a.:..:L"-"'ttir-= cf 'pre<lesti:J..ation'
- ·-:..: t'--,..:. '.:l ar '-,s-::-;-ut.:;.b[e and unchange:ible
...i.:.,.it ,,, m the afterL.fe. ot even a
.,:-7i;,_-, , r :-- ..:..."'. :,,;.::': • "',;,:-ic. Pl "- t"'e -impehlll,; sense of
' - :-:,.:. - - the
'< - t"·- - .i_.::-"- ti-:. • t.H::: dI' a '::e SF'...nse of anxiety.
s...1..r "'!s::,...t...:.
.:_-c -.::a:.·-- ...:.-.::-.:: :c-.,:tm-.:c. to tl°'n:'ugh
.;,..:ts,_ :,uc acts. g()(l(i deeds or
Calvinism
·-- .:-,-'- c-..: _--.:,-r- .:es; j us1-.: : r' us. :he anuety can, how1;5e::,
H.-- - • L .:... ._ ·--::-, ... l.:.-..i::t. m \ 'ere be e,;ers commit all of
---..:-r-- :r--...:--
...... - - .
, - · - .:.: ·-· - c, t-.'-' " '=-te" "' , G he German e.\.pression

- .: c ' for
--- "K - C1:rr= - >r- l er mh 5 trhl".slation of the
69
that no trace of traditionalism remained in the Calvinist Puritan conception, where the
elect could gain some sense of their election only by tinkering relentlessly with all
existing arrangements, by pursuing mastery over themselves.
4. Calvinist doctrine had not expressly authorized and encouraged believers to
translate this new asceticism into a 'spirit of capitalism'. But that translation, Weber
argued, was inevitable. The dogma of predestination placed a religious premium on ways
of acting in the world which conferred moral dignity on entrepreneurship. It turned
entrepreneurship into a test of one's moral worth. It allowed the systematic pursuit of
gain to be practised by the protagonists of early capitalist development, as Weber put it,
with 'an amazing good conscience'. This ethos was epitomized, Weber argued, in the life
and works of the eighteenth-century American statesman, inventor, and entrepreneur,
Benjamin *Franklin.
5. Yet this unintended internal link, or 'elective affinity' (Wahlverwandschafr) as Weber
called it, between Calvinist religiosity and capitalist entrepreneurship has had paradoxical
consequences. Over the generations, capitalism began to change the world in irresistible
ways, to loosen and discredit traditional constraints on business conduct, and eventually
to
*secularize Western culture. Thus the pursuit of gain through entrepreneurship began to
dispense with its earlier religious warrant. It has become )elf-sustaining and self-
justifying, cut free from its earlier religious meaning and content. In fact, the capitalist
spirit itself became dispensable, once the capitalist system had won the day. Today,
Weber argues, the system demands of individuals-and not just of entrepreneurs but also
of workers-the same commitment which it had originally derived from its moral
significance. Today, Weber writes, we find ourselves confronted with an 'iron cage' or
'steel-hard casing' (stah/hartes Gehause), marked by obligations to work and to fulfil our
profe)sional vocations, but no longer with any encompassing ethical or metaphysical
meaning. Weber declares:
The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; today we are forced to be. For to the
extent that asceticism moved out of the monastic cell, was transferred to the life of work in a
vocational calling, and then commenced to rule over this-worldly morality, it helped to construct
the powerful cosmos of the modern economic order. Tied to the technical and economic conditions
at the foundation of mechanical and machine production, this cosmos today determines the
style of life of all individuals born into it-not only those directly engaged in earning a living. This
pulsating mechanism does so with overwhelming force. Perhaps it will continue to do so until the
last ton of fossil fuel has burnt to ashes. According to Baxter, the concern for material good)
should lie upon the shoulders of his saints like 'a lightweight coat that could be thrown off at any
time'. Yet fate allowed a steel-hard casing to be forged from this coat. To the extent that asceticism
attempted to transform and influence the world, the world's material goods acquired an increasing
and, in the end, inescapable power over people-as never before in history. (Weber 1920b: 123-4)
Looking back over the entirety of Weber's study, we can see that Weber's central
question is: did religious factors contribute to the genesis of capitalism and thereby to the
central economic component of the onset of modernity? Weber's answer is that Calvinism
played a significant role in the formation of the spirit of capitalism, and that this 'spirit of
capitalism' in turn played a significant role in the emergence of capitalism itself. Weber
thus contradicted all previous interpretations of the rise of capitalism, beginning with
Marx's, which had invoked only material factors and had treated the religious aspects of
modernization as merely derivative and secondary.
World religionsand socio-economicchange
In hisother comparative essays in the sociology of religion, concentrating on
Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism, Weber addresses similar
general questions to those at stake in The Protestant Ethic. He shows the extent to which
these religions prevented the civilizations of China, India, and ancient Israel from
encouraging or allowing develop ments analogous to Western modernization, and
particularly the sustained *rationalization of all manner of social affairs, beginning with
the economic and political dimensions. These essays date from 1914-19, carrying the title
'The Economic Ethics of the World Religions'. They appeared originally in a series of
three volumes on the sociology of religion, also containing the second revised edition of
the Protestant Ethic of 1920.
The scope of the argument calls on a whole range of factors besides those of religion.
For instance, Weber's discussion of imperial China underlines the so-called 'hydraulic'
factor: the maintenance of agriculture, and thus of civilization, required a centralized
system of political control over floods and irrigation. In tum, such a system hindered the
develop ment of autonomous status groups analogous to those which played a leading role
in Western modernization.
Within this broad framework, the core argument of the essays engages with the social
consequences of religious forms represented in imperial China, pre-Raj India, and ancient
Israel. Weber's argument is the following. The religions in question played a significant
negative role as concerns the formation of anything like the spirit of capitalism. They did
not put a spiritual premium on individuals' efforts to prove their moral stature by achiev
ing a dynamic mastery of their worldly vocation. They discouraged or even condemned
any detachment from tradition and any sustained commitment to innovation in business
practices. At most, they allowed or encouraged the members of privileged status groups to
develop not a rationality of mastery over reality, but a rationality of adaptation to reality,
a recognition of and homage to its intrinsic harmonies. Weber demonstrates this
difference particularly in the case of the Mandarins of imperial China, trained in the
classic texts of
*Confucius and his followers and engaged in the empire's administration. In this account,
Confucianism strongly enjoined respect for tradition, valuing above all the correctness of
behaviour.
A similar argument applies to st.atus groups associated with the other Oriental religions,
in particular the Hindu Brahm ins and the Buddhist monks. These two constituencies
were also trained in bodies of religious doctrine, and their commitment to religious values
im parted a rationalistic tone to their existence. But such rationality was applied in the
pursuit of ritual purity and in the rejection of any serious engagement with the illusory
realities of this world. Thus their doctrines too, in different ways, prohibited the
emergence of something like the Puritans' worldly asceticism. They discouraged a
commitment to take seriously the things of the material world and to tramtorm these
things in everyday practice.
Weber concedes that ancient Judaism encouraged a commitment to worldly affairs
similar to tll,Jt of the Pu ntam. But he points out that this commitment focused chiefly on
the pursuit of military and political power in the contest with Gentile peoples. In this
sense,Judaism had a strongly *particularistic intent, based on advancement of the
interests of the in-group ('us') over against the out-group ('them'), the non-Jews or
Gentiles. Weber
(Li S<,lfAl ',O(IJH THrORY, fll 71
shows how this attitude found expression in the economic sphere. Typically, each Jew, in
trading with and working for other Jews, was expected to respect ethical constraints in his
dealings with other Jews but not in his economic relations to Gentiles. For this reason, the
Jews, despite their pre-eminence in trade and banking, failed to exert anything like as
pervasive an influence on the wider economic relations of society as that of the Protestant
Calvinists of early modern Europe.
We may notice here that Weber's was not so much a sociology of religion as a
sociology of religions, in the plural. Weber did not ,tudy religion in the abstract, as
Durkheim did in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Rather, Weber studied specific
historical religions. He took on board the doctrinal content of different religious traditions
and the associated differences in organizational structures, emphasizing their
differential impact on the way believers positioned themselves within the cosmos. He
was interested in the way different religions answer crucial questions about life before and
after death and conceive of the Deity.
Power, stratification, and domination
We now turn to the second key focus of Weber's thinking, concerning the domain of
politics. We have seen that Weber is acutely aware of the sigmficance of religious
doctrines and the role of the personnel-prophets, priests, monks-who articulate these
doctrines and elaborate the related practices. This concentration should not, however,
lead us to think that Weber attributes to religious factors a general priority over other,
qualitatively differ ent kinds of factors. At the end of The Protestant Ethic Weber
emphasized that it was not his intention to set out 'a one-sided spiritualistic analysis of the
causes of culture and history in place of an equally one-sided *"materialistic" analysis'
(Weber 1920b: 125). On the con trary, Weber argues that individuals can attribute
significance to their lives with reference to several very different kinds of value
schemes-not only religious values but also eco
nomic, political, intellectual, aesthetic., and erotic values.
Weber points out that dominant *status groups can orient their mutual activities by
advancing partic.uJar mat<:rial inkn.:'>l, and ,ceking trJ makl' thl',l' intue,h prl'vail rJVer
competing one,. Jn thi, rl'gard, he empha,iZl''> that brJth 'idcaJ interl''>h' and 'matl'.rial
interests' play a part in shaping social action and s0cial movements through history. In one
revealing pa\'>agl'. Wl'.hu l'XJlfl'\'>l''> thh point with the mt:taphrn r,t \witchml'n' rm a
railway line. Material interests are like trains on railway lines whose movement is
unstoppable but who,l'. dirl'ction can hf.: changl'd hy 1dl'a<,, likl' the fJlficu, whr, rJptratl' thl'
,witchl'.'> at thl' point,: ''.\"ot idea,, but rnatl'rial and ickal inttrl''>h, dirl'ctly govun men\
UJnduct. Yl't vuy frl' quently the "world image," that havl' bu:n ueated by "idea," have,
like ,w1tchm\."n, dl'tu mined the: track'> alrmg which actifJn ha, bc:c:n pu,hul by the
dynamic r,f mtue<,t' !WdJl'r
1920d: 280).
Much of the essence of Weber's thinking in these regards appears in his last great work
Economy and Society, publi,hc:d in two parh in 192() and prJ,thumrrn,ly in 1922. Of kl'y
importance for Webu int hi, late wr Jrk arl' at lc:a,t three, Lardinal fac trJr,: the /act()f of power;
the, factor of stratification in ,rJCial ,true.lure, accurding trJ memhu,hip c la,,l', and \tatm
group,; and thl' factor of type, of lc-xitimutc 'dominution. We irJok at thl''>l' th rel' fallrJr, in
turn.
72 GiANFRANCO POGGI
Power, class, status, and parties

Weber reiterates that which social group prevails over others in a given historical context
does not depend on anything like an overriding law of human development, assuring
the greatest fulfilment of the qualities of the species-such as Marx's law of the rise of
the Proletariat. Nor does it demonstrate the intrinsic superiority of the values held by
the group that prevails over those of the others. It depends instead on contingent
circum stances, and particularly on the quantum of power which a given group _can
successfully mobilize with respect to others. Such power, understood by Weber as a
group's ability to as sert its own interests even over the opposition of others, can
express itself in a political form, resting on a key resource-the means of violence-
which allows a group to threaten the physical survival and well-being of opposing
groups.
But Weber also refers,to two other forms of power: economic power and what we may
call ideological power (Weber leaves this form unlabelled). Economic power is based on
resources necessary for the reproduction of material life. Ideological power is based
on a group's ability to generate valid collective understandings of the meaning of reality
and valid norms required for the maintenance of social order. All these forms of power
the political, the economic, and the ideological-come into play in Weber's analysis of
stratification and domination, to which we now turn.
The distribution of the three power forms, based on possession of, or exclusion from,
their respective resources, generates respectively the political, the economic, and the ideo
logical dimensions of social inequality, or what is also commonly termed 'stratification'.
Each dimension involves a different kind of unit of co-equals (Weber 1922c):
• parties-understood in a very broad sense, designating individuals who do or do not
enjoy access to a society's political centre and influence over its policies;
• classes-designating individuals on the basis of opportunities they may or may
not have for asserting their interests on the market; and
• estates or 'status groups'-designating the degree of social honour and prestige a
plurality of individuals may or may not possess (where 'status group' has a
narrower meaning in this context than in Weber's writings on religion).
In conceptualizing three kinds of stratification units, Weber dissents expressly from

Marx, for whom *class is the only significant unit. On the one hand, he agrees with
Marx that social inequality tends to generate conflict between units, and that in the
modern world the third type of unit (estate) loses significance with respect to class.
On the other hand, he insists that parties are also significant collective players in
modern societies. In fact, in keeping with the place held by political concerns in his
own life, Weber theorizes chiefly the political form of power. This emphasis is
particularly apparent in his analysis of forms of domination.
Domination and legitimacy

Weber is in no doubt that political power has its source in violence (Weber 1919a). However,
he also insists that political power becomes more significant when it clothes itself in
legitimacy, and transforms itself from mere power (Macht) into *domination (Herrschaft,
73
literally 'lordship') (1922d). Domination expresses itself through commands evoking

obedience. Legitimacy exists when those to whom the commands are addressed obey
them because obedience seems to them dutiful, because they sense that they ought to obey
in some morally significant sense.
In one of his most famous essays, 'Politics as a Vocation', to which we turn in a
moment, Weber comments that the state has a 'monopoly on the legitimate use of
violence' (Weber 1919a: 78). In the period of the rise of modern mass industrial societies,
it is the state, and the state alone-not bandits or breakaway factions, or 'terrorists'-that
can claim the great est legitimacy for its use of force to preserve order-through a police
force, a judiciary, and the threat of punishment for criminals. The state can claim a
normative ground for obedi ence, and it is this ground that makes its domination
legitimate, unlike the brute coercion and intimidation of the highwayman, the pirate, or
the mafia cartel.
In his work on power and politics, Weber suggests a novel way to address an age-old
question in political thought: what are the major kinds of government? Weber responds by
analysing the notion oflegitimacy (Weber 1922d). Iflegitimacy exists when the
commander offers grounds (implicit or explicit) on which obedience is due, and if the
commanded accept such grounds (implicitly or explicitly) and act upon them, then one
may ask what are the grounds offered and accepted. According to Weber, the answers,
ideal-typically formulated, are the following three:
• Legitimacy is traditional if the ground offered and accepted for obedience is chiefly
that what has happened in the past has every right to keep happening in the present and
future. Whoever commands in the present is regarded as the lawful descendant of the
people commanded in the past. Thus the commands given repeat and re-enact those
given in the past. Traditional legitimacy is typically to be found in the case of medieval
monarchies, where a monarch is regarded as the legitimate descendant of a blood line and
is owed allegiance by a company of loyal followers or patrons drawn from the nobility,
who administer the monarch's realm in its outlying provinces.
• Legitimacy is charismatic if, on the contrary, the commands issued break with
tradition but do so because the person issuing them demonstrably embodies extraord
inary compelling forces which are entitled to introduce innovation. Charismatic legit
imacy is typically provided by the warrior hero or by the prophet or breakaway religious
leader.
• Legitimacy is legal-rational if the commands issued find obedience by virtue of
being instantiations of general norms, where these norms are valid in turn because they
are enacted according to recognized principles and procedures. Such principles and
procedures authorize the issuing of commands by individuals as holders of offices, not in
their personal capacity. Legal-rational legitimacy describes the structure of modern
bureaucratic states.
The creative aspect of Weber's theory of legitimate domination is its insight that
other significant aspects of domination typically vary with the nature of the legitimacy at
stake. Weber shows how a whole range of political practices will be associated with a
given
*polity's type of legitimacy, including its different ways of empowering the rulers and
constraining the subordinates, of handing out justice, of producing norms, and raising and
74 GIANFRANCO POGGI
expending economic resources. Among the practices Weber considers most significant
are those concerning a polity's staff; that is, the relatively large number of individuals
who administer it, who interpret and implement its policies on a day-to-day basis and
mediate between its summit and its social base, between its centre and its periphery.
The key questions Weber raises in his analysis of political personnel concern how such
individuals are typically recruited, trained, assigned tasks, financed, controlled. His
answers make up a masterful set of ideal-typical concepts, spelling out the ways in
which staffs have been constituted throughout history. Traditional polities are typically
administered either by a *patriarchal staff, involving personnel standing in a relationship
of personal dependence to the ruler, or by a*patrimonial staff, that is, personnel who put
to the ruler's service resources which they control, formally or informally, in their own
right,
Cl ASSICAL sor1 l TH"ORY 111 75
including especially military resources. Charismatic rulers do not attribute particular

significance to the routine concerns of administrators, being themselves engaged in
feats which transcend and challenge those concerns. Thus typically they entrust these
tasks to devoted followers, chosen without attention to their competence, letting them
operate without much guidance other than their commitment to carry out the ruler's
personal will (Weber 1922e). A charismatic ruler might be a figure such as Julius Caesar
or Moses, or a tribal chief, or possibly a modern dictatorial figure such as Hitler.
Weber's account of legal-rational legitimacy appears especially in his analysis of the
phenomenon of bureaucracy and its role in the modern state, which is discussed here
in Box 7.
At least three general considerations account for Weber's interest in bureaucracy. First,
it is most manifest in the political sphere. Secondly, the bureaucratic model, brought
to perfection in the modern state, has subsequently asserted itself in other collective
units in business firms, educational establishments, political parties, and hospitals. But
thirdly and most importantly, bureaucracy represents the most significant embodiment
of what Weber sees as the master trend of modern society: the advance of
*rationalization.
Rationalization and the rise of 'occidental rationalism'
By 'rationalization' Weber means that in all manner of social pursuits actors rely
increasingly on a deliberate search for the mo t efficient means lo achieve goals, optimizing
their achievement and making the costs and outcomes of pursuits as predictable as
possible. Calculation of the most efficient means of achieving desired ends takes
increasing precedence over reflection on the ultimate ethical meaning of these ends
themselves. In the most general sense, Weber sees technical efficiency, capitalism, and
administration as gradually usurping the place of religion, myth, and metaphysics in the
emergence of the modern world. This process is a demonstration of the development he
famously calls 'disenchantment of the world' (Entzauberung der Welt), brought about
by the rise of modern systems of social organization. As discussed in Chapter 7 of
this book, the members of the *Frankfurt School of social research were later to describe
this process in terms of the rise of *'instrumental reason', drawing on Weber's concept
of means-end rationality or 'purposive rationality' (Zweckrationalitat).
Weber developed this thinking about rationalization in two essays known as the
'Intermediate Reflections' and the 'Preface' (or 'Author's Introduction') to his collected
three volumes of writings on the sociology of religion (Weber 1920c, 1920e), as well as in
two famous lectures given in Munich in the winter of 1918-19, 'Science as a Vocation'
and 'Politics as a Vocation' (Weber 1919a, 1919b). In these texts, Weber is preoccupied
with the systematic rationalization of diverse spheres of social life or what he calls 'value-
spheres'. He concentrates particularly on the spheres of the economy, science, law, politics,
morality, the arts, and erotic life. Each sphere comes to develop in an autonomous fashion,
evolving its own independent logic of validity. Each sphere comes into sharp conflict with
the claims of other spheres and cannot be reconciled with them. Science, politics, and the
economy come into conflict with religion, while art and the erotic life also come into
conflict with morality.
76 GIANfRANCO POGGI
Weber sees these processes of rationalization and *differentiation between spheres

as a distinctive aspect of the culture of the West. These processes have enabled the
West to impose its dominance on other cultures, compelling them to adopt some of its
features. However, he emphasizes that in the West itself this aspect does not constitute
an abiding and commanding goal, but has emerged due to a contingent constellation of
historical cir cumstances. Furthermore, he is aware of the human costs of rationalization.
It suppresses alternative ways of conducting social affairs. It removes meaning and
significance from human experience. It marginalizes the related values of other
cultures, due not to the in trinsic superiority of Western ones-a superiority in which
Weber himself did not be lieve-but due to the greater technical efficiency of the
practices of the Western course of development.
Weber feared that with the advance of processes of *secularization, a new 'parcellization of
the human soul' would emerge, eliminating spaces for the development of personal
autonomy and responsibility. Weber became haunted by the image of social life as an
immense bureaucratic machine, and it was this that induced him to reject socialism,
machine which he saw as addirrg to modern capitalism's fateful destruction of individual
entrepreneurial spirit through its collectivization of productive resources. The same preoc
cupation marks, and in a sense also mars, Weber's thinking on political affairs. He empha
sizesdangerously the role of leaders, suggesting that all true leaders are in a sense
charismatic leaders. He justifies democracy only insofar as it constitutes the best way to
select such leaders under modern conditions. Leaders in his view must exercise wide-
reaching powers, first to defeat alternative leaders in a competitive party system, then to
assert, if necessary through deadly force, the interests of their nation in the power
struggles of sovereign states. We shall shortly consider some further elements of Weber's
pessimism about modernity in connection with the thought of his intellectual
near-contemporaries Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. But we move now to the
other key thinker under discussion
in this chapter: Georg *Simmel.
Georg Simmel:the 'sociology of forms'

Simmel's sociological texts date from the early 1890s when he began writing about
theories of social differentiation and theories of historical knowledge. His early writing
shows the influence of both English and French positivism, on the one hand, and, with
increasing prominence, German 'life-philosophy' or Lebensphilosophie, on the other
hand-a move ment of thought associated with the teaching of Wilhelm *Dilthey,
emphasizing the constant flux and historical relativity of human knowledge and
experience. After 1910, until his death in 1918, Simmel ceased to write directly on
sociological matters, retiring to a more introspective mode of writing concerned almost
exclusively with philosophy, art, and humanistic culture. Simmel's two most important
books from the middle period of his intellectual career are The Philosophy ofMoney, of 1900,
and his Soziologie, of 1908. The latter work weaves a number of pre-existent essays into a
comprehensive discourse, ranging over numerous themes.
!CAL SOCIAL THEORY Ill 77
The following account concentrates on Simmel's most distinctively sociological

contributions from this middle period of his life. We begin with his key conception of
'forms of interaction' and the 'sociology of forms', outlined in his 1908 Sociology and
other essays from the same decade.
Interaction and exchange: Simmel's Sociology of 1908

In his most expressly articulated view of the identity of the discipline, Simmel assigns to
sociology the task of considering not so much the content of social events, or the nature
of the interests with which individuals relate to one another, as the forms of their
interaction (Simmel 1908a: 3-57). Simmel argues that such 'forms of interaction' are
distinct from the moti_ves for which actors i teract, and should therefore deserve_separate
consideration. ·we know, for instance, th_at the same interest can be pursued through
different arrangements: one can seek to make money on the market either as a self-
standing businessman or as a member of a partnership. And we know that the same form
can be adopted in the pursuit of different interests. For instance, Ignatius of Loyola,
founder of the Catholic Jesuit order in the sixteenth century, was a military man, and
when he devoted himself to saving souls he organized his followers along the same lines
as units intended to fight battles.
But Simmel stresses that while the forms of interaction are distinct from the contents of
interaction, they are not indifferent to them. The properties of forms of interaction affect
the way in which interaction is carried out. '? rni!_tin_g_ s_()_c_iolqgy-to th study of these.
properties, Simmel suggests its analogy to geometry. Sociology should catalogue the
differ.entpatternsofrelationships people estal;li h whe'n they interact, with whatever intent.
Even if som_etimes people may choose a pattern to adopt, they cannot choose not to adopt
a p;ttern. Sociology should therefore discern the specific tendencies and liabilities of each
.p;HterQ pointing out the possibilities it opens up to interaction and ti-{;;-s·eit foreclose-s. ·-
One of Simmel's most sustained accounts of the role of forms is his essay 'The Significance
of Numbers in Social Life' (Simmel 1908a: 87-104). Here Simmel demonstrates the difference
made when the numbers of individuals or groups involved in a context of interaction are
either two or three. When two units of actors are involved, the secession or disappearance
of one party dissolves the relationship. When three units are involved, the relationship is not
dis solved but leaves open the possibility of its continuing between the two remaining
units. In the three-unit relationship, each unit may establish a closer relationship to one
other unit than to the remaining one. Even within a family, with two parents and one child,
the child may occasionally ally itself with one parent in order to turn the other parent into
an outvoted minority over a given issue. This opportunity is open to each unit, and
generates a complex dynamic. A three-member relationship is typically liable to create 'two
against one' coalitions, possibly shifting ones, with varying outcomes. But the third party's
position is not necessarily a weak one; it can also develop strategies intended to erode the
coalition and form a new one which involves itself, and excludes another party. In case of
conflict between two other parties, the third can also make itself useful as a mediator or
arbitrator-although a mediating posi tion may carry liabilities of its own. Simmel's reflections
here have clear implications for polit ical party formations and international alliances,
among many other cases. More recent elaborations of such ideas can be found in *rational
choice theory and game theory.
78 ( 1/\NfRld.i(O POGGI
Sociability and social process

It can be seen that Simmel articulates a programmatic understanding of sociology as
a discipline dealing systematically with what could be called the 'geometry' of social life.
But Simmel also advances an understanding of sociology which we could describe as
'residualist' in character. His intention was to establish sociology as a discipline without
challenging existent disciplines of longer lineage and greater standing. These other
disciplines, he argued, deal with highly visible and lasting social formations-such as firms,
churches, states, polit ical parties, and so on-and do a most useful job of that. However, t!
1ey neglect formations w_hicti also express the ability of people to engage in joint activity i t.
Less_v_isi?le, less public, and less durable manner. Such 'residual' social formations
deserve the attention of scholars. They include lesser expressions of human sociability, such
as maintaining a correspondence, giving or taking part in a.soiree, establishing an
acquaintance, flirting, addressing or refusing to address a stranger, expressing gratitude, or
wearing jewellery. Simmel here shows how sociology can uncover ways in which
unexpressed, informal conventions regulate social con duct and sanction deviant conduct, and
in this sense constitute conduct. A soiree, for instance, ceases to be experienced and
appreciated as one if it has more than so many participants, or if too many participants fail
to behave as they are expected to behave.
In all these respects, Simmel's overwhelming fascination is with the phenomenon of
sociability (Geselligkeit), with the spontaneous generation of social relationships for what
ever purposes, whether leisure, entertainment, sport, and the arts, or eroticism, work, or
politics. Two particular interests of his were the phenomenon of fashion and the concept
of the stranger. These two cases are discussed here in Box 8.
SOX 8. GEORG SIMMEL ON FASHION AND THE STRANGER
Some of Simmel's best essays analyse numerous apparently minor forms of sociability which the
established sciences of culture do not normally address. In the case of the distinctively modern
phenomenon of fashion, Simmel (1905) points out that fashion expresses two contrasting and
complementary needs of the individual. On the one hand, 1 div1duals signal the1r.1nterit to-ili'slii5'gwsh
themsel\es, to emphasize their individuality, by keeping ahead of the crowd and exploring experiences
not universally accepted. On the other hand, by virtue of appearing fashionable, individuals affiliate
themselves with other individuals like themselves and express a need for bonding and social belonging.
With the same intent, Simmel also discusses such figures as the pauper and, most notably, the
Stranger. Simmel shows how these figures are socially constituted, how they consist in relations
between individuals patterned by consistent though not expressly communicated understandings. The
essay on 'The Stranger' (1908b) conceptualizes perceptively the position of Jews in Western society as
excluded outsiders, but it also makes some more general points. Simmel memorably describes the
Stranger as the person who 'comes today and stays tomorrow'. The Stranger is distinguished from the
traveller or the vagabond. The Stranger embodies two basic and contrasting relations of individuals
to space, namely staying put and moving on. This holds not only in purely physical terms but in
the typical relations between the Stranger and the locals or natives. The Stranger generally seeks
only limited\
I acceptance, rna1nta1ns some degree of detachment and 'otherness'. In turn,"11il: n /;;"w n complex
reactions in the locals: on the one hand, curiosity'. a sens_e that they have something to learn or acquire
I from the stranger; and on the other hand, negative feelings, often extending to outright hostility.
OCiAl Tri:'OP"r
Iii 79
Simmel's 'residualist' understanding of sociology also relates to its concern with

'molecu lar' qualities of social life. Simmel shows how 'molecular' ocial phenomena can
occur in the cracks between the. mqre imposing social formations, as well as withi11 those
formations. Social formations preserve their visibility and perform their function only
insofar.a"s.they°are sustained on a day-to-day basis by a multitude of minute, inconspicuous
episodes of interaction.
In this connection, Simmel considers whether an army or a church or a firm exists,
other than as the loci of an incessant social process between individuals . It seems clear
that certain major social formations such as a state are more durable than others. But
Simmel asks: what precisely makes them durable? In what sense is a currently existing
social entity, say, 'the French state', the same as the French state of two or four centuries
ago, when none of the individuals involved in the French state's operations then is alive
now? One of Simmel's chapters in the 1908 Sociology examines the various conscious and
unselfcon scious social strategies securing 'the persistence of social groups', showing how
these groups also operate in much less conspicuous formations than a state.
It can be seen that oneof Simmel's favourite ways of doing sociology consists in identifying
a phenomenon and exhibiting a number of not-obvious aspects of it, often with the curious
effect of making them obvious. In this regard, one of his most creative essays concerns-\
·: 'Conflict'. Here he states at the outset the paradox that a phenomenon generally seen as
J
negative has in fact a number of positive effects (Simmel 1908a: 118-69, 1908c). But as the
analysis progresses, one realizes that it elaborates a rather obvious proposition, namely
that
: two conflicting parties may be brought together by their conflict with a third party. We may
( think of the old Arab proverb: 'me against my brother; my brother and myself against our
cousin; my brother, my cousin, and myself against our neighbour'.
Ambivalence and reciprocity

We have seen that Simmel is more interested in the how of social life than in the what of
social life. Here we can note a remarkable difference from Weber's effort to identify
recurrent major types of phenomenon. A related theme of Simmel can also be formulated
as that of ambivalence. In accounting for what propels the social process, Simmel speaks
of a certain 'unsociable sociability' of the individual actor (Simmel 1908a: 69-72). Simmel
suggests that individuals can enter into and adhere to any given relationship only with a
part of themselves. As _!hey_ol;cy_forces that,draw them together, they unavoidab_ly_ xperi
ence other forces that draw them apart. They can only accommodate tempo_rarily,
partially,
;ndcon5i.J..t_j 1ally..to,eachaothcr's presence and each other'i d ma ")US: By the same token,
their.-;iations, no matter how stable and settled they may seem, are always subject to a
process of negotiation, for they constitute a compromise between each party's needs for
closeness and distance, a compromise between the search for and acceptance of depend
ence on the one hand, and the hankering for autonomy on the other.
This does not mean that all parties can negotiate their positions equally, for some
relations are markedly asymmetric, being structured by power. Simmel speaks specifically
of 'super-ordination and sub-ordination' in social life (1908a: 181-306). Yet here, too,
Simmel considers a further aspect of ambivalence. He notes how superior parties typically
expect subordinate parties to possess some degree of self-determination. The superior does
80 GIANFRANCO POCG!
notwant the subordinate to be wholly subjected to the superior's will, for such a subjection
would in the end induce inertia, and the superior needs the subordinate to be more than
inert. In this sense the superior can rely on the subordinate only if the latter is not
entirely at the mercy of the superior. This conception recalls the idea of a 'dialectic of the
master and the slave', originally formulated by the philosopher G. W. F. *Hegel and also
echoed by authors as different as Marx and some contemporary feminist and postcolonial
critics. In this thinking, a slave is progressively empowered by the fact that he has learned
more and more and can challenge a master who is disempowered by the fact that he
depends on the slave's labour.
More generally, Simmel's argument is that all social relations involve reciprocity or
reciprocal effect. Simmel's German expression Wechselwirkung is often translated simply
as 'interaction'; but the German term Wechsel specifically means 'exchange'. It suggests
that we consider all social relations, including those apparently most remote from market
and commerce-such as intimate relations-as involving exchange and reciprocity. In
the mid-twentieth century, Peter Blau's Exchange and Power in Social Life (1964) derived
much of its general theory of the social process from Simmel's metaphor of exchange.
In exchange, ambivalence is particularly marked, for it involves giving as little as possible
of something to get as much as possible of something else. Some parallels can be
discerned here between Simmel's thinking about reciprocity and the work of the early
twentieth century French anthropologist Marcel *Mauss on 'the gift' (Mauss 1924).
Money and modernity: Simmel's ThePhilosophy

of Money
Simmel differed from many German thinkers of the period who decried modernization as
an insidious and destructive process, threatening distinctive values of German history and
culture. In contrast, Simmel felt at home in the modem Berlin metropolis of his time and
thus in modern society, although he was acutely aware of the historical peculiarities of the
modem urban complex and the particular colour it was imparting to social experience. We
cannot cover all aspects of Simmel's penetrating account of the distinctive features of
modern culture here; but we can assemble a few of its exemplary threads, especially as
they appear in his first magnum opus of 1900 The Philosophy of Money, as well as in the
1908 Soziologie.
A key theme in Simmel's account of modernity is his conception of, individuation or
individualization, discussed also in different ways by Marx, Durkheim, and *Tonnies. Simmel
considers the allowance increasingly made in modern societies for the distinctiveness,
autonomy, and responsibility of individuals. But he does not account for this by invoking a
notion of the loosening of the social bond, or a distancing between the individual and the
group, or an eclipse of group memberships. Rather, he states that in modem society
the groups to which individuals belong are no longer arranged concentrically, as they
are in pre-modem societies. In traditional or pre-modem settings, an individual's member
ship of the family determined his or her membership of a larger kinship group, in a
neighbourhood, in a religious unit, or in an occupational grouping. In modern society, by
•, 1 • h ,. · DCIAL lHEORY. Ill 81
ontrast, the groups to which an individual belongs overlap. His or her membership of
such groups is e]ecti:ve, expressing the deliberate, contingent choices of the individual. As a
result, individuals are likely to associate with some partners in onegroup and with others
in another group. They are shielded from the incessant monitoring of any single set of
associates and can develop a sense of autonomy. Individuals can weave a 'web of group
affiliations' of their own (Simmel 1903d). It is the idiosyncratic content of each web that
grounds individuals' sense of personal distinctiveness, and this distinctiveness
increases as individuals'
_memberships multiply and vary over time. This contrast between concentric and
overlap ping sets of groups is another example of Sirnmel's geometrical imagery of social
life.
A second theme in Simrnel's idea of modernity is its conception of a link between
economic action and the concept of renunciation. Simmel considers how renunciation
differentiates economic action from robbery and piracy and the like insofar as it involves
exchange; that is, a giving up something for something else. Exchange raises for the
participants a question that is both quantitative and qualitative: a giving up how much
of what for how much of what? Both aspects of the question are best handled when
exchange goes beyond barter and becomes monetary. For money is intrinsically
quantitative, and it can be given and taken in exchange for anything. Nothing is
intrinsically money; anything can be money. What functions as money is thus the critical
question, which can be solved only institutionally, through publicly sanctioned
arrangements. Yet these arrangements need to be backed by public confidence, by
what is called 'trust'.
In the highly developed money systems of modern cities, social life evinces the
prevalence of instrumental over against expressive relations. It displays abstractness, a
heightened significance of quantity over quality, and at the same time an awareness that
everything is related to everything else. The characteristics of the modern money system
are anonymity of possessions and people and a tendency toward unceasing movement. All
these properties powerfully shape modern society, imparting to it its relentless dynamism.
In arguing this, Sirnmel to an extent agrees with Marx's views about the centrality
of economic phenomena, but he also problematizes Marx's account. F J,J.!P,EJ._,fl, the
_illa_ffi!11ent of vJ!lue tO fil!_Qdsjs !:!s.Jed gn_5.uf?j_ c!!_ve cu)twal p_roc s ef of
(;... nootnthaemount of socially necessary labour po er invested
in producing
such goods.
One of Simmel's most often cited essays which complements The Philosophy of Money is
his essay of 1903 'The Metropolis and Mental Life'. This is discussed in Box 9.
The 'tragedy of culture'

Simmel's argument about the impact of money on modern society borders on one he
was to develop in the last years of his life about 'the tragedy of culture' (Simmel
1911a). By culture Simmel means a_J)rQre of self-cultivation, wher.e. the mind of the
individual is enriched by an e c;unterwith theintellectual and artistic legacie_s cifthe past.
This process is possitile because the t -p rties tothe-e; -; t me and the text I am
reading, or me and the painting I am regarding-are both expressions of the same
reality, the human spirit, in its subjective expression at one end and its objective
expression at the other. The subjective growth of the living individual aims at an
assimilation of the best the past can offer, involving a recognition that the products of
the past speak to us and can nourish and
82
metropolitan life threatens individuals with restless stimulation and excitement. To protect themselves
from nervous exhaustion, 1nd1v1duals must adopt practices such as holding otfiers al a c!istan;:E;
_and attitudes of blase indifference. In turn, these practices and attitudes, necessary as they are,
deprive
i 1duals of an opportunity to appreeiate deeply the obJects and people they efi_ OUD1 Jo for1:17
authentic associiltions. The anonymity of life in the larger city protects individuals from the close mon
itoring nd sanct10;; of other people, allowing them to develop their personalities; but at the same
time it engenders loneliness and alienation. In the USA, Simmel's writings on the city exerted an import
ant impact on the *Chicago School of Sociologists, as discussed in Chapter 5 of this book, pp. 115-6.
ennoble us. But this process does not often attain its goal. According to Simmel's late
tragic vision, mastering the makings of the products of culture requires an effort which
most individuaKcannot bear to sustain. They baulk at the effort, contenting themselves
with a vague acquaintance of the works of the past or displaying a shallow
connoisseursh.ip of them. If this happens, a true process of cultivation fails to take place.
Simmel calls this the 'tragedy of culture', which is relentlessly intensified in modern times
as the objective world of social-c11ltural institutions becomes an insuperable mass
beyond any possibility of organic assimilation by a single individual. Above all in the
metropolis, the sheer accumu lation of the products of human agency-
technological,economic, political, and artistic multiplies the occasions for cultivation open
to the individual, but at the same time overwhelms the individual with multiplicity,
variety, and restless change.
ln these last reflections, Simmel shares several attitudes in common with Weber
concerning the fate of the 'old European' cultural world-view. In the final section of
this chapter we turn to some commonalities between Weber and Simmel in relation to the
near-contemporary thinking of Friedrich *Nietzsche and Sigmund *Freud.
The tragic consciousness in Weber and Simmel: links with

Nietzsche and Freud
Nietzsche and Freud have sometimes been placed together with Marx in the history of
social theory as three cardinal exponents of what Paul *Ric ur terms the 'hermeneutics of
suspicion' (Ric ur 1981). Where Marx interprets human action in terms of concealed
83
material interests disguised by ideology, Nietzsche interprets human action in terms of

hidden motives disguised by forms of self-deception. Similarly, Freud interprets human
action in terms of unconscious wishes and desires that have been repressed or sublimated
by culture and the conscious mind (for full discussion of Freud's influence in social
theory, see Chapter 8 of this book).
Such strategies of 'deep interpretation' continue in the work of Weber and Simmel, who
both read and admired the writings of Nietzsche and both responded to the same kinds of
questions of social psychology and pathology that concerned Freud, although they did not
attend to Freud's writings so closely. Together with Nietzsche and Freud, Weber's and
Simmel's thinking shares a certain 'tragic' ethos in the sense that both thinkers point to
dynamic tendencies of modernity-the rise of science, rationalization, and industrialization-
hich equip human action with unprecedented power over natural resources and at the
same time bring about a feeling of meaninglessness and moral emptiness, a condition of
social illness, melancholy, and neurosis. In Weber's classic phrase, modernity results in
the 'disenchant ment of the world', or 'elimination of magic from the world' (c.ntzauberung
der Welt) (Weber 1920a: 105, 1920b: 60). The very processes that remove magic and
superstition from the world are the same processes that tend to destroy a sense of the
meaning of the cosmos. Under conditions of advanced rationalization,society comes to be
concerned only with the most efficient means of achieving ends, not with the ultimate
meaning and value of these ends themselves.
In the spirit of Nietzsche's writings on the 'superman' or Ubermensch, Simme_l's '.!!ag edx..
of cultu_re'.suggests_ that only..a.fe.w..peoplg_, true 'aristocrats of the spirit', can continue to
aspire to appreciate cultural goods. In Simmel's later work, the inexhaustible potentiality of
life is contrasted with the inexorable necessity of forms in which life can find expression,
but which at the same time constrain and repress its fullness. L_ife is compelled in turn not
only to produce forms but also to transcend them. Simmel here seems to resonate both an
elitism and a ,·cultural pessimism' widespread in intellectual circles of his time. Similarly,
the recurrent appearance of the theme of *'asceticism' in Weber's Protestant Ethic and his
emphasis on 'discipline' bear a remarkable affinity to Nietzsche's analyses of practices of
self-mastery. The theme finds a more general expression in Freud's argument that all civi
lization depends on individuals' ability to repress and sublimate the socially disruptive
claims and promptings of their libido-the core of the unconscious-by subjecting them
to the demands of the 'superego'. An abiding implication of all such views is the possibility
of a 'return of the repressed'.The restraints imposed by social institutions and by individual
reflection on pre-rational urges and needs have such costs that they are threatened by
potential breakdowns, such as those represented by the kinds of social malaise that led to
fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
According to Weber, rationalization and modernization are strongly associated with
*secularization and with what Nietzsche proclaimed to be the 'death of God' (Nietzsche
1882). From this 'death of God' arises a danger of moral *nihilism, where moral values are
no longer thought to be underpinned hy unifying schemes of shared belief and are
henceforth thought to be solely matters of personal choice. In this context, Weber's rather
problematic emphasis on the need for charismatic leaders reflects partly the impact of
Nietzsche's exaltation of the ethically sovereign individual, the Ubermensch. In other
authors, this motif is associated with a fear and contempt of 'the masses'. In his description
of the advance of rationalization, Weber associates himself with Nietzsche's scathing
criticism of
84 GIANFRANCO POGGI
one aspect of the late nineteenth century: its complacency about progress, its shallow
assurance about the solidity and superiority of the current era. On the other hand,
Weber does not express any backward-looking lamentation about the ravages of
modernity. His view is that society must embrace the present, in all its contradictions
and paradoxes.
Conclusion
Weber and Simmel share an understanding of social reality which emphasizes its
intrinsically historical nature. Both appreciate the necessity of approaching social reality
'hermeneutically'; that is, with an eye to the subjective processes orienting the conduct of
individuals. They also agree that in those processes, a given individual's activity intersects
with and accommodates the results of the activities of many other individuals, both
present and past. In these respects, Weber and Simmel contrast with Marx and Durkheim.
Where the latter think of society and social change above all in terms of structures and
systems, involving objective forces and dynamics operating above the heads of
individuals, Weber and Simmel underscore the importance of meaning, individual action,
and subjectivity.
At the same time, the orientations of the two thinkers differ markedly. Weber is chiefly
interested in the continuities and discontinuities of historical events and the different
sensitivities, competences, and action orientations generated across the human
species. Weber is concerned with the historical diversity of ways of experiencing and
evaluating reality, of constructing institutions and motivating and justifying action.
Accordingly, his sociological work aims to conceptualize sharply the different value
constructs and diverse sets of institutions constraining human activities, ranging across
such fields as law, reli gion, politics, science, the economy, and the arts. Simmel, in
contrast, focuses attention on the ways in which individuals-especially modern
individuals-negotiate their exist ence in any social context, according to the patterns of
interaction they weave in encountering each other. It is, so to speak, not the what of the
socio-historical process that attracts his attention but the how of that process. Simmel
has as keen a sense for conflict, contradiction, and tragedy, as Weber does; but where
Weber emphasizes contrasts between material and ideal interests and between values,
Simmel explores the import of the 'unsociable sociability' of human beings and the
dynamic tension between the self and the other person as mutually interrelated,
mutually differentiated members of shifting social forms. Read together, these two
authors suggest how diverse the sociolog ical enterprise can be.
rl QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 3
What methodological precepts distinguish Weber's vision of social science from that of
Marx and Durkheim? Why is 'value relevance' important to Weber?
2 Why does Weber attach importance to religion in his account of the rise of capitalism and the
emergence of the modern world?
CLASSICAL SOCIAl TH EORV Ill 85
3 What does Weber mean by 'legitimate domination'? What is the significance of legal-rational
domination for modern social organization?
4 What aspects of social life are illuminated by Simmel's conception of 'forms of

interaction', 'reciprocity', and 'sociability',
5 What does Simmel regard as the driving forces of modernity? How do Simmel's reflections on
money compare and contrast with Marx's and Weber's theories about capitalism?
6 In what sense are Weber and Simmel 'pessimistic' writers'?
■ FURTHER READING
The best place to begin reading Weber is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, either in
the classic translation of 1930 by Talcott Parsons (published by Routledge, with an introduction by
Anthony Giddens) or in the more accurate translation of 2001 by Stephen Kalberg (published by
Blackwell), which includes some useful notes explaining Weber's difficult historical vocabulary.
Another translation is available by Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells, published by Penguin in 2002,
though this translation is based on the first edition of 1904-5, not on the revised and expanded
edition of 1920. Most of Weber'sother key shorter texts and extracts are available in From Max Weber:
Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Routledge, 1948), and in a more recent
and more accurate collection The Essential Weber, ed.Sam Whimster (Routledge, 2003).
For Weber's conception of the relation between 'interests and ideas' or between 'material factors
and ideal factors' in religion and culture, see (in Gerth and Mills) 'The Social Psychology of the
World Religions', alias (in Whimster) 'Introduction to the Economic Ethics of the World Religions'.
For Weber's conception of rationalization, see the 'Author's Introduction' to Talcott Parsons's trans
lation of The Protestant Ethic, alias 'Prefatory Remarks to the Collected Essays in the Sociology of
Religion', in Stephen Kalberg's translation; also (in Gerth and Mills) 'Religious Rejections of the
World and their Directions', alias (in Whimster) 'Intermediate Reflections on the Economic Ethics
of the World Religions'. For Weber's methodological views, read his essay 'The "Objectivity" of
Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy', in The Essential Weber, together with 'Basic
Sociological Terms', in Weber's Economy and Society, chapter 1. But do not attempt to read the rest
of Economy and Society without having first read Weber's shorter and more accessible pieces.
Weber's dense and erudite style of writing can be difficult to read on a first attempt. For some good
secondary introductions, see Dirk Kasler's Max Weber: An Introduction to his Life and Work (Polity,
1988), Ralph Schroeder's Max Weber and the Sociology of Culture (Sage, 1992), Martin Albrow's Max
Weber's Construction of Social Theory (Macmillan, 1990), and Reinhard Bendix's Max Weber: An
Intellectual Portrait (Methuen, 1966). On the Protestant ethic, see Gianfranco Peggi's Calvinism and
theCapitalist Spirit:Max Weber's Protestant Ethic (Macmillan, 1983), Gordon Marshall's In Searcho(the
Spirit of Capitalism (Hutchinson 1982), Randall Collins's 'Weber's Last Theory of Capitalism',
reprinted in Collins's Weberian Sociological Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1986), and also
Weber's replies to early criticism of the text from 1907-10 in The Protestant Ethic Debate: Max
Weber's Replies to his Critics, 1907-1910 ed. David Chalcraft and Austin Harrington (Liverpool
University Press, 2001). For Weber's ideas in relation to politics and power, see David Beetham's Max
Weber and the Theory of Modem Politics (Allen & Unwin, 1974) and Wolfgang Mommsen's The Age of
Bureaucracy (Blackwell, 1974) and Max Weber and German Politics, 1890-1920 (Chicago University
Press, 1984). For an overview of Weber's methodology, see Sven Eliaeson's Max Weber's
Methodologies (Polity Press, 2002). For Weber's relation to Marx, see Karl Lowith's Max Weber and
Karl Marx (Allen & Unwin, 1982). For Weber's relation to 'cultural pessimism', see Lawrence Scaff's
Fleeing the iron Cage (University of California Press, 1989), Arthur Mitzman's The Tron Cage: An
Historical Interpretation of Weber (Knopf, 1970), and Roger Brubaker's The Limits of Rationality
(Allen & Unwin, 1984).
86
Accessible collections of essays and extracts from Simmel in English are Simmel on Culture,
ed. Mike Featherstone and David Frisby (Sage, 1997), Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations, ed.
Kurt Wolff and Reinhard Rendix (Free Press, 1955), and Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social
Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago University Press, 1971). ltis worth beginning with Simmers
essay 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', in Simmel on Culture. In Simmel's The Philosophy of Money
one of the most interesting chapters is the last, titled 'The Style of Life'. Simmel's 1908 Soziologie is
available in abridged form in English as The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt Wolff (Free Press,
1950). Also important is Simmel's essay at the beginning of the 1908 Soziologie, titled 'How ls
Society Possible?', available in English in Georg Simmel, 1858-1918, eel. Kurt Wolff (Ohio State
University Press, 1959). For Simmel's writings on women, see Chapter 11 of this book, p. 236, as
well as Georg Simmel on Women, Sexuality and Love, ed. Guy Oakes (Yale University Press, 1984).
Some good secondary studies of Simmel are David Frisby's short Georg Simmel (Routledge, rev.
edn. 2002) and longer Sociological Impressionism: A Reappraisal of Georg Simmel's Social Theory
(Routledge, 1981) and hisFragments ofModemity (Polity Press, 1985). Also good are Gianfranco
Poggi'sMoneyand the Modem Mind (University of California Press, 1993), Donald Levine's Simmel
and Parsons (Arno Press, 1980), and Lewis Coser's Georg Simmel (Prentice-Hall, 1965). On Simmel
on art, see 'Georg Simmel: Money, Style and Sociability', in Austin Harrington's Art and Social
Theory: Sociological Arguments in Aesthetics (Polity Press,-2004), 150-4.
WEBSITES
Verstehen: Max Weber's Homepage at www.faculty.rsu.edu/-felwell/Theorists/Weber/Whome.htm

Provides a good resource at a basic level, including summaries of concepts such as bureaucracy
and rationalization.
SocioSite on Max Weber at www2.fmg.uva.nl/sociosite/topics/weber.html Contains links to
summaries of Weber's key texts.
Max Weber Studies at www.maxweberstudies.org Displays the site of a journal devoted to new
translations of Weber texts and the reception of Weber's work in different language
communities.
Georg Simmel On-line at http://socio.ch/sim/index_sim.htm Includes a biography with links to
works in translation.
Georg Simmel Page at www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/undergraduate/introsoc/simmel.html Presents links to
Simmel's work, taken from the Dead Sociologists' Society.
4 Functionalism and its
Critics
John Holmwood

Functionalism in anthropology
88
Robert Merton: manifest and latent functions
90
Talcott Parsons: functionalism as unified general theory
92
Parsons's'voluntaristic theory of action'
93
Social systems and the 'problem of order'
93
Power, values, and norms
95
Structural differentiation
97
Criticisms of functionalism: objections and alternatives
100
Conflict theory
100
Marxist criticisms
101
Rational actor approaches
104
'Neo-functionalism'
105
Conclusion
107
108
FURTHER READING
108
WEBSITES
109
This chapter discusses the legacy of *functionalism in modern social theory. Functionalist
theorists argue that society should be understood as a system of interdependent parts. They
believe that there are specific requirements-functional prerequisites-that must be met in
all social systems and that these can provide the basis for the comparative analysis of
social institutions. Functionalism came to prominence in North American sociology in
the 1950s. This was a period of affluence, consolidation, and growth in Western
capitalism. At the time, several commentators-including notably Daniel *Bell-believed
that the pros perous post-war years marked an 'end of ideology' (Bell 1962). By this they
meant that the once defining conflict of nineteenth-century capitalism-between a
bourgeois ideology of radical 'individualism' and a socialist ideology of 'collectivism'-had
lost its relevance. The North American functionalist theorists affirmed this view of the
obsolescence of
88 JOHN HOLMWOOD
ideological struggles between classes and collective social movements.They were frequently
liberal in their political outlook, and the ideas of Marxism, which continued to exert a
significant impact on sociology in Europe, played little role in their work.
This was the context in which Talcott *Parsons and Robert *Merton came to
prominence. Parsons and Merton sought to distinguish sociology from other disciplines,
such as economics and psychology, and to celebrate its relevance to the new social
problems of affluent capitalism. For Parsons (1949a), the 'end of ideology' heralded a 'new
age of sociology'. Parsons's claim was far-reaching in its implications. He argued that
sociology was entering a 'post-classical' phase (Parsons 1937). Functionalism could
provide a frame work that would integrate the insights of *Durkheim and *Weber but
would otherwise draw a line under sociology's past in creating the foundations for future
development.
In this chapter, we first consider the origins of functionalist thinking in anthropological
research from the early decades of the twentieth century. Then we look in detail at the
key contributions of Merton and Parsons. The final parts of the chapter discuss
various criticisms of functionalism, associated with rational actor approaches and with
what came to be called 'conflict theory'.
Functionalism in anthropology
Although functionalism mainly came to prominence as a school in the 1950s, its origins
can be traced to an earlier generation of writers working in the field of anthropology.
These included notably the British-based anthropologists Bronislaw *Malinowski and
Alfred
*Radcliffe-Brown. Elements of a functionalist way of thinking can also be traced to the work
of Durkheim.
A central methodological precept of the early twentieth-century anthropologists
was that social actions are not to be explained by the immediate meanings they have
for indi vidual actors. They are to be explained by the function they serve for wider social
groups. On this view, meanings for individual actors cannot be understood
independently of a wider system of collective practices and beliefs within which they are
embedded. These collective practices are to be explained in tui:n by the functions they
serve for the system of social life as a whole. Different elements of social life depend on
each other and fulfil functions that contribute to the maintenance of social order and its
reproduction over time.
We can illustrate this mode of analysis by looking at a typical piece of explanation
in functionalist anthropology. For many years, anthropologists had observed how the
Hopi tribe of North America engage in a complex series of rituals and dances prior to
the planting of their crops. The Hopi were well known for their rain dances. For
anthropolo gists, it seemed clear that the Hopi dances could not be understood as
instrumental action intended directly to produce the rains. At the same time, it did not
seem right to suggest that the Hopi were behaving irrationally. The claim that they
were behaving irrationally looked suspiciously like a judgement from the perspective of
modern Western beliefs in the superiority of scientific knowledge.
The functionalist response to this puzzle was to suggest that the Hopi rain dance was not
a form of instrumental activity but rather a form of expressive activity. This expressive
tUNCTIONAUSM AND ITS CRITICS 89
activity served to reinforce the bonds of *solidarity among the group. It had the function
of generating group cohesion. Such cohesion was important because the Hopi lived in
dispersed shelters, and so the dances brought them together. In their other activities, such
as planting and harvesting their crops, the Hopi showed themselves to be competent at
organizing instrumental activities too. The Hopi rain dances were thus explained by the
function they fulfilled in the life of the tribe as a whole. The function in question was that
of the reinforcement of group solidarity.
It is a small step from this to suggest that all social relations fulfil certain functions and
that all social groups need to meet certain universal functional requirements-even if these
requirements are handled differently in different societies (compare Malinowski 1944).
Examples of such 'functional prerequisites' could include sexual reproduction, economic
subsistence, social control, socialization and education of new generations, and the
management of sickness and death, as well as 'group solidarity'.
We should note here that in a typical case of functionalist explanation, the existence of
a phenomenon or the production of an action is not explained by its direct efficient causes
but rather by its indirect effects in relation to an environment. Functionalism departs
from the traditional logic of causal argument where a cause precedes its consequences.
Functionalists instead reverse this sequence and assign causal powers to effects (see
further Isajiw 1968). Durkheim captured this distinction when he stated that 'when ... the
explanation of a social phenomenon is undertaken, we must seek separately the efficient
cause which produces it and the function it fulfills' (1895: 95). In this respect, the func
tionalist anthropologist who asks 'why do the Hope dance for rain?' looks for an answer
not in factors that immediately cause the Hopi to dance on a particular occasion. Rather,
the anthropologist considers the effects or consequences of the Hopi's dancing for all the
other elements of the Hopi's way of life, noting that these effects have a positive function
for those other elements. The functionalist concludes that if the rain dance did not have
this positive function, the dance would not be reproduced. Therefore the dance is
explained by its function, by its effects in an environment of diverse other elements of a
social system.
One problem for functionalism is that explanations of phenomena by reference to
effects in an environment can often degenerate into scientifically illegitimate kinds of
*teleology, where that which is described as the 'function' of a phenomenon is tacitly
assumed to be the 'purpose' or 'goal' of the phenomenon. The function is implicitly
described as something necessarily good, or alternatively it is imagined as marking an
end-state to which the phenomenon tends to develop over time. These were the kinds
of *metaphysical problems that infected much nineteenth-century thinking about social
evolution. Most notorious were the assumptions of writers influenced by Darwinist
notionsof 'natural selection' and the 'survival of the fittest', as applied to history and
society. For this reason, the British anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown sought to distinguish
sharply between *'diachronic' and *'synchronic' analysis: between the analysis of change
in a sys tem and the analysis of interaction among parts of a system at any given moment
in time. According to Radcliffe-Brown, the task of anthropology (and sociology) lay
primarily in synchronic analysis. Anthropology and sociology were not to make any
illicitly diachronic assumptions about the positive, beneficial, or progressive unfolding of
functional systems over time. He wrote that 'any social system, to survive, must conform
to certain conditions. If we can define adequately one of these universal conditions, i.e.
one to which all human
90
societies must conform, we have a sociological law ... [An] institution may be said to
have its general raison d'etre (sociological origin) and its particular raison d'etre (historical
origin). The first is for the sociologist or social anthropologist to discover' (Radcliffe-Brown
1952: 43). Sociology and anthropology were to aim at impartial scientific analysis of the
recurring properties of social systems. They were not, however, to speculate on the
meaning of the historical development of social systems over time.
There are some problems with functionalist explanations among early twentieth
century anthropological writers. The division between 'synchronic' and 'diachronic'
analysis is something that came to haunt functionalism. This and other problems were
directly addressed by the American sociological theorists who came to prominence in the
1950s, including particularly Robert *Merton. It is to Merton's work that we tum first.
Robert Merton: manifest and latent functions
Although Merton is standardly treated by commentators in a secondary position after

Talcott Parsons, this procedure is somewhat invidious. In the following account, we look
first at Merton's path-breaking article of 1949, 'Manifest and Latent Functions', which not
only pinpointed a number of difficult issues in anthropological functionalism but also
anticipated much of Parsons's important work from the 1950s. The article appeared in
Merton's major collection of studies titled Social Theory and Social Structure, first published
in 1949, which sought to codify functional analysis. Merton republished Social Theory and
Social Structure twice in 1957 and 1968 with new additions. ln 1941 he became Assistant
Professor at Columbia University in New York where he remained for the rest of his
career. In order to produce a satisfactory statement of functional analysis, Merton
proposed a distinction between manifest and latent functions. The former refers to the
conscious inten tions of actors; the latter to the objective consequences of their actions,
which were often unintended. According to Merton, most of the mistakes of existing
functionalism were the result of a conflation of these two different categories. In
particular, existing functionalism failed to see adequately that the historical origins of an
item can be explained by reference to the conscious intentions of actors, while the
selection of the item and its reproduction is
to be explained by reference to latent functions.
Merton's methodological strategy was to separate the scientific substance of functional
ism from its historical origins in anthropology. This was necessary if functionalism was to
be a proper framework for empirical research. In his view, the tendency hitherto was for
functionalist arguments to supplant research rather than to support it. He identified three
problematic postulates in anthropological functionalism: the postulate of the functional
unity of.society; the postulate of universal fi111ctio11alis111; and the postulate of
indispensability. We look at these three in turn.
Merton associated the postulate of the functional unity of society primarily with
Radcliffe-Brown. He cited the British author's comment that 'the function of a particular
social usage is the contribution it makes to the total ocial life as the functioning of the
total social system' (Radcliffe-Brown 1935: 397). According to Merton, it may be that
some
I, 91
non-literate societies show a high degree of integration, but it is illegitimate to assume this
would pertain to all societies. Moreover, it is possible that what is functional for society,
considered as a whole, does not prove functional for all individuals or for some
subgroups within the society. Conversely, what is functional for an individual or group
may not be functional for the wider society. Merton suggested that alongside the concept
of function, it was necessary to propound a concept of dysfunction, where the objective
consequences of an item are negative for some individuals or groups. For example,
inequality may have the function of motivating individuals to perform at their different
job tasks, but high degrees of inequality may give rise to the alienation of some
individuals and groups.
The second postulate of universal functionalism refers to what was a rather old debate
in anthropology concerning 'survivals'; that is, practices that have no present role but
are understood in terms of the past history of a group. This was used by some
anthropologists to construct highly speculative evolutionary histories. Merton argues that
if we accept that there are degrees of integration, then practices can 'survive' if they are
functional for some individuals or groups, most typically for those groups who are
dominant in the social sys tem. This identifies power and coercion as important issues.
Merton writes: 'far more useful as a directive for research would seem the provisional
assumption that persisting cultural forms have a net balance of functional consequences
either for society considered as a unit or for subgroups sufficiently to retain these forms
intact, by means of direct coercion or indir ect persuasion,' (Merton 1949b: 86).
Merton's final postulate of indispensability was directed as a criticism of Malinowski's
view that every item fulfils a vital function and represents an indispensable part within a
working whole. Merton comments that such an assumption makes unclear whether it is
the function that is indispensable or the particular item held to be fulfilling the function.
Merton argued that once this is clarified, it is evident that it is necessary to distinguish
between functional prerequisites-preconditions functionally necessary for a society-and
the particular social forms that fulfil those prerequisites. In Merton's view, while the pre
requisites are for the most part indispensable, the particular forms or items that meet those
functions are not indispensable. There are always alternative ways of meeting any
particular function. Thus Merton points out that 'just as the same item may have multiple
functions, so may the same function be diversely fulfilled by alternative items' (Merton
1949b: 87-8). Each of Merton's qualificationsof anthropological functionalism is designed
to transform the postulates into *variables that can be the objects of empirical research.
Furthermore, by identifying the possibility of dysfunction and by suggesting that practices
can have differ ent consequences for individuals and groups, depending on how they are
placed within a social structure, Merton explicitly made power and conflict central
issues for research within a functionalist paradigm. This is in line with another of
Merton's ideas about how sociological theory should be built. He reiterated that theory
and research belong together and that topics should be carefully chosen for lying in what
he called a *'middle range' between minor working hypotheses of routine research and
all-inclusive *'grand theory'
(Merton 1949c).
One problem with Merton's essay, however, was its terminology. Merton's reference to
both 'latent functions' and 'manifest functions' was unfortunate since his actual concern
was to distinguish only between latent functions and manifest motives. His terminology
92 JOHN HOLMWOOD
encouraged critics to think that sociological functionalism neglected agency, just when
agency was being identified as a central concern in American sociology. At the same
time, Merton's proposed codification of social enquiry in terms of an analytical distinction
between 'subjective motive' and 'objective function' was also the solution that Parsons had
proposed. The further elaboration of Merton's critique of anthropological functionalism
led him directly onto terrain occupied by Parsons concerning the relationship between
actors' intentions and the objective consequences of their actions. It was this that took
functionalism in the direction of all-inclusive 'grand' or *'unified' theory and away from
the 'middle range'. Thus what in fact came to be identified as functionalism in American
sociology did not develop in the way proposed by Merton. Instead it developed as a single
all-embracing theoretical system, as set out by Talcott *Parsons. It is to Parsons's general
theory that we now tum.
Talcott Parsons: functionalism as unified

general theory
In 1927 Parsons took up a position at Harvard University where he would remain for the
rest of his career until his death in 1979. Commentators commonly identify three phases
in the development of his work: an early, a middle and a late phase. In the early phase,
begin ning in the 1930s, Parsons sought to develop a rigorous theory of the nature and
structure of social action. In the middle phase, from the 1940s and 1950s, he was
concerned with the structure and functioning of social systems. In the later phase, he was
more concerned to set out processes of structural differentiation and a typology of
different stages of social development. However, the core assumptions of his approach
remain throughout.
Almost from the outset, Parsons's intention was to produce a scheme of general
categories that would form the necessary foundation for social-scientific enquiry.
Identifying these categories was the objective of his first major work, The Structure of
Social Action (1937), a work that came to define European social theory for subsequent
generations of North American sociologists. In this book, Parsons described how the
classical generation of European social theorists active in the years 1890-1920 had
brought about a decisive break with the past. The most important thinkers he addressed
were Weber and Durkheim, but he also wrote extensively on the English economist
Alfred *Marshall and the Italian theo rist Vilfredo *Pareto. He did not consider it
necessary to treat Marx because he believed that Marx belonged to a redundant stage of
social thought whose insights had essentially been recuperated in the best way possible by
Weber. Parsons argued that while no single one of these theorists presented all the
elements of an appropriate general scheme, taken together they provided an early
intimation of the functionalist synthesis of sociological theory, which Parsons would
present as the basis of professional sociology. Parsons continued to develop and refine the
scheme in all his subsequent writings. He was, in the words of the Preface to his middle-
period treatise The Social System (1951), 'an incurable theorist'.
We begin with the following account with Parsons's analysis of action in The Structure
of Social Action, before turning to his later more elaborate conceptions of social structures,
functions, and systems.
r rw ITS CF.ITICS 93
Parsons's 'voluntaristic theory of action'

Any general theoretical scheme, Parsons argues, must represent the diverse influences on
social behaviour and must take as its point of reference human action. In European soci
ology, Parsons first noted a tradition of *positivism, which sought to explain behaviour in
terms of certain putatively 'objective' influences upon it. At the same time, he identified a
counter-tradition, that of *idealism, which emphasized the 'subjective' aspect represented
by Weber and German historical thought. In Parsons's view, these two traditions had de
veloped in mutually antithetical ways. He argued that it would not do 'merely to say that
both the positivistic and the idealistic positions have certain justifications and that there
is a sphere in which each should be recognised. It is necessary, rather, to go beyond such
eclecticism, to attempt at least in outline, an account of the specific modes of interrelation
between the two' (1937: 486). It was necessary to provide 'a bridge between the
apparently irreconcilable differences of the two traditions, making it possible in a sense,
to "make the best of both worlds" '(1937: 486).
As a first step in setting out how objective and subjective elements can be combined in
a single scheme, Parsons developed what he called a *'voluntaristic theory of action',
emphasizing the *'action frame of reference'. Within this theoretical framework, he
focused on what he called the unit act and its component elements. The unit act did
not refer to any concretely existing phenomena or to the empirical acts of any specific
individ ual person. Rather, Parsons sought, by a process of logical abstraction, to identify
the most basic elements of a wider scheme. Any manifestation of action could only be
addressed once that wider scheme had been fully elaborated. Its categories were not to
refer directly to concrete entities, even though, ultimately, the scheme must be capable of
direct empirical application. For Parsons, unit acts are not concrete empirical
components of a theory, as they are in methodological-individualist approaches.
Parsons defines action as intentional behaviour oriented to the realization of an end.
Action occurs in conditional circumstances that must be calculated and utilized by actors
in pursuit of their ends. Actors must accommodate and calculate upon conditions if their
actions are to be successful. Ends and conditions (including means) are here analytically
distinct categories. In addition, action involves effort or agency to transform
circumstances in conformity to *norms, which govern ends and the selection of their
means of realization. Finally, action, to be rational, must be adequate in terms of the
knowledge necessary for the realization of ends. Thus Parsons refers to the 'intrinsic
rationality of the *means-end relation' and to the necessary role of 'valid knowledge as a
guide to action' (1937: 600).
Social systems and the 'problem of order'

Parsons states that the concept of the unit act 'serves only to arrange the data in a certain
order, not to subject them to the analysis necessary for their explanation' (1937: 48).
'Explanation' requires a further step in the analysis, from unit acts to their location within
systems of action. This step 'consists in generalising the conceptual scheme so as to bring
out the functional relations in the facts already descriptively arranged' (1937: 49). In
Merton's terms, this represents a move from consideration of manifest functions to that of
latent functions.
94
This further generalization of the scheme is linked to what Parsons sees as emergent
properties of systems of action. These are properties that arise in the coordination of
actions and are not reducible to analysis in terms of unit acts alone. Here Parsons espouses
a key methodological position which marks his explicit attachment to methodological
*ho/ism, rather than to methodological individualism. He writes that 'action systems have
propert ies that are emergent only on a certain level of complexity in the relations of unit
acts to each other. These properties cannot be identified in any single unit act considered
apart from its relation to others in the same system. They cannot be derived by a_process
of direct generalisation of the properties of the unit act' (1937: 739). The concept of
emergent prop erties serves to identify the 'elements of structure of a generalised system of
action' (1937: 718), and these elements of structure are to be further analysed in terms of
their functional relations; that is, in terms of the logical relations established in the
theoretical system. This is what underlies Parsons's use of the analogy of an organism:
'the very definition of an organic whole is one within which the relations determine the
properties of its parts. The properties of the whole are not simply a resultant of the latter'
(1937: 32). It can be seen here that Parsons was very much preoccupied with the idea of
systems of action in his early work, no less than in his later work in which he comes to
use the word 'system' more and more frequently.
The idea of emergent properties of systems of social action is at the heart of what
Parsons refers to as the 'problem of order'. Parsons here refers to the thought of the
seventeenth century English political philosopher Thomas *Hobbes, author of Leviathan
(1651), written in the context of the English Civil War of the 1640s-1650s. Hobbes had
sought to answer the question of how it is possible that a society of self-interested
individuals does not end up in a state of 'war of all against all', which Hobbes also
described as the *'state of nature'. Hobbes's answer was to postulate an external
authority-the sovereign-to whom the power to enforce agreement is voluntarily given.
For Parsons, this answer was too bleak and too directly focused on coercive power.
Hobbes's mechanistic idea of the human animal neglected the *normative regulation of
social relationships through aspects of cultural communication. Parsons did not intend to
make the opposite kind of mistake by neglecting power. He acknowledged that
sometimes social relationships do indeed descend into a war of all against all. Just as the
English Civil War impressed itself on Hobbes, so Parsons was concerned with the rise of
fascism in Europe and its terrible consequences (1942a, 1942b). But in his approach to
such cases of disorder, he wanted first to set out a few basic sociological principles
within an all-embracing theory that could account adequately for the everyday routine
phenomenon of social order, through what he called 'normative integration', or through
what is more commonly known as 'civil', 'normal', 'acceptable' social behaviour.
Parsons's way of solving this problem was to point to various mechanisms capable of
securing the coordination of action. Action occurs in systems and these systems have an
orderly character. There are two aspects of order, identified by Parsons. These are what
we can term personal order and interpersonal order. Personal order involves a recognition
that any given act is, for the actor, one among a bunch of other chosen and possible
actions with a variety of different ends and different requirements for their realization.
Interpersonal order involves a recognition that actions occur in contexts that include, as
Parsons put it, 'a plurality of actors' (1937: 51).
Where means are scarce relative to ends, any individual actor will maximize outcomes
by the most efficient selection of means and by placing his or her ends in a personal
hierarchy of preferences. The ends of actors are determined by their preferences and values,
but actors' cognitive reflection on the means to their ends is also governed by what
Parsons terms a 'normative standard', namely a 'norm of efficiency'. In this regard, one of
the most signific ant emergent properties of personal order is 'economic rationality' (1937:
288 ff.). As Parsons put it, 'economic rationality is thus an emergent property of action
which can be observed only when a plurality of unit acts is treated together as constituting
an integrated system' (1937: 40).
Fundamental issues of social theory arise for Parsons when systems of social action
involving multiple actors are the focus. These are the issues of interpersonal order. It is
here that Parsons confronts, directly the Hobbesian problem of social order. Interpersonal
order concerns the coordination of systems of action where these systems include the
activities of a number of actors. The actions of any given actor form the conditions
and means of other actors in the system. Just as there is an interdependence of acts
within the means-end chains of an actor's system of personal order, so there is an
interdependence of acts and means-end chains among the interactions of a plurality of
actors.
Power, values, and norms

In all his works, Parsons stresses the role of a common culture, both as the source of
the standards governing interaction and as internalized within the personality as the
basis of dispositions to act. At the same time, he is far from arguing that the stability of
systems of action depends only on the functioning of common value elements, as many
of his critics came to maintain-especially the 'conflict theorists'. Parsons's conception
of normative order is more subtle than is often granted, and he most certainly
intended it to include a treatment of issues of power. Several considerations can be
noted in this connection.
The first consideration concerns Parsons's weighting of the significance of coercion
(force) in relation to economic rationality and to common values. He writes that where the
behaviour of particular actors is at stake, 'coercion is a potential means to the desired con
trol. which is not included in the economic concept as such. It also has a similar double
aspect-the exercise of coercive power as a means and its acquisition as an immediate end'
(1937: 239-40). In other words, coercive power does not define the social system in the
sense of being the ground on which the system is based. Rather, coercive power is a
relation within the system. Thus Parsons writes that coercion 'cannot be a property of the
total action system involving a plurality of individuals; it can only apply to some
individuals or groups within a system relative to others. Coercion is an exercise of power
over others' (1937: 740). What Parsons is concerned to establish here is that the coercive
aspects of power do not define its essential features. Power is not simply something that
one person has at the expense of another; it is also something that is generated within
social relationships as a mutual benefit or 'facility', as he terms it.
The final emergent property of the total action system is thus to the requirement that 'in
order that there may be a stable system of action involving a plurality of individuals, there
must be normative regulation of the power aspect of individuals within the system; in this
sense, there must be a distributive order' (1937: 740). In other words, the distribution of
96 J'1HN HOLr.il'cOi
resources within the system, and therefore the actions by which those resources are pro
duced and reproduced, must be governed by some legitimizing principles or norms.
The fact that most people, generally, most of the time, do not freak out, commit murder
or rape in the streets, cannot simply be attributed to the fact that if they were to do so, they
would be punished with physical force by representatives of a system of state laws.
Individuals internalize the threat of physical punishment for deeds they ought not do.
Sanctions restrain individuals from carrying out such acts before they even contemplate
them. But individuals are restrained from so acting not simply by sublimated fear of the
consequences. Rather, they come to develop a sense of the intrinsic normative
illegitimacy of such acts, based on an understanding that such acts are 'wrong' or 'evil',
'indecent' or 'distasteful', and so on, in an ethically significant sense. It is in this manner
that Parsons by a similar route to Durkheim-arrives at a sociological understanding of our
ideas of morality and civilization. What is called 'moral', 'civil', or 'lawful' behaviour in
ordinary laypeople's language is explained sociologically by reference to processes of
socialization that involve a fusion between elements of coercion on the one hand and
elements of common value understandings on the other.
As Parsons developed this theory-chiefly in The Social System (1951) and after-he went
on to offer further distinctions between different levels of analysis. He distinguished
between the level of the personality, the level of the social system, and the level of culture
(later adding a fourth level of the 'biological organism'). These levels correspond to the
analytical distinctions made in his earlier statement of the action frame of reference.
• The level of the personality corresponds to the individual actor viewed as a system.
As well as conscious motivations, it includes unconscious motivations or what Parsons
calls 'need dispositions'. The latter are important for understanding how sanctions
operate. Actors respond not only to positive rewards, as economists suggest, but also to
internalized feelings of guilt, anxiety, and the need for approval.
• The level of culture refers to symbols and meanings that are drawn upon by actors in
pursuit of their personal projects and in their negotiation of social constraints and
facilities.The three key features of the cultural system are 'that culture is transmitted, it
con stitutes a heritage or a social tradition; secondly, that it is learned, it is not a
manifestation, in particular content, of man's genetic constitution; and thirdly, that it is
shared. Culture, that is, is on the one hand the product of, on the other hand a determinant
of, systems of human social interaction' (1951: 15).
• The level of the social system corresponds to the level of interaction among a
plurality of actors which was Parsons's primary focus concerning the 'problem of order' in
The Structure of Social Action. The social system is a structure of positions and roles
organized by normed expectations and maintained by sanctions.
Parsons proposes that each of the three levels forms a system in its own right, where the
characteristic of a system is logical coherence in the relations among its parts. At the same
time, each system functions in relation to other systems and *'interpenetrates' with them.
And in turn, this 'interpenetration', or interdependence, also constitutes a system. This is
what Parsons had previously referred to as the 'total action system'. In his middle-period
work, Parsons sees the total social system as having four basic functional prerequisites
FUNCTlorrnusiv: ANDIT'" CRITICS 97
which are necessary to its constitution and operation. Parsons describes these in the
following four-part scheme, which he terms the AGIL scheme:
• The first prerequisite is adaptation (A). This refers to the relationship of a system to
its external environments and the utilization of resources in pursuit of goals.
• The second prerequisite is goal attainment (G). This refers to the directedness of
systems toward collective goals.
• The third prerequisite is integration (I). This refers to the maintenance of
coordinated relationships among the parts of the system.
• The fourth prerequisite is pattern maintenance or latency (L). This refers to a society's
symbolic order as a generalized series of mutually reinforcing meanings and typifications.
Once again, Parsons does not argue here that actual, empirically existing social systems
manifest integration and interdependence in the way described in the analytical theory.
The functional imperatives only identify general tendencies generated by concrete sys
tems, namely tendencies toward integration and interdependence-although these ten
dencies are never fully realized in actual empirical systems. The functional imperatives
supply the axes of the two-by-two tables that proliferate throughout Parsons's later writ
ings. Figure 4.1, taken from Parsons's late text titled Social Systems and the Evolution of
Action Theory (1977a), presents his idea of the subdivisions of the social system, defined
by prior ities accorded to one or other of the functional prerequisites in its organization.
Structural differentiation
A final key element in Parsons's functionalist theory is his conception of 'structural differenti
ation', which is entailed by the fourfold AGIL scheme of functions. In this conception,
A -----RESOURCE------+ G
ADAPTIVE SUBSYSTEM MOBILIZATION .
(the economy) ------SYSTEM------
L
+LOYALTY -----SOLIDARITY------------.
PATTERN-MAINTENANCE ----- COMMITMENT----- l ITEGRATIVE SUBSYSTEM
(locus of cultural and ------SYSTEM-------------. (Law [as norms] and
motivational commitments) social control)
(fiduciary system) (societal community)
Figure 4.1 Format of the societal interchange system

Source: (Parsons 1977c: 366).
98 . 01m HOl MWOOO
sticil'til", arl' dassilit'd according to tlll'extent of i!lstitutional specialization around functions;

for l'xampk, thl' l':\ll'llt to which political institutions are separated from economic institu
tions; or the extent to which economic institutions are separated from the household; or
the extent to which the household specializes around functions of socialization.Societies
can be characterized according to different patterns and degrees of structural
differentiation.
In his books Societies: Evo/utio11ary and Comparative Perspectives (1966) and The System
of Modem Societifl (1971a), Parsons sets out a developmental account of the emergence of
modern societies. These are conceived in terms of evolutionary stages derived from the
application of the four-function paradigm. One problem with this, however, was that his
scheme of functional imperatives was supposed to apply to all societies in the synchronic
di111msio11. It ought tn haw lol!t11n•d from this that societies with lesser degrees of
specializa
tion n)l1]d lw no kss 'adequate' than those with greater degrees of specialization. The only
way in which there could be an 'internal requirement' for greater structural differentiation
would
have been on the assumption of an overarching system goal of more effective
performance. This would have carried some problematic *teleological implications. The
idea of the superi ority of higher over lower stages of developmental complexity carried
the implication that better-adapted forms are realized out of the deficiencies of 'lesser'
forms. The way in which structural differentiation occurs around the four hmctions, each
with its characteristic subsystem, is suggestive of an overall 'end' to the process. In this
scheme, modernity-or more Spl't'llkally North J\mcrican modernity, \\'hkh Par ons (1966)
called the new 'lead' societv of modernity-is presented as the culminating stage of social
development. It is in this respect that the Parsonian model of modernization can be
criticized for its Westem-centredness, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 13 of this book (pp.
31-3, 275).
In general, many sociologists have felt uneasy about the seemingly endless conceptual
elaboration that makes up the bulk of Parsons's writings. Unli1.e Weber, whose reflections
on sociological concepts derived from a more historical focus on definite empirical prob
lems, Parsons was less engaged with empirical questions. This is not to say that Parsons
took no interest in empirical matters at all. He frequently claimed that the ultimate
purpose of his theoretical scheme was to facilitate practical sociological research. In
addition, he wrote a number of important empirically oriented articles in fields such as the
sociology of professions, deviance, youth, medicine, social *stratification, and the family.
Parsons's analysis of the family in particular is discussed in Ilox 10.
But whatever Parsons's insights into empirical problems-and they are undoubtedly
strong ones-there is always a sense in his work that it is the theory that drives the
argument, rather than the findings or the data. Rather than providing a means for
integrating theory and research, as he had intended, he seemed to have driven a wedge
between them.
American sociologists in the 1960s increasingly found sympathy with the views of
C. Wright *Mills (1959), one of Parsons's most outspoken critics. They increasingly took
the view that Parsons's 'grand theory' was arid and pointless, and that the emperor of
theory had no clothe . The presentation of North American modernity as the end-state
of social development abo seemed to represent an extreme form of functionalist teleology,
reveal ing ideological biases inherent in a scheme that Parsons had wished to present
as neither partial nor ideological but simply and innocently as an 'indispensable logical
framework' (1937: 733). In the remaining sections of this chapter, we consider some key
criticisms and some further critical extensions of functionalism that came to be
propounded in Anglo American sociology from the 1960s to the 1980s.
FUNCTIONALISM AND tTS CRiTICc- 99
persed across institutions. With the rise of processes of industrialization, economic needs were met by
paid employment that took place outside the family household. Authority was mediated through politi
cal institutions where office holders were elected or chosen on ment. It seemed that the functions of
the family were very much reduced to those of the regulation of sexuality and the socialization of
children. In Western society since the nineteenth century, the form of the family was changing, becoming
much more focused on the nuclear family-the nexus of father, mother, and their children-with fewer
obligations to extended kin (Parsons 1949b, 1949c, 1956, 1977a).
When Parsons first turned his attention to the sociology of the family in the 1940s, there was something
of a moral panic about the family in American society. Commentators had seized upon a rising divorce
rate and a falling birth-rate to suggest that the family was in crisis, deriving in part from its loss of func
tions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Parsons concluded that the problems had to do only with transition,
and were not fundamental. The functions of the family were fewer but they were no less important.
Divorce rates had increased but they were stabilizing, and rates of remarriage remained high,
indicating that marriage continued to play a meaningful role at the centre of people's lives.
As Parsons developed his arguments about the nuclear family, he was concerned to demonstrate
how its internal structure reflected its more restricted functions. He identified how male and female roles
were concentrated respectively on instrumental and expressive aspects. The male role was concerned with
the , external linkage of the family to the world of occupations and paid work, while the female role was
more associated with the rearing of children. Although housework was an instrumental task, its menial
charac ter was alleviated for women through the emotional significance with which it was invested.
According to Parsons, the family produced the human personality through child socialization. It was
therefore important that the family remained an environment on which a child could fully depend
and in which it could invest all of its emotional resources. But it was also important that the family
did not become too isolated. The family was 'a differentiated subsystem of a society, not itself a "little
society" or anything too closely approaching it' (1956: 19). Family members needed other roles
outside the family. The most important one according to Parsons was the father's occupational
role.
Alongside the socialization of children, the family also had a secondary function of stabilizing adult personalities.
The marriage pair was more concentrated when compared with extended kin relation ships. In both cases children
were important to parents insofar as they allowed for an element of acceptable 'regression' in which parents could
express 'childish' elements of their own personalities. In
this regard Parsons accepted some of the insights of psychoanalysis and sought to incorporate them in
his own theory.
Parsons's analysis of the family soon came to be criticized by feminist sociologists for its inadequate
theorization of the position of women in families. These important critiques are discussed later in this
chapter in Box 12.
100 JOHN HOI.IVIWOOO
Criticisms of functionalism:objections
and alternatives
Parsons's theory is subtle and complex, but it is certainly not without problems. In
some cases, criticisms of his work have rested on simple misunderstandings. In other
cases, they have pointed to some genuine deficiencies. Here we must bear in mind that
Parsons's critics did not always represent a unified position. Frequently they criss-crossed
between different and mutually exclusive criticisms as their own positions unfolded. We
now look at four main bodies of criticism from the late 1960s onwards. These are (1)
conflict theory, (2) Marxist criticisms, (3) rational actor or rational choice approaches, and
lastly (4) 'neo-functionalist' approaches. In Box 12 we also discuss some feminist
responses to Parsons's analysis of the family. We begin with conflict theory.
Conflict theory
For C. Wright *Mills (1956), James *Lockwood (1956), Ralf *Dahrendorf (1958), John *Rex
(1961), and Randall Collins (1975), the problem with Parsons's theory was straightforward: it
was too one-sided. Parsons's language of systems gave far too much weight to
interdepend ence and integration, neglecting independence and contradiction. It also
seemed to give greater emphasis to values and norms than to power. These 'conflict
theorists', as they came to be called, drew inspiration from Marx and Weber, to whom
Parsons had indeed failed to give proper at tcntion in The Structure of Social Action,
especially Marx. It was true that Parsons had not merely excluded Marx from the founding
sociological generation of 1890-1920 for reasons of chronology. More especially, he had
believed that Marx's writings were tied to a moment in capitalism that had been
superseded and that the German thinker's ideas had been too influenced by the ideological
formations of early capitalism to be relevant to the mid-twentieth century (Parsons
1949d). Conflict theorists did not greatly disagree with Parsons's judgement on Marx and
the superiority of Weber in this regard. Dahrendorf, Rex, and Wright Mills certainly
tended to draw more inspiration from Weber than from Marx. But they felt that Weber
owed more to Marx than Parsons had allowed for and that Parsons's attempt to synthesize
Durkheim and Weber had meant that the more conflict-oriented aspects of Weber's
writings had been lost. It was Durkheim's approach, with hb emphasis on order and social
*solidarity, that dominated Parsons's interpretation of the classics.
In his essay 'Out of Utopia' (1958), Dahrendorf disagreed with .\.1erton's implied judgement
that the problem with Parsons's scheme was that it was too generalized. The problem was
rather that Parsons was insufficiently explicit about the values that informed his approach.
For Dahrendorf, the 'consensus' model with its emphasis on synchronic analysis and on
processes tending toward integration was part of a long-standing conservaiive tradition in
social thought reaching back to *Plato. It was utopian in the sense that it rested on a model
of society in which change and conflict are wholly absent. As Dahrendorf suggested, 'it
may well be that society, in a philosophical sense, has two faces of equal reality: one of
sta bility, harmony, and consensus, and one of change, conflict and constraint. Strictly
speak ing, it does not matter whether we select for investigation problems that can be
understood only in terms of the equilibrium model or problems for which the conflict
model is required.
101
There is no intrinsic criterion for preferring one to the other' (1958: 127). The problem,
then, was that Parsons had placed consensus above conflict for no good reason. A similar
argument was put forward by Rex, who argued that while 'perfect cooperation' and
'perfect conflict' are polar theoretical cases, 'all actual cases lie somewhere along the
continuum between perfect cooperation and perfect conflict' (1961: 54). Like Dahrendorf,
Rex argued that 'Durkheim and Parsons have unduly restricted the scope of sociology to
the study of forms of perfect co-operation' (1961: 54). Dahrendorf, Rex, and Mills all
recommended that sociological attention should be redirected toward conflict.
The criticisms of the conflict theorists struck a chord. Yet their own position was unsta
ble for a number of reasons. Parsons had in fact sought to account for both power and con
sensus in his model. Therefore it was difficult to argue that the two models could be kept
entirely apart and used separately for different purposes. In Parsons's actual thinking, the
issues of conflict and cooperation, and power and legitimation, were very much inter
twined. This was Parsons's argument when he set out to synthesize positivism and
idealism in The Structure of Social Action. He repeated this in his response to the conflict
theorists (1971b: 385) and especially in his opposition to C. Wright Mills's book The
Power Elite (1956), which he saw as resting on an inadequate 'zero-sum' view of power,
where a gain in power for one group is wrongly automatically equated with a loss in
power for another group (Parsons 1967).
On the whole it can be said that the conflict theorists were more successful in pointing
out the empirical significance of conflict within systems-in terms of the power of classes
(Dahrendorf 1958) or the power of elites (Mills 1956)-than they were at finding a way of
expressing this in the general language of analytical theory. In Box 11 we consider a more
subtle extension of conflict theory in the work of David *Lockwood.
Marxist criticisms
To a large degree, the fate of conflict theory was overtaken by more radical approaches.
By the late 1960s, the USA was embroiled in the Vietnam War and opposition to it was
grow ing. Along with the anti-war movement, there was an increasingly radical movement
of civil rights for black Americans, while the women's movement and feminism waited in
the wings to emerge in the 1970s as a powerful force for change. The growth of
universities and favourable employment opportunities for sociologists were conditions
that encouraged disciplinary transformation (compare Turner and Turner 1990). A
younger generation of sociologists influenced by the new social movements promoted
radical sociologies in op position to the functionalism of their seniors. They were on the
side of dissent and change, not the side of the system and order (compare Becker 1967).
While their own sympathies lay with Weber rather than Marx, the conflict theorists had
contributed to a re-evaluation of the relation between Marxism and academic sociology.
In the changed social and political circumstances of the 1960s, many sociologists were
now open to a more explicit appropriation of Marxism. By the early 1970s, conflict
theory appeared insufficiently radical and its theoretical arguments less sophisticated than
those of Marx. It was not just that the Durkheim-Parsons axis of theorizing was called
into ques tion but that the whole generation of 1890-1920, including Weber, was seen to
represent a 'bourgeois reaction' to Marxism (Therborn 1976).
102
contradiction. Simply put. Parsons had no place for the idea that the parts of a social.system may
con tain tendencies toward mal-integrat1on--<Jr contradiction. According to Lockwood, those
tendencies may eventually come to the surface ,n the form of oppos tional interests and conflicts
among actors, and these conflicts may or may not be contained by the *normative order. Rather
than proposing two separate models, then, lockwood argued that it was necessary to cons der the
question of coopera
tion, conflict, and social change in terms of two distinct but interrelated sets of processes. One
concerned normative processes of social
integration; the other concerned material processes of system
integration. The problem was that Parsons had conflated the two types of integration and had
overemphasized the aspect of mut ality between the two corresponding sets of processes. The task for
sociologists was to be more aware of contradictions within the system and of how they were managed
at the level of social integration.
Lockwood's argument can be seen as returning to and reinforcing Merton's statement of
funaionalism. Merton had argued for the importance of recognizing the role of 'dysfunctions', which
is similar to what Lockwood meant by problems of 'system integration'. At the same time, while 1t 1s
apparent that the idea of 'function' lends itself to general expression, it is not clear that the same is true
of 'dysfunc- , tion' or contradiction. Dysfunctions and contradictions seem to be specific to particular
cases, rather than to have a general form. If this is so, Lockwood's argument, properly understood,
would reinforce Merton's turn away from general theory towards middle-range theory. Indeed, when he
returned to the
themes of his earlier article in a book-length discussion of Marx and Durkheim and the 'problem of dis
order', Lockwood (1992) declared himself to be uncomfortable with the way in which such
discussions tended to conclude with a new general framework of social theory, rather than with
specific pro grammes of substantive research.
For North American sociologists, Alvin *Gouldner's TileComing Crisis of Western

Sodology (1970) was the definitive statement of these criticisms. Gouldner was a one-time
function alist, turned its sternest critic. The book was part of a wider critique of
conservative social theory, which, like Dahrendorf, he traced back to Plato (Gouldner
1965). But Gouldner also sought to extend the analysis to the relationship between
academic sociology and other agents of advanced welfare capitalism. At best, professional
sociology seemed irrelevant to the pressing social and political issues of the times. At
worst, professional sociology was partisan, not only for implicitly supporting the status
quo but also for being part of what Gouldner described as the modern 'military-industrial-
welfare complex'. In Gouldner's view, this complex was in collusion with government
agencies, including the military, on an increasingly large scale.Sociology had become
absorbed into the management of the advanced state as part of the apparatus of social
control. Parsons's theory, which seemed so abstracted from the world, was an expression
of the dominant interests of welfare capitalism.
103
In place of professional claims to objectivity, Gouldner proposed that sociology should

organize its activities in 'new theoretical communities' connected to the new social
movements that were emerging to challenge welfare capitalism. In this way, he directly
subverted the professional ambitions of Parsons and Merton and set an agenda for radical
sociology. These were the kinds of attitudes that would evolve into postmodern criticisms
of general theory in the 1980s.
A similarly radical body of criticisms came from the side of feminist sociologists, who took
a highly sceptical view of Parsons's work on the family. These criticisms are discussed in Box
12.
BOX 12. FEMINIST CRITICISMS OF PARSONS
Parsons himself suspected that his functionalist analyses of women, work, and the family were
oversimplified. For example, he was aware that many women were in paid employment, although
he correctly observed that the tendency was for women to be found in jobs that mirrored their family
roles and for competition for jobs between men and women to be restricted. 'In general,' he
observed, 'the woman's job tends to be of a qualitatively different type and not of a status which
seriously competes with that of her husband as the primary status-giver or income earner' (1956: 14).
Nonetheless, he was rather insensitive to the asymmetry between men and women, where men
were enjoyed a primarily public role and women were restricted to dependency in the domestic
sphere.
In the period of the emergence of second-wave feminism 1n the 1960s, several feminist writers began to
point to the changed fertility conditions that meant that a large part of women's lives would be spent
with out dependent children in the household. This would involve new social problems, including
female poverty on divorce or in old age, given increasing female longevity (Myrdal and Klein 1956).
Parsons had written that the fact that 'the normal married woman is debarred from testing or
demonstrating her fun damental equality with her husband in competitive occupational achievement
creates a demand for a
*functional equivalent' (1949e: 193). Parsons had accepted that housework was a relatively menial task,
suggesting that women might instead develop specialized interests in matters of taste relating to personal
appearance, furnishing, and the like-although he acknowledged that these could frequently be ex
pressed as neuroses. Once again, this was something that feminists also came to argue, but in a much more
radical way, notably in the influential book by Betty *Friedan The Feminine Mystique (1963). Increasingly,
feminists were to identify such 'dysfunctions' in a more systematic and rigorous way. Much like the conflict
theorists, they would see functionalism as an obstacle rather than a means to a fruitful understanding
of the family. They pointed out that dependency within the family was increasingly a reflection of
power relationships, and that far from being a place that stabilized adult personalities, the family was
frequently a site of violence and abuse. Women were tied to unsatisfactory relationships precisely because
the gender segregation of employment and lower pay for women meant that they were economically
dependent.
Some feminists have suggested that Parsons was correct 1n his description of the nature of the
family household and its relation to the occupational sphere (Johnson 1989). However, there is no
doubt that he lacked a feminist sensibility and that the weight of his analysis was to emphasize the
positive functions for society of the nuclear family, rather than its dysfunctions for women (see Barrett
1980). Yet it should be acknowledged that Parsons was one of the first male sociologists to write of the
close interconnections between age, sex, family, and social *stratification. The more usual
response by male sociologists even those of a radical persuasion-was to concentrate on the class
relationships of the occupational sphere and to regard the household and gender as secondary
matters For a more detailed overview of feminist interventions in social theory, see Chapter 11 of
this book.
104 JOHl\i HOLf;IIWOOO
Rational actor approaches

For other critics, the problem with functionalism was its concentration on systems at the
expense of individual actors. This problem was also seen as linked to functionalism'sconcern
with elaborating a general conceptual framework, rather than specific testable
propositions. One major criticism came from those who held that the social sciences could
be unified only if sociologists based their research on the testable *individualistic
concepts of economics or psychology. Representatives of this line of argument defended a
conception of the individual as 'rational actor' or 'rational egoist', capable of 'rational choices'.
This school of approach pro vided the foundation for what is commonly called *'rational
choice theory', which has been especially prominent in economics. Here we look at the work
of two among several champions of rational actor thinking. These are George *Homans and
James *Coleman.
Homans maintained.that functionalism was unscientific because it deviated from
the proper hypothetico-deductive form of scientific explanation. Functionalists had
fashioned a conceptual scheme, and however necessary a conceptual scheme may be,
it is not the same as a theory. A theory involves testable propositions about the world
and, according to Homans, these are conspicuously lacking in the functionalism of
Parsons. Homans's idea of theory was avowedly positivist and firmly methodological-
individualist.
For Homans, functionalists analyse social systems in terms of roles and their normative
expectations but nowhere explain why and how norms exist. The answer, he suggested, is
to be found only in direct examination of social interaction in terms of the attributes of
real individuals, their dispositions, motives, and calculations. These attributes are derived
from the studies of psychologists and economists and can be given a general form as the
basis of sociological explanation. Homans (1961) proposed that the units from which
sociological explanations should be fashioned were the real, concrete acts of individuals.
Explanations of macro-phenomena had to be based on micro-foundations. Where
Parsons had argued that 'the very definition of an organic whole is one within which
the relations determine the properties of its parts', Homans argued that the 'whole' is
nothing more than the re sultant of the properties of its parts. Homans called his
approach 'social *behaviourism', adapting the terminology of behavioural psychology.
Other critics of functionalism, including notably Peter Blau (1964), took inspiration
from the *utlilitarian axioms of economics, arguing in a similar fashion to Homans that
theory needed to be built from propositions about actors. Similarly, from a conflict theory
perspective, Randall Collins (1975) accepted Homans's critique of functionalism and set
out to produce a compilation of causal principles that would constitute 'conflict sociology'
as an explanatory science.
One of the most ambitious of such enterprises was undertaken by James *Coleman.
Coleman had been a student of Merton and was an early critic of Parsons (Coleman 1971).
He continues to be influential in social theory. Towards the end of his career, he produced
a major treatise in rational actor theory that sought to develop the explanatory theory
proposed by Homans and to present it in a mathematical form (Coleman 1991). Coleman
presented a further argument for the individualist approach. This is that the data collected
by social scientists comprise evidence about individual behaviour, about individuals and their
opinions. The social system as a whole cannot be observed. Social theory, Coleman
wrote, 'continues to be about the functioning of social systems of behavior, but empirical
research is
fU[ffTl01H\l '',MAND n 'j n:n,r·· 105
of en concerned with explaining individual behavior' (1991: lJ. for this reason, while he
iH r !·r;tr·rJ I hdt < r JJl(_fl"\f ,r J( Jdl w,ttm, dfl' Wfldl '-,( ,, 11,Jr ,g1 '-,1', \\ilfl t tr J r·xplilll J, ( .( ,l,·111,lJI
argU(·d that it 1s rational actor thinking that offers the best building birAks with which to
wmtru<.t ilrl r·xr,lar1atr,r: th<:r,ry that J'-, dJru tly ,upp(Jrt,-rl l;y f'fllJJlfl( al (·VJd<•IJ( (•. J-r,r
(•Xilfnplr·, vvh1l<· trust may be important in maintaining stable S0cial relationships, it is
vulnerable to actors defaulting on it. Coleman therefore argued that rather than
comtructing an analytical th• Jr:: th2it rn;;h:, tru,t d u:11trdl prl·,upp<,,1t1r,n 1,f v,c Jal r,rdc·r, JI
'MJ1Jld lw lwttl'r 1,, c·xMnim· the different empirical circumstances that serve to sustain or
undermine trust. This will be f:i· Jlitat<:d IJ: th<: u,,: ,,f mr,dr:1'> dl·,uJIJing clilr·mma, faC/:d IJy
rdti<,nal act<,r-, in IJ<:havmg altruistically when confronted with the possibility that other
actors may 'free-ride'; that is, fail to live up to an expectation or take self-interested
advantage of the altruism of others.
Over the years, the debate between functionalists and rational choice theory has been
continuous (see further Turk and Simpson 1971, Coleman and Fararo 1991). Although there
21r<· c,tr,,ng ad\'/Jlat<:, ,,f ratirmal act<,r appr,,adJc,, many ,,,u,,lr,g1,h frncl thr:,l· apprr,achr:,
compromised by reductionism and by an excessively behaviouristic form of *objectivism.

Rational choice theory tends to lack a sense of the expressive, creative, and self-
interpretive character of action. It typically lacks a sufficiently strong or 'thick' concept
of the *reflexiv ity of actors who monitor their own preferences. It has difficulties in
accounting for mean ingful social norms that are presupposed in action, in historically
specific context of ethical belief, and that are not merely the products of intended action
(Bohman 1991 ). These are ar gu m•:n t, 1h21t ha'.(: b•·<an dr:vr:l<,pt:d in 'int<:rprt:tJV<: <,r
'hum<:ncutiutl traditJr,n, 1,f ,r,ual thought, and they have particularly been defended
recently by writers such as Charles
--raylor (1989), Hans *Joas (1992), Margaret *Archer (Archer and 'fritter 2000), and
others (for detailed discussion of interpretive social theory, see Chapter 5 of this book).
Here it is irnp<,rtant tr, nr,tr: th;,t l'arvJn,\ unpha,1, r,n tht ,ubjr:ctivi: rnr:arnng <;f iH tirJfl wa,
ihtlf an attr-rnpt tr; draw ,,n thr: insight'> r,f thl: intupn:tiw traditi<,n and trJ dr:vr:lrJp thr:m a,
part ()f
;:, , ::'.1'-ma tJC th E:r,ry. f n tlm rr:garrJ at lr:a,t, it< an bt arguul that f'ar,r,n '> prrJVidr:d t hr: dd i nit
ive critique of the utilitarian concept of action, on which a large part of rational choice
theory 1s based (see further Scott 1995; Lockwood 1992).
We now turn lastly to a revived strain of functionalist thinking prevalent in the 1980s
known (somewhat artificially) as 'neo-functionalism'.
'Neo-functionalism'
'fo;o of the strands of criticism directed at Parsons lead back to his starting place. Conflict
th..,,r;, ,r:t ,Jut;:, duali',tJl appr<Mch tr, ,r,cir,I/Jg1cal pr<,bl<:m<,, whuc f'arvm, had v,ught tr,
,:;ntr1c,i1:r: th•· dui.tli·,m, mr:<Jiating br:twr:cn pr;,itivi,m and idcali'>m and between pr,wu
anri u,n,<:n'>U'>. I r,r Jt, part, ratir,nal ilel'Jf t h("<,ry pr<,m<Jtt:cJ thr: utili tariiln schtmc: <Jf
il<.tirm a', the miur,Jr,girill fr,unrfatir,n fr,r iJ ,u<:ntific VJ(irJ]rJgy, which /'ar,rm, had alrtady
uiti c.iz,,rl in The Structure: of Social Action. Yt:t many uJtJc, dirJ n1,t rt:uJgnizr: this a,
/'arson,\
,;•sn ,ta rt in g pr,i n t. f h 1:y u <,Ua I ly v1r:wr:rJ v ,c irJI ,,gi Cil I fun Ui r;nal1,rn a, a pr;,i ti vi ,tic.
,y,tr:m, apprrJar.h that nr:gl<:ctuJ ar.tJrJfl. /Int hrmy '( 1iddr:m\ uitichm h typical: 'thtrt i,
nrJ actirm rn l'a!V;W,' "ac tir,n fram,'. rJf rdur:nu:", ,,nJy hr:havi<;ur which i'> prr,pr:llcd by
n<:c:d rJi,pr,,J
tir,n,, r,r r<,I<: txpr:ctatirm, .....'vlcn d<, nr,t appr:ar Jn [l'arsrm,\ writin ,j a, skill<:d and
knr;·1;J,:dgcc1hh· agf:nh, a,ill l<:a,t tr, ,,Jmt: r.:xtr:nt ma'>lc·r, rJf thr:ir <JWll fat<:' 11976: 16, 7(JJ.
106 JOHN HOLMWOOO
A similar view of functionalism was taken by Jurgen *Habermas, whose work is discussed
at length in Chapters 7 and 13 of this book (pp. 164-5, 279-83). In his The Theory of
Communicative Action, Habermas (1981b) argued that social enquiry had been unhelpfully
divided between two conceptual strategies, one taking the standpoint of 'systems', which
'ties the social scientific analysis to the external perspective of the observer', the other
taking the standpoint of the *'lifeworld', which 'begins with members' intuitive know
ledge' (1981b: 151). According to Habermas, 'the fundamental problem of social theory is
how to connect in a satisfactory way the two conceptual strategies indicated by the
respect ive notions of "system" and "lifeworld" ' (1981b: 151). Habermas offers his own
theory as just such a generalized integration of categories.
Several contemporary theorists have proposed general theories as alternatives to
Parsons, arguing that their schemes avoid his problems because they incorporate
action from the start. However, it can be argued that what they propose is very similar in
conceptual structure and intention to Parsons. This can be illustrated briefly with reference
to the work ofGiddens, whose contributions are discussed in greater detail in Chapters 10
and 13 of this book (pp. 217-20, 287-9). Although Giddens argues vigorously that his
own theory of
*'structuration' has no 'functionalist overtones at all' and has declared that it would be
helpful to 'ban' the term altogether (1981: 16, 19), he proposes certain universal 'structural
features' that are remarkably similar to those of Parsons. Giddens identifies four basic
struc tural principles, with similar points of reference to Parsons's four functional
imperatives. Giddens calls them 'signification', *'legitimation', 'authorisation',and
'allocation'. He argues further that two aspects of these principles can be identified as
follows: 'one is how far a society contains distinct spheres of "specialism" in respect of
institutional orders: differentiated forms of symbolic order (religion, science, etc); a
differentiated "polity", "economy" and "legal/repressive apparatus". The second is how
modes of institutional articulation are organised in terms of overall properties of societal
reproduction: that is to say "structural principles" '(1981: 47-8). This is very similar to
Parsons's AGIL scheme.
A common pattern in contemporary discussion is that each critic of functionalism is
careful to distance hisor her position from that of Parsons, but has little difficulty in
accusing others of converging with his scheme (see further Holmwood and Stewart 1991;
Holmwood 1996). Thus Giddens (1982: 158-9) accuses Habermas of converging with
Parsons, while Archer (1988: 87) offers the same criticism of Giddens.Jeffrey*Alexander
(1988) takes these convergences as indications of a 'new theoretical movement' back to
functionalism, which he calls 'neo-functionalism'. In the 1980s Alexander set himself
the self-conscious task of reviving functionalism through the project of a four-volume
rewriting of Parsons's The Structure of Social Action, each volume devoted respectively to
nineteenth-century positivism, Marx and Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons (Alexander
1982a, 1982b, 1983, 1984). According to Alexander, Parsons's approach was deficient in
its detail but correct in its fundamentals. Current social theory is converging on a
reinvigorated functionalist paradigm that recognizes action alongside function (Alexander
1985, 1998; Colomy 1990; Munch 1987). Alexander argues that Merton's middle-range
approach is insufficiently ambitious. What is required is a revised exercise in unified
general theory.
Yet one may reasonably question whether neo-functionalism is anything more than
a restatement of the standard approach which retains its problems. From Parsons's
perspective, if empirical circumstances are less than fully integrated, this implies that there
107
must be relevant factors that operate in addition to those represented within the
general theoretical statement. For Habermas, Giddens, Alexander, and Margaret Archer,
such fac tors are assigned to actors, thought of as acting concretely, while the
structural-system point of view is bracketed or taken as a given. This is what is promoted
by Alexander when he defends neo-functionalist analysis against the older
functionalist paradigm's overex tension of the concept of system. Alexander writes
that functional analysis 'is concerned with integration as a possibility and with deviance
and processes of social control as facts. Equilibrium is taken as a reference point for
functional systems analysis, though not for participants in actual social systems as such'
(1985: 9). Yet despite Alexander's claim for a fully integrated theoretical statement, it can
be argued that his project rests on an unsatis factory unreconciled dualism between
grand theory construction on the one hand and empirical data input on the other hand.
Conclusion
There is some validity in Kingsley Davis's (1959) assertion that functionalism is integral
to sociology. The concepts, issues, and problems of functionalism are not easily avoided.
Simple oppositions between functionalist and action approaches are inadequate because
the most elaborate and extended forms of functionalist argument are themselves based on
a highly developed concept of action. In the case of Parsons, they incorporate the very
action assumptions that are often taken to express an opposition to functionalism. This is
why Parsons's writings have retained lasting significance, no matter how difficult they
may be to read. Taken as a whole, they contain one of the most sophisticated statements
of problems that have beset sociological enquiry since the earliest days.
While the project of general theory remains attractive to some sociologists, there can be
no doubt that it has been increasingly singled out for criticism. For some *postmodernist
commentators, it is an example of inappropriate 'grand narrative' (for further discussion of
this theme, see Chapter 12 of this book). For some feminist writers, it is an expression of a
masculine taste for abstraction. In light of this, other sociologists have been attracted by
the promise of rational actor theory to provide a science of society capable of reuniting
theory and research. Where conflict theorists argued that functionalism overemphasizes
consensus and social order, neglecting conflict and power, rational actor theorists argue
that functionalism overemphasizes systems and neglects individual actors. The rational
actor theorists argue that there is no such thing as a social system, that only individual
actors interact with each other, and that the motives and calculations of individuals can
and should be taken as the building blocks of general social theory.
Yet the rational actor theorists' ambition to produce a deductive system of interlocking
laws and propositions-after the fashion of Homans and Coleman-seems almost as
unlikely to win general support as Parsons's original ambition in unified functionalist the
ory. In all of the approaches that have followed in the wake of functionalism, what seems
to be missing is some evidence of direct integration between theory and empirical
research. Parsons's own contribution was directed toward establishing sociology as a
collective collaborative enterprise. Yet in retrospect, it seems that Parsons probably did
more than
108 JOHN HOLMWOOD
anyone else to establish theory as an activity for autonomous 'grand theorists', separated
from immediate empirical research programmes. This has certainly not helped to improve
the poor public image of 'theory', in contrast to 'research' which tends to be seen as some
thing more open to new findings. In the early 1960s, the arguments of Merton and
Lockwood were seen as being insufficiently ambitious in their aspirations and too much
preoccupied with discrete empirical issues. Today, however, it can be argued that the most
I ikely context in which functionalism might flourish again is not as an all-embracing the
oretical scheme but as an empirically grounded enterprise directed at specific explanatory
problems.
What are the advantages of explaining social life in terms of systems and functions?
2 Is Merton's 'middle-range theory' preferable to Parsons's 'unified theory'?
3 What is 'social order'? How satisfactory is the functionalist explanation of social order?
4 Does functionalism neglect power, conflict, and sooal change7
5 Does rational actor theory provide a better basis for sociological explanation than functionalism?
6 Is it possible to avoid functionalist explanations in sociology?
7 How convincing is the functionalist account of the nuclear family?
FURTHER READING
Talcott Parsons's writings are numerous. Particularly important to read are his first book
The Structure of Social Action (McGraw-Hill, 1937) and his middle-period work The Social
System (Free Press, 1951). But these will be difficult to approach without first reading some
of the secondary guides. Useful introductions and studies are Peter Hamilton's short Talcott
Parsons (Tavistock, 1983), Neil Smelser and A. J. Trevino's edited Talcott Parsons Today:
His Theory and Legacy in Contemporary Sociology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), Uta
Gerhardt's Talcott Parsons (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Guy Rocher's Talcott Parsons
and American Sociology (Nelson, 1972), Jonathan H. Turner and Alexandra Maryanski's
Functionulism (Benjamin Cummings, 1979), and John Holmwood's Founding Sociology?
Talcott Parsons and the Idea of General Theory (Longman, 1996), which considers conver
gences between Parsons and the more recent work of Anthony Giddens, Jeffrey Alexander,
and Jurgen Habermas from a critical perspective. A study of the politics of functionalism is
W. F. Buxton's Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation State: Political Sociology as a Strategic
Vocation (University of Toronto Press, 1985). Other notable studies include Jeffrey
Alexander's Theoretical Lo:,:ic i11 Sociolog}', iv: Tl,e Modern Reco11struaio11 of Classical Thought:
Talcott Parsons (University of California Press, 1984), Donald Levine's Simmel and Parsons
(Arno Press, 1980), Bernard Barber and Uta Gerhardt's Agenda for Sociology: Classic
Sources and Current Uses of Parsons's Work (Nomos, 1999), Thomas Fararo's Social Action
Systems:
FUNCTIONALISM AND rrs (RITICS 109
Foundation and Synthesis in Sociological Theory (Praeger, 2001). For an evaluation of

Parsons\ approach to the family, see the broad study by Lynn Jamieson, Intimacy: Personal
Relationships in Modern Societies (Polity Press, 1998).
A comparison between functionalism and exchange theory and rational actor
approaches is M. K. Mulkay's Functionalism, fxchange and Theoretical Strategy (Schocken
Books, 1971). One of the most comprehensive books on American sociological theory by a
leading neo-functionalist is Jeffrey Alexander's Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory since
World War II (Columbia University Press, 1987), which also covers exchange theory and
conflict theory. Also substantial as guides to technical sociological theory in the American
scientific tradition are Randall Collins's two books Four Sociological Traditions (Oxford
University Press, 1994) and Theoretical Sociology (Harcourt Brace, 1988). Two collections of
readings in functionalism are Paul Colomy's Functionalist Sociology (Edward Elgar, 1990)
and Functionalist Sociology (Edward Elgar, 1990). See also James Lockwood's 'Some
Remarks on "The Social System" ', in the British Journal of Sociology, 7 (1956).
For a detailed introduction to Robert Merton, see Piotr Sztompka's Robert K. Merton:
An Intellectual Pro(ile (Cambridge University Press, 1986). In Merton's own writings, it is
best to begin with the chapter 'Manifest and Latent Functions' in his main work Social Theory
and Social Structure (Free Press, 1968). A key text for criticism of functionalism from the
stand point of conflict theory isJohn Rex's Key Problems of Sociological Theory (Routledge, 1961).
An informative overview of evolutionary thinking in social theory is Jonathan H. Turner and
Leonard Beeghley's The Emergence of Sociological Theory (Dorsey Press, 1981).
• WEBSITES
Functionalism at www.wikipedia.org/wiki/functionalism Provides an overview of functionalism,

with links to associated theorists.
Conflict Theory at www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_theory Contains a summary of conflict
theory, with links to texts and associated theorists.
Rational Choice Theory at www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Choice_Theory Covers rational
choice theory, with links to related terms.
Rational Choice Theory Essay http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/-scottjlsocscot7.htm Contains an
essay by John Scott on rational choice theory.
Quotations from Talcott Parsons at www.mdx.ac.uk/www/study/xpar.htm Displays quotations,
with Ii nks to key concepts.
lnterpretivism and
5 lnteractionism
William Outhwaite
The idea of interpretation: understanding from the inside 111

Alfred Schutz and phenomenological sociology 112
George Heroert Mead and American pragmatism 114
Symbolic interactionism and the Chicago School 115
Erving Goffman and the 'presentation of self in everyday life' 116
Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodology 117
The sociology of knowledge 119
Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge
120
Anthropological approaches to knowledge
121
Social studies of science: the rise of social constructionism
123
Language and hermeneutics 125
Peter Winch, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and the early Jurgen Habermas
125
Conclusion
127
129
FURTHER READING
129
WEBSITES
131
'Interpretivism' is a label for approaches stressing the importance of subjective meanings

carried by actions and institutions in the social world. It is particularly associated with the
methodological idea of Max Weber and Georg Simmel and their influence on subsequent
generations of writers. Interpretive thinking is also seen as encompassing what is known
as the *'phenomenological sociology' of Alfred *Schutz and the 'sociology of knowledge'
approaches of writers such as Karl *Mannheim, Peter *Berger, and Thomas *Luckmann.
This chapter discusses interpretive approaches in social theory in conjunction with a
second tradition of thought with entirely separate origins but with many theoretical
similarities to interpretive work. The parallel tradition is *'interactionism', or
'symbolic
INHRPRETIVISM f\ND nJTERACTIOiJ'';M 111
interactionism', associated with the *Chicago School of sociologists represented by the

names of George Herbert *Mead, Herbert *Blumer, and others, as well as more loosely
with the work of Erving *Goffman and Harold *Garfinkel and their pupils from the
1960s. Where interpretive thinking is largely European in origin, interactionist research
devel oped mostly in the United States from the 1930s onwards.
The two traditions of analysis are grouped together in this chapter around several
interrelated themes bearing on the concepts of interpretation, action, interurtion, knuwled:,:c,
meaning, and lan:,:uage. First we discuss the idea of interpretation in early twentieth-century
European thought, beginning with Max Weber's conception of *'interpretive sociology'.
Then we cross the Atlantic to lookattheworkofG. H. Mead and the Chicago sociologists. Next
we turn to the broad paradigm known loosely as the 'sociology of knowledge',
encompassing the work of Karl Mannheim and more recent developments in the sociology
of science and cognition. In a final step, the discussion turns to a body of ideas about the
role of language and meaning in social life known broadly as *'hermeneutics'.
The idea of interpretation:understanding

from the inside
Interpretive social theory is motivated by an interest in knowledge which is rather

different from the more general scientific interest in explaining social processes. One way of
putting this is to say that it is interested in what Robert *Merton called 'insider knowledge'-
rather than, or as well as, 'outsider knowledge' (Merton 1949a). Interpretive theory is
interested in knowledge of what it is like to bea social actor of a particular kind, and in how
such people understand their social situation. Another way of expressing the same idea is to
say that interpretivists are more interested in 'understanding' (from the inside) than in
'explaining' (from the outside).
Looking back at Chapters 2 and 3 of this book, we can see that Marx and Durkheim
tended to emphasize social forces of which social actors are mostly unaware: exploitation
through the wage contract, differential proneness to suicide resulting from marital status,
religious affiliation, and so on. Durkheim, in one of his rare comments on Marxism,
expressed approval of the idea of explaining social processes not by people's conscious
actions but by 'the more profound causes which escape consciousness' (Durkheim 1895:
171). Weber and Simmel, by contrast, were more interested in exploring the inner
meaning of action for the actors themselves. It was not enough for Weber to demonstrate
that cer tain types of Protestant Christians in early modern Europe were exceptionally
innovative in their economic behaviour; he wanted what he called a 'meaningfully
adequate' expla nation of this in terms of their situation and beliefs to supplement the
demonstration of this causal association. Otherwise, he said, all we have is a fact to be
explained.
In general, and quite roughly speaking, it can be said that whereas Marx and Durkheim
were interested in matter of structure, in the large-scale macrological features and
dynamics of social life, Weber and Simmel were concerned more with matters of
subjective meaning, action, and individual *agency. Similarly, it can be said that whereas
the *functionalist theories of *Parsons and Merton were concerned with social systems
and macrological
112 V: llUAM OUTHWAITE
structures, the writers to be discussed in this chapter are more interested in the
micrological elements of meaning, action, and interaction.
Simmel and Weber drew on a nineteenth-centuryline of discussion which moved from a
concern with the interpretation of literary texts to a rethinking of the foundations of
history, economics, psychology, and the other human sciences. Wilhelm *Dilthey and
other German historical philosophers developed what we would now call a research pro
gramme for history and the other human sciences based on the distinctiveness of
human psychic expressions and the under<;tanding of those expressions. In a move which
was to become a definitional feature of later interpretive social theory, Dilthey
emphasized the continuity between everyday understanding and more formal processes of
interpretation. His distinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences
was developed in large part in opposition to Auguste *Comte's *positivism. In a
parallel formulation, two German *Neo-Kantian philosophers, Wilhelm *Windelband
and Heinrich *Rickert, ar gued that the study of culture is essentially concerned with
individual and unique or 'one off' processes. The cultural sciences relate these processes to
shared human values, whereas the natural sciences are concerned with general laws
about objects which are essentially remote from questions of value. We are interested,
for example, in the French Revolution not just as a member of a class of revolutions
exhibiting certain common features-this would be, for Rickert, a natural-scientific
mode of approaching it-but as a unique event, emhodying, and perhaps also violating,
certain crucial human values. Rickert in particular was a major influence on Max Weber.
At the time of Weber's death in 1920, the main intellectual elements of interpretive so
cial thought and the styles of research corresponding to it were already in place. Simmel
and Weber had taken theories of 'understanding'-still often referred to by the German
word *verstehen-out of the philosophy of history, philology, and Biblical *hermeneutics
and had put them at the centre of the relatively new discipline of sociology.
On the other side of the fence, in opposition to hermeneutical and idealist thinking,
there was now a more aggressive variant of posithism. This was the logical *empiricism
or 'logical
*positivism' of the *Vienna Circle, in whose 'unified science' the statements of all
sciences were seen as reducible to material-object language or to statements in physics.
According to one member of the Vienna Circle, Otto *Neurath, verstehen was of no more
importance than 'a good cup of coffee' which revives the flagging scientist (Neurath 1973).
The next sections of this chapter trace the main developments in interpretive thinking
after 1920. We begin with the work of Alfred *Schutz.
Alfred Schutz and phenomenological sociology

The most direct response to Weber's attempt to bring together explanation and
understanding came from the leading interpretive theorist of the mid-twentieth century,
Alfred Schutz. Schutz initiated the tradition of sociological *phenomenology with a book first
published in Vienna in 1932 with the title 'The Meaningful Constitution of the Social World'
(translated in 1972 as The I'l1eno111e1wlogy of the Social World). Schutz felt that the
problem
INTERPRETIVISM AND il\l 'EHACTIONISM 113
with Weber's *ideal types was not that they were insufficiently scientific but precisely
the opposite: Weber was too quick to impose them on the phenomena he described,
paying insufficient attention to their grounding in acts of typification performed
by ordinary members of society. For Schutz, the social scientist merely constructs
additional or second-order typifications based on those already carried out by ordinary
people in every day life:
The observational field of the social scientist-social reality-has a specific meaning and
relevance structure for the human beings living, acting, and thinking within it. By a series of
common-sense constructs they have pre-selected and pre-interpreted this world which they
experience as the real ity of their daily lives ... The thought objects constructed by the social
scientists, in order to grasp this social reality, have to be founded upon the thought objects
constructed by the common-sense thinking of men [sic] livingtheirdaily life within their social
world.Thus, the constructs used by the social scientist are, so to speak, constructs of the second
degree, namely constructs of the constructs made by actors on the social scene, whose behaviour
they scientist observes and tries to explain in accordance with the procedural rules of his science.
(Schutz 1962a: 59)
Schutz refers to everyday life as the *'lifeworld'. This term, like many of Schutz's
main concepts, is taken from Edmund *Husserl's phenomenological philosophy.
Phenomenology in Husserl's original sense meant an approach to knowledge which
focuses on our experience of things, bracketing out the issue of whether or not they really
exist or are optical illusions, or of what they are made of. The lifeworld in this sense
means the world of common-sense perception, before it is subjected to theoretical analysis
by sci entists. In Schutz's more informal use of phenomenological terminology, it refers to
the so cial world which we interpret and make meaningful through our 'typifications'
(Schutz and Luckmann 1973). A person comes to the door in a police uniform; we
assume he or she is a police officer and behave accordingly. We may of course be wrong
in our assump tion; the person may be a robber impersonating a police officer, or
someone going to a fancy-dress party. But the point, for Schutz, is that we make sense
of the world through what he calls our 'stock of knowledge' at hand which we do not
normally problematize. One of Schutz's most famous essays, 'The Stranger' (1962b), is
about persons finding their way around in unfamiliar surroundings and negotiating social
situations in which they are not 'at home'. We inhabit multiple social realities, based on
the nature of our knowledge of people, places, and so on. We can construct
concentric circles of people we know intimately, people we recognize or whose names
we know, people we have seen only on TV, and soon.
Schutz was not a full-time academic, and he wrote mostly essays. He was, however, very
influential, and can now be seen as an important figure linking Simmel and Weber to
more recent and radical developments in interpretive social theory. Some of the appeal of
interpretive social theory after the 1960s derived from the radical forms of political protest
in the student and 'alternative' movements. A focus on small-scale or micro-interactions in
everyday situations may have wider implications for social structural analysis. Schutz
believed that systematic theorists like Parsons could be criticized for neglecting or
denying the need for social theory to be grounded in attention to the 'subjective point
of view' (see Schutz and Parsons 1978). But Schutz himself was by no means radical in
either a
114 lill!i..UAM OUYHWAIH
political or an intellectual sense. In a typically phenomenological gesture, he

suggested that his work was complementary to more systematic types of theory such
as functional ism or neoclassical economic theory and that it opened up an area
linking everyday or common-sense social understanding with more systematic
analysis.
When Schutz emigrated to the USA, his closest contacts were with other followers of
Husserl, but he was also led into a more intense engagement with the North American
philosophical tradition known as *pragmatism. In the next section we cross the Atlantic
to look at the development of pragmatism in the work of George Herbert *Mead and his
impact on the Chicago School of sociologists.
George Herbert Mead and American pragmatism

The philosophical movement known as pragmatism developed in the late nineteenth
century from the work of Charles Sanders *Peirce. Peirce stressed that questions of
knowledge which had been central to Western philosophy since the time of *Descartes
should no longer be abstracted out of the practical context in which they occurred: that of
people's active engagement with the world and their attempts to make sense of it. Thus
pragmatist thinkers are concerned with how we develop and test our knowledge and the
concepts we form of things in the world. The popularity of this approach in North
America is often explained rather simplistically by a cultural context in which settlers
from Europe, escaping religious and other ideological conflicts, were more concerned
with the practical ities of making a living in their new environment on the basis of hard
facts and hard cash. But it is also worth noting some parallels between pragmatism and
the related appeals to 'practice' in the work of Marx and Engels or to 'life' in that of
Friedrich *Nietzsche.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the American philosopher William *James,
brother of the novelist Henry James, had systematized pragmatism as a philosophical
approach and developed it in relation to, notably, the psychology of religious
experience.James was exceptionally influential in Europe, as well as in North America.
Social theorists such as Weber and Durkheim were impressed by his work. Durkheim in
particular took an interest in pragmatism as a philosophical approach which he saw as
having affinities to his own variety of neo-Kantianism (Durkheim 1955: 28). In the
twentieth century, pragmatism was developed further by John *Dewey. Dewey, like
James, was concerned to work out the implications of pragmatism for other areas of
knowledge and in particular for social and political philosophy and democratic theory.
These social and political concerns were also an important aspect of the work of George
Herbert Mead. Mead, though he published little systematic work himself, reached a wider
public though the work of his student Herbert
*Blumer and became one of the founders of social psychology. Mead's main book Mind, Self
and Society was put together after his death by his students in 1934.
Unlike philosophers and social theorists who began from the individual and his or her
action, Mead focused on situations of social interaction. In humans, this is symbolically
mediated. We respond to others' gestures, rather than just to their behaviour, and we put
ourselves imaginatively in their place, in what Mead called 'taking the role of the other'.
INTERPRHIVISM AND INHRACTIONl'iM 115
These expectations may be momentary, as when I interpret your gesture as meaning

that you are waving me on in a traffic queue. Or they may be more systematic
expectations. Mead distinguished between the 'I', the individual ego, and the socially
structured 'me', made up of others' expectations of me. The 'me' refers to a self which
is produced and constantly reshaped in social interaction and in the reciprocal
exchange of perspectives (Mead 1934). An individual may have multiple and
overlapping 'me's, arising from differ ent situations and roles-professional, personal,
and so forth. In his studies of the forma tion of the ego in a child's relationship to the
mother and father and other members of kin, Mead was the first to speak of an
emotionally immediate partner to interaction as a 'signif icant other'-in a today familiar
phrase.
Mead's approach implied a novel conception of knowledge, language use, and
socialization. Most fundamentally, it involved what has been called a conception of the
'creativity of action' (Joas 1980, 1992). Mead called his approach 'social behaviourism',
but it is very different from that of J.B. *Watson or B. F. *Skinner. Whereas
*behaviourists focus only on observable behaviour and avoid any speculation about the
mental processes which accompany it, Mead's interactive conception necessarily involves
conjectures about the ways in which humans interpret each other's behaviour in complex
structures of intentional action and interaction-what Harre and Secord (1972) later called
'act-action structures'. More generally it involves what Harre and Secord ironically called
the 'anthro pomorphic model of man': 'treating people as if they were human beings'.
Symbolic interactionism and the Chicago School

The term 'symbolic interactionism' was introduced in 1937 by the Chicago sociologist
Herbert Blumer. The Chicago sociology department, founded by Albion *Small in 1892, was
not the first in the country, but it was the first to develop a collective conception of social
research. This was oriented to the ethnic and other urban crises of early twentieth-century
Chicago and to reformist impulses from Jane*Addams and others. The Chicago
sociologists began conducting ethnographic studies of local social problems, permanently
shaping the image of sociology as typically concerned with the observation of 'low life'.
An admirer of Simmel, Blumer saw his main achievement as bringing together Herbert
Mead's pragmatic philosophy and social psychology with the sociology of W. I. *Thomas
and others. W. I. Thomas is today remembered principally for his slogan: 'If men define
things as real, they are real in their consequences' (Thomas and Thomas 1928). Blumer
showed how this idea fitted well with C. H. *Cooley's idea of the 'looking-glass self',
based on our idea of how we appear to others and Mead's distinction between the 'I' and
the 'me' (Blumer 1969; Cooley 1902). In other words, we relate to people and things
according to our interpretationsof them; we respond to a threatening gesture before it
becomes a real threat, or to a friendly approach indicated by a momentary smile.
This 'creative' model of action can be contrasted with that of Talcott Parsons in his book
The Structure of Social Action, also published in 1937. Although Parsons described his
conception of action as *'voluntaristic', Parsons in practice emphasized an orientation to
116 WILLIAM OUTHWAiH
prevalent shared norms, in an approach increasingly criticized as conservative. In contrast,

the interactionist sociologist's account is continuous with social actors' own more or
less conscious awareness of what they are doing. It does not offer a description or
explanation of their actions at a radically different level. In this sense the symbolic
interactionist approach is consonant with Schutz's model of typifications, in which
those of the social scientist build on and reconstruct those produced by ordinary
members of society.
Blumer's systematization of interactionism coincided with the eclipse of the Chicago
School by other centres of US sociology, and it was particularly important because Mead him
self did not present his work in a systematic way. Interactionism continued as an oppositional
current to functionalism as sociology expanded in the USA and Britain after the Second
World War. Among the main second-generation representatives of symbolic
interactionism were Blumer's students Anselm *Strauss, Tamotsu Shibatani, Howard
*Becker, and others. By the 1960s the functionalist idea that a theory should be precisely
formulated, systematic, and of general application was giving way to a more pluralistic
and informal conception of theo ries as sensitizing frameworks. ln this sense,
interactionists returned to some of the original pragmatist ideas that had inspired Chicago
sociology. An influential text by Glaser and Strauss (1967) formalized a version of this
approach in the idea of 'contexts of awareness'. Strauss in particular produced substantial
work in the sociology of medicine.
One of the most influential and theoretically creative strands of interactionism in later
yearsfollowed the original pragmatist model in stressing the informal and negotiated
aspect of social roles and social interaction in general. This occurs notably in the
ethnographic work of Erving *Goffman and Harold *Garfinkel, who are discussed in the
following two sections of this chapter.
Erving Goffman and the 'presentation

of self in everyday life'
Erving Goffman obtained his doctorate at Chicago with a thesis based on fieldwork
in the Scottish Shetland Islands. He remains perhaps best known for his first book, The
Presentation ofSelfin Everyday Life (1956). For Goffman, the notion of 'performing' social roles
means just that: we are 'on stage' in our everyday lives, moving between 'front stage' and
'back stage', dressing to create an impression, even if only an understated one, and
constantly
monitoring the impression we create. We are constantly engaged in 'interaction rituals' .
Sometimes, as in our homes, the stage metaphor is almost literal, as we admit visitors to
some rooms or parts of rooms and not others. On the other hand, it serves in Goffman's
presentation as a guide to a more fundamental issue. As he stresses at the end of the book,
The claim that all the world's a stage is sufficiently commonplace for readers to be familiar
with its limitations and tolerant of its presentation, knowing ... that it is not to be taken
too seriously ... This report ... is concerned with the structure of social encounters-the
structure of those entities in social life that come into being whenever persons enter one
another's immediate physical presence. The key factor in this structure is the maintenance of a
single definition of the situation, this definition having to be expressed, and this expression
sustained in the face of a multitude of potential disruptions. (Goffman 1956: 246)
INHRPRETIVISM AND INTERACTIONISM 117
In a later book, Frame Analysis (1974), Goffman shows how situations can be shaped
by a variety of alternative perspectives. We must use 'frame clues' and 'frame conventions'
to know-or rather guess-whether someone is joking or serious, blinking or winking,
polite or sarcastic, unaware of a social convention or deliberately flouting it. We are
confronted with multiple realities in the form of a choice between alternative
perspectives. And these interpretations may be self-fulfilling; to misidentify a look as rude
or hostile and to act accordingly may land you in hospital.
Goffman is often criticized for portraying a rather sad social world without sincerity or
spontaneity, where people are constantly monitoring their performances and calculating
their effects. Are all cultures as obsessed with impression management as he suggests, or
is he falsely universalizing particular features of advanced capitalist societies? The
evidence of cross-cultural studies suggests that Goffman may have been right in his
assumptions. Certainly the model of *'dramaturgical action', as he called it, should be put
alongside that of norm-directed and economically rational action as part of the repertoire
of social theory. In his book Asylums (1961), Goffman coined the term 'total institution',
placing prisons in one and the same category as hospitals, care homes, clinics, army
barracks, boarding schools, ships, and monasteries. Goffman's preoccupation with the
intensely self-contained character of 'total institutions' is movingly conveyed in the
1970s film One Flew over the
Cuckoo's Nest, starring Jack Nicholson. In Asylums Goffman writes that
A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of
like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time,
together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. Prisons serve as a clear example,
providing we appreciate that what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions whose
members have broken no laws....
Every institution captures something of the time and interest of its members and provides
something of a world for them; in brief, every institution has encompassing tendencies. When
we review the different institutions in our Western society, we find some that are
encompassing to a degree discontinuously greater than the ones next in line. Their
encompassing or total character is symbolised by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside
and to departure that is often built right into the physical plant, such as locked doors, high walls,
barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, or moors. (Goffman 1961: pp. xiii, 4-5)
Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodology

The US sociologist Harold *Garfinkel was a contemporary of Goffman, and his work
shows affinities with the latter's. Like Goffman, Garfinkel was interested in the
'dramaturgy' or 'dramatic structure' of situations of social interaction. One of Garfinkel's
first studies, published in 1956, is titled 'Conditions of Successful Degradation
Ceremonies'. It explores the ways in which the victim of an act of humiliation is defined as
an outsider and the perpetrators are defined as acting in the public interest and according
to universal values. Garfinkel later developed his analysis in three main directions. First,
he looked more closely at the reasoning processes through which people come to define
situations in certain ways. Secondly, having studied under Talcott Parsons, he
reformulated Parsons's concern with the problem and maintenance of social order in
terms of contexts of
118 WILLIAM OUTHWAITE
everyday interaction. But where Parsons had been concerned with the conditions of
war and peace at the level of entire societies (following the seventeenth-century
English philosopher Thomas *Hobbes), Garfinkel was interested in the maintenance
of order in microcosmic interactions. Third, Garfinkel realized that the implicit rules that
guide social interaction could be identified through studying situations where they are
breached, and that he and his students could deliberately cause these rules to break
down.
Garfinkel coined the term *'ethnomethodology' to describe the study of the reasoning
processes routinely followed in everyday life. He documented these in studies of a trial
jury and other sites of 'mundane reasoning'. He noted that conversational exchanges were
marked by what linguists call 'indexicality': by the use of expressions like 'I', 'you', 'here',
and 'now', which are given meaning solely by space-time context. Elliptical expressiom
like 'the next lecture will be in the other room' can be unpacked by listeners with the
necessary background knowledge to mean: 'the next lecture in this series will be in the
second of the two lecture theatres which we are using this semester'. Forcing people to
spell out what they mean by shorthand references of this kind is perceived as irritating and
rude. One of Garfinkel's experiments involved asking people what they meant when they
asked 'How are you?', and offering an unexpectedly detailed response. In another
experiment, which demonstrates how we try to produce order and meaning in puzzling
situations, a researcher posing as a counsellor gave a random succession of 'yes' or 'no'
responses to the victim's requests for advice, leading him or her into more and more
contorted attempts to recon struct the logic of the 'counsellor's' replies. Garfinkel draws
the theoretical conclusion:
In accounting for the stable features of everyday activities, sociologists commonly select
familiar settings such as familial µouseholds or workplaces and ask for the variables that contribute
to their stable features.Just as commonly, one set of considerations are unexamined: the socially
standard ized and standardizing, 'seen but unnoticed', expected, background features of
everyday scenes. The member of society uses background expectancies as a scheme of
interpretation. With their use, actual appearances are for him recognizable and intelligible as the
appearances-of-familiar-events. Demonstrably, he is responsive to this background, while at the
same time he is at a loss to tell us specifically of what the expectancies consist. When we ask him
about them he has little or nothing to say. (Garfinkel 1967: 36)
Like interactionism, ethnomethodology tended to become polarized between detailed

sociolinguistic studies, in which its original anti-positivistic thrust disappeared, and
more speculative and essayistic philosophical reflections. One very fruitful classic text of
American sociology in the late 1950s which avoided these two extremes and became an
intellectual bestseller was David *Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950). This is discussed
in Box 13.
Both European interpretive thinking and American interactionist research share an
emphasis on continuity between formal sociological reasoning and the informal pragmatic
reasoning carried on by ordinary members of society. Both traditions of approaches converge
on the idea that all people are to some extent sociologically knowledgeable and skilled. This
idea has had a wide influence in social theory and has led to important explorations of the
idea of *'reflexivity' in modern social life. The theme of the knawledgeability of social actors
also brings us now to a further important component of the broad terrain of approaches
concerned with meaning, action, and context. This is the 'sociology of knowledge'.
119
BOX 13. DAVID RIESMAN'S THE LONELY CROWD
Interpretive social theory is also represented in popular and theoretically unpretentious works such as
David *Riesman and his colleagues' enormously influential book on American society, The Lonely
Crowd
! (1950). Riesman had been a student of the critical social philosopher and psychologist Erich *Fromm.
He applied his model of social character to the history and present condition of the USA in the 1940s
and 1950s. Riesman traced the development of American character through three successive ideal
types:
1. a pre-modern 'tradition-directed' orientation;

2. the robust and apparently self-sufficient 'inner-directed' character, respectful of parental and other
authority figures from an older generation, who is characteristic of high modernity, as described in
Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism;
3. the more recently predominant 'other-directed' character, oriented to and seeking the approval
of peer groups. Other-directed characters tend to conformism, but with the possibility of
developing a more autonomous orientation.
By 'other-directed' Riesman did not mean 'altruistic'; and by 'inner-directed' he did not mean
'selfish'. The 'other-directed' character reflected a type of person from the affluent metropolitan
suburbs, typi cally employed in the services professions, and typically surrounded by friends and
colleagues as mem bers of loose-knit networks of sociability. The 'other-directed' person is both
more in touch with the feelings of other close associates and at the same time beset by a
loneliness, by an anxiety to appear normal and to join with the crowd.
Although the authors conducted some interviews, they relied on more informal data sources. They
declared that 'mainly ... this book is based on our experiences of living in America-the people we
have met, the jobs we have held, the movies we have seen' (1950: 5). The Lonely Crowd can be
The sociology of knowledge

The broad field of enquiries known as the sociology of knowledge combines elements of
thinking found in both interpretive and interactionist traditions of research. Philosophers
have agued for centuries about the nature and grounds of our knowledge. In the early
twentieth century, however, there was increasing interest in the idea of the social bases of
knowledge. Wilhelm Jerusalem, who had overseen the publication in German of William
James's book Pragmatism of 1907, introduced the concept of a 'sociology of cognition'
(Soziologiedes Erkennens) in 1909. What soon came to be called the 'sociology of knowledge'
took several forms. Here we look at three main schools of approach: first, a phenomen
ological school inaugurated in Germany by Max *Scheler and Karl *Mannheim, and later
resumed in the USA by Peter *Berger and Thomas *Luckmann; secondly, an
anthropologi cal tradition beginning with Durkheim and Marcel*Mauss; and third, a more
recent school loosely referred to as *'social constructionism', arising out of sociological
studies of the
natural sciences.
120 WILUAM OUTHWAITE
Karl Mannheim'ssociology of knowledge

The idea of a sociology of knowledge that developed in Germany in the 1920s had its
roots in Marxist theories of class society. The phenomenological philosopher Max
*Scheler and especially the Hungarian-born theorist Karl *Mannheim generalized the
Marxist theory of ideology into a post-Marxist approach. This held that all knowledge
outside mathematics and natural science could and should be understood in relation to the
social groups which generated and sustained it. This, for Mannheim, did not entail
*relativism between the different perspectives of different classes, generations, and
cultures. Rather, it entailed what he called relationism. It was an approach which aimed at
objective knowledge through an awareness of the social and historical relativity of
particular, partial perspec tives on a given topic.
Mannheim criticized the principle drawn in German Neo-Kantian philosophy that held
that the context of the genesis of a particular proposition or idea has no bearing on the -
validity of the proposition or idea. For example, Mannheim showed how the context of
emergence of the statement- that we find in the Christian New Testament where
Jesus proclaims that 'the first will be last and the last will be first' does have a bearing on its
validity. This statement has to be considered in light of the position of the Christian slaves
under the rule of the Romans. It expresses the yearning of a particular social group for
emancipation in a definite context of social history. Therefore it is not a statement whose
meaning can be isolated from its particular context of material social relations and held up
abstractly as an article of unchanging validity, with an unequivocal or universally recog
nizable message.
Mannheim presented this conception of the sociology of knowledge in several texts.
His first book was a study of nineteenth-century European conservative thought, titled
Conservatism (1925). In this work he links the conservative critique of dogma and
rationalism in political affairs, its approval of 'common sense' and 'sound judgement', to
the world-view of an aristocracy threatened by modernity and democracy in the form of
the French Revolution and its effects elsewhere in Europe. In his major treatise of 1929
Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim generalized an originally Marxist conception of the way in
which political doctrines and, more broadly, views of the world, alternate between two
functions. Either they serve to justify and 'stabilize' the status quo, or they serve to
criticize and subvert it:
The concept 'ideology' reflects the ... discovery ... that ruling groups can in their thinking
become so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain
facts which would undermine their sense of domination ...
The concept of utopian thinking reflects the opposite discovery ... that certain oppressed
groups are intellectually so strongly interested in the destruction and transformation of a given
condition of society that they unwittingly see only those elements in the situation which tend to
negate it. (Mannheim 1929: 36)
Mannheim believed that intellectuals were well placed to accede to an objective

knowledge of social relations based on relative detachment from particular roles and
perspectives. This wasdue to their 'relatively free-floating' or unattached social position.
Mannheim spoke of 'socially unattached intellectuals' (freischwebende Intelligenz).
INHRPRETIVISM AND !NTERACTIONISM 121
Mannheim's work and other German approaches, including particularly the work of
Schutz, reached English-speaking audiences in the 1960s and 1970s, through the impact
of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's influential book The Social Construction of
Reality of 1966. This is discussed in Box 14.
Anthropological approaches to knowledge

A parallel tradition of approaches to social contexts of knowledge developed in France
from a more anthropological source. In the early years of the century, Emile Durkheim,
Marcel
*Mauss, and others had suggested that systematic links obtained between different forms
BOX 14. PETER BERGER AND THOMAS LUCKMANN'S THE SOCfAL

CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY
In the 1960s the two Austro-German-born authors Peter *Berger and Thomas *Luckmann argued that
the sociology of knowledge in the early twentieth century had been too concerned with formal belief
systems and political ideologies. Taking their point of departure from the phenomenological sociology of
everyday
Alfred Schutz, they argued for a reorientation of the sociology of knowledge towards
common
sense knowledge, promoting the slogan of the 'social construction of reality'. Among many
formulations, they expressed this difference between formal knowledge and everyday knowledge as the
difference between the knowledge of the criminologist and the knowledge of the criminal. The one has
a set of theoretical principles; the other has a practical know-how, born of experience, from life on the
streets.
Berger and Luckmann were explicitly relativistic in their approach, arguing that the sociology of
i knowledge should be concerned with 'whatever passes for "knowledge" in a society' (Berger and
Luckmann 1966: 15). Society in their view is both an objective and a subjective reality. As an
objective reality, society results from subjective processes of definition and conceptualization. In this
sense Berger and Luckmann reinvigorated the phenomenological tradition in sociology, linking it to
more substantial conceptions of society derived from Durkheim. They saw sociological analysis as
involving a task of har monizing two basic propositions: on the one hand. the proposition that 'society
exists only as individu als are conscious of it'; on the other hand, the proposition that 'individual
Durkheim tells us: 'The first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things.' And Weber observes:
'Both for sociology in the present sense, and for history, the object of cognition is the subjective
meaning complex of action'. These two statements are not contradictory. Society does indeed possess
objective facticity. And society is indeed built up by activity that expresses subjective meaning. And,
incidentally, Durkheim knew the latter, just as Weber knew the former. It is precisely the dual character of
society in terms of objective facticity and subjective meaning that makes its 'reality sui generis'. (Berger
and Luckmann 1966: 30)
This approach provided a strikingly new analysis of the *legitimation of belief systems and the
main tenance of 'symbolic universes'. Berger and Luckmann showed how the idea of *reif1cation
introduced by Marxist writers can be seen as involving a 'forgetting' of the socially constructed
character of reality. They affirmed that 'if the integration of an institutional order can be understood
only in terms of the "knowledge" that its members have of it, it follows that the analysis of such
"knowledge" will be essential for an analysis of the institutional order in question, (1966: 82-3).
122 WILUAM OUTl-lWAITE
of social organization and different belief systems. In his The Elementary Forms of Religious
Life of 1912, Durkheim had shown, for example, how Australian *totemic religion could
be explained by the tribal and clan organization of aboriginal societies. Representations of
the cosmos could be shown to reflect the spatial organization of settlements, which in turn
reflected their social structure. All religion was 'about something'. Religion was too
pervas ive in human societies to be simply based on illusion. It was actually the form in
which human societies celebrated themselves and their solidarity.
More fundamentally still, Durkheim suggested that sociology could resolve the
long standing dispute between *empiricists and rationalists over whether knowledge
comes just from experience or also from categories of thought pre-loaded into the
human mind. Durkheim maintained that Immanuel *Kant's conception of *a priori
categories of thought supplied by the human mind was essentially correct. But
Durkheim also main tained that these categories are themselves shaped sodally and that
they derive from sodety in a certain sense. A Durkheimian approach to knowledge and
cognition was developed further by the French structural anthropologist Claude *Levi-
Strauss, who is discussed in Chapter 9 of this book.
In more recent times, the British anthropologist Mary *Douglas studied the way in
which societies categorize the world in simple oppositions between, for example, 'clean'
and 'dirty', where dirt means 'matter out of place' (Douglas 1966). Following the
Durkheimian school, Douglas saw these as the key to our understanding of the most
fundamental opposition in social life between the 'sacred' and the 'profane'. It is in this
sense that creatures or substances that fall outside familiar categories or that fall in
between categories can be at once dangerous, or poisonous, and special or sacred.
Transsexuals, for example, may be suspect because they are 'neither one thing nor the
other'. An unusual creature, or people born with deformities, may be objects of
abomination or they may be objects of special veneration. 1t is in this connection that we
can understand the literal meaning of the Hebrew word 'holy' as 'set apart'. Douglas and
those working with her became increas ingly interested in the political implications of this
model, in relation to internal power struggles within cultures and in relation to public
policy controversies. Her model is Durkheimian in its stress on the need for cultures to
preserve themselves by rituals of *soli darity and punishment for deviants. It is neo-
Durkheimian in the sense that cultures are also seen as divided and 'adversarial' (Douglas
2002).
In the USA in the 1970s, the anthropologist Clifford *Geertz developed a notion of
'thick description' as a programme for *ethnographic practice. By 'thick description'
Geertz meant detailed immersion in the relationships and 'webs of significance' spun by
actors in particular contexts of interaction. Geertz found inspiration in the work of the
British philosopher Gilbert *Ryle who had been concerned with the sort of sensitive
description that can differentiate between someone who intentionally winks and someone
who unintentionally blinks or twitches. In a particular social context-such as a school
classroom full of boys playing a prank on the teacher-the wink may function as a sign
with a particular meaning, which it is the ethnographer's task to decipher. Thus 'thick
description' for Geertz is a way of proceeding in social science which brings in the cultural
context and makes sense of what is observed. It emphasizes that explanation in the social
sciences is not often a labour of simplification-like, say, Einstein's simple elegant equation
E = mc2 but rather one of 'substituting complex pictures for simple ones while striving
I NTERPRETIVISM AND I NYERACTIONi5M 123
somehow to retain the persuasive clarity that went with the simple ones' (Geertz 1973:
33). In his book The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Geertz writes:
In finished anthropological writings ... [the] fact-that what we call our data are really our
own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up
to-is obscured because most of what we need to comprehend a particular event, ritual, rustom,
idea, or whatever is insinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly
examined. (Geertz 1973: 9)
Geertz in this sense illustrates the way in which ethnography can be pursued as a work of
narration where social relations are read like a text.
Social studies of science: the rise of social constructionism

A third broad field of sociological studies of knowledge developed in the USA and Britain in
the 1960s in relation to theories of valid knowledge in the natural sciences. The field
emerged partly in response to the 'falsificationist' theory of science propounded by Karl
*Popper (1935). Popper had proposed that good scientific theories cannot be pronounced
'true'; they can only be deemed to be 'not yet disproven', or not yet 'falsified'. Popper held
that a good scientist should test theories to destruction, constantly looking for
counter evidence and giving only conditional credence to theories which have so far
survived empirical testing.
Popper broke with many of the claims of *positivist philosophers about science. However,
he still retained some of their assumptions and entertained a rather idealistic image
of scientific progress. Moving beyond Popper and adopting a more radical position, the
American historian and methodologist Thomas *Kuhn showed that scientists were very
profoundly bound by shared assumptions and conventions or what he called *'paradigms'.
In his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn showed how
the development of natural science was shaped by social influences at every level, from
small scale research teams to larger scientific communities and ultimately whole societies.
In Kuhn's picture, scientists are much more conservative and collectivistic than in Popper's
idealistic image of science. They are relatively unwilling to question core assumptions
of their paradigm, and they move en masse from one paradigm to another only when its
inadequacies become overwhelming and an alternative is available. This is in part a matter
of the internal 'thought style' of a scientific community, as Ludwig Fleck (1935) had
earlier called it. And scientific change also interacts with, and depends closely upon,
general meta physical images of the world or 'world-views', and is related closely to
contexts of institu tional power and authority. Copernicus's heliocentric theory, for
example, had to wait nearly a century before gaining acceptance. Galileo had to struggle
bitterly with the papacy and the Catholic Church for institutional endorsement of his
scientific discoveries.
Further extensions of the Kuhnian thesis occur in the work of the Austrian philosopher
of science Paul *Feyerabend (1975). For Feyerabend, to be 'a good empiricist' is to
consider seriously even the most unfashionable or apparently outlandish theories. In what
he provocatively called an 'anarchistic' theory of knowledge, Feyerabend proclaimed that
'anything goes'.
124 1/'IILLIAM OUTHWAITE
Kuhn's idea of 'paradigms' can also be compared to what the French theorist Michel
*Foucault termed 'epistemes' in his book The Order of Things of1966, a brilliant study of
forms of scientific thought in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
(discussed at length in Chapter 9 of this book, pp. 206-8). In contrast to simple models of
enlightenment in which dialogue and truth undermine illegitimate power, Foucault
bound the two ideas of knowledge and domination together, stressing the involvement of
disciplinary power in what he termed 'regimes of truth'. Along with the work of French
his torians such as Georges Canguilhem (1977) and Paul Veyne (1971), the ideas of
Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Foucault challenge us with some fundamental questions about
what counts as true in different cultures and different historical worlds.
Since the 1970s Kuhn's work has inspired a variety of projects in what has come to
be known as 'social studies of science', also broadly understood as contributions to
*'social constructionism'. Thes·e projects are united by a rejection of triumphalist or
*Whiggish notions of the emergence of truth from error. They favour a more sensitive
reconstruction of historical and social contexts of scientific discoveries in relation to the
emergence of new disciplines. In this vein, the French anthropologist Bruno *Latour
showed in his influential ethnographic study Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar 1979)
how the chaotic mess on a scientist's desk, made up of research reports, photocopied
articles, equations written on the back of old plane tickets, and so forth, is gradually
shaped into the scientific paper. Together with Michel Callon, Latour subsequently
developed an 'actor-network theory', in which scientific knowledge is socially
constructed by a variety of 'actors', including its objects themselves, such as the
molluscs of a Breton fishing port or the research objects and equipment in a laboratory.
In this sense Latour's ethnographic approach to knowledge challenges long-standing
*metaphysical distinctions in Western philosophy between conscious intentional
human agents, supposedly belonging to a realm of 'culture', and non-conscious
physical objects or forces, supposedly belonging to a realm of 'nature'. In Latour's
work, the scientists' materials, instruments, and institutional spaces of research can be
just as much 'actors' as the scientists themselves.
In Britain, the so-called Edinburgh school of the sociology of science pursued a similar
programme in the 1970s. Barry Barnes (1974, 1977) emphasized the need for interpretive
charity in relation to alternative conceptual schemes, while David Bloor (1976) stressed in
a Durkheimian manner the social constraints exercised by scientific communities. The
image of social construction was fed back into much of the sociology of natural scientific
knowledge, with the idea that natural entities, since they are conceptualized in human
languages in ways which vary over time and space, are basically social constructions. It
was argued that the sociology of scientific knowledge should be methodologically
relativistic and should not privilege whatever conceptions might happen to be favoured at
the time of writing. This 'strong programme' of the sociology of science, as it came to be
called, affirmed a position of neutrality between currently accepted scientific views and
alternative or historically outmoded conceptions, regarding neither as in principle more
valid than the other. Further variants of a social constructionist approach to science have
been developed by Ian Hacking (1999).
A further broad element in the sociology of knowledge is the rise of *postmodernism
in the 1980s, as proclaimed among others by the French theorist Jean-Frarn;:ois *Lyotard.
Lyotard's influential book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) gave
INTER PR ETIVISM AND IIHERAlTION I SM 125
new impetus to social constructionism, foregrounding the idea of stubborn conflicts

between different *cognitive ideas of the world or 'language games', in the phrase of the
philosopher Ludwig *Wittgenstein. Lyotard's work is discussed at length in Chapter 12 of
this book, pp. 260-2.
It should, however, be noted that some of the themes today packaged as 'postmodern
sociology' were already present in developments in hermeneutics and the philosophy of
language from earlier decades of the twentieth century. It is to this last main body of
approaches that we turn now.
Language and hermeneutics
In general, it can be said that interpretive approaches in social theory get under way by
reflecting on similarities between the understanding of human social processes and the
understanding of texts. Understanding the rules and relations of conduct that underpin a
particular social situation is like learning a language and reading a text. And if
understand ing a society is in this way like learning a language, it may also require us to
learn a language or to use it in a specialized way. In the 1930s Austrian philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had begun with a simple conception of the way language maps
onto the world, came to develop a more complex idea of 'language games' in which
certain moves have meaning and make sense. In a religious language game, for example,
words like 'prayer', 'sacred', 'holy', 'salvation', and so on, have a specific meaning which is
given to them only by and in this context.
One important effect of Wittgenstein's philosophical legacy in social science was the
introduction of the concept of *'speech-acts' and *'performatives'. This was developed in
the 1960s by the analytical philosophers John*Austin (1962) and John *Searle (1969).
They showed how, for example, when a priest says 'I pronounce you man and wife', or the
rector of a university says 'I confer on you the title of Bachelor of Arts', the priest and the
rector instantaneously create the social fact of marriage or graduation for the couple or
student concerned. This way of analysing linguistic performances and competences has
been taken up by a variety of theorists in recent years, from Jacques Derrida and Jurgen
Habermas to feminist theorists such as Judith *Butler (for further discussion, see Chapters
9, 11, and 13 of this book, pp. 202-6, 243-5, 279-83).
We conclude our discussion here by looking at several writers influenced by
Wittgenstein and by other ideas about language. Three of these are the British writer Peter
*Winch and the German philosophers Hans-Georg *Gadamer andJiirgen *Habermas.
Peter Winch, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and the early Jurgen Habermas

In his book The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958) Peter Winch
developed Wittgenstein's ideas into a radically anti-positivist, linguistically based model
of social science. Winch argued that to understand a society is to learn to use language in
the way its members do. If the members of this other society talk about witches in ways
which assume the reality of witchcraft, so must the social scientist. Winch, like Schutz, set
up his
126 \"llU 1AM OUTHWAITi
argument partly in support of .\fax Weber and partly in opposition to him. He claimed that
Weber had been wrong to suggest that understanding needed to be complemented by
causal analysis. For Winch, knowing a society meant learning the way it is conceptualized
by its members. He thus revived a central principle of nineteenth-centuryGerman *histor
icism, according to which every age must be understood in its own terms. Winch directly
identified himself with the German idealist tradition by insisting that social relations
are 'like' logical relations between sentences in language (1958: 126).
Winch's book and a subsequent article by him, titled 'Understanding a Primitive Society'
(Winch 1970), sparked off a debate in Britain in the early 1960s about *relativism and
anti-relativism in social science.The debate focused on Winch's discussion of the work of the
British anthropologist Edward *Evans-Pritchard, who had studied the beliefs and practices of
the north African tribespeople, the Azande and the Nuer (1937, 1940). At issue was
essentially what we mean if we saythat witchcraft is real to the Azande people. A relativist is
likely to say that what counts is the Azande's beliefin the reality of witchcraft, and that it is
irrelevant to add that back home in Oxford or Paris most people no longer believe in
witchcraft or do not consider it scientificallyproven·or provable. Anti-relativists-suchas Ernest
*Gellner (1985) are prone to insist that there is a fact of the matter about whether witchcraft
works, that in fact it does not work, and that the role of the social observer is to try to explain
the reasons for the prevalence of such false beliefs.
In the same period, the German philosopher Hans-Georg *Gadamer introduced the
concept of 'philosophical hermeneutics', which also found its way into social-science
discussions. In his book Truth and Method, first published in 1960, Gadamer extended the
traditional scope of hermeneutics, which had formerly been limited to the theory of
interpretation of texts, including particularly the Bible. Gadamer insisted on a practical
dimension of interpretation, conceived in the philosopher Martin *Heidegger's sense of an
'encounter' between the 'horizon' of the interpreter and the 'horizon' of the text itself.
Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics was conceived in opposition to the methodological
emphasis of traditional hermeneutic theories that had been concerned predominantly with
accuracy, technique, and impartiality. Gadamer's aim was to describe the underlying
process, the existential encounter between two perspectives or 'horizons of expectation',
which makes interpretation possible. Understanding is not only a matter of immersing
one self imaginatively in the world of the historical actor or text. It is an at once reflective
and practical process which operates with an awareness of the temporal and conceptual
distance between the text and the interpreter and of the ways in which the text has been
and contin ues to be reinterpreted and to exercise an influence over us. For Gadamer, this
'effective history', as he called it (Wirkungsgeschichtc), which traditional historicist
hermeneutics had tended to see as an obstacle, is an essential element which links us to the
past and to other cultures. Our 'pre-judgements' are what make understanding possible.
Pre-judgements, or 'prejudices', do not necessarily limit understanding, though they may
do so.
The conception of hermeneutics espoused by Gadamer became central to the early work
of the German critical social theorist Jiirgen *Habermas, whose work is discussed at
length in later sections of this book (Chapter 7, pp. 164-5, and Chapter 13, pp. 279-83). In
his early text Logic of the Social Sciences (1967), Habermas welcomed Gadamer's critique of
historical objectivism, which he saw as the equivalent of positivism in natural science.
However, Habermas also maintained that Gadamer's stress on the fundamental nature of
language-expressed in
11\iHRPRETIVISM AND !fHFHACTiQl''l,M 127
his claim that 'Being that can be understood is language'-amounted to a form of 'linguistic
idealism'. In Habermas's view, Gadamer's stress on the value and wisdom of past historical
tra ditions and his rehabilitation of the category of 'prejudice' suggested a conservative
approach. Habermas argued that this conception of interpretation failed to deal with the
possibility of systematic distortions in relations of dialogue between subjects, due to the
effects of power,
*domination, and *ideology. Habcrmas and Gadamer debated these issues in the late
1960s and early 1970s. On the one side stood Gadamer's idea of tradition and openness to the
world views of past cultures and ancient classical civilizations. On the other side stood
Habermas's idea of *enlightenment, *emancipation, and ideology critique. More recent
theorists have tended to stress compatibility between hermeneutics and Hahermasian
critical theory, rather than conflict between them. Several writers have espoused a conception
of 'critical hermeneu tics' (Thompson 1981; Outhwaite 1987; Hoy and McCarthy 1994;
Harrington 2001).
Hermeneutics and critical theory can also be brought into relation with the school of
*realist philosophy of science developed in Britain by Mary Hesse, Rom *Harre, Roy
*Bhaskar, and others. For Hesse and Harre, science is an attempt to produce models of
real entities and processes in the world, aiming particularly at causal relations. Where
Harre (1993) combines this realism about natural science with a social-constructionist
social psychology, Bhaskar (1979) is more sympathetic to theories such as Marxism, as
well as to Anthony *Giddens's theory of *'structuration' (on Bhaskar's and Giddens's
work, see, Chapter 10 of this book, pp. 217-20, 227-8). For both Harre and Bhaskar,
meanings are real and have causal effects. Bhaskar has sought to overcome positivism in
social science with out at the same time acquiescing in cultural relativism or an idealizing
overestimation of the significance of texts and linguistic constructs in social life.
All of these more critical responses to hermeneutics can be seen as attempts to
reconcile the rival claims of causal 'explanation' with meaningful 'understanding' in social
science-just as Weber had attempted to reconcile them at the beginning of the twentieth
century. In general, hermeneutics in a broad sense continues to exist as a major research
tradition in the humanities and social sciences; and social scientists who might not sign
up to an explicitly hermeneutic programme mostly accept at least the importance of
hermeneutic issues today.
Conclusion
The approaches discussed in this chapter all possess what Wittgenstein called a
certain 'family resemblance' to one another. Although they have very diverse origins
and traject ories of development, several common themes unite the broad fields discussed
here under the brackets of phenomenological sociology, interactionism, sociology of
knowledge, and philosophies of language and hermeneutics. We may not be able to
identify a single proposition or set of propositions to which all these fields would
subscribe, but they share a general orientation or style of theorizing. All the approaches
focus in various ways on themes of meaning, understanding, action, interaction,
language, context, and everyday knowledge. These themes point us to a shared
general outlook which marks out these approaches in opposition to positivism.
A common general I:> ue m,"t'r' · the st;ltu ·d ·,h.it '-' rt \!..:rt,,·- ,·..ul<c'I..: •;",:,'" J."•-'
l
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reallv understand is our L'wn nllture rhh w, · l t: Hl\1. t1,· \\ ,l\ ,t th•'' 1.r 1.. 1
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free social re:-t, Kh, ,md th.lt then.•t,,:.: f\'-. ·,m.ht ·, ,h,,uld t>.: ,t n.,i .l"=' t 1r: -.tu...,u\
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appc>ar th;it there car> be no pul\.'h d.iT1ten.·,tt'li r , ttlm fn,n "h1;!', J.1 1
:u t1::v,
can be obs<.'rYed in a reli.ible w.1y It w1.,llld ,1p:-...•,u th.lt .ti. m11k•,p1,h•1_ m .1. ,Y- ·_-n• -,
require . and enabk-s. .it least SLm1t cr1r h' ·, 1 J; ,n'nt\\ltt- tt> :-uti :t "1
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be t>etwet>n ;,··11.:1cst,mdm{.ind ·e,p!.Pl..lt ,m·. !'hen:- is. hl'" ' r.
in terms of a .:-ontr,tst
thing unsatisfa<.toff ,1bout set\· -:- tn·ngs t,p in th · \\,l\. f,,r ,b \\ m,h .lrh. l; -
indifferent w1ys. some mterrn:•· "- des, ripti,,ns ,, t''-i .nut ,r, ..tt k,1,t t'l 1 ,..........,.,
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S<X ",
,,t,sen,:'ti
ing a pos<b .e rea,on ,,mt tfh:\. s ,'-(\.urn. t.'X"' ,., t, '"" J.I\.'
wh
inherent! open-ended. '>lnle ;t 1s ,1h,,1,--,; 1.'r,c'Il tl' ,,t1'.e tl) t·s lter,1,1t.w c ,( i
s_1,:.
tion or to argue that the,ft1.'{'t has t>rt>n misdes, n ,1 [)ur' he im d1,tr.h·ter·,n,·.1•,· t-, ...te--.t
to l-nl'ck do,,-n a small numl>t?r ,f p<..'. ,ible e'\pl,Put•.<'lls and th.:-..., -.u t>,t •r.1t ,h "..l' th.:-
011I·possible one. but hh •rit11..'1\\ thn,u h thh m,,, E ,pl,m.ttll'n' .1;'- -t ..i, ,c11.-: • ,t.:
can tend to be in·l1rpl'rat intl) tht' des•rip!tl'D (>f th<:' t''1tit, l)r e,t·nt. rJth • J. th,
molecular structure o• dtl,mh. wt>1_,:ht tif ,t thenu\.,ll :ul,st.m.. t'n\•mes 1 ,l •1n ,k' i..t,
propert\ of it.
It is possible to l,m1bme the- JprR1,1, h.:- d ,cu ,t,1iP thb,.._ .1r•u in "'utu.)[I\ -r • ,,tl , J\:
In particular. s\mtx,li, interal'til,m n, <•. '1<::111.) ,l r l , , ,,,•i l,, v t't •................ ,
l
-.ti ;.1n
a cl ,,er attention to l,111 1.1 t' fthmm11:.'thlx1,,1.,,0 in t'11:. l,f l;,u• '-.c' •1..'1 'U 1 .t" i
"'-'
others ·s a major ex.mtple t'f this enndunent. Smu irl\ 1.3 1..t ttP,;,'r\ ·wn,,p l,f tl'>t. .i · <'ll, •
hor; •1ns' form a u,dul..:orn.Ytin? t,1 \\'inch's r.1dk.1l rd.lt ,,,,,, L 1' " .s<:'. tt P!l\ us,.....,,
complement interpretn-e appro,tdk JS d whl1le w1th m,,re trn,·tur.tl r"'-' .-r-.:.,:tt' -- ,1. 1,, 1
from *critic.tl theory. •,tn1cturatll'll tht'\.1n. *ret1<:''\I'"' 1.'l."11. l,•0 ,1r •rt·,1lts1n. lntt'r,1 t• ,r ·i•1
is ,·a'.ued bY mam· ,L-x·ial ,.:-knti ts a a ·,en,1tizin,>!·t ·::-.t ttw. t'\ f" 11' the\ ht,>' ·w •t-, lt t
need to be c,m1plementt.'l.i b\' m,'rt' -.tern l\.tst.'1.1 J.I1.1h ""' Th repn,lu, t ,, 1 l,t ,l t:-,. J.•J
gender s, rel.1tions in 1:n•rnia · lin 'U-,!k CL,mmunic,1t1L1n i,;. c'.e1m.1, r 1d.1' '+ t , m. · •
tion but structural maten.11 ! apJ W$tt>mk . - tJ., d, n..t"'h"' ,nll 11, · r it-,
nequ.tl1fa. :"1·.:.h ... '_,- \,::-..:, _ ,_-
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1 ::... ,,,'\.·:... · .. .., ;,.·, ;t,:. : .',,............
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forms of may be d nig,.., ec ;., in,;,,rc''!' \\\l\:. a, '-"L'm 1,,p· ,.,,, ·•• '-"I' 'r!J.t ,·t•
knowledge
iNTERPRETIVISM Arm INTERACTIONISft'I 129
what has come to be called 'feminist standpoint epistemology', as dt:veloped by writers

such as Dorothy *Smith and Sandra *Harding. Methodologically, these approaches entail
taking the standpoint of the excluded, not purely as a piece of political partisanship or a
gratuitous rejection of social-scientific value neutrality, but as the best way of
understanding a context of inequality and marginalization.
It is true that some interpretive theorists have denied a need for cooperation with other
methodologies in social science, just as some empiricists, functionalists, or rational
choice theorists have not always recognized a need to attend to hermeneutic issues.
Here we are back with familiar controversies over the place of sociology and other
humanistic disciplines 'between science and literature', as the German writer Wolf
Lepenies (1985) has put it. In some disciplines, such as history or anthropology, an
interpretive approach may be accepted more or less automatically. In others, such as
economics, it may seem exotic and eccentric. But what the debates have shown is that
interpretation is not just an option in social theory; it is the way in which we obtain access
to the social world. Hence precision of meaning has something like the same importance
in social theory as precision of measurement has in many areas of natural science. It
follows that researchers in the social sciences and humanities had better be explicit that
this is what they are engaged in.
How far are all social actors amateur sociologists? What is the relation between this 'lay
sociology' and more formal social theory?
2 What similarities and differences can be discerned between European and North American
traditions of interpretive and interactionist sociology?
3 What it does it mean to have 'empathy' for the experiences of another person or people7
4 What does it mean to say that reality is 'socially constructed' or 'linguistically

constructed'? What follows from these claims?
5 What does it mean to say that all knowledge is 'relative' to social contexts7 Is there a problem
of 'relativism' in the sociology of knowledge?
6 Must one be a member of the oppressed to be able to understand the oppressed? Is experience
of suffering a necessary precondition for explaining suffering sociologically?
7 Are there any elements of social reality for which interpretive and interactionist thinking fails to
account adequately?
■ FURTHER READING
For a broad overview of interpretive approaches to social enquiry, see William Outhwaite's article
'The History of Hermeneutics', in the International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioral Scienr es
(Elsevier, 2001) (www.iesbs.com). For a good overview of these and other issues in social theory, see
MarkJ. Smith's Social Science in Question (Sage, 1998). Some good collections of extracts by
influen tial interpretive writers are Fred Dallmayr and Thomas McCarthy (eds.), Understanding and
Social Inquiry (University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (ed.), 'fhe
Hermeneutics Reade,
130 IA'ILUAIVi OUTHWAlrE
(Blackwell, 1986), and Josef Bleicher (ed.), Contemporary Hermeneutics (Routledge, 1980). Studies
showing how interpretive perspectives can be combined with other approaches in social theory are
Anthony Giddens's New Rules of Sociological Method (Polity Press, 2nd edn. 1995),John Thompson's
Critical Hermeneutics (Cambridge University Press, 1981), William Outhwaite's New Philosophies of
Social Science (Macmillan, 1987), and Gerard Delanty's Social Science beyond Constructivism and
Realism (Open university Press, 1997). See also Zygmunt Bauman's Hermeneutics and Social Science
(Hutchinson, 1978). An illuminating account of hermeneutics in relation to literary theory is David
Hoy's The Critical Circle: Literature, History and Philosophical Hermeneutics (University of California
Press, 1978). Peter Winch's short book The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy
(Routledge, 2nd edn. 1990) can be recommended as an elegantly written classic. Gadamer's work is
best approached through Georgia Warnke's guide Gadamer (Polity Press, 1987) and Kurt Mueller
Vollmer's The Hermeneutics Reader (Blackwell, 1986). For a critique of the theme of 'hermeneutic di
alogue' in Gadamer, Habermas, and other German writers, see Austin Harrington's Hermeneutic
Dialogue and Social Science: A Critique of Gadamer and Habermas (Routledge, 2001). See also
Gary Schapiro and Alan Sica's edited Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects (University of
Massachusetts Press, 1984).
For a collection of writings in phenomenology and sociology, see Thomas Luckmann's edited
Phenomenology and Sociology: Selected Readings (Penguin, 1978). A good place to begin reading Schutz
is his essay 'Common Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human 'Action', in Alfred Schutz:
Collected Papers, vol. i (ed.) M. Natanson (Nijhoff, 1966). See also Nick Crossley's lntersubjcctivity: The
Fabric of Social Becoming (Sage, 1997), which deals with Schutz, Mead, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault.
For a comparison between Schutz and ethnomethodology, see Burke Thomason's Making Sense of
Reification: Alfred Schutz and Co11structionist Theory (Macmillan, 1982).
A good introduction to the Chicago School is Martin Bulmer's The Chicago School (University
of Chicago Press, 1984). A useful textbook in symbolic interactionism is Robert Prus's Symbolic
Interaction and Ethnographic Research (State University of New York Press, 1996). For an
informative account of symbolic int'eractionism, see HansJoas's article 'Symbolic Interactionism', in
Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner (eds.), Social Theory Today (Polity Press, 1987), as well
asJoas's longer study G. H. Mead (Polity Press, 1985). Two primary works in the area are Ken
Plummer's edited
collection of papers Symbolic lriteractionism (in two volumes) (Edward Elgar, 1991) and Herbert
Blumer's papers Symbolic lnteruclionism (Prentice-Hall, 1971).
Goffman is a very readable author. It is good to start with The Presentation of.Self in Everyday Life
(Penguin, 1971) or Asylums (Penguin, 1991). For secondary guides, see Tom Burns's Erving Goffman
(Routledge, 1992) and Peter Manning's Erving Goffman and Modem Sociology (Polity Press, 1992).
Garfinkel's use of technical jargon may seem off-putting at first, but his accounts of experiments
make lively and entertaining reading. A good secondary guide is John Heritage's Garfinkel and
Ethnomethodology (Polity, 1984). For a collection of readings, see Roy Turner's Ethnomethodology:
Selected Readings (Penguin, 1974).
The field of the sociology of knowledge is helpfully tackled through Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann's very clear and accessible The Social Construction of Reality (Penguin, 1966). Karl
Mannheim's work can be approached through David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr's Karl
Mannheim (Horwood, 1984) and Volker Meja and Nico Stehr's Knowledge and Politics: The Sociology
of Knowledge Dispute (Routledge, 1990). Try alsoJohn Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New
Sociology of Knowledge (Routledge, 1986), or more recently Doyle McCarthy's Knowledge as Culture:
The New Sociology of Knowledge (Routledge, 1996). In the field of social studies of science, see Steve
Fuller's Science (Open University Press, 1997) and Steve Woolgar's Science: The Very Idea (Horwood,
1988). See also Micheal Lynch's Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Etlrnomcthodology and Social
Studies of Science (Cambridge University Press, 1993). For the idea of social constructionism, try Ian
Parker (ed.), Social Constructionism, Discourse and Realism (Sage, 1998).
INTERPRETIVISM AND INTERACTIONISM 131
..C WEBSITES
Alfred Schutz at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schutzl Provides a discussion of Schutz and

his influence, with a bibliography.
The Chicago School at http://cepa.newschool.edu/hetlschoolslchicago.htm Gives a good overview
of the Chicago School with links to profiles of the main associates.
Erving Goffman at www2.fmg.uva.nlisociosite/topics/sociologists.html#GOFFMAN Provides
a biography, with discussions and excerpts from Goffman's texts.
The Sociology of Knowledge at www.trinity.edu/-mkearllknowledg.html Oisplays an overview,
with links to related theorists and texts.
Karl Mannheim at www.radford.edu/-junneverltheorylmannheim.htm Contains links to sites
on Mannheim.
6 Historical Social Theory
Dennis Smith
Historical thinking in social theory 133

Mid-century American historical sociology: the influence of functionalism 135
The Parsonian school: Neil Smelser and Shmuel Eisenstadt on
long-term social processes 135
Mid-century European historical sociology: the crisis in liberal democracy 138
T. H. Marshall on social citizenship 138
Joseph Schumpeter on capitalism, socialism, and democracy 139
Friedrich Hayek on the free market 140
Norbert Elias and the 'civilizing process' 141
The rise of nation-states: revolution and violence 144
Barrington Moore: modernity and the agrarian power base 145
Charles Tilly: capital and coercion in the rise of states 145
Theda Skocpol on social revolutions 146
Explaining the rise of the West 147
Perry Anderson: feudalism and the transition to capitalism in Europe 147
Immanuel Wallerstein's world systems theory 149
Conclusion 150

FURTHER READING 151
WEBSITES 152
Historical socialtheory, or 'comparative historical sociology', as it is also known, focuses

on long-term social processes and on differences and similarities between societies at
different times in history. It tries to make sense of what we know, or believe we know,
about the way many different types of society, past and present, have been held together
and at the same time divided by different forms of government, economic organization,
culture, religion, kinship, ethnicity, and class structure. When historical social theorists
look at different societies and different historical periods, they want to identify and
understand the underlying patterns in the way human beings act, think, and feel. They
want to link these
H ISTOR!CAL S OCI! : ,• :i ' 133
patterns to the overarching structures-such as the family, government, or the

economy that shape the way human beings enter into social relationships. They also want
to see how the behaviour of people within those relationships affects those
overarching structures, sometimes reinforcing them, sometimes weakening or
tramforming them. Above all, they want to know: why do societies change? Why do
societies differ? What are the social processes driving historical change and creating
similarities and differences?
This chapter looks at a number of key historical social theorists. We concentrate on the
work of five main groups of twentieth-century writers active from around the 1940s onwards.
The first group includes Neil *Smelser, Seymour Martin *Lipset, and Shmuel *Eisenstadt:
these writers are associated with *functionalism in historical sociology. The second
group includes T. H. *Marshall, Joseph *Schumpeter, and Friedrich *Hayek: these writers
address themes of capitalism, citizenship, and democracy. The third group includes
Reinhardt
*Bendix and Norbert *Elias, who address issues of power and conflict. The fourth group
includes Barrington *Moore, Theda *Skocpol, and Charles *Tilly: these writers are notable
for their writings on the role of the state, violence, and revolution. The last group includes
Immanuel *\Nallerstein, Michael *Mann, and Perry *Anderson, whose writings focus on
the dominance of the Western world.
We begin by discussing the emergence of historical thinking in social thought from the
eighteenth century to the present day, together with some of the central general questions
of historical social theory.
Historical thinking in social theory

Historians, sociologists, and social theorists all use ideas and empirical evidence referring
to two kinds of things. One is the way social structures change and social processes occur
over time: for example, how styles of warfare or the organization of the family develop
from one century to the next. The other is how specific instances or types of social
structure and social process are similar to, or different from, each other: for example, the
ways in which the organization of the military or relationships between husbands and
wives are similar and different when comparing, say, eighteenth-century China and
eighteenth-century Britain. Thus historical social theory has two basic dimensions: a
historical dimension and a comparative dimension.
In general, statements about how things change over time and how things differ from or
resemble each other are central to scientific and philosophical arguments, especially those
that depend on demonstrating that a supposed 'cause' precedes in time a supposed 'conse
quence' or that argue that when causal conditions vary across cases, so do consequences.
Here the interests and practices of historians and sociologists overlap to a great extent. It
is true that the professional self-understanding of many historians emphasizes the import
ance of recording the details of particular circumstances, taking an *ideographic approach,
while the professional identity of many sociologists places more emphasis upon the dis
covery or attribution of regularities across cases, taking a *nomothetic approach.
Historians tend to be interested in individual cases for their own sake, whereas historical
sociologists tend to be more interested in structural generalities or commonalities
among cases.
134 DENNIS SMITH
However, in their actual work, historians and sociologists regularly combine both
ideographic and nomothetic elements.
The major works of classical social theorists such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim are
deeply embedded in a historical understanding of society, oriented to explanations for
similarities and differences between processes of macro-social change in different his
torical epochs and in civilizations, in the East as well as the West. What today is
called 'historical sociology' only appears to be a sub-specialism of social theory
because of the rise to prominence in the mid-twentieth century of a search for
recurrent social univer sals discoverable at all times and places. This search was given
a large boost by Talcott
*Parsons's attempt to restructure sociology in terms of invariant propositions reminis
cent of economics. Today this kind of project is reflected in the influence of *rational
choice theory.
Historical social thought in the West began to take a recognizably modern form during
the eighteenth century. As the power of organized religion gradually weakened,
especially among the educated classes, scholars took up a task of providing 'rational' and
'scientific', explanations for the character and development of human societies,
explanations that aimed to replace the narratives provided by the Bible. Although many
scholars had fairly clear ideas about what kinds of social arrangement were 'good' and
which were 'bad,' his torical sociology borrowed an ideal taken from natural science. This
ideal was to examine what 'is' in as clear-sighted a way as possible, without allowing
perceptions to be distorted by value-laden assumptions about what 'ought to be'.
Thinkers such as David *Hume, Adam *Smith, Adam *Ferguson, *Montesquieu,
and Alexis de *Tocqueville were linked by their commitment to a shared ideal. They
sought to examine comparative data about social arrangements in the past and present
in order to establish generalizationsabout human nature, social order, and change. The
object of mak ing these generalizations was to give men and women knowledge relevant
to their attempts to make themselves and their societies better, within the discoverable
limits of possibility. The agendas of historical social thinkers in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries were dominated by themes such as:
• the origins of social solidarity and conflict;
• the nature of social hierarchy and interdependence, as illustrated, for example, by
slavery and the market;
• the dynamics of social change; for example, the origin and nature of war
and revolution;
• the nature of empires and civilizations and the causes of their rise and fall;
• the rise of rational bureaucracies, especially the state, and the different forms taken
by the state, such as dictatorship and democracy;
• the development and spread of capitalism;
• the relationship between the West and the rest of the world.
The writings of historical social thinkers from Adam Ferguson in the late eighteenth
century to Weber and Durkheim in the early twentieth century constitute a first 'long
HISTORICAL SOCIAL THEORY 135
wave' of historical sociology. This wave came to a halt in the period between the two
world wars of the twentieth century. It can be said that a consensus broke apart as
political and social life in the West in this period came to be dominated by a bitter
contest between three ideologies that were far more concerned with the future than with
understanding the past. The three ideologies were communism, under the leadership of the
Soviet Union, fascism, led by Hitler's Third Reich, and capitalist democracy, led by the
Western European colonial powers of Britain and France as well as the USA. Over half a
century later, we can observe that it was this third system of capitalist liberal democracy,
spearheaded by the USA and Western Europe, which won the long war of attrition-the
Cold War-against the Soviet Union, after the earlier defeat of fascism.
The Allied victory in 1945 generated an intellectual climate in which historical social
thinking could flourish once more. Yet by this time, the agendas of social science were
strongly influenced by the determination of the USA and the Western powers to show
that capitalism and democracy could be combined to generate social and political arrange
ments superior to available alternatives. Capitalism and democracy thus climbed to the
top of the agenda in the second long wave of historical sociology that began in the late
1940s. It is to this body of work that we now turn.
Mid-century American historical sociology:

the influence of functionalism
In this section we look at six writers who rose to prominence in the first decades after
the Second World War. They are Neil Smelser, Seymour Martin Upset, S. N. Eisenstadt,
T. H. Marshall,Joseph Schumpeter, and F. A. Hayek. What links them is their belief that
the question of how societies should be organized had been settled definitively by the
defeat of the Nazis and the rise to global power of the United States. In their view,
modern societies would he capitalist and they would be democracies. Two questions
remained to be worked out: how would societies that were not already capitalist
democracies move in this direc tion? How were capitalism as an economic system and
democracy as a political system to be combined and made to function together?
The Parsonian school:Neil Smelser and Shmuel Eisenstadt

on long-term social processes
As we saw in Chapter 4 of this book, Talcott Parsons's approach to historical change was
deeply influential in American sociology in the early post-war years. *Structural function
alism was sometimes accused of being 'static' and unable to cope with social change. It is
true that Parsons himself declared that 'a general theory of the processes of change of
social systems is not possible in the present state of knowledge' (Parsons 1951: 586). But
Parsons did at least think that 'the process of rationalization', as described by Max Weber,
136 DENNIS 5MiTH
was 'a general directional factor in the change of social systems' (Parsons 1951: 499). He
also argued that change was often accompanied by 'strains' due to the resistance of vested
interests and the fact that society's established expectations were challenged and disrupted
(Parsons 1951: 513).
Neil *Smelser, a student of Parsons, developed the Parsonian idea that the key to
understanding social change was structural *differentiation, meaning an increase in
the number of subsystems in a society and a shift to a higher degree of complexity in
the relationships between these subsystems. Smelser sought to inject a more explicit
historical dimension into the Parsonian approach in ways that echoed some of the
emphases of the conflict theorists on change and discontinuity, but without the
conflict theorists' general hostility to Parsons's functionalist thinking (see Chapter 4 of
this book, pp. 100-1). Smelser applied this approach in his book Social Change in the
Industrial Revolution (1959). His subject was the Lancashire cotton industry between
1770 and 1840, the time of the English Industrial Revolution. Smelser argued that
structural differentiation typically happened as a result of two conditions. First, key
social agents became dissatisfied with what Parsons called the 'goal-achievements' of
the social system, i.e. its capacity to deliver desired resources and commodities.
Secondly, they saw the 'prospect of facilities ... tocorrect this imbalance', i.e. the
chance to change social arrangements. Subsequently, social control mechanisms
through the family, religion, and the police ensured that disturbances were handled in
such a way that resources such as money and human energy were mobilized. As a result,
innovations were brought about that satisfied societal demands, and the new norms of
action became routinized.
Smelser analysed several empirical examples of structural differentiation. Looking at the
textile industry (Smelser 1959: 69-128), he argued that the spread of Methodism in the
manufacturing districts strengthened values legitimizing manufacturers' complaints
about bottlenecks in the existing industrial structure. Disturbances caused by industrial
difficulties were handled and channelled through the lawcourts. Tolerance for new ideas
was shown by the Patent Office, and there were innovations in the machinery of industrial
production. Smelser also considered other aspects of social change in the textile districts,
especially in family structures.
Structural-functionalist theory was able, Smelser wrote, 'to relate a multitude of
complex social phenomena to a single set of analytical propositions without varying the
logic of the propositions themselves' (1959: 384). One serious problem with Smelser's
work, however, was that it did not test the assumptions of his theory against competing
theories, other than that of structural functionalism. Instead of 'telling it like it is',
according to a range of diverse empirical data, Smelser tended to present his subject 'like it
had to be', according to a pre-established model.
In a similar manner to Smelser, the Israeli historical sociologist Shmuel *Eisenstadt
examined the development of specialized political institutions and movements that
resisted traditional values and practices. In his book The Political Systems of Empires
(1963), Eisenstadt investigated large pre-industrial societies, especially what he called
'historical bureaucratic empires', including ancient Egypt, China, Rome, Byzantium,
and the major European states during the period of *absolutist rule. He sought to
define the conditions under which specialized political systems developed in these
societies
HISTORIC.Al SOCIAL THi:ORY 137
and how they were perpetuated, avoiding collap,e or being owrthrown. He argued that
such political systems developed when rulers began to follow their own plans, rather
than accepting traditional values and goals. Other factors included new types of social
actors created by the growth of towns, by new religious movements, and by the spread of
the market. These 'free-floating resources' became 'a reservoir of generalized power'
(1963: 27).
The ruler and the bureaucracy were part of a three-way structure of conflict and
com promise in these empires. Powerful traditional groups such as landowners
competed with new urban, commercial, and religious interests, and both had a tense
relationship with the central government. Rulers were often committed to traditional
values at the same time as pursuing their own goals. On the other hand, the new social
interests resisted attempts by the ruler and bureaucracy to restrict their independence
and to tax them heavily. \1eanwhile, government bureaucrats were liable to become
corrupt, to line their own pockets, and build up their own power. These conflicts
created constant pres sure for change: sometimes marginal or 'accommodable',
sometimes total, bringing about a fundamental alteration of ,ociety and government.
One outcome of total challge was the modern state, the result of an increase in
structural differentiation. In modern states, government and society are very closely
interwoven. Such states may be either de,potic and *totalitarian or more democratic,
allowing different groups to participate in the political process.
The strength of Eisenstadt's work is his analysis of structural tensions in societies that
in various ways stand in between what we like to call 'tradition' and 'modernity'. Like
Smelser, Eisenstadt sees a historical pattern of stability and disruption, followed by
re,tmed ,tability. But where Smeher ,tresse, tendencies to restored stability, Eisenstadt
<,tre,,e, recurrent di,ruption. And unlike Smelser, Eisenstadt sees these conflicts as being
'>(JCiety-wide, rather than contained within 'subsystems' such as the family. Where
Smelser was concerned with specialized institutions and changes over decades, Eisenstadt
examined changes in whole societies and over centuries. In The Political Systems of
fmpires he end'> with the suggestion that historical bureaucratic empires stand at the
c.rossmad'> between modern dictatorship, and modern democracies. That thought con
nect, [i<,emtadt\ work to the writing, of another sociologist who applied structural
functionalist ideas to government and politics. This is the US writer Seymour Martin
Upset, whose work is discussed in Box 15.
In his later work, Eisenstadt ceased to write in a structural-functionalist mode. In the
J9i:>O, he completed a wide-ranging comparative ,tudy of ancient and modern civiliza
tirm, influenced by Weber and by the ideas of the German philosopher Karl *Jaspers
rnncerning 'axial age civilizations'. In hi, la,t work, Eisenstadt introduced the import
ant theme of 'multiple modernitie'>', as an alternative to Western-centred conceptions
of mrJdernity wch a, the rather US-centred Parsonian theory of modernization which
dominated in the 1950s. The theme of multiple modernities represents a self
consciously globalized understanding of sociology which can be contrasted to
7
[urocentric developmentali',t thought in nineteenth-century evolutionary theory,
,uch as that of Augmte *Comte and Herbert *Spencer (as discussed in Chapter 1 of this
book, pp. 32-3).
138 DENNIS SMITH
BOX 15. SEYMOUR MARTIN UPSET ON POLITICAL STABILITY AND INSTABILITY
In Political Man (1960), the American sociologist Seymour Martin *Lipset set out to determine historical
preconditions for democracy. He classified societies according to whether they were 'stable democra
cies' or 'unstable democracies or dictatorships'. He tabulated various key indices such as urbanization,
education, industrialization, and wealth. These enabled him to demonstrate that those societies with
the highest scores were 'stable democracies' (see Upset 1960: 31-8). In The First New Nation
(Lipset 1963), Upset applied this argument to the American case, discussing it from comparative and
historical perspectives. The book was written at a time when the British, French, and other
European empires were breaking up and American politicians were concerned that the ex-colonies in
Africa and elsewhere might acquire communist-influenced governments.
Lipset's analysis placed emphasis on political institutions together with the strategies adopted
by elites and especially values and national character. In his analysis, American history had produced a
spe cific set of 'structured predispositions' for 'handling strains generated by social change' (Lipset 1963:
207). They included a stress on achievement and belief in equality. The tension between these two
ideals was
kept in check by a strong sense of nationhood. This was reinforced by a stable two-party system. This
argument was presented cautiously, as a possible hypothesis. However, it was clearly playing to
an American audience that was highly sympathetic to its main proposition. This was, to put It crudely,
that America would remain strong as long as its citizens held fast to the principles of the
Declaration of Independence. Like Neil Smelser, Lipset assumed that within industrial societies,
especially if and when they became more like the United States, there was a natural tendency for the
social system to solve all problems that it was set. Mainly, these problems turned out to be technical
matters that needed prag matic adjustments to fix them. This approach led to partial blindness with
respect to endemic American problems such as the persistent discrimination against African-
Americans. More recently Lipset revisited this analysis in his book American Exceptionalism: A
Double-Edged Sword (1996).
Mid-century European historical sociology:

the crisis in liberal democracy
On the other side of the Atlantic, the British sociologist T. H. *Marshall agreed with
Parsons, Smelser, and Upset that capitalist democracy was here to stay and would continue
as the dominant type of society. However, he did not think that pragmatic adjustments
were the only challenge. On the contrary, serious matters of fundamental principle
remained unre solved. A similar view was taken, with some differences of emphasis, by
two central European emigre writers: Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek. Marshall's,
Schumpeter's, and Hayek's contributions are discussed here in tum.
T. H. Marshall on social citizenship

Marshall's approach was both historical and structural. In his influential essay 'Citizenship
and Social Class', Marshall (1949) described a long-run historical tendency for individuals
in Western societies to achieve full membership of their national community and to
acquire the same citizenship rights and duties as others, rich or poor. His main focus
was
139
the British case where the rise of citizenship, with its equalizing tendency, had coincided
with the rise of capitalism, which tended to produce inequality. In Britain, civil rights,
including the right to own property, to make contracts, and to speak freely, advanced
strongly in the eighteenth century. Political rights, especially the right to vote, expanded
in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, great progress was made with respect
to social rights such as the right to welfare, health care, and education.
Marshall's problem, however, concerned the question of how the polarizing effects of
the market were to be reconciled with the equalizing effects of citizenship. How could
one tell when there was 'too much' inequality in the market place? To summarize the
central problem: the rights and obligations created by contracts in the markets, including
the right to get rich and make others work for low wages, were both dependent on
principles of citizenship-including especially the right to protection for property-and
challenged by citizenship principles, including especially social rights which implemented
ideals of social justice and fairness. The tension between these two sets of principles was
felt sharply in the education system, since by acquiring qualifications at school and in
university, school-leavers and graduates felt a 'right' to a job of a certain income and
status-and often the market denied their expectations.
Joseph Schumpeter on capitalism, socialism, and democracy

In his classic book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Schumpeter 1941), Joseph
*Schumpeter argued that capitalism had been very successful as a system for generating
and distributing social goods but was likely to become increasingly socialistic in its politi
cal organization. Capitalism would be undermined by its very success. This success could
be measured in terms of technological innovation and 'avalanches of consumer goods'
(Schumpeter 1941: 68). It was due to two things. First, capitalism penalized failure and
rewarded success. Secondly, it was driven by repeated examples of 'creative destruction' in
the course of which new techniques, products, materials, and organizational methods
destroyed old institutions and practices and put new ones in place (Schumpeter 1941: 83).
According to Schumpeter, this unsteady dynamism of the capitalist economy was
increasingly the work of big business. Monopoly and oligopoly gave innovators
protection, keeping rivals out of the market place. The organizations and work practices
created by the bourgeoisie were systematic, rationalistic, and individualistic. Innovation
became increas ingly bureaucratized in the work of specialist teams. This array of
characteristics enabled capitalism to generate great wealth and spread it through society.
However, it also under mined the middle classes. In Schumpeter's narrative, the individual
entrepreneur who had provided the dynamism and vision of the middle classes was
becoming redundant as research teams took over. The entrepreneur's sense of personal
ownership of the business declined as large corporations became limited companies
with shareholders. Bourgeois
family life weakened as opportunities to found family business dynasties diminished.
Schumpeter also considered the part played by intellectuals and enlightenment rational
ism in undermining the prestige of the aristocracy. While the bourgeoisie was busy
making money, the aristocracy had run government and provided the former 'with political
protec tion. But now this balance was being eroded. The overall result was a drift towards
socialism, defined as a system where control over production falls out of the hands of
families and
140 !JENrns SMITH
pri,ate inn'stors and intci the hands ut J cL'ntr,11 pulilic ,1utl1L1ritY. S,:humpc'h'r l,l,uld St'<:'
certain ad,antages in this. Sl1c1et\· \\·l1uld Ill1t h,1,·e tc1 Sllf'PL'ft ,in 1dk lt'bure d.iss. \\·,1stetul
n1mpctition ,n1uld lw abt1lishe,I. Planning 11\1uld ,11·(,1d tht' need t,1 m,mir1uL1te intt'fc'St
rates. Irr:1ti,mal n1nt1icts bet,wen the publi,· ,md pri,,1tl' sphere,s,·l1uld l1t' kit l1t'hind.
Sncia.lism might eYen be democratic as lL1ng ,1s pl1lit1cuns Wt're rwt ,·L1rrupt. it l1urt',1ucr,1ctt'S
"ere strong and efficient, and if go,ernment rt'siskd t lw tt'mputil1n tl1tn· tl, run c'\.t'n-t h in_,::.
\\"hen Schumpeter surYeYed ll1ng-run tendt'rKies in tht' dt·,·elL 1['l11c'nt ,1t ,·.1r1iUlism ,11hi
democracy, he concluded that it was difficult to achiew advances in knowledge and
rationalitY witlwut the danger t1f a stifling ,,f indi, idu,JI CTL',1ti,·it,· in the l1usiness w,,rld
and elsewhere. A rather similar view was taken bv Friedrich *Hawk.
Friedrich Hayek on the free market

.\n emigre from .--\ustna. Friedrich HaYek ,Jgreed ,,·ith Sdn1m11eter's cc'ntr.11 pr,,p,1siti,1n th.It
capitalist demncracies \\·t're mti\ing in the directiL'll L'i SL1ci,1l!sm. Hl1,w1·er. hi c,1nclusi,11b
differed. In The Ro,1tl to Sert;/olll lHawk l'-l..t-1,1. K1wk pr,1isc d the' L1hSL'Z--t,1ire iree-nurkt't
0
ethos of British capitalism in the nineteenth ,·enturY. ln his ,·ie,,. 1t l1rL1u,s::ht pr,1sperit\·,m,i
po\\-er to British socit'ty, a flrnn'ring L1f l'ntt'rprhe ,md science.. md h1_,::h e:,,.p,'ct,lt1L1ns .,h,ut
the future. This era then came to an end with the great world recession of the 1930s, which
Ha,·ek recognized as gi,·ing Sl1cialbm its d1,mce. B1· s(,ci,1lism. !Lnt'k mc',lllt l1urt',w,·r,1t1,·
planning in a similar sense to Schumpeter's use t1f the' tl'rm. But in H,l\"c'k's ,ic'\1·. t lw 11l.mnc'rs
belieYed mistakenly. that theY could create rules ,ind institutiL)[lS th,it "·,1uld Ukc' l1,·er
.
fr,,m the market, or at least interfere with it on a large scale, producing wealth, inwsting
this
\\'ealth rational!\·, and distributing it in ,1 just ,1·aY. ln H,1n'k·s d:,Jpwsi,. such wh,1k,,1Ie s,1d,,l
engineering ,vas a disaster. Socialistic planning could not work because there was no way to
determine correct principles of social justice-planners were always bound to disagn:>e
furthermore, if the m;uket ,ras distorted L1f ,lbL,lished. peL1ple \1,,uld Ile' l,1ng,'r re,·ei, e th,'
.JC· curate and unbiased J..:.no1rledge abL1ut supply ,md dem,md th,lt \\·,1s prL'Yi,ied l1Y tht'
rrice sys. tern. It was far better to let indi\iduals make their own economic and other decisions
Hithout being commanded by a central authority liable to make mistakes.
In the early 19-l0s, when Hayek wrote this book, it seemed likely that Britain would soon
elect a Labour gl1,·ernment. ,Jdl1pt ,rhuks,11l' pLmning. ,md lc,st' the ,llh ,mu,:e 1t h.1,i H:
herited from its nineteenth-centun- industrial glL1n·. In fact. ,1ne l,t the likt'l,· ,,utCl'Il1l'S ,,t
socialist planning, HaYek bt'lieYed. 1\·,1s resentment ,mwng the' pett, b,1urgeL'lSlt' .m,i serY
ice classes, ll'ading tl, incre:1sed suppL1rt for fascist pL1litic,il n1c1,·emt'llts. He eYen te.Ht'd th,lt
Britain might go the way of Germany in the 1930s.
Hayek became fashionable among economists and politicians in the 1980s on both sides
of the .\tlantlc \\·hen his argument,, \\'1:re 111\ Liked t,1 justif, the dism,mtlm_,:: ,,t num i,JC,'t
()f public o\\·1wrship. gi,ing a freer Jund tL1 big business. He' \\·,Js t',HtlcuL1rlY ,lP['Lluded
t,y the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in Britain and the USA.
An influential counter-blast to Hayek came from the LS economist J K *Galbraith.
lialbraith h:1d been influenced b, Schumpeter"s general ,1ppr,1,Kh ..1greeing th,1t h_,::h1 1-
ness had bt'ct1me dL,minant within capitalism. In his Dl L,k 1:_-,,,1l1mi,, ,111,/ th, fz1hk
f,1,r,,_-,· lllJ73), he emisaged the 1-wssibilit, lit ,1 thriYin_,:: small bminess se,·h r run h
indi,1chul
entrt'preneurs \\·lw ,,·t1uld pw,•ide 1wn-stand:Hdized prl1ducts .ind ser,1ces 111 .1 cre.1tiYt'
HISTORICAL SOCIAL TllEOR'i 141
way. But Galbraith strongly disagreed with Hayek, and with Haye k's close follower,
Milton Friedman. In his books The Affluent Society (1958) and The New Industrial State
(1967), Galbraith pictured consumers in a Hayekian world of private affluence and public
squalor, imagining them going out for the day to 'picnic on exquisitely packaged
food from a portable icebox by a polluted stream' and then going on to camp in 'a park
which is a menace to public health and morals ... on an air mattress, beneath a nylon tent,
amid the stench of decaying refuse' (1958: 204). In other words, making the planners
redundant meant making life in modern industrial society unbearable for most people.
The decades of the 1960s and 1970s were a watershed for much of the intellectual self
understanding of Western societies. While African-Americans protested at their lack of civil
rights and the women's movement gathered strength, the United States suffered
humiliation in Vietnam. The British empire in Africa crumbled, while oil producers in the
Middle East asserted their independence. The assumptions and structures on which post-
war capitalist democracy had been based were placed under threat. Historical
sociologists responded by giving more prominence in their analyses to questions of
power, class, and conflict, and they became more aware of the global context in which
historical processes occurred. Two writers who stand at a point of transition between the
earlier and later phases are the German emigre sociologists Reinhard *Bendix and Norbert
*Elias. Bendix and Elias had a sense that there was a strong historical tide running in the
direction of capitalism and democracy, but they were very sensitive to counter-currents to
this trend and to the central significance of power and conflict. Bendix's work is discussed
in Box 16. Elias's work is discussed in the following section.
Norbert Elias and the 'civilizing process'
Like Reinhard Bendix, Norbert *Elias came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s,
although he had been writing as early as the 1930s. Elias was keen on finding explanations
for social processes not simply from a detached interest but from a deep involvement in
the fate of humankind. Having lost his parenb and other Jewish relatives to Auschwitz,
Elias kept up a faith in wanting to improve humanity's capacity to shape the course of
social processes, or at least to avert their worst consequences.
Elias offers a powerful and influential vision of how human beings and societies inter
connect and develop. At the centre of this vision are at least seven key ideas:
• The human capacity to exercise agency, to wield power, and to experience a sense
of identity, self, and belonging is the result of being embedded in human social
relationships. In this sense, power and identity are fundamentally relational.
• Social life takes place in complex networks of interdependence amongst people, groups,
and institutions. Elias's term for these networks of interdependence is figurations.
Figurations include patterns of kinship, class relationships, or structures of government.
• Figurations undergo change over time as a result of long-term, and largely unplanned,
social processes which have a discoverable pattern or structure. The concept of 'process'
is thus key to sociological analysis.
142 N ' N l'i SM 1TH
ing its mark. Bendix saw this complexity as an important resource for historical sociologists, whose task
was to investigate a society's ideologies in association with its key social structures in order to find
clues about how problems were managed in the past.
Comparison between societies showed that similar problems could be solved in different ways; it
reduced the perception that the solutions adopted in one single society, such as the USA, were the
necessary and inevitable ones. This approach can be seen in Bendix's Nation-Building and
Citizenship (Bendix 1964; see also Bendix 1956, 1984). Here Bendix confronted at least indirectly the
structural functionalism of Parsons, Eisenstadt, and Upset, whose premises he did not accept. Bendix
retrieved the moral concerns that Eisenstadt had pushed aside in the name of scientific objectivity. At
the same time, he believed that Upset had neglected the historical dimension, notably by assuming that
other nations in the twentieth century could follow a road towards independence of the kind taken by
the United States in the late eighteenth century under very different circumstances.
Bendix paid more attention than Upset to the shape and dynamics of historical processes, especially
the development of the central relationships between state and citizens in the course of nation-
build ing. In Nation-Building and Citizenship, he pursued this strategy in the cases of Western Europe,
Russia, Japan, and India. In the case of Western Europe, he traced the rise of patrimonial social
order domin ated by ,-oyal power, examining the way powerful monarchies of the early modern
period defeated local resistance and established absolutist regimes. He investigated the rise of
processes of bureaucra tization and democratization in the nineteenth century, marked by the demands
of mass popular move ments to become part of the political process through extensions of voting
rights, as well as the
• Figurations and processes have powerful effects on the psychological make-up or

*'habitus' of individuals and groups, especially on their capacity to exercise control
over themselves, other people, and the natural world, such as through science. In this
regard, there is such a thing as 'national habitus' or 'national character', which
-RICI.L SOCML ,!HOii.V 143
develops over centuries through complex interactions between elite groups and the
whole of the society.
• One of the challenges of the human sciences is to foster people's capacity to
exercise reasonable (non-repressive) control over themselves, by supplying
knowledge about historical social processes and figurations that shape people's
social existence.
• European social development in the past thousand years hasbeen characterized by a
long-run tendency-frequently interrupted and reversed-towards the development of
increasingly dense and complex figurations in which relatively stable power
monopolies appear and entrench high levels of self-control. These include the royal
courts and central state bureaucracies.
• The processes by which men and women acquire increasing self-control and
interdependence in relation to increasingly stable power monopolies make up an
overall *civilizing process. Civilizing processes can be detected across the course
of history in diverse social-cultural contexts. But interruptions and reversals may
also occur, leading to the onset of decivilizingtendencies that move toward
decreasing control and increasing instability.
Elias sees sociology as a science of human figurations and long-term social processes.
Its aim is to produce knowledge capable of eroding the fears and illusions endemic to
relations between individuals, groups, and nations. It should be 'a destroyer of myths' (Elias
1970: SO). Elias's sociology is deeply rooted in his intuitive sense for the character and
subtle 4ualities of social relations. He has a strong feeling for interconnectedness and
growth, for processes of integration and expansion, and for the intertwining processes
of disarticulation and fragmentation that always accompany them. At the same time,
Elias can empathize with those who stand apart, feel sequestered, or look at life
through a glass screen. He under stands the appeal of an apparently well-defended and
protected existence, such as in a royal court, in a bourgeois household, in a university
college or an academic department, or within the self.
Elias's sociological understanding of the world revolves around a central tension: between
merging and separation, between involvement and detachment, between inhibition and
expression, between being 'part of' and being 'apart from'. Both these aspects of his vision
come through in his most important work, The Civilizing Process, first published in 1939. By
the 'civilizing process' Elias means a long-term development, with some reversals, charac
terized by increasing pacification and self-control. Elias draws his evidence from Europe
be tween the Middle Ages and the early twentieth century. Through the civilizing
process, human beings are drawn into ever-denser relations of mutual interdependence so
that their fates become intertwined. Individualsgradually acquire a civilized 'habitus', or
psychologi cal make-up, which is expressed in inhibition, self-awareness, detachment, and
a calculat ing manner. Civilized people keep their emotions under control. Such an
orientation to civility, 'good manners', 'polish', 'discretion', and the like would not have
been conceivable in the less regulated societies of early medieval Europe when aggression
and fear primed people to engage in battle or flight at a moment's notice. External controls
and self-control were both intermittent and unstable before the later Middle Ages.
144 PENNIS SMITH
ln contrast, Elias describes how, in the early modern period, more stable and long-
lasting forms of central power monopoly gradually came into being, especially through the
for mation of the royal courts. As kings pacified their territories, warlords were forced to
attend court, to disavow violence, and to learn the skills of etiquette and political
manipulation. It was the only way for the nobility to survive and advance. As pacification
encouraged trade and industry, and as interdependence increased, the civilized habitus
spread from the court to the counting house, and from the upper classes to the people at
large. Elias traces these processes at the level of personal behaviour by showing how
manners grew more pre cise and delicate over the centuries. Among many other detaUs,
he investigates the rise of table manners, including the proscription of belching and farting
and other bodily indis cretions. This analysis is also developed in his book The Court Society
(1969), a specific study of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century absolute monarchy in
France and its influence on French cultural manners and mores.
ln addition to his master concept of the civilizing process, Elias argues that a typical and
recurring pattern in social history is tension between establislzmmts,able to define and defend
standards of civilized behaviour, and outsiders, who arc stigmatized for failing to meet those
standards. Another key distinction is between an attitude of detachment, which allows one to
observe and interpret events without being swayed by emotional responses, and an attitude of
involvement, which both intensifies and distorts perception in the sense that events are felt
and interpreted in an emotional way. A final concept Elias developed later in his career, espe
cially in his last major study The Germans (1989), was that of 'decivilizing processes'. These
entail a reversal of previous tendencies towards reasonable political centralization and pacifi
cation. In a society undergoing a decivilizing process, such as Germany under the rise of
Hitler, violence increases as society fragments into warring groups acting with greatly reduced
restraint. The desperate centralization of the Nazi state was a reaction to the breakdown of
civil society in Germany.
One weakness of Elias's work is the other side of its strength. This is the very great,
per haps excessive, attention he pays to the aristocracy and court society acting as social
pace makers, as a vanguard for the civilizing process. Elias tends to downplay other
causes of self-restraint in social change. One factor he should have paid more attention to
in the emergence of distinctly controlled rationalized social conduct is the factor of
religion, which Max Weber had examined in the case of the Protestant ethic. But together
with Bendix, Elias made an important hreak with the structural-functionalist tradition,
opening the way for a new phase in the development of historical social theory. The new
phase came to place much more emphasis on power, coercion, and conflict, especially in
relation to the state and revolution. It is to this new phase that we now turn.
The rise of nation-states:revolution and violence
By the 1970s there was a strong upsurge of historical social theory dealing with the topics
of violence and revolution, exploitation and class, the rise of nation-states, and the rise of
the West as a whole. These themes preoccupied writers such as Barrington Moore, Theda
Skocpol, Charles Tilly, Perry Anderson, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Michael Mann. In the
following section we look first at the work of Moore, Tilly, and Skocpol.
Barrington Moore: modernity and the agrarian power base

In his book The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), the US sociologist
Barrington *Moore presents the startling thesis that modern political systems have been
fundamentally shaped by peasants and aristocrats in pre-industrial societies (see also
Moore 1978). These political systems-democracy, fascism, and communism-differ from
each other in the extent to which the central state penetrates the interests of the agents it
seeks to serve. Moore argues that the functioning of the central state is deeply affected by
the extension of the market into local communities in agrarian societies, especially the
way in which agriculture comes to be commercialized. For example, in Prussia, serf
labour was exploited to produce cash crops on large estates. In France, peasants were
entrepreneurial but had to share their profits with aristocratic landlords demanding *feudal
dues. In England, sheep farmers forced peasants off the land. These different strategies
went hand in hand with different patterns of alliance and conflict between aristocracy,
bourgeoisie, and the state. In England, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie acting together
kept the Crown in check. In France, Crown and nobility stuck close together, producing
*absolutism. In Japan and Germany, similar alliances kept the bourgeoisie politically
weak, though it grew stronger economically. By contrast, in Russia and China, the
bourgeoisie was weak eco nomically as well as politically, and so the authoritarian
alliance between ruler and aristoc racy was unable to build up its strength by taxing rich
traders. As a result, the bourgeoisie could not resist peasant revolutions when they came.
Moore explains major transforming events such as revolutions and civil wars in terms of
particular inter-group conflicts, alliances, and changes in the integration and disintegra
tion of social groups. A key variable is the type and degree of solidarity in the rural work
force. In England, the peasantry was thrown off the land and thus slowly destroyed. In
India, the caste system divided local rural society. In Japan, inter-class solidarity remained
strong. [n Germany, repressive labour control kept the peasantry weak and divided. In
general, democracy was the outcome when the peasantry was gradually eliminated as a
political force and the bourgeoisie became dominant. This was the case in Britain, France,
and the USA. Fascism, on the other hand, was aided by a history of agrarian repression,
while communism flowed from peasant revolutions, which in Russia and China were
followed by repressive action against the peasants themselves.
Moore makes convincing use of the comparative method to build upa set of broad-
ranging causal explanations. However, this strength is rather undermined by some
weaknesses. One weakness is his neglect of inter-societal relation in the sense of global
interaction. Another is his rather uncritical acceptance of capitalist-democraticideology. In
particular, his treatment of nineteenth-century English history comes too close to
accepting at face value the benign myth of steadily expanding citizenship rights (also
largely accepted by Marsha Ii).
Charles Tilly: capital and coercion in the rise of states

Charles *Tilly, one of Moore's best-known students, has built his reputation in three areas:
as a theorist of historical sociology, as an analyst of social movements, social protest, and
con tentious behaviour, and as the author of broad overviews of European history, most
notably his Coercion, Capital and European States AD 900-1990 (1990), which is considered
here (see also Tilly 1995).
146 DEIJNIS SMITH
Tilly shows how the demands of constant war-making led rulers to extract resources
from unwilling populations. Constant struggles over how much tribute should be paid to
the state and what the state might do in return shaped the central organizational structures
of the European national societies. A key factor was the extent to which a territory was
either coercion-intensive, that is, able to support strong government pressure over the
population, or capital-intensive, that is, economically productive and prosperous. Capital-
intensive territ ories such as Italy and Holland tended to be highly urban, with a thriving
merchant class. Coercion-intensive territories such as Prussia and much of Habsburg Eastern
Europe tended to be much more rural and dependent on repressive forms of agriculture,
sometimes based on serfdom. Tilly shows how where capital was plentiful, systems of
fragmented sovereignty developed. Government remained relatively decentralized and
sometimes took the form of city-states. Where conditions favoured coercion, large
tribute-based empires tended to develop. By the sixteenth century, nation-states had an
advantage in times of war because they could support large standing armies drawn from
the countryside, while at the same time having the advantage of being able to tax their
cities. The most successful nation-states, such as France and Britain, combined coercion and
capital in what Tilly calls 'capitalized coercion'. Tilly points out that the success of the
nation-state as a form of government only seems inevitable to us in retrospect. As late as
1650, empires such as the Habsburg Empire and fed erations of city-states such as the
Dutch Republic maintained a notable grip on territorial power in Europe. But Tilly shows
how nation-states eventually prevailed, drawing on his other research on contentious
behaviour and social protest. He shows how several European states gradually yielded a
variety of rights to their populations and accepted a widening
variety of tasks. One problem not explored at length by Tilly, however, is the question of the
extent to which hisgeneralizationsapply outside Europe, such as in the US/\ or Asia. We may
ask whether there is something distinctive about nation-state formation in Europe, perhaps
asa result of the specific pattern of interstate competition between Britain, France, Spain,
the Dutch, and so on. How would the USA fit into Tilly's model? Perhaps it would be best
described in terms of 'fragmented sovereignty' along the 'capital-coercive path'.
Theda Skocpol onsocial revolutions

Theda *Skocpol is also a student of Barrington Moore. In her book Slates C1nd Social Revolutions
(Skocpol 1979), Skocpol adopts what she calls a 'non-voluntarist, structural perspective'
on the origins of revolutions (1979: 14). She argues that revolutions are not simply made
by conspirators but rather emerge as the unintended outcome of multiple conflicts shaped
by complex socio-economic and international conditions. She attaches great importance
to the inter-societal and world-historical contexts in which social revolutions occur.
Modern social revolutions tend to occur in societies located 'in disadvantageous positions
within inkrnational arenas' (1979: 23). A key factor is the state, which is more than simply
an arena in which other interests struggle with one another. Skocpol accepts that the state
has its own interests, which it can enforce by wielding coercive power and collecting
taxes.
By 'social revolutions' Skocpol means 'rapid, basic transformations of a society's state
and class structures, accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from
below' (1979: 33). She concentrates on three cases: the French Revolution of 1789, the
Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Chinese Revolution of 1949, completed after a long
civil war. In all three cases, she shows how rulers and aristocracies jointly ran the old
regimes. These agencies shared, and squabbled over, the surplus gained from tax and rent.
In all three cases, the old regime faced a sudden challenge from foreign states with greater
economic and military strength. Faced with this challenge, the ruling establishment,
which was internally divided, did not manage to respond effectively. At the same, in all
three cases there were widespread lower-class rebellions, especially among the peasantry.
This led to 'mass-mobilizing political leaderships' which were able to 'consolidate revolu
tionary state power' (1979: 41). In each case, the outcome was a 'centralized, bureaucratic,
and mass-incorporating nation-state with enhanced great-power potential in the interna
tional arena' (1979: 41). The influence of the aristocracy was abolished in rural society
and central government. The new regimes brought the masses into the political system and
created systems of government that were more rationalized and centralized than before.
Skocpol's strategy of comparison between France, Russia, and China is to show that
despite much dissimilarity between the cases, especially in their different levels of techno
logical development, they all experienced the same distinctive phenomenon of social
revolution as a result of the same distinctive set of causal factors. Here we may note that
Skocpol's central argument partly resembles the argument made by Shmuel Eisenstadt in
The Political System of Empires. The two analyses share in common an emphasis on endemic
structural conflicts between the ruling power and traditional interests (the aristocracy), as
well as on disputes among powerful groups about control over 'free-floating resources'
(such as tax and rents). Both writers examine the resolution of those conflicts in favour of
the state after a major structural transformation, involving greater centralization, bureau
cratization, and involvement of mass populations in the *polity. Both authors also deliber
ately bracket the values, intentions, and motives of the major participant groups through
the use of a self-consciously scientific framework.
Explaining the rise of the West

A further unifying theme for number of theorists in the last quarter of the twentieth cen
tury is the need to make sense of the West and its place in the world. Perry *Anderson
explored the differences between Eastern and Western Europe in relation to *feudalism and
the rise of capitalism. Immanuel *Wallerstein developed a distinctive approach to what he
called 'world systems' emanating from centres of power in Europe and later from the USA.
Michael *Mann began a study of the sources of social power geared toward explaining the
power and dominance of the West, without at the same time neglecting other regions. All
three writers reflect a debt to Marxism, which is qualified in various ways. We look at each
in turn. The work of Michael Mann is discussed in Box 17.
Perry Anderson:feudalism and the transition to capitalism in Europe

Why and how did the capitalist mode of production originate in Western Europe? This is
Perry Anderson's question in his books Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (Anderson
1974a; hereafter Passages) and Lineages of the Absolutist Stale (Anderson 1974b; hereafter
143 DENNIS SMITH
capacity to integrate peoples and spaces into dominant configurations' (1986: 31). This includes the
capacity to make resources operate in a way that is useful to those who control them. Societies are
'organized power networks'. Mann analyses four principal sources of sooal power: (1) economic
power. (2) ideological power, (3) political power, and (4) military power. None of these has ultimate
primacy. Different combinations predominate according to the world-historical context. For example,
Mann believes that during the nineteenth century the role of political power in the internal workings
of national states declined with the disappearance of aristocratic classes. He proposes that
ideological power also grew less important in that period, especially in comparison with the great
influence of Christianity during the Middle Ages in Europe.
In Mann's view, two types of configuration have recurred throughout human history. One of them
consists of empires of domination, which used concentrated military coercion to control large territories
with a centralized state. The Roman Empire is a classic example. The other type consists of multf-
power actor civilizations, a notable example being the city-states of ancient Greece. In the latter case,
economic
' and ideological forms of sornl power predominated. Empires of domination had a tendency to fragment
and to become decentralized. By contrast, multi-power-actor civilizations tended to move towards
greater centralization.
A third historical tendency noted by Mann is that there was a steady drift by the leading edge of
sooal power away from the Mediterranean towards the North Sea and the Atlantic. For example,
the Scandinavians began to open up the Baltic Sea in the north at about the time that the Roman
Empire collapsed. There was nothing inevitable about this drift. It was the result of 'a gigantic series
of acci dents of nature linked to an equally monstrous series of historical coincidences' (1986: 540).
By the eighteenth century, Europe was integrated by four closely connected institutions· the
capitalist mode of production; industrialism; the national state; and 'a mult1state, geopolitical,
diplomatic civilization' (1986: 471) In other words, Europe had become a modern form of multi-
power-actor civilization (see also Mann 1988)
Lineages). In Passages, he looked at the dynamics of four modes of production: the

slave mode, found in the Roman Empire and among the Vikings; the primitive
communal mode, tound in Germany; the nomadic mode, involving wandering goat-,
sheep-, or cattle herders on arid steppe-land; and the feudal mode. Anderson's main
concern in this book is with the origins of the feudal mode of production. He explains
feudalism as a result of the merging of the dt:'clining Roman Empire's slav;: mode of
production and the primitive communal mode of production of the Empire's main
adversaries, the Germanic tribes. This svnthesis was relatiwly balanced in France and
England. By contrast, Italy and Spain were more influenced by the Roman inheritance in
urban trading and canon law, while Germany had a stronger tradition of peasant village
solidarity and warlike knights.
In Lineages, Anderson looks at the origins and nature of the absolutist state, a form of
government in which rulers claim absolute sovereignty over all their subjects. Here
Anderson argues that the feudal aristocracy faced difficulties as European societies
became more peaceful and more commercialized. In place of the old system in which the
lower orders were expected to fight or pay feudal dues to their masters, the market was
penetrat ing into the countryside and providing a new basis for exchanging goods and
services. The aristocracy's hold over the peasantry was loosening. It found greater
difficulty in obtaining goods and services from the peasantry. In these circumstances, the
absolutist ruler pro tected the class interest of the feudal aristocracy by ensuring it
continued to benefit from the surplus produced by the peasantry. The task of extracting
such surplus, by force if nec essary, was moved upward from the local manorial court run
by the local feudal lord to the central state apparatus. The crown, so to speak, 'took the
aristocracy under its wing'.
This pattern differed between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. In the West, by the
fourteenth century, the strength of the towns and a shortage of agranian labour made it
possible for the peasantry to throw off their feudal bond of serfdom. By contrast, in the
East the state in conjunction with the larger landowners responded to a labour shortage by
imposing serfdom on the peasantry for the first time. One reason the landowners were
able to do this was that the towns were much weaker in the East and could not support
those peasants that tried to protest.
Immanuel Wallerstein's world systems theory

The US historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein is the progenitor of a theory of
*'world systems', involving 'centres' and 'peripheries' (Wallerstein 1974, 1980, 1989a).
This theory has attracted renewed attention in recent years in the wake of debates about
globalization. According to Wallerstein, the capitalist world economy, which first took
shape during the sixteenth century, stretches across several *polities. It is linked together
by market relation ships reinforced by the strength of the states that dominate the centre
or 'core' of the system. One factor maintaining the stability of the world system is the fact
that the exploited majority dominated by countries at the centre are themselves divided
into two tiers, which Wallerstein labels the 'periphery' (the larger lower tier) and the 'semi-
periphery' (the smaller middle tier).
The main players in the system are social classes and 'ethno-nations' (Wallerstein 1979:
24). The bourgeoisie pursues capital accumulation and it clings to an ideology of
scientific rationalism. By contrast, the proletariat is divided and ranked in terms of
ethnicity, which makes it easier to control. Economic actors in world systems are
managed within global structures with a high degree of vertical integration such as
chartered companies (for example, the East India Company, a British trading company
very active in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), merchant houses, and, more
recently, *transnational corpora tions, such as General Electric. However, governments
and national bourgeoisies also com pete with each other. This means that as the balance
of advantage shifts, so does the particular pattern of relationships in the capitalist
world economy.
By the late sixteenth century, the system's core included England, the Netherlands, and
northern France. The semi-periphery was centred on the Mediterranean, including
Italy, southern France, and Spain. The periphery included America and Eastern Europe.
By the nineteenth century, the British state had eclipsed both the Dutch and the hench
and become dominant in the core. During the same period Sweden and Prussia (later
unified
150 DENNIS SMITH
with Germany as a whole) moved into the semi-periphery. The periphery expanded to
include Russia, the Ottoman Empire, India, and West Africa. During the twentieth
century, the USA asserted its leadership of the core. After the Second Worid War, the USA
shared the core with the USSR, Japan, and the European Union. Communist regimes such
as those of Poland and Hungary belonged to the semi-periphery. The periphery consisted
mainly of the Third World.
Wallerstein believes that the widespread protest movements of 1968 signalled the
beginning of a 'revolution in the world-system' directed against domination by the core
(Wallerstein 1989b: 411 ). He saw this revolution as fuelled by six movements: the
Western 'old Left'; new social movements in the West concerned with women, ecological
questions, and ethnic minority rights; the traditional communist parties of the socialist
bloc; new movements for human rights in the socialist bloc; traditional national liberation
move ments in the Third World; and anti-Western Third World movements, often of a
religious nature. Wallerstein recognizes that there was considerable mutual suspicion
between these different 'anti-system' movements, but he thought that by the mid-1980s
this mutual suspicion had decreased in intensity. In the current climate of anti-
globalization movements, or global movements directed against global capitalist
penetration, it appears that at least some of these movements have been joining together
under a common banner.
Conclusion
This survey of historical social theory has travelled from the 1940s through to the last
decade of the twentieth century. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the
Cold War, and the apparent triumph of Western liberal capitalist democracy, the agenda
of his torical social theory has been somewhat in disarray. On the one hand, interest in
writers from the first phase such as T. H. Marshall and Talcott Parsons has revived. On
the other hand, globalization has emerged as a new focus of historical social theory as
part of a much larger complex of changes.
Today it would appear that older Western ideologies of communism, fascism, *Keynesian
welfarism, and trust in the problem-solving capacities of science are in decline. As
voter turnout diminishes at successive elections, public political participation appears
under threat, while social relations appear to be ever-increasingly regulated through the
market. Relations between government, business, and civil society today are not the same
as they were in the post-war period. Large multinational businesses have broken free from
the con straints imposed by national planning, just as they have untied themselves from
their once close involvement with colonial administrations based in Europe.
In this context, one theme deserves a high place on the agenda of historical sociology in
the early twenty-first century. It is the fact that despite the hegemonic influence of global
business discourse, the free-market version of capitalism rediscovered during the 1980s is
suffering a process of de-legitimation. *Neo-liberal forms of marketization have become
implicated in the widespread fragility and vulnerability of the economies of the global
South. In a great many regions of the world, large business corporations have become less
151
and less responsive to the social constraints once imposed by national goverments. The
relatively cohesive post-1945 political and economic system that preoccupied many of the
writers discussed in this chapter is largely a thing of the past. The system of social
democ racy that developed in Western Europe after the Second World War, founded on a
welfare state offering universal provision, went together with what have been called 'thirty
glorious years' of economic growth (Fourastie, 1979). Since the mid-1970s, the Western
world has seen the end of this period of stability and the emergence of a new era of
deregu lated, crisis-ridden, neo-liberal economic policy.
These developments present historically minded social scientists with an important
challenge. The question is whether social scientists will find the courage and imagination
to use their research on long-term social processes to provide independent and insightful
analyses of the structural alternatives available to human societies in a context of
increasing global uncertainty. Here the potential uses of historical sociology have not
changed. They are to help us think through the causes and consequences of long-term
social processes. They are to make us aware of the alternative trajectories of social
development that existed in the past and those that may exist for us in the present. The
ultimate value of historical sociology is that it can improve our knowledge of the ways in
which human beings may intervene in these processes and give societies a push in the
direction we believe to be right.
Why is historical thinking important to social theory7
2 What considerations distinguish the interests of the historical sociologist from the interests
of the historian?
3 According to the theorists discussed in this chapter, what advantages and disadvantages can
be discerned in capitalism, socialism, and democracy as systems of social organization?
4 What factors account for the rise of the nation-state in modern Europe?
5 What factors account for the dominance of the West in world history7
6 What is a revolution?
7 What are we to understand by the concept of 'civilization'?
FURTHER READING
A useful introduction to historical social theory is Dennis Smith's The Rise of Historical
Sociology (Polity Press, 1991). Two recent guides to diverse topics in historical social
theory are Gerard Delanty and Engen !sin's edited Handbook o(Historical Sociolosy (Sage,
2003) and James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer's Comparative Historical Analysis in
the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Dennis Smith's shorter
essay 'Historical Analysis', in Melissa Hardy's edited Handbook ofData Analysis (Sage,
2004) and Phillip Abrams's older but still important work Historical Sociology (Open
Books, 1982). Theda Skocpol's Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge
University Press,
152 DENNIS SMITH
1984) has chapters on individual figures, including Wallerstein, Anderson, Moore,

Eisenstadt, Bendix, and Tilly. For guides to mutual influences between historians and soci
ologists, see Peter Burke's two books History and Social Theory (Polity Press, 1992) and
Sociology and History (Allen & Unwin, 1980), and Mary Fulbrook's Historical Theory
(Routledge, 2002).
Commentaries on T. H. Marshall's conception of social citizenship can be found in Jack
Barbalet's Citizenship (Open University Press, 1988) and Gerard Delanty's Citizenship in a
Global Age (Open University Press, 2000). On Upset, see Samuel Huntington's article 'After
Twenty Years: The Future of the Third Wave', fournal of Democracy, 8 (1997), 4, 3-12. On
Hayek, Schum peter, and Moore, see Alan Ebenstein's F. A. Hayek: A Biography (University
of Chicago Press, 2003), Richard Swedberg's foseph A. Schumpeter: His Life and Work (Polity
Press, 1991), Dennis Smith's Capitalist Democracy on Trial (Routledge, 1990), and Dennis
Smith's Barrington Moore (Macmillan, 1983). On Elias, see Stephen Mennell's Norbert Elias:
An Introduction (Blackwell, 1992), Dennis Smith's Norbert Elias and Modern Social Theory
(Sage, 2001), and Jonathan Fletcher's Violence and Civilisation: An Introduction to the Work
of Norbert Elias (Polity Press, 1997). For collections of readings by Elias, see Stephen Mennell
and Johan Goudsblom's edited The Norbert Elias Reader (Blackwell, 1998) and Norbert Elias
on Civilisation, Power and Knowledge (Chicago University Press, 1998).
For further studies of the rise of the West and the rise of the nation-state, see Gianfranco
Poggi's The Development o(the Modem State (Stanford Univer<;ity Press, 1978) and John A.
Hall's Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West (Penguin,
1986), and the same author's Coercion and Consent: Studies o(the Modem State (Polity Press,
1994), as well as John A. Hall and John Ikenberry's shorter guide The State (Open
University Press, 1989). Also informative in the field of historical social theory are
Arpa<l Szakolczai's three books Reflexive Historical Sociology (Routledge, 1999J, Max Weber
and Michel Foucault (Routledge, 1998), and The Genesis of Modernity (Routledge, 2003),
covering figures not discussed in this chapter, including notably the Austrian emigre the
orist Eric *Voegelin. A further valuable resource is W. G. Runciman's A Treatise on Social
Theory, 3 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1983), which deals with a broad range of
problems and topics in historical sociology. See also Runaman's essay 'Comparative
Sociology or Narrative History?', in his book Confessions of a Reluctant Theorist: Selected
Essays (Harvester, 1989).
One important writer on historical social theory not discussed in this chapter is the
Czech-born theorist Ernest *Gellner. His works are stimulating and accessible. Particularly
worth reading is his book Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Hlllnan History (Chicago
University Press, 1988), which develops a theory of secularization and modernization
from an anthropological perspective.
II WEBSITES
Comparative and Historical Sociology Homepage at www.comphistsoc.org/ Displays a site for

the American Sociological Association with thematically organized guidance in the field.
Historical Sociology at www2.fmg.uva.nl/sociosite/topics/history.html Presents manv links to
relevant sites and on-line articles.
Joseph Schumpeter page at http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/schump.htm Contains a
biography of Schumpeter, with a bibliography and links to other resources.
Nation States at http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu/richard.robbins/legacy/nation_state_resources.htm
Provides a list of sites on the organization of nation-states and international conflict from
a historical and contemporary perspective.
Norbert Elias Foundation at www.norberteliasfoundation.nl/ Displays an authoritative overview
of Elias's work and the school of 'figurational sociology' he set in motion.
i
7 Western Marxism
Douglas Kellner
Western Marxism and the critique of ideology 155

Gyorgy Lukacs and Karl Korsch: reification and the standpoint of the proletariat 156
Antonio Gramsci: the theory of hegemony 157
Critical theory of society: the Frankfurt School 160
Theories of the 'culture industry' 160
Walter Benjamin: mass culture and the decline of 'aura' 162
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment 162
Jurgen Habermas: emancipation and the public sphere 164
Western Marxism from the 1960s to the present 165
Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man 165
French and Italian Marxism 166
Structural and analytical Marxism 167
Cultural studies in Britain and the USA: the influence of Marxism 168
Conclusion 170

FURTHER READING 172
WEBSITES 174
In investigating the genesis of modern societies, Karl Marx and Frirdrich Engels
developed a new *materialist theory of history and society, introducing the concepts of
forces and relations of production, division of labour, *ideology, and class struggle as
keys to under standing society and history. They formulated a conception of history as a
succession of modes of production, charting the emergence of modern bourgeois society
and its future transition to a communist society. The Marxist vision of society and history
first appeared in Marx and Engels's The <:ormmmist Manifesto of 1848 in dramatic
narrative form, pro claiming the rise of capitalism and bourgeois society and its
revolutionary overthrow by an industrial proletariat. Capital (1867) and other classic
Marxian texts developed a critical theory of capitalism, a model of socialism, and a project
of revolution combining political
155
economy, social theory, philosophy, history, and politics that provoked both fervent ad
herence and passionate opposition.
This chapter explores the development of Marxist social thought in the twentieth
century, concentrating on what is called 'Western Marxism'. The term 'Western Marxism'
was first used by the Soviet communist regime to disparage the turn to more diverse
forms of Marxism in Western Europe after the 1920s. Since then, however, the term has
become widely accepted as a generic category used to distinguish more independent and
critical forms of Marxism from the dogmas of the Soviet and Chinese regimes. In this
chapter we trace the spread of Western Marxism in Europe after the Russian Revolution
until the 1960s and the rise of new syntheses between Marxism and other theoretical
approaches since the 1970s under the ambit of 'cultural studies'. Among the key theorists
under discussion are Gy6rgy *Lukacs, Antonio *Gramsci, Ernst *Bloch, Walter
*Benjamin, Theodor *Adorno, Max *Horkheimer, Jean-Paul *Sartre, Herbert
*Marcuse, Louis *Althusser, Raymond
*Williams, Stuart *Hall, and others.
We begin with a resume of the classical Marxist conception of ideology formulated by
Marx and Engels.
Western Marxism and the critique of ideology
Cultural forms in Marxist analysis are seen as emerging in specific historical situations
and as serving particular socio-economic interests and functions. For Marx and Engels,
the cultural ideas of an epoch serve the interests of the ruling class, providing
*ideologies that legitimize class domination. In The Gennan Ideology Marx and Engels had
asserted that 'the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas' (1846:
64). Ideology in this sense describes how dominant ideas of a ruling class promote the
interests of that class and help mask oppression and injustices in a given society.
The economic *'base' of society for Marx and Engels consisted of the forces and
relations of production. The 'superstructure' consisted of legal and political institutions,
along with culture and ideology. The goal of Marx's science of society and history was to
grasp the primacy of this economic base in its relation to culture and politics. Marx and
Engels sought to show how ruling ideas serve to naturalize, idealize, and *legitimize the
existing society and its institutions and values. They argued that during the *feudal
period, ideas of piety, honour, valour, and military chivalry expressed the interests of the
ruling aristocratic classes. During the capitalist era, values of *individualism, profit,
competition, and the market became dominant, articulating the ideology of the new
bourgeois class and consolidating its class power.
In this sense Marx and Engels showed how ideologies appear to represent common
sense and are thus often invisible and elude criticism. In a competitive and
atomistic capitalist society, it appears natural to assert that human beings are
primarily self-inter ested and competitive. In fact, human beings and societies are
extremely complex and contradictory, but ideology smoothes over contradictions and
conflicts, idealizing traits like individuality and competition and elevating them into
governing conceptions and values.
156 DOUGLAS KELLNER
After Marx's death in 1883, many different versions of Marxism began to emerge.
The first generation of Marxist theorists and activists tended to focus on the economy
and politics. The second generation ranging from German Social Democrats and
radicals to Russian Marxists focused even more narrowly on economics and politics.
Marxism became the official doctrine of many European working-class movements
and was thus tied to the requirements of the political struggles of the day. In contrast,
later generations of intellectuals after the Russian Revolution developed Marxian
theories of culture, the state, social institutions, and psychology. Where Marxism was
generally associated by the beginning of the twentieth-century with economic,
political, and historical doc trines, a new generation of Marxists began turning
attention to cultural phenomena in the 1920s and 1930s onwards. Many twentieth-
century Marxian theorists employed Marxian·theory to analyse past and present
cultural, political, economic, and social forms in relation to their production, their
imbrications with the economy and history, and their functions in social life.
The term 'Western Marxism' had first been used by the Soviet communists as a label of
derision, aimed at what they saw as defeatist and revisionist thinking. Yet the term
swiftly became adopted by European intellectuals to describe a more independent
form of thinking distinct from that of the party line represented in Moscow. For many
intellectuals active in the 1920s and 1930s, the Marxist movements arising out of
Bolshevism in Russia and the Social Democratic Party in Germany had rested on an
overly dogmatic and *deterministic conception of society. These intellectuals sought
to develop alternative agendas that Jed to tensions between 'scientific' and 'orthodox'
Marxism on the one hand and 'critical' Marxism on the other hand. In a later contribu
tion from the 1970s, the British Marxist historian Perry*Anderson (1976) interpreted the
turn from economic and political analysis to cultural theory in the 1930s as a symptom of
the crushing of the European revolutionary movements of the 1920s and the rise of
fascism. In the 1950s, on the other hand, the French *phenomenological philosopher
Maurice *Merleau-Ponty (1955) provided the term with more positive connotations,
emphasiz;ng the centrality of struggle over culture, art, philosophy, language, and
ideas to material social transformation.
Among two of the earliest partisans of this non-dogmatic conception of Western
Marxism were the Hungarian critic Gyorgy *Lukac and the German theorist Karl
*Korsch. It is to their work that we turn first.
Gyorgy Lukacs and Karl Korsch: reification and the standpoint

of the proletariat
In the early years of the century, Lukacs wrote important books influenced by *Hegel and
German idealist philosophy, including S011/ and Form (1910) and Theory oft/Je Novel
(1910). Relatively quickly, Lukacs converted to Marxism and briefly participated in the
Hungarian Revolution of 1918 (see further Arato and Breines 1977; Feenberg 1981).
Adopting an orthodox communist position, Lukacs held that working-class revolution and
socialism constituted solutions to the problems of bourgeois society. He became a lifelong
adherent to the communist movement.
157
The ultra-Marxist Lukacs of the early 1920s focused intently on developing philo
sophical, sociological, and political dimensions of Marxism before returning to cultural
analysis later in the 1920s. He then went to Russia where he withdrew internally from
Stalinism while working on a series of literary texts that have significant but largely
unappreciated importance for cultural criticism. Lukacs's literary studies employed
theories of the mode of production, class and class conflict to provide economic
grounding for cultural analysis. He saw history as constructed by a mediation of economy
and society, viewing cultural forms in their relation to socio-historical development within
a mode of production. He also demonstrated that cultural and artistic forms themselves
illuminate material historical circumstances, when properly interpreted.
In his most influential work History and Class Consciousness of 1923, Lukacs argued
that the Marxian vision of *totality and its focus on the primacy of commodity forms
provided the best methodological tools with which to analyse capitalist society and to
discover forces that would overthrow it. Lukacs asserted that adopting the standpoint of
the working class enabled one to see how capitalist society produced *reification,
involving the transformation of human beings into things, in all dimensions of society-
from the labour process to cultural production and even sexual relations. Lukacs saw all
domains of society, culture, and even intimate relations as pervaded by economic
imperatives. The proletariat, however, stood in a privileged position to grasp societal
reification and to organize to overcome it. The proletariat became, in Lukacs's typically
Hegelian phrase, the
*'subject-object' of history. Hegel's classic analysis of the relation between master and
slave, in which the slave's practical mastery of the situation leads to an inversion of the
hierarchical relation to the master, was taken up in Lukacs's analysis of proletarian class
consciousness. For Lukacs, every class perspective is necessarily partial and limited, espe
cially the perspectives of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. However, the exception to
this rule is the perspective of the proletariat, because the proletariat cannot understand its
own social position without at the same time understanding the society as a whole, as a
'totality'.
In Germany after the abortive revolution of 1918, the political activist and theorist Karl
*Korsch also developed a Hegelian and critical version of Marxism. In Marxism and
Philosophy (1923), Korsch argued that Marxism involved *dialectical thinking, providing
the mental forces to transform bourgeois society through a union of theory and practice. In
a later work, Korsch (1938) asserted the importance of historical specificity to Marxian
theory, maintaining that Marxism provided a historically determinate critique of capitalist
society and alternatives to it (on Korsch, see further Kellner 1977).
Two other early Western Marxist thinkers who were to become influential were
the Italian writer and party activist Antonio Gramsci and the German theological philo
sopher and critic Ernst Bloch. In the next section, we turn to Gramsci's conception of
'hegemony' and the 'philosophy of praxis'. Ernst Bloch's work is discussed in Box 18.
Antonio Gramsci: the theory of hegemony

The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio *Gramsci became secretary of the Italian Communist
Party in 1921, before being imprisoned by Mussolini's fascist regime in 1926 until his
158 t::'OUC-LA KHLNfR
BOX 18. ERNST BLOCH ON HOPE, IDEOLOGY, AND UTOPIA
The German theorist Ernst *Bloch also responded positively to the Russian Revolution and the
European revolutionary movements of the 1920s, but he developed a more *messianic and utopian
version of Marxism. Bloch's three-volume work The Principle of Hope (1952-9) provided a systematic
examination of the ways in which fairy tales and myths, popular culture, literature, theatre, and all
forms of art, political and social utopias, philosophy, and religion contain *emancipatory moments. He
showed how these elements of culture project visions of a better life that question the organization
and structure of life under capitalism-or state socialism. In this magnum opus, he analysed the
ways in which hope for a better world exists in everything from daydreams to the great religions,
pointing to anticipatory visions of what would later be systematized and disseminated as socialism.
He concentrated on analysing popular literature, architecture, department store displays, sports,
clothing, and other artefacts of everyday life. He shows how the critique of ideology aims not only
at political texts and manifest political doctrines but also at film, radio and the mass media, and
everyday life in general. For Bloch, ideology contains a utopian dimension, in which its discourses,
images, and figures produce images of a better world and illuminate what is deficient and lacking in
this world and what should be fought for to bring about a freer and happier future. Bloch thus
provided a more 'hermeneutical' account of the ways in which cultural history and socio-economic
development point forward to socialism as the realization of humanity's deepest dreams and hopes.
Bloch developed a type of cultural theory that is quite different from other Marxian models that present
ideology critique as the demolition of bourgeois civilization. Unlike dogmatic Marxist wntIng, Bloch did
not directly equate culture with ideology in a wholly negative sense. This dogmatic model-found in
Lenin and most Marxist-Leninists-had interpreted ideology primarily as a process of mystification and
error, as 'false consciousness'. It had viewed the function of ideology critique as being simply to
demonstrate the illusions of ruling-class interests in cultural objects that are then discarded under the
heavy hammer of the 'scientific' Marxist critic.
Although Leninist Marxism also developed a more positive concept of ideology that viewed socialist
ideas as constructive forces for promoting revolutionary consciousness, Bloch remained wary of those
who stressed the unambiguously progressive features of socialist ideology. Instead, he saw emancipa
tory content in all living ideologies - socialist or capitalist - and deceptive illusory qualities as well. For
Bloch, ideology was'Janus-faced', two-sided: it contained techniques of manipulation and domination
but It also contained a residue or surplus that can be used for social critique to advance *enlightened
pol itics. Bloch rejected what he saw as the denunciatory 'half-enlightenment' of dogmatic Marxism.
Half enlightenment wrongly dismissed as superstition and legend everything that did not measure up to
its 'scient1f1c' criteria. It deluded itself by thinking that truth can be obtained solely by eliminating error
rather than also by offering some alternative vision. Bloch believed that part of the explanation for the
defeat of the Left by the Right in Weimar Germany was that the Left tended to focus on negative
denunc,at,ons of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, while fascism inculcated an apparently more positive
and attractive vision for the masses who desperately sought for a better life.
death in 1937. /\ccording to Gramsci, the ruling intellectual and cultural forces of the
era constitute a form of *hegemony, or domination by ideas and cultural forms that
induce consent to the rule of the leading groups in a society. Gramsci argued that the
unity of prevailing groups is usually created through the state, such as in the American
Revolution
WE STERN M i'tfl )(l"i Y'I 159
or in the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century. In addition, the institutions of *c,vi/
society also play a role in establishing hegemony. Civil society involves institutions of
the Church, schooling, the media, and forms of popular culture. It mediates between the
pri vate sphere of economic interests and the family on the one hand and the public
authority of the state on the other.
In Gramsci's conception, societies maintain stability through a combination of force
and consent, involving obeisance to 'intellectual and moral leadership'. On the one hand,
social orders are founded and reproduced through the agency of institutions and groups
that violently exert power and domination to maintain social boundaries and rules-for
example, the police, the military, or vigilante groups. On the other hand, other institutions
involved in religion, schooling, and the media induce consent to the dominant order
establishing a distinctive type of social system, such as market capitalism or fascism or
communism. Societies also establish hegemony through an institutionalizing of
*patriarchy or male supremacy, as well as through the rule of a dominant racial or ethnic
group over subordinate groups. In his Prison Notebooks (1926-37), published after his death
in various edited selections, Gramsci's key example is Italian fascism. Gramsci showed
how fascism supplanted the previous liberal bourgeois regime in Italy through its control
of the state and through its frequently repressive influence over schooling, the media, and
other cultural, social, and political institutions.
The theory of hegemony for Gramsci involved both analysis of the ways in which
prevalent political forces achieve hegemonic authority and the delineation of counter
hegemonic forces, groups, and ideas capable of contesting and overthrowing the existing
hegemony. One illustration of this Gramscian analysis in recent cultural studies has
focused on the conservative regimes of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan
in the United States in the early 1980s. Stuart *Hall (1980a) and others analysed the ways
in which the Thatcher-Reagan regimes promoted a counter-hegemony to social-
democratic politics in the 1970s. In winning power, they achieved a new hegemony of
market individu alism. In the 1980s, conservative groups gained dominance through
control of the state and the media and through the arm of cultural institutions such as
think tanks and fund raising political action groups. They succeeded in presenting the
market not only as the source of wealth but also as the solution to all social problems,
while the state became pictured as a cause of excessive taxation, over-regulation, and
bureaucratic inertia.
In this context Gramsci defined ideology as the 'social cement' that holds together the
dominant social order. He described his own 'philosophy of *praxis' as a mode of thought
opposed to ideology, contesting dominant institutions and social relations and attempting
to generate a socialist counter-hegemony. In his essay 'Cultural Themes: Ideological
Material' (repr. 1985), Gramsci notes that the press in the 1920s had become the dominant
instrument of producing ideological legitimation for existing institutions, but that many
other institutions such as the Church, schools, and socio-cultural associations and groups
al o played a role. He called for sustained critique of the hegemonic forces that
legitimized these institutions and the creation of alternative ideas and movements capable
of challenging the existing system.
Gramsci's critique of dominant modes of culture would be taken up by the Prankfurt
School and later by British cultural studies, to which we turn shortly. It is to the work of
the Frankfurt School that we turn now.
160
Critical theory of society: the Frankfurt School
The term 'Frankfurt School' refers to the work of members of the Institute for Social
Research ([nstitut for Sozialforschung) established at Frankfurt in Germany in 1923.
Under its first director, Carl Grunberg, the Jnstitute's work in the 1920s tended to be
empirical, his torical, and oriented towards problems of the European working-class
movement. It was the first Marxist-oriented research centre affiliated to a historic
German university. Max *Horkhcimer became director of the Institute in 1930, gathering
around him many talented theorists, including Erich *Fromm, Franz *Neumann, Herbert
*Marcuse, and Theodor W. *Adorno. Under Horkheimer's direction, the Institute sought
to develop an interdisciplinary social theory serving as an instrument of social
transformation. The work of this era was a synthesis of philosophy and social theory,
combining sociology, psychology, culturalanalysis, and political economy. Most members
had Jewish backgrounds and were forced to flee Germany after Hitler's ascendancy to
power. The majority emigrated to the USA where the Institute became affiliated to
Columbia University from 1931 until 1949, when it returned to Frankfurt.
The Institute's first major project under Horkheimer's direction was a systematic
study of authority, an investigation into individuals who submitted willingly but irra
tionally to authoritarian regimes. This culminated in a two-volume work, Studien iiber
Autoriti:it und Familie (1936), and a series of studies of fascism. From the 1930s onwards
the Institute referred to its work as the 'critical theory of society'. The term *'critical
theory' was elaborated by Horkheimer in a seminal essay of 1937, discussed here in
Box 19. For many years, 'critical theory' stood as code for the Frankfurt School's
distinctive brand of Marxism, distinguished by its concern to found a radical
interdisciplinary social theory on Hegelian-Marxian dialectics. The critical theorists
argued that Marx's theories of money, value, exchange, and *commodity fetishism pertain
not only to the capitalist economy but also to all social relations under capitalism. All
human relationships undercapitalism, public and private, can be shown to be dominated
by exchange values and commodity forms.
In a series of studies carried out in the 1930s, the Frankfurt theorists developed
accounts of monopoly capitalism and the new industrial state, focusing on the roles
of technology, giant corporations, and mass communications in the decline of demo cracy
and the erosion of the moral responsibility of individuals. They were to become best
known for theories of 'the totally administered society', analysing the increasing power of
capitalism and bureaucracy over all aspects of social life and the development of new
forms of social control. They propounded research programmes that influenced many
aspects of European Social theory until the 1970s.
Theoriesof the'culture industry'

The Frankfurt School coined the term *'culture industry' to signify the process of the
indus trialization of culture and the commercial imperatives of mass production and
consump tion that determine it. The critical theorists analysed all cultural artefacts in
contexts of
161
BOX 19. MAX HORKHEIMER'S ESSAY 'CRITICAL AND TRADITIONAL THEORY'
In a key article titled 'Traditional and Critical Theory', of 1937, Max Horkheimer argued that
modern philosophy and science since Descartes suffered from abstraction and *objectivism, cut off
from social practice. In opposition to this 'traditional theory' and especially to *positivism, the new
'critical theory' would be grounded in social theory and Marxian political economy. It would mount
a systematic critique of existing society, allying itself to efforts to produce alternatives to
capitalism and the monstrosity of fascism. Horkheimer proclaimed that critical theory would expose
the way 1n which 'the concepts that thoroughly dominate the economy' metamorphose 'into their
opposites: fair exchange into a deepening of social injustice; a free economy into monopolistic
domination; productive labour into the strengthening of relations which inhibit production; the
maintenance of society's life into the impoverishment of the people's' (1937: 247). The goal of
critical theory was to transform these social
industria I organization where mediated objects exhibit the same features as other
products of mass production: *commodification, standardization, and massification. In
their view, the culture industries had the specific function of providing ideological
*legitimation for capitalist society and integrating individuals into its way of life.
Mass culture and communications stood at the centre of leisure activity in an industrial
society as agencies of socialization and mediators of political reality. They were
therefore to be seen as major institutions of modern life with a variety of economic,
political, and cultural effects. In particular, the critical theorists were among the first to
examine the impact of a consumer society on the very classes who were supposed to be
the instrument of revolution in classical Marxism. They analysed the ways in which
consumption and the culture industries function to stabilize capitalism. Accordingly,
they sought for new agencies and models of political emancipation that could serve as
norms for social science.
The two theorists most closely linked with the concept of the culture industry are Walter
*Benjamin and Theodor*Adorno. Although Benjamin was not formally a member of the
Frankfurt School, he exerted a profound influence over it and has been closely associated
with the spirit of its work. It is to his writing that we turn first.
162 DOUGLAS KELLNER
Walter Benjamin: mass culture and the decline of 'aura'

Active in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, Benjamin discerned relatively socially
*emancipatory aspects in new technologies of cultural production such as photography,
film, and radio. Benjamin was one of the first radical critics to look carefully at mass
media culture in apprai ing its complex nature and effects. In his famous essay of 1936
'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Benjamin noted how new mass
media were supplanting older forms of culture. The mass reproduction of photography,
film, record ings, and publications replaced the aspect of original uniqueness or magical
'aura' of the work of art in an earlier era. Freed from the elite aura of high culture,
Benjamin believed that mass communications within limits could cultivate more critical
individuals able to judge and analyse their world, just as sports fans could dissect and
evaluate athletic activi ties. In particular, he asserted that processing the rush of images of
cinema helped to create subjectivities better able to parry the flux and turbulence of
experience in industrialized, urbanized societies. At the same time, he remained very
critical of the products and func tions of the culture industry. But he took a less negative
attitude to its realm of possibilities than some of the other associates of the Frankfurt
School.
Collaborating with the prolific German dramatist Bertolt *Brecht, Benjamin worked
on producing film screenplays and radio plays, seeking to utilize the media as organs
of social progress. In the essay 'The Artist as Producer' (1934), Benjamin argued that
radical cultural creators should 're-function' the apparatus of cultural production,
transforming theatre and film into a forum for political enlightenment, beyond pure
'culinary' audience pleasure. Working in the same spirit as Benjamin, it can be said
that Bertolt Brecht in his writings on radio theory anticipated the Internet in his call
for reconstructing the apparatus of broadcasting from one-way transmission to a more
interactive form of two-way, or multiple-channel, communication (compare
Silberman 2000: 41 ff.).
Benjamin wished to promote a radical media politics oriented to oppositional cultures.
Yet he recognized that media such as film could have conservative effects. While he
considered it progressive that mass-produced objects forfeited the 'aura' of traditional
works of art and high culture, he recognized that film could create a new kind of ideologi
cal magic based on a cult of celebrity, through techniques such as the close-up which
fetishized certain stars and images.
Benjamin also developed a unique approach to cultural history. ln a micrological
history of Paris in the nineteenth century known as the Arcades Project, or the
Passagenwerk in German, Benjamin analysed shop window dressings, street junctions,
architectural fa<;ades, and bohemian subcultures to elucidate the more general contours of
the imperial French metropolis. This uncompleted project illustrated his fascination with
the minutiae of daily consumer life, taking his inspiration from dada art and the surrealist
poets and painters (Benjamin 1925-39; see also Buck-Morss 1977, 1989).
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Adorno and Horkheimer answered Benjamin's more hopeful picture of the mass media in
their influential yet deeply pessimistic book Dialectic o(t:nligiltenment, which first
appeared
163
in German in 1947 (based on an earlier manuscript of 1944). They argued that the system
of cultural production dominated by film, radio broadcasting, newspapers, and magazines
was controlled by advertising and commercial imperatives, functioning to instil sub
servience to consumer capitalism. They sketched out a vision of history from the Greeks
to the present that argued reason and *enlightenment turned into their opposite,
transform ing what promised to be vehicles of truth and liberation into tools of
domination. Under the pressure of societal systems, reason became *instrumental,
reducing human beings to objectified things and nature to numerical quantities. Such
modes of abstraction enabled science and technology to develop apace, but at the same
time produced a moral void that led to social psychosis, culminating in the concentration
camps of the fascist and Soviet communist regimes. As science and technology created
tools of extermination, culture degenerated into mass entertainment, while democracy
collapsed into fascism based on mass popular support for charismatic leaders. This
perverse 'dialectic of enlightenment' induced individuals to dominate over their own
bodies and to renounce their innermost needs and desires by assimilating themselves to a
system that turned them into passive agents of war and persecution.
Although many critics have seen Adorno and Horkheimer's approach as too focused on
the idea of manipulation and mass deception, it provides an important corrective to more
populist approaches to media culture that tend to downplay the ways in which media
industries exert power over audiences and tend to induce conformist behaviour (see the
discussions in Kellner 1989a, 1995). We should also note that in sharply criticizing
enlightenment scientism and rationalism in relation to systems of this domination,
Adorno and Horkheimer implicated Marxism to a certain extent in this 'dialectic of
enlightenment'. For in their view Marxism, too, at least in its reductive and dogmatic
forms, affirmed the primacy of labour and instrumental reason in its celebration of
'socialist production' and 'progress'.
After the Second World War, Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt to
re-establish the Institute for Social Research in Germany, while Herbert Marcuse and Leo
*Lowenthal and others remained in the USA. In 1966 Adorno published a major work of
philosophical method, Negative Dialectics, in which he sought to redeem Hegel's concep
tion of dialectical contradictions and syntheses as the logical motor of historical change.
Adorno gave qualified support to what Marx had demonstrated as Hegel's *idealist
reifica tion of the material bases of social life. Adorno saw himself as pursuing Hegel's
principle of dialectical 'negativity' in a way in which Hegel himself had betrayed through
support of the Prussian national state as the most authentic agency of social belonging.
Negativity for
/\dorno meant a work of exposing the disparity between the manifest ideals of
society ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity-and the actual reality of social repression.
It meant demonstrating the difference, the 'non-identity', as Adorno called it, between
concepts and things, or between values and ideas on the one hand and the material status
quo on the other. In his last major work, Aesthetic Theory, of 1970, Adorno applied this
conception to an understanding of *modernist art as a possible vehicle of truth and
enlightenment about the 'system of illusions' that was consumer capitalism. Adorno
proposed that in the mod ernist work of art-which he saw exemplified in the work of
experimental composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg and avant-garde
writers and dramatists such as Samuel Beckett-it was possible to discern a mode of
aesthetic experience which threw
164 DOUGLAS KELLNER
light on the way intrinsically sensuous experiences are reduced by capitalist consumerism
to purely functional bodily gratification.
During this period the Frankfurt theorists engaged in frequent methodological and
substantive debates with other social theories, most notably in The Positivist Dispute in
German Sociology, edited by Adorno (1969). In this work they criticized more empirical
and quantitative approaches to social theory, including notably Karl *Popper's
conception of empiricism and 'value-free' science. Against Popper, they defended
their own more speculative and politicized brand of social research.
Jurgen Habermas:emancipation and the public sphere

In the 1960s, Jurgen Habermas, a student of Adorno and Horkheimer, produced a rich
body of work based on Hegelian-Marxist ideas. His early work is discussed in what
follows. His later work from the late 1970s onwards, which gradually led away from
Marxism, is discussed in Chapter 13 of this book, pp. 279-83. In addition, Habermas's
writings on
*hermeneutrics are discussed in Chapter 4, pp. 125-7.
In his path-breaking book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962),
Habermas historicized Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture industry.
He showed how bourgeois society in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was
distinguished by the rise of a *'public sphere' that stood bet ween civil society and the
state, mediating between public and private interests. Members of the middle classes
could shape public opinion, giving expression to their needs and interests while
influencing political practice. The bourgeois public sphere enabled the formation of a
realm of democratic discussion and opinion that opposed state power and the
powerful interests coming to shape society. It found expression in the numerous literary
salons and cafes, newspapers and publishing houses that flourished in eighteenth-century
Europe.
In the later chapters of his book Habermas analysed the transition from an enlightened
liberal public sphere that had helped bring about the American and French revolutions
to a media-dominated sphere in the stage of what he calls 'welfare state capitalism and
mass democracy'. Echoing Adorno and Horkheimer, he saw this process as demonstrating
a takeover of the public sphere by giant corporations, transforming it from a site of
rational debate into one of manipulative consumption and passivity. What was called
'public opinion' shifted from a critical consensus emerging from discussion and reflection
to a manufactured consensus based on the intervention of media experts and opinion polls.
Habermas saw individual participation in public debate as having become fractured and
transmuted into political spectacle, where citizen-consumers passively ingest entertain
ment and information. Citizens become spectators of media presentations that reduce
audiences to recipients of news and novelty.
Habermas's critics have argued that he tends to idealize the earlier eighteenth-century
public sphere, ignoring its exclusion of particular voices and neglecting various plebeian
and women's public spheres alongside that of the bourgeois class (see the studies in
Calhoun 1992 and Kellner 2000). Nevertheless, Habermas is right to point out that in the
age of the eighteenth-century revolutions, a public sphere did indeed emerge, allowing
at least some members of civil society to participate in political discussion and to organize
and struggle against unjust authority. Habermas's account points to the increasingly
165
important role of the media in politic and to ways in which corporate commercial forces
tend to colonize this sphere for their own interests.
Habermas's distinctive version of critical theory introduced elements of linguistic
philosophy and empirical sociological theory that had been ignored by earlier members of
the Frankfurt School. In his second major treatise, Knowledge and f/11,nan lntercsts (1968),
Habermas distinguished between what he called three types of 'cognitive interest' in
science: (1) a 'technical' interest in control and objective causal knowledge, operative in
the natural sciences; (2) a 'practical' interest in hermeneutic historical understanding,
operative in the humanities; and lastly (3) an *'emancipatory' interest at stake in collective
sociologi cal self-knowledge, operative in the critical social science . Habermasargued
that the eman cipatory interest of critical social science brings together the interest of the
natural sciences in causal explanation with the interest of the humanities in historical and
intercultural understanding. In Habermas's model, critical social science views the
theoretical idea of true knowledge about social life as bcing internally linked to the
practical pursuit of justice in political life. Habermas saw this conception of emancipatory
sociological knowledge as exemplified both in Marx's conception of the critique of
ideology and in Sigmund *Freud's conception of psychoanalysis as a work of overcoming
repressive pathological forms of con sciousness. Both Marxian ideology critique and
Freudian psychoanalysis represented forms of cognitive liberation from coercive and
illusory structures of communication.
In later work from the late 1970s onwards, however, Habermas withdrew trom some
central elements of this thesis. His most distinctive break with the earlier Frankfurt
School occurred in his two-volume work The Theory of Communicative Action (1981a,
1981b), which is discussed at length in Chapter 13 of this book.
Western Marxism from the 1960s to the present
In surveying the field of critical theory, one observes a heterogeneity of projects loosely
connected by commitment to interdisciplinary analysis and an interest in radical social
critique. In the 1960s the field of critical theory came to be complemented both by more
activist forms of Marxism and by more academic forms. Four particular strands stand
out in this period. The first is the work of Herbert *Marcuse in the USA. The second is
the proliferation of *existentialist and autonomist Marxism in France and Italy. The third
is the emergence of *'structuralist' and 'analytical' Marxism in the 1970s. The fourth is the
rise of 'Cultural Studies' in Britain and the USA since the late 1970s. We now look at
these four strands in turn.
Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

Herbert Marcuse, an early member of the Frankfurt School who emigrated to the USA in
1934, worked for US intelligence during the Second World War, and then in the State
Department. After the war he remained in the USA to pursue an academic career and
rapidly ascended to the role of a guru of the American New Left in I he 1960s. A philosopher
by training, his first book Reason and Revolution (1941) introduced English-speaking readers
166 DOUGLAS KELUJER
to the dialectical thinking of Hegel, thematizing the unity of theory and practice, or
'praxis' in the popular term of the 1960s. His next book Eros and Civilization, of 1955,
combined Marxism with Freudian psychoanalytic ideas. In this text, Marcuse's emphasis
on polymorphic sexual liberation, play, utopian desire, and cultivation of an aesthetic
ethos anticipated the counter-culture of the 1960s.
In One-Dimensional Man of 1964 Marcuse theorized the decline of revolutionary poten
tial in capitalist societies and the development of new forms of social control. Marcuse
argued that what he called 'advanced industrial society' creates false needs that bind
individuals into the existing system of production and consumption. In this argument,
mass media culture, advertising, industrial management, and liberal discourse reproduce
the existing system and attempt to eliminate critique and opposition. The result is a 'one
dirnensional' universe of thought and behaviour in which aptitudes for critical thinking
begin to wither away. Marcuse here questioned two of the fundamental premises of
orthodox Marxism: the idea of the proletariat as a reliable source of revolutionary opposi
tion and the idea of the inevitability of capitalist breakdown. Rather than locating forces
of revolutionary change exclusively in the working class, Marcuse championed the non
integrated forces of minorities, outsiders, and the radical intelligentsia, hoping to nourish
oppositional thought and behaviour through what he called 'the great refusal'. Where the
old Left had embraced Soviet Marxism in a doctrinaire and puritanical way, the New Left
under Marcuse's influence combined critical Marxism with ideas of participatory democ
racy and an openness to a range of pluralistic alliances, embracing social movements
around issues of gender, race, sexuality, peace, and the environment. Marcuse tirelessly
criticized 'advanced industrial society' with its concomitant militarism, racism, sexism,
imperialism, and its violent colonial intervention in developing countries in the so-called
'Third World' (see also Marcuse 1968, 1969, 1998a, 1998b).
French and Italian Marxism

'Existentialist Marxism' developed in France in the 1950s and 1960s under the influence
of Jean-Paul *Sartre, combining philosophy, politics, and literary theory (see further
Poster 1975). Based on Sartre's concept of freedom, *existentialist Marxism focused on
the sufferings and desires of concrete individuals, considered as vulnerable mortal
beings. In his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Sartre combined Hegelian-Marxist
concepts of alienation and class consciousness with his own existentialist philosophy of
the ethical freedom of the autonomous human ubject. Socialism in this sense made
possible a reinteg ration of the 'class-for-itself' with the 'class-in-itself', or 'spirit' and
'existence', in Hegel's language. In the same period, Sartre also championed Frantz
*Fanon's doctrine of revolu tionary violence by the oppressed peoples of Western
colonialism in the Algerian war of independence against France. Sartre evoked
tremendous controversy and was criticized by the French liberal social philosopher
Raymond*Aron.
In May 1968, radical students took control of the universities in Paris and joined
with workers in a general strike that shocked the complacency of the advanced capitalist
societies, believing themselves immune to challenge and upheaval. The French activists of
1968 found inspiration in the neo-Marxist ideas of the *phenomenological theorist Henri
*Lefebvre (1947, 1974), who, like Bloch, had developed a critique of everyday life. A further
167
stimulus came in the work of Guy *Debord, author of The Society o{lhe Spectacle (1967) and
the central figure in the anarchist Situationist movement which militated for revolution ary
alternatives to consumerist escapism and pectacular distraction from misery. In these
years many younger French intellectuals turned to the new forms of Marxism, including
Jean *Baudrillard and Jean-Frarn;ois *Lyotard, who would later become part of a *post
structuralist and *postmodernist movement that went beyond Marxism. Influenced by
George *Bataille and other maverick thinkers, Baudrillard's early work developed neo
Marxian critiques of the consumer society, exploring diverse utopian alternatives (see fur
ther Kellner 1989b). In the 1970s, however, Baudrillard declared that the emergence of a
new postmodernity required altogether different forms of theory and politics, thus break
ing with Marxism (for further dbcussion ofl3audrillard's work, see Chapter 12 of this
book, pp. 263-5).
In Italy in the 1970s, a form of Marxism developed known as 'autonomist Marxism',
notably around the work of Antonio *Negri (1976). Autonomist Marxism sought to
develop revolutionary politics outside the official European communist parties as these
were deemed to be compromised by reformist attitudes. Harry Cleaver (1979) criticized
the Frankfurt School and other forms of Western Marxism for exaggerating the power of
capi talist hegemony and underestimating the force of working-class opposition. This
outlook continues in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire (2000), which
presents con tradictions in globalization in terms of an imperializing logic of 'Empire' and
an assortment of struggles by the 'multitude'. Hardt and Negri present the emergence of
'Empire' in forms of sovereignty, economy, culture, and struggle that open the new
millennium to an unfore seeable flow of political surprises and upheavals.
Structural and analytical Marxism

]{eacting against existentialist Marxism, Louis*Althusser developed a school of
'structural ist *Marxism' influenced partly by French *structuralist theory (discussed in
Chapter 9 of this book). A member of the French Communist Party, Althusser argued that
Marxism pro vided 'scientific' perspectives on capitalism which made possible a
revolutionary transi tion to socialism. In For Marx (1965) and Reading Capital (1970),
Althusser analysed links between the structures of the economy, state, and ideology in
relation to material condi tions of production that were 'in the last instance' the
determining force of all domains of social life. Like Lukacs, Althusser presented Marxism
as a theory of the *'totality' of capital ist society and history. But he insisted that Marx
undertook a sharp 'epistemological break' with Hegel in his later writings on economics.
Althusser himself excoriated all Hegelian and 'idealist' elements that had entered Western
Marxism. Championing what he called 'theoretical practice', he argued for the relative
autonomy of theory in relation to what he called 'ideological state apparatuses'. Among
others, Althusser's brand of Marxism influ enced the Slovenian theorist Slavoj "Zizek who
has combined structuralist Marxism with
*Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (see Chapter 8 of this book, pp. 184-5).
Althusser has been criticized for his highly abstract Marxism, notably by the British so
cialist historian E. P. *Thompson (1978). In the 1980s, however, another academic form
of Marxism developed in the English-speaking world known as 'analytical Marxism.' Like
Althusser's work, analytical Marxism defended science and empirical research against
168 DOUGLAS KELLNER
Hegelian idealist philosophy. G. A. *Cohen's influential Karl Marx's Theory of History: A

Defense (1978) defended a strict *functionalist reading of historical materialism. Jon
*Elster\ Making Sense of Marx (1985) argued that Marx's methodology could only be
under stood in terms of methodological individualism and *rational choice theory.
Marxian concepts of class and capital also found analytical treatment in the work of Eric
Olin Wright (1978) and John Roemer (1981). Central to Cohen's account was Marx's
distinction in the 1859 'Preface to the Critique of Political Economy' between 'forces and
relations of production' (quoted in this book, pp. 44). Cohen concentrated specifically on
Marx's proposition that at certain stages in the development of modes of production, the
forces of production become 'fettered' by the relations of production. According to
Cohen's func tionalist-economistic reading of Marx, revolutionary transitions to new
modes of produc tion occur when the exisiing relations of production are no longer
functional for the full and continuous expansion of the forces of production. Capitalism
in this sense breaks the fetters of the old feudal order. In turn, communism is destined, in
principle, to break capitalism's own fettering of the further growth of productive forces.
Cultural studies in Britain and the USA:

the influence of Marxism
The variety of approaches that have come to be known in the Anglophone world as
'cultural studies' first emerged in Britain in the 1960s at a time of widespread sympathy
for socialism. The historical forms analysed by the earliest phase of British cultural
studies in the 1950s articulated conditions in an era in which there were still significant
tensions in much of Europe between an older working-class culture and newer commercial
kinds of popular culture emanating from the American culture industries. The initial
project of cultural studies developed hy Richard *Haggart, Raymond *Williams, and E. P.
*Thompson attempted to preserve working-class culture against the onslaughts of
commercial mass culture. Thompson's enquiries into the history of British working-class
struggles and the defences of working-class culture by Haggart and Williams were part of
a socialist project that regarded the industrial proletariat as a force for egalitarian social
change. Williams and Haggart supported projects of working-class education, viewing
cultural studies as an instrument of social progress.
The attacks of Thompson, Haggart, and Williams on Americanism and commercialism
in the late 1950s and early 1960s partly paralleled the earlier work of the Frankfurt
School. Yet the British writers valorized a working class that the Frankfurt School had
seen as defeated by fascism in Europe and as unlikely to recover itself as a united class force.
Slightly later in Britain, a second wave of cultural studies emerged at the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies at Ilirmingham University, led by the Jamaican-British
theorist Stuart
*Hall (Hall et al. 1980). The Birmingham School was continuous with the Hoggart
Thompson-Williams 'culture and society' tradition, as well as with the Frankfurt School.
But the 13irmingham School eventually paved the way for a more popuiist of
'postmodern' in cultural studies.
WESTERN MARXISM 169
The Birmingham scholars developed a variety of critical approaches for the analysis
and interpretation of cultural artefacts (see further McGuigan 1992; Kellner 1995). They
came to focus on the interplay of representations of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and
nationality in cultural texts, including media culture. They were among the first to focus
on how audiences actively interpreted media culture in varied ways and contexts,
analysing the factors that guided their responses. Employing Gramsci's model of
hegemony and counter-hegemony, they identified both elements of domination and
elements of resistance, struggle, and creativity.
Like the Frankfurt School, British cultural studies concluded that mass culture
played an important role in integrating the working class into existing capitalist
societies and that mass consumerism represented a new mode of capitalist hegemony.
Both traditions at the same time identified forces of resistance to capitalist society, and
both the Frankfurt theorists and the earlier forerunners of British cultural studies,
especially Raymond Williams, looked to high culture, including avant-garde art and
literature, as critical vehi cles of political consciousness raising. But unlike the
Frankfurt School, the later British writers valorized elements of resistance in popular
media culture and in audience uses of media artefacts. In contrast, the Frankfurt
School tended, with some exceptions, to see mass culture as an undifferentiated,
homogenized tissue of domination-a difference that would seriously divide the two
traditions.
In addition to studies of working-class culture, the Birmingham School focused on the
potential of youth subcultures for resistance to hegemonic forms of capitalist society. The
British scholars considered how popular culture made possible distinct youth identities
and certain potentially counter-hegemonic forms of group membership. They studied
patterns of conformity to dominant political ideologies in dress and fashion codes carried
by members of the upwardly mobile white middle classes, and they demonstrated how
subcultural groups could resist these forms by creating their own styles and identities.
They pointed, for example, to black nationalist subcultures, to the punk movement, and to
Asian and Jamaican-British forms of ethnic contestation (compare Hall and Jefferson
1976; Hehdige 1979). In contrast, the only member of the earlier Frankfurt School to treat
youth culture as a serious political force was Marcuse.
Yet one problem with cultural studies is that it has rarely engaged adequately with
modernist and avant-garde aesthetic movements. In its concern to legitimize the study of
popular media culture, it has tended to turn away from so-called 'high' culture and to
ignore the equally potentially oppositional dynamics of more 'advanced' forms of art,
music and literature. In so doing, it has run a risk of bifurcating the field of culture into
'elite' and 'popular' in way that only inverts the positive/negative connotations of the
older distinction between 'high' and 'low'. We need to be aware that early twentieth
century avant-garde movements such as expressionism, dada, and surrealism sought to
develop cultural forms that would revolutionize society, and that access to the avant-garde
elements of modernist art has not always been simply a privilege of dominant social
classes and groups (compare Burger 1974; Huyssen 1986).
British cultural studies has had a complex relation to Marxism since its beginnings.
/\!though Stuart Hall (1983) and Richard Johnson (1987) grounded cultural studies in a
Marxian model of the circuits of capital (production-distribution-consumption
production), Hall and other figures in cultural studies have not always pursued economic
170 OOUtilAS KHLF.tl1
analysis consistently. Many practitioners of British and North American cultural

studies from the 1980s to the present have tended to pull away from political economy
altogether. Although Hall claimed that with Gramsci he would never deny 'the
decisive nucleus of economic activity' (1988: 156), one might argue that Hall does not
adequately incorporate economic analysis in his work. For example, Hall has
proposed that the emergence of a new 'global postmodern' involves a pluralizing of
culture, suggesting openings to the margins, to difference, to voices excluded from the
narratives of Western culture. However, one might reply, in the more militant vein of
the Frankfurt School, that the global postmodern also represents an expansion of
global capitalism on the terrain of new media technologies and that the explosion of
information and entertainment industries represents powerful sources of capital
realization and social control. Global social and economic exchange certainly suggest a
great many possibilities of cultural communication and subversion of dominant
structures of power. But we must also recognize that such exchange can be limited by
transnational corporations that are becoming powerful political and cultural
arbitrators, threatening to constrict the range of cultural expression rather than to
expand it (compare Best and Kellner 2001; Kellner 2003). For further discussion of
these issues, see Chapters 12, 13, and 14 of this book.
In the 1980s, the neo-liberal turn in the economic policies of most governments of the
developed 'First World' posed a profound crisis for the Left. This anxiety reached a head
with the collapse of communism in the regimes of the Soviet Eastern Bloc and the
revolu tions of 1989. The challenges for \1arxism posed by these developments are
discussed here in Box 20, as well as in Box 34 in Chapter 13 of this book.
Conclusion
Whereas the work of Marx and Engels was inspired and shaped by the revolutionary
movements of 1848, the construction and spread of a tradition of Western Marxism in the
twentieth century was promoted by the success of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and
then later by the cultural movements of the 1960s. Students and young militants through
out the world sought a version of critical and revolutionary Marxism independent of the
orthodoxies and compromises of political parties and regimes such as the Soviet Union .
They rejected scientistic kinds of Marxism in favour of more open-ended and less
dogmatic thinking. In recent decades, Western Marxism has been supplemented, and to
some extent supplanted, by more diverse forms of theory such as post-structuralism,
psychoanalytic theory, discourse analysis, feminist theory, multiculturalism, and
postcolonial theory. Nevertheless, it continues to be a vital strand of contemporary theory
and research. Writers such as Lukacs, Gramsci, Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, and
others continue to be of interest. Although they no longer enjoy the same intellectual
hegemony they once held in some circles of the Left, their writings remain an important
component of the tools of con temporary social theory. Marxism continues to provide
insights into multiple contempo rary problems and crises-from globalization to ecology,
terrorism, imperialism, power, technocracy, postmodernism, and the information society.
171
BOX 20. MARXISM IN THE 1980s: RESPONSES TO THE COLLAPSE

OF COMMUNISM
The 1970s saw many debates and developments in Western Marxism. We may note that in 1973
Habermas wrote a study of what he called the *'legitimation crisis' in 'late capitalism', arguing that the
post-war social-democratic policies of wealth redistribution in Western European states could no
longer expect to confer legitimacy on the fundamental tendencies of capitalist economics (Habermas
1973). By the 1980s, however, as the Western European economies seemed to recover from the
industrial disputes of the 1970s and the incumbent governments made a turn toward neo-liberal
free-market policies, this sense of a basic problem of 'legitimacy' in capitalism seemed to retreat from
mainstream public opinion. Political passions were cooling and an era of conservativism was
inaugurated. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s
and early 1990s presaged a turn away from Marxism in academic social science toward newer
forms of
*postmodernist, *post-structuralist, and multicultural approaches, as well as a turn by many
former leftists to liberal theory and politics.
One characteristic line of argument was taken by Aronson (1995) who maintained that
Marxism's nineteenth-century roots made It difficult to adapt to the changed conditions of the late
twentieth cen tury. Aronson asserted that Marxism had never adequately addressed distinctively
twentieth-century issues of gender, race, sexuality, and other forms of exclusion, focusing too
narrowly on economic factors and questions of class. Classical Marxism's hopes for revolution
had been grounded in the historical forces of its time. But when the political parties and social
classes that been the foundation of its hopes were defeated and the original doctrines could no
longer account for the complexities of reality, it was time, Aronson argued, to move beyond
Marxism to new theories and politics.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, first published in 1985, helped
shape an influential version of 'post-Marxism' that criticized orthodox models and developed a concep
tion of 'radical democracy' based on 'new social movements'. A later dialogue between Laclau, Judith
*Butler, and Slavoj *Zizek continued to reconstruct the Western Marxist project on post-structuralist
and mult1culturalist lines (Butler et al. 2000).
Several theorists have also sought to explain the collapse of communism from the standpoint
of Marxist premises and to appraise the future of Marxism after the demise of the Soviet Union. Some
writ ers have used Marxism to explain the flaws of orthodox Marxism and the reasons for the Soviet
collapse. Thus Kagarlitsky (1990) argued that Soviet communism betrayed Marxist principles, that it
oppressed and alienated the working class and thus produced its own opposition. Likewise,
Callinicos (1991) argued that the Soviet Union never departed from Leninist and Stalinist
orthodoxy and that it was necessary to return to more authentic modes of revolutionary Marxism
represented by Trotsky. Others argued that the Soviet Union failed to keep up with technological
development while images of a more affluent life in neighbouring capitalist countries created
.
disillusion, opposition, and eventually upheaval (see Blackburn 1991; Magnus and Cullenberg 1995,
Callari et al. 1995).
In general, it has been argued that the collapse of communism cannot be regarded In any simplistic
sense as proof of the error, naivety or obsolescence of Marxist ideas. On the one hand, the long-
lasting political repressions and eventual implosion of the Soviet experiment certainly raise serious
l
questions about the capacity of the Marxist vision of society to inform morally valid ins.titutional
arrangements for the administration of justice and the sponsoring of well-being in society. It has
been argued that Marxism never provided an adequate account of the moral bases of politics, in the
sense of determin ing just institutional arrangements for the recognition and reward of individual
virtue and individual
· continues
172 DOUGLAS i<Ei.lNER
BOX 20 continued
moral responsibility-largely because it has tended to regard existing moral problems in world culture as essentially r
In what ways do the Western Marxists build on the doctrines of Marx? In what ways do
they depart from them?
2 How should the concept of ideology be defined? Is all ideology 'false consciousness'?
If not, why not?
3 In what respects does the Frankfurt School's idea of critical theory diverge from 'traditional
theory' or positive science?
4 Is the Frankfurt School's critique of mass culture 'elitist'? How far do more recent writers
provide a better understanding of cultural life?
5 In what sense has Marxism declined over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?
6 Does the collapse of Soviet communism invalidate Marxism?
FURTHER READING
Some good overviews of Western Marxism are Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism
(Verso, 1976), Stephen Bronner's of Critical Theory and its Theorists (Routledge, 2002), Russell
Jacoby's Dialectic of Defeat (Cambridge University Press, 1981), Leszek Kolakowski's Main Currents
o( Marxism, 3 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1978), Kevin Anderson's Lenin, Hegel and Western
Marxism (University of Illinois Press, 1995), and Moishe Postone's Time, Labor and Social Domination: A
Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
The key source for Marx and Engels's classical conception of ideology is The German Ideology
(Lawrence & Wishart, 1975). Among numerous discussions of this conception are Stuart Hall's arti
cle 'The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees', in Betty Matthews (ed.), Marx:
A Hundred Years On (Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), Abercrombie et al., The Dominant Ideology
11iesis (Allen & Unwin, 1980), Douglas Kellner's article 'Ideology, Marxism, and Advanced
Capitalism', Socialist Review, 42 (Nov.-Dec. 1978), 37-65, and the texts on Gramsci and the
Birmingham School cited below. For an interesting analysis, see also Alvin Gouldner's The Dialectic
of Ideology and Technology (Seabury Press, 1977) as well as Gouldner's TheTwo Marxisms
(Macmillan, 1980).
173
On the work of Ernst Bloch, seeJamie Daniel and Tom Moylan's edited Not Yet: Reconsidering
Ernst Bloch (Verso, 1997). For some uses of Bloch's dialectic of ideology and utopia in
contemporary cultural studies, see FredricJameson's article 'Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture',
Social Text, 1: 130-48, as well as Jameson's Late Marxism: Adorno, Or the Persistence of the
Dialectic (Verso, 1990). On Gramsci, ideology, and hegemony, seeJorge Larrain's The Concept of
Ideology (Hutchinson, 1979) and Marxism and Ideology (Macmillan, 1983), Chantal Mouffe's
edited Gramsci and Marxist Theory (Routledge, 1979), and Carl Boggs's The nvo Revolutions.
Antonio Eramsin and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism (South End Press, 1984). The classic
essays of Walter Benjamin, including 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction',
are collected in Benjamin's Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (Cape, 1970). For an introduction
to Benjamin, try Graeme Gilloch's Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Polity Press, 2002). For
an equally pioneering mode of cultural critique similar to Bloch and Benjamin, see Siegfried
Kracauer's The Mass Ornament (Harvard University Press, 1963), based on essays originally
written in German in the 1920s and 1930s.
Some good overviews of the Frankfurt School are Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination: A
History of the Frankfurt School and the institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Heinemann, 1973)
and Seyla Benhabib's Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory
(Columbia University Press, 1986), also Martin Jay's Marxism and Totality (Polity Press, 1984),
Douglas Kellner's Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989),
David Held's Introduction to Critical Theory (Polity, 1990), and Rolf Wiggershaus's The Frankfurt
School: Its fiistory, Theories, and Political Significance (Polity Press, 1994). Some good collections of
readings from the Frankfurt School are Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt's edited The Frankfurt School
Reader (Continuum, 1976) and Stephen Bronner and Douglas Kellner's edited Politics, Culture and
Society: A Critical Theory Reader (Routledge, 1989). The key collection of Adorno's writings on the
culture industry is Adorno's The Culture Industry, ed. Jay Bernstein (Routledge, 1991). See also Brian
O'Connor's edited Adorno Reader (Blackwell, 2000). Two good introductions to Adorno are Martin
Jay's Adorno (Harvard University Press, 1984) and SimonJarvis'sAdorno: A Critical Introduction
(Polity Press, 1998). For a concise account of the Frankfurt School in relation to art and
aesthetics, see Austin Harrington's Art and Social Theory: Sociological Arguments in Aesthetics
(Polity Press, 2004), chapter 6. Adorno himself is difficult to read. A good place to begin is his short book
Minima Moralia (Verso, 1981).
The best introduction to the early work of Habermas is Thomas McCarthy's The Critical Theory of
Jurgen Habermas (MIT Press, 1978). A good collection of essays on Habermas on the public sphere is
Craig Calhoun's edited Habermas and the Public Sphere (MIT Press, 1992). See also Box 28 in Chapter
11 of the present book on Nancy Fraser's feminist perspective on the public sphere. See also
Douglas Kellner's essay 'Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention', in
Lewis Hahn's edited Perspectives on Habermas (Open Court, 2000). On Marcuse, see Douglas
Kellner's Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (University of California Press, 1984) John
Bokina and Timothy Lukes's edited Marcuse: From the New Left to the Next Left (University of
Kansas Press, 1994). For further sources on Marxism in British and American cultural studies, see
Stuart Hall et al. (eds.), Culture, Media, Language (Hutchinson, 1980), and University of
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (ed.), On Ideology (Hutchinson, 1978). See
also Richard Johnson's article 'What is Cultural Studies Anyway?', in Social Text, 16 (1986/7), Jim
McGuigan's Cultural Populism (Routledge, 1992), Douglas Kellner's Media Culture: Cultural
Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern (Routledge, 1995), and loan
Davies's Cultural Studies and Beyond (Routledge, 1995). A useful reader is Meenakshi Durham and
Douglas Kellner (eds.), Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works (Blackwell, 2001). For some Marxist
perspectives on postmodernism, see David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity
(Blackwell, 1989), Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Verso, 1991), Alex Callinicos's Against Postmodernism (Polity Press, 1990), Steven Best and
Douglas Kellner's Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (Macmillan, I991), and Steven Best
and Douglas Kellner's The Postmodern Adventure:
174 lflOUGil\S !{Hi f\li'll
Science Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (Routledge, 2001). See also the titles in
the Further Reading guidance for Chapter 12 and 13 of this book.
if' WEBSITES
Marxist Internet Archive at www.marxists.org/archive/rnarx/ Provides a good resource with a

search facility and links to texts of Marx.
Gyi:irgy Lukacs at www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/ Contains a comprehensive biography, with
sections from his major works.
Antonio Gramsci at www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/ Provides an introduction to Gramsci's
life and thought, with links to selections from key texts.
Illuminations at www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/1llumina%20Folder/index.html
Displays links to essays, excerpts, and articles by contemporary writers on the Frankfurt School
and its legacy.
Herbert Marcuse at www.marcuse.org/herbert/ Shows a site maintained by one of Marcuse's
grandchildren, with a biography, an archive of major works, and reports on his legacy.
Psychoanalytic
Social Theory
Anthony Elliott

Sigmund Freud's legacy for sociology
Repression, civilization, and the Oedipus complex
176
Psychoanalysis after Freud: developments in social theory 176
French structuralist psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan and his school 179
Problems with Lacan
179
Lacan, Althusser, and Slavoj Zizek
183
Psychoanalysis in feminist social theory 183
Nancy Chodorow: the mother---<:hild relationship and male domination 185
Jessica Benjamin: gender and agency
186
Julia Kristeva: subversion and the feminine semiotic 188
Postmodernism and psychoanalysis: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 189
Conclusion 191
FURTHER READING
194
WEBSITES
194
195
Psychoanalysis, as developed by Sigmund *Freud and his followers, has had a major
impact on social theory and modern sociology. Freud's central discoveries-the uncon
scious, sexual repression, the Oedipus complex, and the like-have been deployed by
sociologists to theorize the self and human *subjectivity, *gender and sexuality, the
family and socialization, language and *ideology, as well as the formation ot cultural
identities and forms of political *domination. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, social theorists have engaged with the psychoanalytic tradition in order to
conceptualize the relation between the individual and society, including the complex,
contradictory ways that human subjects acquire, reshape, and transform the ideas,
values, symbols, beliefs, and
176 ANJHONY HLIOTT
emotional dispositions of the wider society. This has been particularly evident over recent
decades as Freudian themes and psychoanalytic motifs have been used to analyse sexual
politics, issues of identity and lifestyle, and the nature of modernity and postmodernity.
This chapter looks at some of the most important elements of Freud's legacy for socio
logical thinking today. We also discuss some influential post-freudian psychoanalytic the
orists who came to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s onwards. These include the French
theorist Jacques Lacan and more recent figures active since the 1960s, including Gilles
*Deleuze, Felix *Guattari, Slavoj *Zizek and the feminist theorists Julia *Kristeva, Nancy
*Chodorow, and Jessica *Benjamin.
Sigmund Freud's legacy for sociology

1 Freudian psychoanalysis shares with sociology a primary preoccupation with the fate .
\ of the individual self in a context of social relationships and wider cultural processes./
While Freud's own writings derive primarily from clinical work with patients, and to
that degree are at variance with the core methodologies of mainstream social science,
his characterization of the human personality has certain parallels with, among
others, Thomas *Hobbes's theory of human nature or with Marx's account of the self-
seeking individual in capitalist society. But whereas both Hobbes and Marx stressed
the impact of social forms in the constitution of the self, Freud's methodological
starting point is the individual psyche, principally the instinctual impulses and libidinal
longings that shape the human imagination.
The self for Freud is radically fractured or divided, split between consciousness of
identity and a repressed unconscious. The biographical trajectory of the self according to
Freud is carried on against the backdrop of a radical otherness of the unconscious. Freud
analyses the psyche into three agencies: the id, the ego, and the superego. Thtl_ id, lying
at the root of unconscious desire, is that which cannotbe ymboliz(;d yet constantly strives
for expression
in our daily lives-manifesting itself in dreams, daydreams, slips of the tongue, and the
- . - ·-- -.. .
like. The unconscious id is a hidden area of the self which knows no reality, logic, or con-
tradiction, and is at the root of how people canimultaneously xpress bothJ_ove and
hate-whether of their parents, their siblings, their friends or colleagues, and so on.
Unconscious desire, infiltrates all human intentions, ideals, and imperatives. Freud sees
therefore the ego as interwoven with the force of the isJ, and the self as a product of the
unconscious. The superego is rreud's term for moral conscience. The supergo is
responsible for the self's sense of prohibition and restraint, and is founded both in the ego
and the wayward drives of the id.
In the following account, we look primarily role of these concepts in Freud's theories
about repression, civilization, and the Oedipus complex.
Repression, civilization, and the Oedipuscomplex

While Freud's writings on human personality and the constitution of the self have been of
interest to sociologists, it is his account of the relations between self and society-primarily
177
in his late writings on civilization-that has had greatest influence. In his late writings,
Freud comes to see human beings as living under the destructive force of a terrifying
death drive, based on strict cultural prohibitions on sexual desire and enjoyment. These
themes are set out in his magisterial books Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and
Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Civilization, Freud proposes, is repressive. Society
imposes psychic demar:ict upon individuals to achieve cultural conformity, demands that
can produce intense personal misery ana neur6tk suff ring:-----' -
According to Freud, ambivalence is at the core of an individual's relation to itself and to
others. Just as the ego seeks to establish order and control over the disruptive unconscious, so
cultural ideas must incorporate the deeper emotional strivings of social members, pressing the
'pleasure principle' into the service of the 'reality principle'. This is necessary, Freud contends,
for the very reproduction of social life. The development of civilization, of social bonds, and
the injunction to labour, all depend upon self-control. Yet it is precisely at this point, where a
disjunction emerges between individual desire and social necessity, that Freud locates cultural
pathology. The fundamental problem for Freud is that culture tends to rob the individual
su!)ject of unfettered instinctual enjoyn1t,>nt, and places gigantic restrictions on sexuality.
Listening to the anxieties of his bourgeois patients each day in Vienna at the turn of the
nineteenth century, Freud discovered a deep connection between personal, inner desires and
the repressive social forms that engender excessive self-control. The denial of feelings, the
structuring of sexuality into narrow paths of monogamy and marital legitimacy, and the rigid
(male) insistence on genital monosexuality: these are, Freud argues, the oppressive emotional
wounds inflicted by culture. Imposing order on the free flow of unconscious desire is a key
task of civilization; but the balance between desire and order is constantly changing and
can easily become too great burden for individuals and collectivities. When the imposition
of social control, order, and structure results in repressive *closure, cultural life is liable to
self-annihilation.
In his early writings, Freud understands the way in which individuals comet<?_
confront social regulation in terms_of the polar opposites of desire and control, pleasure
and reality, sexuality and ·self preservation. Central to this structuring process of
prohibition and re pression is the Oedipus ·complex; which Freud outlines in his classic
early work The Interpretation of Dreams, of 1900. The intervention of the father into the
child-mother dyad is of key importance for grasping the institutionalization of moral
imperatives, primarily because the paternal role is symbolic and thus su_ggestive of social
regulation. In the an cient Greek myth, the young boy Oedipus is fated to murder his
father and sleep with his mother. In studying the significance of this myth, Freud traced
the origins of collective moral prohibitions back in history to a mythical event. The
theorem of an original parri cide, of a murder of the father, led Freud in Totem and Taboo
(1913) to speak of a collective Oedipal moral imperative. Freud paints a picture of a
'primal horde', a collectivity of brothers dominated by an all-powerful father who
monopolizes women. In anger and frustration, the brothers eventually kill and eat the
father. Due to ambivalence and guilt, however, the brothers come to feel remorse for the
killing. This unconscious anguish induces the brothers to identify with the dead father as a
*'totem', and to invent moral rnstraints against the free expression of sexual desire. Just as
in the Oedipal fantasy itself, the terror of the father is now 'owned' on the 'inside'. The
regulation of society is instituted through a renunciation of desire, registered in the taboo
against incest.
178 ANIHONY ELLIOTT
Freud's most developed account of culture and morality as a work of socially organized
'sublimation' is developed in his late book Civilization and its Discontents (1930). This is
discussed in Box 21.
BOX 21. SIGMUND FREUD'S CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
In Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud develops a conception of the 'death -drive' as both the
object and means of a system of repression laying the foundations of culture. Freud's theory of the death
drive entails a radical reinterpretation of the organization of modern culture. By the death drive Freud
understands a will to make clean, to purify, to return to order. Human misery and oppression are no
longer Understood as the outcome of sexual repression alone. Instead, Freud comes to equate culture
with a fundamental constraint on self-destructiveness. Civilization protects against certain essentially
aggressive liabilities of the death drive. 'The main renunciation culture demands of the individual', writes
Paul *Ricoeur (1965: 307) of Freud's metapsychology, 'is the renunciation not of desire as such but of 1
aggressiveness'.
By incorporating this new dualism into his analysis of modern culture, Freud is able to rewrite the
problem of self and society as a contest between love and hate, or between love and death. Love is the
principle of civilized co-belonging. Hatred and the death drive are forces that threaten to tear this apart.
The Freud of Civilization and its Discontents unfolds love and death, eras and thanatos (Greek
words for 'love and 'death', respectively), in the following way:
[C]ivilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and
after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity ... These collections of men are
libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them
together. But man's natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each,
opposes this programme of civilization. The aggressive instinct is the derivative and main representative of
the death drive which we have found alongside Eros and which shares world-dominion with it. (1930:
122)
The pathological compulsions of cultural life are rooted in a repressive structuring of love and
hatred. Freud remains faithful to his earlier view that the reproduction of society depends on sexual
repression; but in his late sociological vision this sexual repression becomes integrated into a
deathly self preservatIon, organized as a destructive assault on the human body, on others, and on
nature. Freud
particularly had in mind the highly authoritarian European societies before the First World War that sent
thousands of young men to their death in 1914. But he also became acutely aware of the
pathologies of fascism, racism, and anti-Semitism in the 1920s and 1930s as a form of breakdown
of civilization, resulting from a transformation or degeneration of sexual repression into a will to
exterminate the alien
and disorderly. Today we may also think of the phenomenon of 'ethnic cleansing', as well as homo
phobia and 'moral panics' about people perceived as deviant.
Freud's writings on the fate of the self in contemporary culture have strongly influenced debates in
social theory, from Herbert *Marcuse (1955) to Michel *Foucault (1976) and many others. Too much
repression, Freud says, leads to intense unconscious anguish, hostility, and rage. At such a point, the
intensification of unconscious desire can release the mental dams of sexual repression in a far-reaching
way. The issue of the subJective seeds of social and political transformation are thus at the heart of
Freud's contribution to sociology and social theory.
179
Psychoanalysis after Freud: developments

in social theory
For many philosophers, artists, and writers, Freud's ideas have been as fertile and
challeng ing as they have been contentious and problem-ridden. We may note in brief that
Freud's own speculations about civilization and social dynamics from the later years
of his life tend not to live up to the scientific claims and credentials that hebegan by
attaching to psychoanalysis as a clinical project in his early years. They suffer from
tendencies to reductionism and physiological determinism where problems of mental
and psycholog ical illness in individuals are generalized to whole collectivities of
social agents. In mak ing these generalizations from the individual to the collectivity,
Freud tends to neglect the mediating role of shared social forms of cultural expression
and shared communica tion systems transmitted through language which give
different meanings to biologically lived experiences in different cultures and at
different times in history. It is possible to object that Freud's speculations about
certain putative 'universal constants' of human nature betray a pretension in
psychoanalysis to universal scientific know ledge about human behaviour that fails to
acknowledge its own cultural and historical limits, as one discourse about human life
among others. The revolutionary brilliance and ingenuity of Freud's arguments about
'repression', 'displacement', 'condensation' 'unconscious wishes' and 'drives' prevented
him from acknowledging that the story of sexuality and its manifold disguises might
not be the only story to be told about human nature with an ultimate claim to truth.
These problems notwithstanding, Freudian ideas have loomed large in sociological
conceptualizations of human subjectivity and interpersonal relationships and the mix
of reason and irrationality in politics and history. The remainder of this chapter will
discuss a few highly fruitful ways in which subsequent psychoanalytic writers
critically extended Freud's thinking in various directions by adopting certain elements
of his work and discarding others. We look at three key developments in the
emergence of a psychoanalytic strain of social thought in the twentieth century. These
are: first, a French *'structuralist' school, founded in the 1950s through the work
of]acques Lacan; second, feminist psychoanalytic thinking since the 1960s; and lastly
postmodernist psychoanalytic theorizing, represented by the work of Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari. In Box 22 we also consider the role of psychoanalytic ideas in Marxist
and functionalist social theory from the middle decades of the century.
French structuralist psychoanalysis: Jacques

Lacan and his school
For many years the integration of psychoanalysis with Marxist and *functionalist theory
developed by members of the *Frankfurt School on the one hand and Talcott *Parsons on
180 ANTHONY ELLIOTT
internalized by human subjects throughout the socialization process. According to Parsons's function
alist appropriation of Freud, the structure of the human personality is the outcome of an internalization
of desired objects, role relationships, and ethico-cultural values that make up the broader social
network. In this approach, it is the linkage of personality structure, the social system, and the cultural
system that is stressed (see Parsons, 1964).
----- --------- continues
PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIAL THEORY 181
Box 22 continued
Unlike Marcuse's and Adorno's emphasis on social manipulation of the unconscious, Parsons found
a kind of pre-established harmony between the individual and society. While Parsons's attempt to
blend sociological theory with psychoanalysis has few followers today, some aspects of this work have
con tinued to be influential. Another exponent of a fusion of Freudian ideas with socialization theory is
the German sociologist Norbert *Elias (1939), whose work on 'civilization' and *'civilizing processes' is
dis
cussed in Chapter 6 of this book.
the other was commonly regarded as the most important work in this sub-field of modern
sociology. However, from the late 1960s onwards, the impact of French theory,
particularly
*structuralist and *post-structuralist philosophy, became increasingly influential in under
standings of the social dimensions of psychoanalysis.
The key figure in this connection was Freud's French interpreter Jacques *Lacan.
Seeking to rework the core concepts of psychoanalysis in light of structural linguistics,
Lacan argued that the unconscious exemplifies key linguistic features. Lacan famously
stated that 'the unconscious is structured like a language' (1973: 48). The subject, or the 'I',
according to Lacan, is not transparent to itself. Rather, it is located in a system of
signification from which identity is fashioned. For Lacan, linguistic *intersubjectivity is at
the centre of psy chological functioning and its disturbances. Distortions and pathologies
at the level of the self are, Lacan says, located in 'the discourse of the Other'. Among the
most central com ponents of Lacan's work are, first, his conception of the 'Mirror Stage'
in the formation of the ego, secondly his triangular conception of 'the Imaginary', 'the
Symbolic' and 'the Real', and thirdly his distinctive use of the structural linguistic theory
of Ferdinand de Saussure. We look at these three components in turn.
One of Lacan's most influential texts is his essay from 1949, 'The Mirror Stage as
Formative of the Function of the l' (1949). In this essay, Lacan conceptualizes the infant's
initial recognition of itself in a mirror or a reflecting surface, and how this generates a
sense of identity. Through the mirror, Lacan argues, the infant makes an *imaginary
identifica tion with its reflected image, an identification to which the infant reacts with a
sense of jubilation and exhilaration. But the mirror image of the self is, in fact, a
distortion: the mirror lies. The mirror stage is radically 'imaginary', since the consoling
unified image of selfhood which it generates is diametrically opposed to the actual bodily
fragmentation and lack of coordination of the child. According to Lacan, these imaginary
traps and dis tortions are a universal and timeless feature of self-organization. Lacan sees
such illusions as directly feeding into and shaping pathologies of the self in contemporary
culture.
Lacan's thinking in psychoanalysis revolves around three hasic concepts that stand in a
triangular relation to one another: the concept of the Imaginary, the concept of the
Symbolic, and the concept of the Real. By the 'Imaginary', Lacan means the mental
images projected by a particular individual self, a subject, in order to make sense of the
chaos of its impressions, sensations, and desires. By the 'Symbolic', Lacan means the
public code of language, the public order of legitimate standards of sense and reference
and expected norms of conduct. The Symbolic order pre-structures the Imaginary for any
individual subject. A child is inducted into the Symbolic order by its parents, through the
workings of
182 t N,HONY [LLIOYT
the Oedipus complex. B, the 'Real', Lacan means every experience which erupts into
the Imaginary or the Symbolic from the out.side ever} experience of a brute intensity-
such as pain, shock, horror, or the witnessing of death-which defies the subject's ability
to make
sense of it in an ordered structured wav
fo illustrate Lacan's terminology with a recent and rather sensitiw example, we might
sav that the crashing of the two hijacked aeroplanes into the ½orld Trade Center in '.\.ew
York on 11 September 2001 constituted a traumatic irruption of the Real into the taken-for
gran ted routines L1f the .'11111hi/1t L1fder for\:e\1· \ ,1rkers .SL1i11,s .1\1L,u t t ht'i r d.1i l\ \1usiness. l
n
11 September 2001 the ro,1ts ,1i this S\·mb,1lic L,r,kr in .1 cert.I in !111,1.-.:i11.111 pr,1iec"ti,1n ,,f the
invincible freedom and security of the USA were sudden Iv thrown into question (compare
Zizek 2002).
Lacan was as interested in the symbolic dimensions of culture as he was in the imaginary
drafting of the self. Rewriting the unconscious and the Oedipus complex in terms of the
symbolic dimensions of language, Lacan's central theoretical point of reference was the
structural linguistics of Ferdinand de *Saussure. Saussure's lingui tic theories and their
influenn.' on French structur,1\bt thuu,sht are discussed ,It len th in l·11.1 ptt'r '1 ,,t t h1, l1L1,1k.
lPP· 197'-20rn. The specific relt'\':mce ,1i S,1ussure\ thinkin.s t,1 L.1c.m can l1e briefly st.ltt'd
here as follows.
A.ccording to Saussurian linguistics.1.mguage is ,1 S\·stem ,,i intcm.il differences. Si_sns .ire
composed of a *'signifier' (a sound or image) and a *'siguified' (the concept or meaning e\
·ok.ed). Saus,ure asserts that the relation bet11een the s1p11iier ,md the ,ignit1ed h ,1rh trary
not 'natural'. The meaning of a word arises only through its differences from other
\1·mds: the 1wnd ·pencil·. for e:x,1mple. is nc>ttllc' 11·,1rd ·pen·...\ ·b,1,,1,;· is 11L1t .1 ·p,11111,hkt'. 11c1t
a 'magazine', not a 'newspaper' and so on. ½'ords do not directlv refer to their objects in
the sense l)i ·copYing· or 'rL'Sembl ing· them. Lm.sluge t"reate, 111t'Jnin.s ,,nh thr,,ugh .111
Hlter nal play of difference, bet\1·een sp,1ken or writtc'n elemenb. R,1ugh\\· spe.11--ing.
L1CJn\ Snnbulic correspL1nd,; tL1 Sau,,urc'°s CL)iKept L•i /,111_,71<'. and L1c.m·, lnu.sin-1r1·
c,1rrespL1nd, to Saussure's concept of parole.
Lacan accepts the key ideas of Saussure's structural linguistics, but he radicalizes the rela
tion between the ,i.snllkr and the s1,smiieJ. Lh.'an Jc,es n,,t tc,aL111 S.1usSLire's pri111.1r1
search for the 'signified', or concept or reference. Instead, Lacan inYerts Saussure's inter
pretati,111 L1ithe sign. assertin_s that thL' sigmfitr has pnm.11:Y ,,wr th, sigmtlt'd 111 the pre'·
dLKtion L1I meaning. L1ran ,t.1tes th.it ·rw s1gnific,1tit1n c.m be smt.1ined ,,the'r th.m lw
rl'fl'rL'l1Ce tu ,l!Wther si.sniflcattL•n .. \\e ,,·ill tail t,,1ursue thequesti,111 further .is 1,,ng .1,
we cling t,1 the illusi,111 that the' ,igniiier .ms\1ers t,1 the functiL1n L1i representin.s the si.s111-
fied. ,H bl'tter, th.it the signifier has t,1 answer t,1r ib t',istence in the n.mw L'i .m, sip1ific.1-
tion whatever . _ . \Ve are forced ... to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the
signified under the signifier' (1957: 165, 166, 170).
Lacan goes on to propose that the signifier is itself coterminous \\ith the unconscious.
!'hi means th,lt l.111p1.1,sc. ,1, .1 ,ntem ui diifert?nce . ,,,11'-ritut,·., the> sub1t',·t · rccpressed
desire through and through. The subject, once severed from the narcissistic fullness of
thl' [111,1gin.lf\'. is in,erted intL1 linguistic and \YlllbL1llc ,tructurt'\ th.It b,,th i<',lt'r,ltt' tlw
unconscious and allow for its contents to traverse the intersubjective field of culture. At the
same time, access to ourselves and others is complicated by the fact that desire is itself an
·eftect ,1t till' si.snitier'.•m outL wp L1i the spacings ,1r c1itfrrence ,,r lm ubtic ,tructuro:,.
HOANAlYllC SOC.Al THEORY 183
From this angle, the unconscious is less a realm on the 'inside' of the individual, or
'underneath' language, than an intersubjcctive space he/ween subjects-located in thme gaps
which separate word from word, meaning from meaning. Lacan comments that 'the
exteriority of the symbolic in relation to man is the very notion of the unconscious' (1966:
469). It is in this sense that advertising and consumer culture in general can be read in
terms of schemes of displaced desire, as systems of internal symbolic references that
attempt to manufacture a sense of wholeness, health, happiness, and meaning tor the
subject that is in fact non-existent. These items of culture attempt to paper over conflict,
fragmentation, dissent, pain, and deprivation, through fabrications of unity, consensus,
satisfaction, and contentment.
Problems with Lacan

Lacan's rereading of Freud has powerfully influenced social theory. His emphasis on
sym bolic structures in the constitution of the subject and the disruption of these
structures through the fracturing effects of the unconscious has been of core importance
to debates about social identity (see, for example, Ragland-Sullivan and Brivic 1991; Leu pin
1991). His stress on the interweaving of language and desire has served as a useful
corrective to accounts that portray the self as site of rational functioning. His linguistic
reconceptualiza tion of the unconscious powerfully dcconstructs theories of
representation which presume that mind and world automatically fit together.
Yet there are limitations with the Lacanian account of *subjectivity and social relations.
While it is undeniable that Freud viewed self-misrecognition as internally tied to ego for
mation, Lacan's interpretation raises some problems. The difficulty with his conception
of the distorting mirror is that it fails to specify the psychic capacities which make any
such misrecognition possible. Lacan denies the expressive agency of the subject to such
an extent that it becomes difficult to see how he can coherently speak of any self at all.
Related to this problem is Lacan's tendency to suppress the radical implications of Freud's
discov ery of the unconscious by structuralizing it, by reducing it to a chance play of
signifiers. Lacan tends toward a *deterministic conception of the self as a heing
constructed by forces that radically elude all possibility of the self's *autonomous
appropriation of them (see for example the criticisms by Ric ur 1965; Castoriadis 1975;
Laplanche 1987; Elliot 1999). It can be argued that in presenting desire as entirely and
linguistically pre-structured, Lacan effectively strips the subject of any capacity for
autonomous self-transformation.
However, despite these problems, Lacan has been a fruitful source of inspiration for
several social critics. One recent exponent has been the Slovenian theorist Slavoj *Zizek,
who has eclectically combined psychoanalysis with the structuralist Marxism of Louis
*Althusser and Hegelian *dialectics. It is to Zizek's work that we now turn.
Lacan, Althusser, and Slavoj Zizek

Lacan himself was not especially interested in political applications of psychoanalysis. It
was one of his followers, the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who brought
Lacanian theory to the centre of debates in sociology (Althusser's work is also discussed
in Chapter 7 of this book, pp. 167-8). In his influential essay 'Jdeology and Ideological
State
184 t NTHONV ELLIOTT
Apparatuses' (1971), Althusser analysed ideology in terms of the process by which

individ uals come to relate to themselves in a manner which supports dominant class
relations. According to Althusser, ideology provides an imaginary identity, an imagined
map for lo cating oneself in the wider social network. Echoing Lacan, Althusser uses the
notion of the mirror stage to deconstruct ideology. Althusser argues that there is a
duplicate mirror struc ture at the heart of ideology, a structure that grants to the self a
political mirror in which it can recognize itself and other people. Althusser calls this
process 'interpellation', involving a capturing of the individual within a net of received
social meanings. This Lacanian Althusserian account of the ideological 'subjection' of the
subject has deeply affected de bates in social theory about *agency, structure, class, social
fragmentation, and cultural order.
Drawing on this framework, Zizek considers the ambivalence of unconscious desire
and specifically the impact of fantasy in contemporary life. For Zizek, as for Althusser,
ideology is an imaginary domain that implies a collective relationship to socio-symbolic
forms of class, race, nationality, and gender. In contrast to Althusser, however, Zizek
contends that ideology always outstrips its own social and political forms; it is a realm
'beyond' interpellation or internalization. Ideology, he says, is not something which
magically sets to work on individuals, assigning identities and roles in the act of
producing itself. Rather, it is an overdetermined field of passionate assumptions and
commitments. 'The function of ideology', Zizek writes, 'is not to offer us a point of escape
from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic,
real kernel' (1989: 45).
Zizek's writing, stranded somewhere between high modernism and postmodernist
pastiche, can be viewed as an attempt to develop a psychosocial diagnosis of the self in its
dealings with the global capitalist economy. From Zizek's Lacanian standpoint, the self is
marked by *lack, gap, and antagonism. The subject is alienated through self-blockage or inter
nal trauma, all knowledge of which is displaced at the level of society and history.
According to Zizek, politics vainly tries to build on a melancholy loss or lack at the core
of desire, at the core of passions that people find too painful to acknowledge. In this sense,
ideological discourse operating through fantasy provides a lining or support to the lack or
antagonism that marks the self. Ideologies of nationalism, racism, or sexism structure the
fantastic coherence of cultural formations-with the result that unconscious forms of libid
inal enjoyment periodically erupt as symptoms, such as in the violent waws of killing and
'ethnic cleansing' that followed the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Zizek sees the
eruptions of neo-nationalism and ethnic xenophobia across Europe in precisely these
terms. Racism in his sense is an outer displacement of that which people cannot accept
within. The projection of a 'surplus of enjoyment' onto denigrated others, the dumping of
distressing and painful affects onto socially constituted objects of antagonism, lies at the
heart of the psychic dimension of strategies of political exclusion. This eruption of excess
enjoyment, directed at the Other, represents an unbearable kernel of desire. Such excess is
alleviated solely through its translation into an ideological symptom. Thus the collapse
of Soviet *totalitarianism in Eastern Europe unleashed a surplus of fantasy. It involved the
projection of pain onto something perceived as strange and Other.
It is possible to criticize Zizek's radicalization of Lacan in certain respects. It can be argued
that if loss, lack, and absence are ideological anchors for desire, their composition would
P'iYCHOANAlVTlr SOCIAL THEORY 185
,t::l·m tr, bt mrm· intt::mally difft::ru1tiatt::d than iih·k H·r r,gr111.r·,. i1ick ,r·r·, Hlr:,,lr,gy a, a
fant;r>y ',ru1arir,, thl: v,lt:: ptHf)(J'>t::<,f whid1 i, tr; fill in <1r, <1w1 ,,vr-r r·lr·rm·nh <>f l,H k. 'f hcrt
i, a pr<,blc-m with thh vir:w in,r,lar a, it tr-nrh t<> flatt1·n r,ut thr· r ,,mplr-x, r 1,ntradir tr,ry
rc, (-[Jt1,,n r,f idr:<Jl<>g1cal f<Jrm, tJy individ11ah. iizr·k ,1·r·, nr, ,ignifi1 ant difff-ru1((· rJctwr:t-n
wh,,t hr:r r,nt:: I'> int h<· grip ()f •idcntity pr JIJ!1< '>,Jf r<-cHling phi Ir,,r ,phy ilnd, l;r,,ir al
Jitcratun· r,r l'.'atching il ·1 V talk-,hr,w hr,,t '>Ulh a, ( Jpr,ih Winfrr:y. ·1 hc·,v ;m· all cqually tr,
be· ,t-l'n a, piu• , ,,f 1dt::<Jl<Jgic;,l fanta,y, aimed at dfar ing th,: v,ur ta,tc· <1f Jar k, gap, and
antilg/Jni,m r,r:r: furthi:r J.lli<,tt 2!J(J21. Jn thh n:,pl·lt, i11t::k ha, a tcndt::nr y t<J pa'>'> <Jvc·r
the multiplt::x
way, in which pt::< ,pl,: UJITT l· t<J c hallr-ngr· JHJl itic al idr·rJl<Jgi(·'>, and tr, t rtat the vtry w<JT,t
and m<J,t ,mi,tl'r idl'<,l<Jgical frJTrnc1tirrn, rJn thr: ,aml' lt::vc·l a, fJthu rtlat1vcly
'prr1grl',,ivl'' or 'intelligent' formations.
·1 h,:,t prrJblr:m, in Ziz<·k can trJ ,rJrnc· cxttnt hr: traced back t<J Lacan\ accrJunt of culturr:.
Li,1an\ linkage <Jt the ,uhject r;f the unuJm<.iou, tcJ thr: idea of tht: arbitrary m1turl: <Jf thl:
·,ign t•·nrh t<J ,;ivt an madl:CJUiltl' acuJUnt <Jf hr,w VJmt: idt<Jl<,giuil and f)(J)itical rnr-;rning,
pruJr,rnmat('. 'AU rJthu, int hr- ,ha ping <Jf t hr.: pt:rv1nal ,phr.:rl:. In sll-ad, 1n Lac.an\ writing,
r ultural drJmmat1rrn is r:quattd with all Janguagr- a, such. A, Utw, (]9i)7J and <Jthl'r critic,
havt ar,;ur:d, /.acan\ rathl:r indhuiminatc· equation rJf languagl: with d<Jmination ,r-ri
r,u,ly rJrJwnplay, the hi,toricu//y 1pr:cific '>latu, r,f p<JWU, iduJlrJgy, and VJC1al in,titution, in
the reproduction of cultural life.
Psychoanalysis in feminist social theory

hyr h<Janaly,1'> ha, ah<J <:x<:rtr-d a pr<Jfr1und impact rm dr-hak, a hrJut gender, ,i:.:xuality, and
th•· family in v;cial rt,r:ard1. (Jflfs arnrmg,t many rnflut:ntial apprrJi!c.ht, in thi<, fitld in tht
r:a.rl:,- J'j7r1,-, ·...-;;, Julif:t .\1Jtch1:ll\ hychoanaly1i1 and f-r:mini1m (J974J. In thh brJrJk ''vfitchl:11
dr-1,lrJy•·rJ l·n,11d1an and /.aurnian p,ych<Janalytic. idta, a, a mi:.:an, r,f urnntcting a di,cu,
·,ir,r, ,,t
gr:r1rkr f!'J'l,'f:T with an /\lthu,,l:rian .vlarxht thr.:rJry r)f latl: capitalist ,rKit:ty. Against
th1<, trw,Jwtical rJackrJrr,p, ,hl: il'>'>Utl:CJ that cldiniti<rn, rJf masculinity and femininity arl:
framed through linguistic and historical structures-with man as a self-determining,
autr,n<Jrnr;u<, ag,-:nt, and wrJman a, a lac.king '()thr-r'.. vlitchdl argu(:d that such gtndtr
dualism wa, highly r_r,nduuvt trJ capital1'>1 ,<Kial rr-gulati<Jll, im·rJlving a ,plit httwr-l:n
privatt and pur;lic and giving rhl' trJ pathr;lrJgit'> in familial lift. ·i h<Jugh uiti<.iztd in ,/Jme
feminist circles, Mitchell's ideas have been influential in feminist sociology.
In the USA since the 1980s, the feminist theories of "Janey *Chodorow and Jessica
• H•·n1Mnm hilvt· iJhr, bn·n dfcctiVf· in cr,ntr-mprJrary v;cJCJirJgy. ·r ht,t authw, draw fr()m
P'>'.-''.hr;analyw,, r;ut rathE·r than turning t<J Lac.an and J-rench p,ych<Janaly,i,, their work
,r·l<cr.ti·.'•:ly inr_r;rpr1ratr-, thl: in,ighl'> rJf J·rl:udian and pfJ,t-1-rl:udian thtory, a, W(:]] a, the
• 'r,rJ1<:r.t rtlatir;ns,' tht<Jrit, <JI tht Briti,h and ,\mtrian-Briti,h p,ych11analy<,ts, Donald
'Sinn ir ,,tt and .vldan if· Kll:in. In crrnt(:rnp/Jrary J·rr-nch fl:m mi ,m, r,nt rJf the mr;,t
influtn ti J analy'lt'> r,f g,:ndu ha'> bttn Julia 'Kri,t<:va. In tht follr1wing ,tctifJm, wt I/Jok
at tht
wr,rr: r,f (Jv,d<JI'N:, ) cnjamin, and Krhtcva in turn. J-tmini'>t VJCial thuJry a, a whole i,
d.scussed in Chapter 11 of this book.
186 ANTHONY ELLIOTT
Nancy Chodorow:the mother-child relationship and male domination

Instead of following Freud's concentration on the father-son relationship as the basis of
the Oedipus complex, Nancy Chodorow examines the mother-daughter relationship. In
her pioneering book The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), Chodorow argues that
mothers experience their daughters as doubles of themselves, through a narcissistic
projection of sameness. Because daughters are perceived as the selfsame of the mother,
differentiation of the self of the daughter is beset with emotional difficulties. The female
child finds it painfully difficult to disengage from the mother's love. Locked in maternal
narcissism, the daughter is emotionally hindered in the task of establishing a sense of
independence and individuality. From this perspective, Chodorow reinterprets Freud's
concept of 'penis envy' not as biologically pre-given, but as a sign of the daughter's desire
for autonomy.The daughter turns to her father, through an awareness of the social
privilege that the phallus symbolizes, in the hope of achieving a sense of independence
from the mother. Yet because fathers are emotionally distant and absent-for reasons to be
examined-daughters are unable to break with the power and authority of the mother.
According to Chodorow, the emotional sensitivity and intuitive concern often taken as a
hallmark of womanhood is a direct outcrop of these socio-structural patterns embedded in
the early mother-daughter bond. Daughters grow up with a powerful sense of emotional
continuity with their mothers, a continuity which provides the basis for a strong relational
connection in women's adult lives. However, this relational component of feminine ident
ity is achieved only at a severe personal cost. Since mother donot perceive daughters as
separate, girls remain without adequate affirmation oft heir sense of personal identity and
agency. This results in a confusion of ego boundaries, coupled with a wider estrangement
from personal needs, aspirations, and desires. feelings of inadequate separateness, lack of
self-control, and a fear of merging with others arise as prime emotional problems for
women. Related to this is the socially devalued category of the feminine. For Chodorow,
women's 'core gender identity' involving weak ego boundaries and immersion in narciss
ism comes to mirror a culturally devalued social position. One common way out of these
difficulties for women, Chodorow argues, is through a defensively constructed set of per
sonal boundaries. Denying what is needed within, women focus on what is needed by
others, particularly the needs of men.
In a similar fashion, Chodorow argues for the existence of a distinctly masculine form
of personality structure. Reversing Freud, Chodorow argues that masculine identity is
forged against the backdrop of a primary identification with the mother. Such love for the
mother among boys makes the achievement of maleness much more difficult than Freud
had ori ginally presumed. For what boys must at all costs repudiate, in order to forge a
masculine selfhood, is their emotional intimacy with the mother. Boys must deny their
primary bond to female eroticism, repressing their own femininity permanently into the
unconscious. The originating cue for this repression comes, somewhat paradoxically, from
the mother. Chodorow argues that boys are assisted in the developmental task of making
their male ness through the mother's perception of gender difference. from the start of life,
mothers propel their sons towards differentiation and autonomy, prizing assertiveness.
Chodorow calls this pre-Oedipal mother-son bond 'anaclitic object-attachment'. This is a
kind of attachment by which mothers relate to their sons as different and other from
themselves.
187
Mothers lead their sons to disengage emotionally from care and intimacy. This
prepares boys for an instrumental and abstract attitude towards the world, an attitudr
which will be expected from them in the public sphere of work and politics.
This account of gender relations suggests that exclusive female mothering produces an
ideology of male domination. The absence of a primary attachment to males in pre
Oedipal childhood leads to an idealization of men and a devaluation of women. The only
way out of this self-reproducing gender system, Chodorow argues, is through shared par
enting. The inclusion of men in early parenting activities should lead to a break-up of
established gender polarity. Both parents would be available to establish a caring, nurtur
ing connection with their children. In this context, children of both sexes would be able to
forge emotional intimacy and autonomy through a primary relatedness to both mother
and father.
Chodorow's work presents a powerful account of those psychosocial forces that distort
gender relations. Her model has exercised great influence (see, for example, Balbus 1982;
Connell 1987). Her claim for a stable gender identity for males and females has proved
attractive to many seeking to understand the persistence of patriarchal domination, and
her arguments about female psychology are illuminating. Of key importance is her
assertion that women want to have children in order to recapture the primary bond of the
mother-daughter relationship. The reasoning is that women's lives are emotionally
drained because men are cut off from sexual intimacy and interpersonal communication.
From this angle, the desire to have a child is rooted in distortions in the current gender
sys tem. Conversely, the abstract traits of male selfhood help to explain the anxieties that
many men experience in relation to intimacy. Masculinity, according to Chodorow,
has come to involve the adoption of intolerance, insensitivity, and emotional
coerciveness. From this angle, male sexual dominance, often involving the use of
violence towards women, has its roots in the damaged, fragile, and precarious nature of
masculine identity.
Chodorow's theory is open to criticism in some respects. There is something too neat
and comfortable in her claim that exclusive female mothering produces asymmetric gen
der roles. She presents a model of woman as primary caretaker, with maternal desire fixed
into either narcissistic or 'anaclitic' modes of identification. But is the institution of moth
ering really so limited to these two psychic categories? What of mothers who encourage
'feminine' modes of expression in their sons? What of the increasing phenomenon of sin
gle-parent, mother-led families? A further problem for some critics is that Chodorow's
con cept of 'core gender identity' returns to a pre-Freudian view of subjectivity, one that
brackets Freud's analysis of infant bisexuality and instead affirms the consoling unity of
personal identity. Consequently, instead of exploring the problematic cultural construc
tion of sexual difference and gender, Chodorow only describes how dominant sex-roles
become interwoven with core masculine and feminine identities. As a whole, her model
resembles a functionalist account of how sexual identities are generated to mirror gender
power in patriarchal modern societies. According to Jacqueline Rose (1986), Chodorow in
this respect fails to get beyond a basic notion of 'gender imprinting'.
A third possible criticism concerns Chodorow's suggestion that under conditions of
shared parenting, men would develop the kind of relational qualities that women possess,
while women would be free to develop personal autonomy. Given Chodorow's own thesis
about gender identity being powerfully shaped in negative and polarizing forms, it is not
so
188 ANTHONY ELLIOTT
clear how women and men might actually liberate themselves from the destructive gender
identities that currently preoccupy them.
Jessica Benjamin: gender and agency

In The Bonds of Love (1988), Benjamin focuses on women's lack of agency in the
wider social context of power relations. Like Chodorow, Benjamin sees the contemporary
gender system as locating the mother at the pole of biological regression on the one
hand, with the father at the pole of progressive agency on the other. But unlike
Chodorow, Benjamin refuses to view the psychic world of the developing child as
simply mirroring gender asymmetry. Instead, Benjamin contends that it is necessary
to tackle head-on 'the problem of desire': that is, the identifications and cross-
identifications through which an infant establishes basic differences between itself
and other people. With this aim, Benjamin develops a concept of 'identificatory love',
by which she refers to a pre Oedipal phase of rapprochement in which the child seeks
to establish a sense of both attachment to and separation from parental figures.
Through identification, the small child is able to separate out a sense of elf while
remaining emotionally connected to others.
According to Benjamin, pre-Oedipal identificatory love is routinely denied and dis
placed in modern society. Children of both sexes cannot n1aintain their identificatory Juve
for the mother since she is devalued by current sexual ideology. While boys can identify
with the father and his phallus to separate from the mother and establish autonomous in
dividuality, the same path to psychic individuation is denied to girls. A girl' s empathic
relationship to the exciting father is usually refused, with the result that women's 'lack' of
desire returns as masochism in idealizations of male power. This means that the tension
between dependence and independence, which underpins healthy emotional relationships,
break down in society at large. Worse, sexual relations between men and women may
grow diseased and deformed into master-slave patterns.
In Like Subjects, Love Objects (1995) and The Shadow of the Other (1998), Benjamin
explores in more detail the range of multiple identifications that women and men forge or
discover through sexual object choice. Here Benjamin focuses on constructions in which
the adult self accepts multiplicity and difference, displays complementary erotic fantasies
or gender ideals, and tolerates oscillating identifications. She forcefully questions Freud's
construc tion of gender identity along the lines of splitting and polarization-
masculinity versus femininity, activity versus passivity, same versus other. Oedipal
theory, she argues, divides the sexes too neatly around the notion of anatomical
difference, foreclosing the myriad paths through which individuals identify with both
masculine and feminine ideals of the self.
Against the thesis that love object and identification are polarized (the boy loves his
mother but identifies with his father), Benjamin focuses instead on the murky,
indistinct emotional identifications with both mother and father, stressing throughout
that inter personal relationships and fantasies always coexist. Benjamin stresses the
bisexual or 'poly morphous' (multi-directional) identifications of the most primitive stage
of psychosexual development, in the pre-Oedipal phase. In her view, pre-Oedipal
bisexuality suggests that the defensive repudiation of opposite sex identifications in the
Oedipal stage depends on a
PSYCHOAt,AL'fTIC SOCIAL THfORY 189
denial of bisexual identification, and on an adoption ot mutually 1cxclu\1ve gender pmi

tions. ln this way, polarity is sub\tituted for paradox in ma\culini\t culture. But Benjamin
also emphasize\ that the recuperation of the pre-(h:dipal pha\e can he revisited through
out life. Cross-identifications of the pre-Oedipal \tage with tolerance for difference and
multiplicity inform what she terms the 'po,t-Oedipal' configuration, in which a more
playful and creative approach is taktn to identity, sexuality, and gendc1. According to
13enjamin, the psychological task of replacing splitting and polarization with the sustain
ing of psychic tension and the ability to manage opposing emotional rlispositions towards
self and other rewlts from fluid boundaries between Oedipal and pmt-Oedipal configura
tions. For the boy, inclusion of denied feelings or blocked identifications depend on
regaining contact with multiple identifications of the pre-Oedipal period, especially with
experience of the mother as a creative subject.
Ben1am111 accepts paternal identification as potentially playing a positive role in the
achievement of autonomous female subjectivity. However, she emphasizes that any
identification with the father is likely to prove counter-productive as long as the cultural
devaluation of women remains in place. In her view, merely an alteration of parenting
arrangements-as proposed by Chodorow-is insufficient to transform gender struc
tures. Non-repressive gender relations depend rather on replacing the cultural split of
progressive autonomous father against regressive mother with new sexual identifications
that permit a less rigid set of sexual roles. This would involve a repudiation of defensive
mode, ot separation. That is, the father's phallus would no longer be used as the dominant
medium to beat back an engulling mother. Instead, children might construct more fluid
sexual identifications-expres,ing both masculine and feminine aspects of identity-in
relation to a socially and sexually autonomous mother and a more empathic caring father.
Two figures of love and idealization-both mother and father-are equally necessary for
the creation of non-patriarchal patterns of socialization.
Julia Kristeva: subversion and the feminine semiotic
In a different manner from Chodorow and Benjamin, Julia *Kristeva's reference point for
situating gender and sexuality is the reading of Freud proposed by Lacan. In her book
Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), Kristeva contrasts Lacan's account of the symbolic
order-the social and sexual system of the Law of the Father-with those multiple psychic
forces which she terms *'semiotic'. According to Kristeva, the 'semiotic' is essentially pre
Ji ngui stic. Semiotic processes include libidinal energies and bodily rhythms experienced
by the child during the pre-Oedipal relationship with the mother. For Kristeva, these
pre-Oedipal forms undergo repression upon entry to the social and cultural processes of
the symbolic order.·1 hat is, the flux of semiotic expenence i channelled into the relatively
table domain of ,ymbolization and language. However, Kristeva contends that the repres
sion of the semiotic is by no means complete. The semiotic remains present in the uncon
scious and cannot be shut off from culture.
Against this p,ychoanalytic backdrop, Kristeva explicitly connects her analysis of fem
ininity with the idea of the maternal. Semiotic longing for the pre-Oedipal mother is part
and pared of Ith()( ·L m.1k:n,: iht'if felt tl':.wud, t..1",lt rl Yt '"' s·;",. ,t",1 s ',,.,,..:t"' ·'
e\·er,ti.lY ,pt'\?l h The-.t -.um 'ti, f,\•1..·e, ,Ut' ,utwer,in• ,\I tht' "' 11 ., ,, dt "' -
wtitt'd in a prt',ratr..irchal t'l.'l1Pt' ·tit,n with the nh,thtr\ h' h. Ht'th the,:..b,I'.' ,, • r
disruptin' p,.>knti,1!d the emil.1tk is d1.)"1..'ly int ••w1..wu ,, ,th temn: · t, rut r ,te,\1
emphasiit'S that it w,)uld ht' ,1 mht,1ke to <...n tlut tht' \t'lllt,•h• t •l,)ngs t'\.,lust''-'h ltl
w,)mt'n. On tht' C,)ntr,1n t ht "emil\tlt' is -i pl't;'-l..),;,lip,11 n.-,1lm ,-f t''-l"' r.ent ' t ti.it (\\•ne,
ulttl h•ing prior to se'\ual dittert'IKt' If the semt,ltil' h 'ft·nnmtlt''. tlu-. i' ,1 ft'm11w11t, tr
..tt 1-. ah •an pt\tentially aYail.1t,''-' tt, tx,th w,,men ,md. me•1111 th 1r l'lt,,rh t,) tran,ft\flll
:,l nttt,
,me. gender pt>wer -\s childre•1 of llt,th sex, initt.111\ \ld1 1,;. ,·,,mt·n- thJt h. ,t 1
wonu 1·s bod,-all 1111..lh tdua ls.ire f.Ked \\ith tht' t'mN ,,n..l 1, t :t.11'\1,hmg ,1 rd iti,'11
to the feminme. Femininit, t·,mnN tie (h,·u,,t'll withllllt 1..
!11.ltt'PlJI
:Kriste,a s s ,rt;,•k t"reati,,n and. lite•.u e'\prt',,hm ,1, I"-' ,itik 1.., nt.tilwr, tl)rtm,r'<-'1 t"1
e'\perience. gi· i g ,;\ 1b1..,\k fl'rm tl) tht' ,cmi,,tK It i, 1p tht'1.·ultrn ,n_..._ldt't" 1..)t ths:.' ,trt1,t
lished meaning......Sht' finds s1Kl't a pt>eth.--.; ·ht st' 1,'tit m the w gs t'•f numt'f\lll"
t)f
,n-aPt-gardt autht)f", )rindp I the French pt'<-'h 'tt'l l.lllt' \!,111.ume. L.mtrt',ltn,,nt. ,md
.-\nt,)nin .-\rtaud. as well ;b _l,1mes 1,,\-( '. \lth,)ugh h1.''-1. h.' ,tll nuk ,tu!h,,f". kri,tt''.t d"
,'lb at length on thea1.'stht'tk stnKture, t)f pt't'tk I.mg 1g1., nd e,l1.tlh 1.'n tht ,h1fttng t'it-
1
J,;. cf ,eP ioti( forces that unlink 1.lll\ 1.)US eamn -s in the,e wntt:•r--, Stie . tre,,e,
th..lt tht'
energy of the pre-Oedipal, 'mi,,t1.:- mhe 'lt•mimnt' ,utk1.1\,1tk,'l 1.l' p e.isurt'. ,1 re.ilm
1..'I st't"rd desire, ,,hid11.ktk · patriarch.1 u ltu "°' ,md l.m'-!-...1-.;:1.
In other WTiting ·. :Kri te,·,1 ,eeks to lend htrth1.. ,,», ent t,) th1.• i,ka ,,f ,<'"li ,ti, sut-n:. r
sitin through the empin,·al studY of motherh,xx t: .u 1e, th,1t ,n pn.'.S::n,m,,. m. " •1
can re-:-oYer a rt'presse,t rel.ttion tt' the semilltl( m.1te al thrl)ti,..:h the pr,,t1.llllll.l !
C'llll'ti,'n,tl t''\perience of ,t, ingbirth. Prep1,m -,- inY1.\!w::. a k,nd ,,f plt,1.._ur,1blt 1.n.',1ti\e
link.·.'g \\itl-t 1.'therne,.·. Inhere ·ay '\\·,,men\ rime·. ,he ,l 'llt'' th.it prt'pl,lllt"\ re 'fl' iu,'\.'S
·the r.hh'tl nrdeal of the splitting of th<' sub;1.Yt. ft'•,foublingd the btxh.,ep,1r.1t1,\Il.,md,
><;'\.,\teth"-' lf
the self and of an 1.1ther ,1f nature and Cl'nscil,ume ··. 1. f ph,··i,)k "' ,md r,'e-, h · t<:>,' c,.
1
200· This mtxlt? of rel,tt ng im•olws ,, ..._ tential l'\.,,,mtrudll1n tlf hum,m ,xial f('
ship,. ont? m whICh .in 'w r"'latw1 tt tht '11 t)f,·1tltl\'. it" rkamres. andit's dh:n.H1 ,
1.1 fi:wd 1.1pp,),ttit,n- can,), erturn xist· ,_.,
mascu ,t ,,lt,1n.'
lore rl;:'('enth·. "n,teYa ha, pt. "!-t , •heD1t?, ,h: 1re-.s11.1n. m,)urmng .md 111eLrn1..·h1.)lt,1
in modern n1lture. In dt>presswn. she suggests. there 1s .m eml't ,mal s 1 ·t, 'lt. ·fl.,m
t." - fttn
a, a result of 11.),t ltwe-suffer fwm a paraly:..h l'f ,y111b,,Jil' actint\. lnef e'-, • -1,, t t,
b tot in or s;ub,titute for what has been It,,;t at tht' I wl ,,f tht' r.nhe .\-. the dt'l'l'\'.
std
pers,)n lo,e, mter.:-,t m thE ,urro1mding world. in l,m,:i.1,l!!t' 1t elf. P"Yth11.. ene , ,i, tt· tt\
a more pnm1t1, e m,1de of l\t'ing. to a nMternal. drive--rd.1ted tpr,11 ,._ f e'\ 'nt n1..
Depression pr,1du'-·e, ,l trauma of wmb,Jhc identifh::,1tion. wh11:h m,1y then Ull t'1 ..l ,n
power of semiotK e1er . Inthefore.:- field 0f the semil,ti -in rh thm ·.1. h,mgt'' in inti.\
nat11.m. sen, •', shift·-1'.ri te, a discerns a mean, t0 l"1..1rreLt the unsrl'l,t'n t''-j.'\.'rtei ,l:'
'Y: r ,,, iJTM rm and ac.+• ,_ .w·nct.(-r -stru2;;)t ,n favr, ir r,f an ab trac.t fT'.a't m<.>d< I <if '><•muJtic
, ..
rJ ...a.r 'A.Jf-"n,◄--r -:+ru ,--

'l' 1 t>t n<Af •hat n ·thtr r,f the-,e c.ritici;m<, J tntirdy fair. ft i<, imp<Jrtant to set
i··,,,,f r:,:,rr.anh::il 'r, ' a n dt ! - ;rri;:;.ht_ ! ·,,netb·k--<,'>, a pr<hltm rt'ma:n'>ifl Kr·.tc:"d\a\'¼'rtion

r• p,, npl <-4t 'JO\ of tht '>t'm <JtJ. '>ht a<.'>Umh th.at ',(·m ,,tK d p au::mt nt< •n
.·•c'"f,'.:·. •...,; a:·.·°'··
,:;f-', , ......,,,..,., ff'JW rr·,¢t '>t-Tl'.'-,J!·c.., ,t,ve,.,:,;n'> tran-form ,,, eradiuik 'kxual "·r;!tnce ()T
f/1' f'J"Arap )
I
Postmodernism and psychoanalysis: Gilles Deleuze

and Felix Guattari
t'.,tr,,; ,rt,-rt· ·::1 r:

,} J;,,••-c. rA rr,ychrJar,aly'>·, and km;ni',m, "p'istm'·derni'>t apprr;pria
ti,,,. 'f v,,·,
·,ar ,a < '10''', al:,r; b<:t,.., mfrn• ntiil in rHtr• years Jn tht writ n <, f \1 c ht!
h
",,, ..---<1 •J n
f rar,'/1, 11<,tud, a!Jd far '1'lt.., vunda lwtv> art '.1 >'.U '>t.d in Chai:,•er<, ':I
;:;r;'j 2 ,J! •r, _ r,,<,<,'£.J, tb< r<· ha\ t.l( t-n mu' _h ddJat( ab•"J • th, fatc. of •r.1: m• ·d :ia' or 'd(:;1• h
1
,Ji th<'-, ·,J' <n J)"f>trr '11• •n •c.ult•J"· In •h,-,k dl'A'J'>\l'JD'>, ps \.h,anah,ha, pm· .dtd
'/Y , / -1 .-. t;-,, ,,n ,,pt .1.aJ tf.l'J f<Jr qu,,.,•wr·ng and dt• r;n<,truct ng EnlighttPmtnt d .,._
,,..- r,t n• ,r•v r:pr,, ,tfJ:Jt nc.,tablt thb<irat on of? _.-ch,iana y<,1, in thi<
r '1 : h;;• r;(••n c, '( , "JJ,kt.z(•ard 't ,x •(, t•.a•1'< trtat,,eAnt1 OeJpu,, 0' 1972 pn.
'P:' 1 •i,ta tr,,,,a<, J u,ntn J t,<m trJ tht theory ,,t 'c..ap·t;,.'i m and schizophrtn a·.
J ,,
I .x- ( JJ.: :;r .-j (, .J,:i•a•r c ,,, •r nd •hat t!-',- Lacan an tht'J <Jf d.rt, JJl<,cfdr as t b,rtis tht
-.-,lV ( t t<1 tht y,<. .:1; ,,rd•,1rh m tilt 'kr c_,- of rtpH-S)l<1n The;, mai7ta1r. that ps\c.h>
:,.r•iJ',,•Jc ( Lp,-u,!..dn and Lac..ar: ·.an t'Jn function ·!1 tht- intt n. •so• cap tz.J rr> a<-a nd
,,.,,,t(-'x r<,1rr1 1 ,; •h ur([1f')(.J<, \r.1tc'1fTlt<,lxnt•JUtnfs'1apt.lnthun·kw CJilS) wJ
theincestuous sexual realm of the nuclear family. They criticize Freud's and Lacan's
reduc tion of Oedipal prohibitions merely to signifiers which chain desire to normative
represen tations, at the point at which we come to desire what capitalism wants us to
desire. Instead, in a more radical gesture, Deleuze and Guattari seek to uncover this
psychoanalytic privi leging of desire rooted in lack as a product of Law. They argue that
desire in fact precedes representation and self-identity, so that there is nothing at all
personal to the flows of libido, which continually burst out anew. They propose
giving full throttle to flows of libidinous energy, affirming the absolute 'positivity' of
unconcious productions and treat ing schizophrenia as a potentially emancipatory
model.
Anti-Oedipus was a courageous poetic attempt to explode the *normative power of cat
egories like 'Oedipus' and 'castration', using psychoanalytic concepts against the coloniz
ing conceptual logic of psychoanalysis itself. Deleuze and Guattari trace the 'free lines' of
schizophrenic desire as affirmative force, as a series of enabling rhythms, intensities and
transforming possibilities. From this angle, the schizoid process is what enables libidinal
pulsations to be uncoupled from systems, structures, or cultural ohjects, which may in turn
transform the production of the political network, making politics no longer unfold ac
cording to the repressive functioning of Law. Rejecting the rigid and closed worlds of
Oedipus and capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari claim to speak for schizophrenia over neu
rosis, for flows of desire over lack, for fragments over totalities, differences over uniformity.
They write that 'schizophrenia is desiring production at the limit of social production'
(Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 35). Against the Oedipalizing logic of capitalist discourse,
where desire is channelled into prescribed pathways, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the
impersonalized flows of schizoid desire can herald a radical transformation of society.
Similar theoretical directions were taken in the early writings of the French philosopher
Jean-Frarn;ois*Lyotard, whose work is discussed at greater length in Chapter 12 of this book
(pp. 260-2). Lyotard argues that political society is itself secretly libidinal. Whereas Deleuze
and Guattari hold that desire is codified and repressed capitalist arrangements, Lyotard
views contemporary society as an immense desiring system. In Lyotard's picture, the post
modern is a vast libidinal circuit of technologies, a culture swamped with seductive signs
and images. Underscoring the indeterminancy of intensities, Lyotard here effects a shift in
focus away from theories of representation and structures of the psyche toward bodily
intensities and erotogenic surfaces. In his text Libidinal Economy (1974), Lyotard constructs
the excitations of libido on the model of the Mobius strip, conceptualized as an endless
series of rotations, twistings, and contortions. The upshot of this, in political terms, is a
series of proposals about how best to extract libidinal pleasure and intensity from
postmodern culture. 'What would be interesting', Lyotard writes, 'would be to stay where
we are, but at the same time to grab all opportunities to function as good conductors of
intensities' (1974: 311).
The postmodern psychoanalytic thought of IJeleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard emphasizes
experiences of fragmentation, dislocation, and polyvalency in contemporary society. It is
pitted against the view that social transformation might be linked to the undoing of hid
den meanings or discourses-as suggested by theorists such as Marcuse and the early
*Habermas. Instead, truth in postmodern psychoanalysis is located in the immediacy of
libidinal intensity itself. In the postmodern imagination, the unconscious cannot
be tamed or organized. Desire needs no interpretation; it simply is. It is within the diffuse,
PSYCHOANALYTIC SOC.AL TliEOHY 193
perverse, and schizophrenic manifestations of desire that new forms of identity, otherness,
and symbolism can be found.
The issues raised by postmodern psychoanalysis have an interest in light of contempo
rary social transformations such as globalization and new communications technology.
However, it is not apparent that postmodern psychoanalytic theories generate genuinely
sustainable criteria for the critical assessment of social practices, politics, and value posi
tions. As Dews (1987), Frank (1983), and other critics have urged, the dissimulation of li
bidinal intensities enjoined in many currents of postmodern psychoanalysis is something
that can be ideologically marshalled by both progressive and reactionary political forces
alike. One may argue that the idea of desire as something ipso facto rebellious and
subver sive is premised on a naive naturalism, failing to examine realistically the specific
institu tional forms in which unconscious passion is embedded. Here there is little
consideration of the potential harm, pain, and damage that psychical states of
fragmentation and fluid ity may comprise. There is a grave danger of romanticizing
'schizophrenia'.
Conclusion
Postmodern variants of psychoanalytic thinking need to be placed alongside the full
gamut of schools and developments in psychoanalytic social theory discussed in this
chap ter. Postmodern interventions are not understandable other than as polemical side-
shots across the foundational work of Freud and the subsequent contributions of figures
such as Lacan, Marcuse, Fromm, Parsons, and the Frankfurt School, as well as the work
of feminist theorists such as Chodorow, Benjamin, and Kristeva.
We have seen that in Chodorow's work, psychoanalysis is part of an attempt to under
stand the psychic components of female and male socialization, especially in terms of the
unconscious forces that shape gender roles. In Jessica Benjamin's work, psychoanalysis is
deployed to rethink the dynamics of domination and submission within the wider frame
of gender, society, and history. In Kristeva's texts, we find primarily a set of observations
about transformations of the psyche and about how identity splices with disruptions in
cultural life. For Lacan and the various Marxist writers who draw on his work, including
Althusser and Zizek, psychoanalysis is the study of the precarious fabrications of identity
that make up our sense of self in a world shot through with displaced representations of
desire encoded in everyday language and the mass media.
The individual writers discussed in this chapter by no means exhaust the scope of
psychoanalytic social thought. There have been numerous contributors to psychoanalysis
since Freud whose work we have not been able to discuss here. Among others, these
include particularly the Austrian-British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and the British
psychoana lyst Donald Winnicott, who both exerted a major impact on the study of child
psychology. Alongside these, mention should be made of the work of Freud's daughter
Anna, as well as of the Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung who applied psychoanalysis to
the study of myth, folklore, and fairy tales, speaking of various 'archetypes' of the soul.
All these develop ments attest to the continuing vitality of Freud's revolutionary work in
contemporary thought, despite its various methodological limitations and problematic
assumptions about the nature of the human animal.
194 f, {HHONY ELUOH
How far are Freud's analyses of psychological illnesses in individual persons applicable to the
study of whole societies and civilizations?
2 What sense can be given to Jacques Lacan's statement that the 'unconscious is structured
like a language'? What does this proposition help explain about social and cultural life?
3 To what extent is psychoanalytic thinking oriented to the goal of social and political
emancipation? How effective are combinations of psychoanalysis and Marxism?
4 How useful is psychoanalysis in explaining male domination and the position of

women in society?
5 How much of Freud's work from the early decades of the twentieth century is relevant to
the study of social behaviour today, in a multicultural or 'postmodern' context? Is the
Oedipus complex still a valid tool of analysis?
FURTHER READING
Some general overviews of psychoanalysis in relation to social theory are Anthony Elliott's four
books Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction (Duke University Press, 2nd edn. 2002), Social Theory
since Freud: Traversing Social Imaginaries (Routledge, 2004), Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in
Transition: Self and Society from Freud to Kristeva (Blackwell, 2nd edn. 1999), and Subject to Ourselves:
Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1996). Also useful are Stephen Frosh's The
Politics of Psychoanalysis (Macmillan, 2nd edn. 1999) and Ian Craib's two books Psychoanalysis:
A Critical Introduction (Polity Press, 200l) and Psychoanalysis and Social Theory (Harvester, 1989). See
alsoJohn Forrester's Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Macmillan, 1980).
For some helpful introductions to Freud, try Anthony Starr's Freud (Oxford University Press,
1989), Richard WolJheim's Freud (Fontana, 2nd edn. 1991), and Peter Gay's more detailed historical
study Freud: A Life for our Time (Dent, 1988). See also Paul Ricreur's hermeneutical study Freud and
Philosophy (Yale University Press, 1970) and Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Chicago
University Press, 1979), as well as the essays in Anthony Elliott's edited Freud 2000 (Polity Press,
1998). Two excellent one-volume collections of readings from Freud are Peter Gay's The Freud Reader
(Vintage, 199S) and Anna Freud's The Esm1tials of Psychoanalysis (Penguin, 1986). Freud is probably
best approached first through The Interpretation of Dreams (Oxford University Press, 1999) and
Civilization and its Discontents (Dover, 1994).
Two good introductions to Lacan (with an emphasis on literary and cultural theory) are Malcolm
Bowie's Lacan (Fontana, 1991) and David Macey's Lacan in Contexts (Verso, 1988). The authoritative
intellectual biography is Elisabeth Roudinesco's facques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in
France, 1925-1985 (Free Association, 1990). The work of Zizek can be approached through Elizabeth
and Edmund Wright's edited Zizek Reader (Blackwell, 1999) or through any of Zizek's own lively
books,such as Looking Awry: An llltroduction to Popular Culture through facques Lacan (MIT Press,
1991) or Enjoy your Symptom (Routledge, 1993).
Some good guides to feminism and psychoanalysis are Jane Flax's Thinking Fragments:
Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodcmism in the Contemporary West (University of California Press,
1991), Nancy Chodorow's Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (Polity Press, 1989), and Rosalind
Minsky's collection of edited readings with commentaries Psychoanalysis and Gender (Routledge,
1996). A useful collection of readings from Kristeva is Tori! Moi, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Tori! Moi
(Blackwell, 1986). For an introduction to the work of Deleuze and Guattari (who do not write in a
conventionally clear way), sec Ronald Bogue's Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 1989) or Paul
Patton's Deleuze and the Political (Routledge, 2000).
195
■ WEBSITES
international Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) at www.ipa.org.uk/ Displays the home page of

the IPA, with links to psychoanalysis as a professional practice.
American Psychoanalytic Association (APSAA) at www.apsa.org Displays the home
page of the APSAA with links to relevant literature, affiliate societies, and the practice of
psychoanalysis.
The Freud Museum London at www.Freud.org.uk/ Contains links to several sites on the life,
work, and influence of Freud.
Jacques Lacan at www.mythosandlogos.com/Lacan.html Provide a comprehensive list of links to
sites on Lacan, including excerpts and review articles.
Feminist Theory at http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/wstudies/theory.htmlContains links to texts on
(mainly French) feminist theory and psychoanalysis.
9 Structuralism and
Post-structuralism
Samantha Ashenden

Ferdinand de Saussure and structural linguistics 197
Structuralism in anthropology: Claude Levi-Strauss 200
Difference and deconstruction: Jacques Derrida 202
Speech, writing, and logocentrism 203
Difference, decentring,and the deconstruction of the subject
204
Discourse, knowledge, and power: Michel Fuucault
206
'Episteme', discursive practices, and the 'end of man'
207
Genealogy, subjectivity, and power-knowledge
209
Conclusion
212
QUESTIONSFOR CHAPTER 9
213
FURTHER READING
213
WEBSITES
214
The movements of thought that developed in France from the late 1950s to the 1970s
known as *'structuralism' and *'post-structuralism' have had a major impact in twentieth
century social science, as well as in the humanities, in aesthetics, and in literary theory.
French structuralist and post-structuralist thinking from the radical decade of the 1960s
and the 'generation of 1968' today stands as a potent source of influences behind such
intellectual developments as feminist theory, *postcolonial theory, *queer theory, film
and media theory, *deconstructive literary criticism, and *postmodernist thinking in the
broadest sense.
It should, however, be noted that structuralism is often used rather loosely as a term and
that the term 'post-structuralism' was eschewed by most of the writers so labelled. Broadly
defined, structuralism can be defined as an attempt to provide a unified method for the
social sciences through the development of a methodology drawn from the structural
197
linguistics of the early twentieth-century French linguist rerdinand de *Saussure.

Saussure envisaged a general science of signs, called 'semiology'-today known more
commonly as *'semiotics'-which was to study both linguistic and non-linguistic ways
of creating meaning. In the 1950s in France, other writers came to prominence in related
disciplines, most notably the anthropologist Claude *Levi-Strauss and the literary
critic Roland
*Barthes, both of whom developed structuralist modes of analysis to examine kinship
systems, myths, rituals, and a wide range of cultural artefacts. In the same period Jacques
*Lacan synthesized structural linguistics with psychoanalysis (discus ed in Chapter 8 of
this book), while Louis*Althusser applied structuralist analysis to Marxism (discussed in
Chapters 7 and 8). The Swiss psychologist Jean *Piaget developed a theory of genetic
struc turalism based on studies of cognitive development in children. In the early 1970s,
Pierre
*Bourdieu imported elements of structuralism into empirical sociology (discussed in
Chapter 10), while Julia *Kristeva developed feminist positions in literary theory and phi
losophy drawn from structuralist and post-structuralist thought (discussed in Chapter 8).
In a more postmodernist direction, Gilles *Deleuze and Jean *Baudrillard developed theo
ries of capitalist media culture drawn variously from Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post
structuralist semiotics (discussed in Chapters 8 and 12).
This chapter begins by outlining Saussure's structural approach to linguistics and its
further elaboration in the anthropology of Levi-Strauss. We then concentrate at length
on the movement away from structuralism made in the 1960s by the two major figures
of Jacques *Derrida and Michel *Foucault, who today stand out as the two most
influential representatives of a post-structuralist vision in French thought, even though
neither of these thinkers accepted this label.
Ferdinand de Saussure and structural linguistics

In opposition to nineteenth-century linguistics and historical philology, mostly in the
German *historicist tradition, Ferdinand de Saussure developed an account of language as
a system of signs, emphasizing the need to study language *synchronically, rather than in
terms of disparate histories of uses of words over time. Writing in the early years of the
twentieth century, Saussure also set himself against earlier seventeenth- and eighteenth
century theories of language in which words tended to be seen in terms of naturalistic rep
resentations or imitations of things in the world, like pictures. In opposition to both these
two schools, Saussure argued that signs produce meaning only by virtue of their relation to
other signs, not through any organic relationship to the things they are held to signify.
Signs are to be seen as arbitrary, established purely by convention. Language is to he
studied as a system of relations. Language does not reveal a set of natural concepb.
Rather, it reveals the structuring operations of the mind through which things are made to
signify or to have meaning. Meaning is to be seen as differential, produced through
differences between terms within a system, not predicated on any intrinsic properties of
the terms themselves. Saussure presented this thesis in his Course in General Linguistics, a
series of lectures col lated and published posthumously by his students in 1916. This book
provides the kernel of structuralism as a theory of language-although it should be noted
that Saussure did not
198 SAMANTHA ASHENDEN
use the term 'structure'; he used the term 'system'. In his Course, Saussure defends five key
propositions, which we discuss in turn:
I. The sign comprises a signifier and a signified.
2. Signs are arbitrary.
3. Difference creates meaning.
4. Language is to be studied synchronically, not diachronically.
5. The proper focus of linguistics is not speech by individual speakers (termed parole) but
language as an independent objective system (termed langue).
By the *'signifier', Saussure means a sound or image. 13y the *'signified', he means a
concept or mental image to which the signifier refers. Signifier and signified together
make up the 'sign'. Between any given signifier and signified, however, there is no
necessary relation. Saussure demonstrates the arbitrary character of signs by comparing
words with similar meanings across languages, arguing that no particular word is more
appropriate than any other in designating a particular idea. He points out that the concept'
"sister" is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds s-6-r [sreur]
which serves as its signi fier in French' (Saussure 1916: 67). Similarly, 'the signified "ox" has
as its signifier h-6-f[bm1( in French] on one side of the border and o-k-s [Ochs in
German) on the other' (Saussure 1916: 68). Different societies use words to carve up the
world in different ways. For example, different language communities make different
categorizations of the colour spectrum; Eskimos have many different words for snow,
while Europeans only have one word. Although some words retain partially naturalistic
features, such as onomatopoeic words (words which 'sound like' the things they name),
these are exceptions; and while many Asian languages retain pictorial elements, the basis
of the production of meaning in these languages is not pictorial but relational.
Saussure emphasizes that 'arbitrary' does not imply that individuals can choose any
signifier they like. In order to communicate, individuals have to follow the order of signs
established in the linguistic communities to which we belong. Speakers must know the
rules of language. Saussure comments that 'the signifier, though to all appearances freely
chosen with respect to the idea that it represents, is fixed, not free, with respect to the
linguistic community that uses it' (Saussure 1916: 71).
The key proposition in Saussure's account is that difference creates meaning. Meaning
is a product of internal differences between terms in a language as a system. Saussure
states: 'In language there are only differences without positive terms' (Saussure 1916:
120). Considered separately, signifier and signified are nothing but negations of other
signifiers and signifieds. Only their combination produces a positive fact in the institution
of a particular language. Saussure here reserved the French word langue for the systematic
dimension of language. He distinguished this from the word parole, which he reserved for
written or spoken language-in-me by individual persons. Saussure maintained that whilst
language use only exists in space and time, use of language depends on a set of unstated
rules that make language possible. To focus on /a11s,11e was to focus on language as a
system of these unstated rules of composition.
Saussure proposes that the relations between linguistic terms form two distinct groups.
When we hear someone speak, or when we read something, we have a sequence. This is
the
STRUCTURALISM Allil 199
BOX 23. ROLAND BARTH ES ON MYTH AND THE 'DEATH OF THE AUTHOR'
The writings of Roland *Barthes provided important statements of structuralist method and played an
important role in popularizing structuralist ideas. Barthes applied Saussure's structuralist analysis of
lan guage to all sign systems, including images, gestures, and sounds. His early writings show strong
sim ilarities with the work of Levi-Strauss. In his book Elements of Semiology (1964), one of Barthes's
analysis focuses on the social meanings of eating, treating eating habits and codes in terms of syntag
matic chains. He shows how the arrangement of dishes on a menu is organized along an associative
paradigmatic dimension-through basic oppositions between 'savoury' and 'sweet', and so on-while
the syntagmatic combination of dishes produces a meal, a linear chain (1964: 27-8).
Barthes was concerned to provide an explicitly critical analysis of bourgeois society. To this end, in
his major work Mythologies (1957) his observations examine the manner in which advertising
operates. Barthes observes how the marketing of detergents is conducted in the language of
international con flict, while wine, steak, and fries are portrayed as the 'alimentary sign of
Frenchness' (1957: 36-9, 62--4). Barthes here sees semiology as a science of forms that aims to
denaturalize myths by exposing the conditions of their production. He writes that 'myth is
depoliticized speech' (1957 142-3). Myth turns historical contingencies into eternal and apparently
naturally justified states. Barthes analyses the cover of an issue of the magazine Paris-Match,
showing a young black man in French army uniform saluting the tricolour. He shows how the image
states the fact of French imperialism while operating to convert history into nature (1957: 115, 143).
Barthes's aim is to examine the political interests served by such processes of naturalization.
This concern with questioning the function of processes of naturalization and suggesting the possib-
' ility of alternative patterns of signification especially clearly in Barthes's essay 'The Death of the Author'
(Barthes 1968). Barthes here argues that the author is a distinctly modern figure, one whose function in
literary criticism is to provide an explanation and delimitation of the meaning of a text. He contends that
'linguistically, the author is never more than the instance of writing, just as I is nothing other than the in
stance of saying/' (1968: 145). Barthes attacks cultural institutions that maintain control over the mean
ing of literary texts through recourse to the author as explanation. In place of this, he looks for the
possibility of new interpretations of texts that might be produced by overthrowing the myth of
origins entailed by the idea of the author. Barthes proclaims that the 'birth of the reader must be at
the cost of the death of the Author' (1968: 148).
We can see here how *subJectivity and authorial voice in structuralist and post-structuralist
thinking are not regarded as given but as organized through the *totality of language. Subjectivity is
predicated on differences in linguistic and semiotic structures. Speakers and agents gain access to
themselves and their identities as persons only through the institutionalized totality of language.
This is at the root of the characteristic anti-humanism of structuralist and post-structuralist theory,
where 'anti-humanism' refers to an antipathy toward *phenomenological and *hermeneutical ideas of
the meaning-conferring powers of individual human agents.
empirically observable form of language which Saussure calls its syntagmalic dimension,
characteristic of parole. A syntagm is formed by two or more consecutive units supported
by linearity, by a line of some kind. Phrases and sentences are examples of syntagms.
Within syntagmatic chains, terms gain value through their linear relation to others that are
present. Such chains are distinct from what Saussure calls the associative or paradigmatic
dimension of language, characteristic of /angue. Associative relations are not supported by
linearity.
200 5 MANTHA ASHENDEN
They develop outside the context of spoken utterances or written statements by an indi
\"idual. Unlike the syntagmatic dimension present in parole, the associative dimension
unites terms 'in absentia' (Saussure 1916: 123l. This associative dimension of /angue forms
a background of meaning, making up the 'inner storehouse' of the language spoken by each
speaker (Saussure 1916: 123).
Among the more general ideas bequeathed by Saussure to social and cultural theory is
his conception of the primacy of the whole over the parts. His model of langue is that of
an 'absent totality' which does not itself exist in space or time. The *totality is
instantiated in speech and writing, yet is only discernible beyond any individual act of
speaking or writing. This idea shares something in common with Emile Durkheim's
conception of the social as a 'sui generis reality' that is more than the sum of its parts. It
was to prove important later to both structuralist and post-structuralist theorists, including
notably to Derrida and Foucault, as we shall see shortly. A further influential element of
Saussure's account is that it does not see language merely as a means of expression or
instrument of a speaking subject. Rather, it conceives language as the structuring
precondition of thought, which stands be yond the mental agency of any individual
speaking subject. Language is not seen as some thing merely at the disposal of an indi\
idual person. On the contrary, the subject is seeP as in a certain sense at the disposal of
language. This idea later came to be associated with the theme of the 'decentring of the
*subject' in French structuralist and post-structuralist thought. The theme is especially
prominent in the thinking of Derrida and Foucault, but it is also present in the literary
criticism of Roland Barthes, who famously spoke of the 'death of the author'. Barthes's
contributions to the tudy of myth and popular culture from a structuralist perspec tive are
discussed here in Box 23.
Saussure's work was exclusively in the field of linguistics, but it became central to struc
turalism in social and cultural theory through the work of writers such as Barthes and
Levi Strauss. It is to Levi-Strauss's work that we turn next.
Structuralism in anthropology: Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude *Levi-Strauss was the first author to disseminate the term 'structuralism' and to
import Saussure's linguistic insights into social science. He made important contributions
to the study of kinship rules, primitive classification systems, *totemism, myth, music, and
art. In each of these fields, he applied the methods of structural linguistics to social sys
tems, aiming to uncover the uni\·ersal rules underpinning the apparent diversity of social
and cultural life.
The initial formative influences on LeYi-Strauss were Durkheim and Durkheim's nephew
!\1arcel '\1auss. In particular, LeYi-Strauss drew on Durkheim's precept that social order
forms a coherent system comprising subsystems, and that social facts precede the indi
Yidual and giw structure to individuality. Levi-Strauss also drew on Mauss's (1924)
account of the role of gift exchange in archaic societies, where exchange establishes
reciprocit)· (see Levi-Strauss 1950). But it was the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson
who introduced Levi-Strauss to the work of Saussure in New York during the Second
World War. Most of LeYi-Strauss's anthropological fieldwork is based on studies of the
tribes of Amazonian
STRUCTURALISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM 201
South America. His major works are The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Tristes
Tropiques (1955), Structural Anthropology (1958), The Raw and the Cooked (1964), and The
Savage Mind (1966).
Levi-Strauss described structural linguistics as effecting a 'Copernican revolution' in
anthropology and the human sciences in general. He wrote that 'first, structural linguistics
shifts from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to the study of their unconscious
infrastructure; second, it does not treat terms as independent entities, taking instead as
its basis of analysis the relations between terms; third, it introduces the concept of
system ... finally, structural linguistics aims at discovering general laws' (1958: 83, 33,
emphasis in original). These methodological tenets were to become central to Levi-
Strauss's way of proceeding. We can illustrate them by looking at his work on kinship
systems and at an example from his study of myth.
In The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) Levi-Strauss analyses what he sees as certain
fundamental laws of exchange underpinning systems of kinship. He observes that all soci
eties have restrictions concerning appropriate sexual partners, but that these restrictions vary
and that the ways in which they are enforced also vary. He then searches for the
underlying structures governing marriage relations that divide members into two
categories, prohibited partners and possible partners. He argues that this basic *binary
opposition is a product of the universality of the incest taboo and the accompanying rule
of exogamous (non-blood related) marriage. In other words, marriage is misunderstood if
it is thought of purely as an individualized relation between two persons. Marriage is
rather a fundamental form of exchange, which grounds human sociality. This law of
exogamy is 'omnipresent'; it is 'the archetype of all other manifestations based on
reciprocity, and ... it provides the fundamen tal and immutable rule ensuring the existence
of the group as a group' (1949: 481). This is because exogamy 'provides the means of
binding men together'. It superimposes on natural links of kinship artificial links of
'alliance governed by rule' (1949: 480). Levi-Strauss comments that 'the prohibition of
incest is less a rule prohibiting marriage with the mother, sister or daughter, than a rule
obliging the mother, sister or daughter to be given to others. It is the supreme rule of the
gift, and it is clearly this aspect ... which allows its nature to be understood' (1949: 481).
Marriage rules concerning the exchange of women generate a system of alliances and
interdependencies that enable the social group to reproduce itself. Marriage for Levi-
Strauss is thus a fundamental form of exchange that upholds institutionalized relations
between groups. He compares kinship to a linguistic system: 'like a phoneme, a device
having no meaning of its own but helping to form meanings, the incest taboo struck me as
a link between two domains' (1983: 142). Levi-Strauss means the domains of nature and
culture. The incest prohibition and exogamy are necessary to lift human beings out of
biological relations into social relations. Levi-Strauss comments that the prohibition of
incest is 'the prohibition'. It is as universal as language (1949: 493). Levi-Strauss seeks to
determine the laws underlying different systems of marriage by examining relations
between elements as part of a system. His aim is to examine the unconscious activity of
the mind that consists in imposing 'form' on 'content', or shape on matter (1958: 21).
This structuralist aspect of Levi-Strauss's analysis can be clarified further with an
example from his work on myth. Levi-Strauss observes that myths have a storyline, or
syntagmatic dimension. But he argues that to understand a myth, we need to examine
the
202 5(4fwiAN"iHA I SHENDEN
structural oppositions that it embodies, such as between 'nature' and 'culture', or between
time and space, or between the 'raw' and the 'cooked'- food found in the wilderness and
food prepared by the hands of man. He suggests that we read a myth as we read a musical
score, both *diachronically along one axis and *synchronically along another. Read in
this manner, a musical score ceases to be a simple succession of notes; it forms a
meaning ful whole (1958: 212). Using this model, he argues that individual elements of a
myth taken in isolation are meaningless. Their meaning is to be found in the ways in
which they are brought into relation and ordered as a totality. In a similar manner to
Saussure, Levi-Strauss insists on examining myth th rough the totality of the system of
oppositional relations that compose it (1958: 210). Indeed he argues not only that myth is
structured 'like language' but that myth is language. Myth gives symbolic expression to
unconscious aspirations. It express properties of the human mind, and studying these
properties allows us to understand the structural oppositions that operate in the human
unconscious.
In a similar manner to Jacques *Lacan's structuralist psychoanalysis, Levi-Strauss
analy ses the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus: the story of the exiled young boy
condemned by prophecy to murder his father and sleep with his mother. Levi-Strauss
proposes that the Oedipus myth is constructed through a series of recurring oppositions
between the under rating and overrating ot blood relations. These antitheses build a series
of transformations as the story progresses, so that the whole story constitutes an attempt
to mediate between 'nature' and 'culture'. It is an attempt to resolve the contradiction
between the belief that man is autochthonous (born of one principle, born of the earth-
represented by Oedipus on his own, in exile) and knowledge that humans are the result of
union between man and woman (born of two different parents, one male, one female-
represented by Oedipus in the family). The myth is a way of attempting to manage conflict
about where humans come from, about the origins of man (1958: 213-16).
From this brief discussion we can see that Levi-Strauss conceives of cultures and their
myths as totalities ordered through differences between terms. Structural anthropology
aims to dig beneath the variety of human experience in order to uncover certain putatively
uni versal laws governing human sociality and unconscious life'. Levi-Strauss does not
attempt to search for the earliest version of a particular myth, for its 'origin'. Rather, he
regards a myth as consisting in all its manifold versions. The key concern lies not with the
origin but ½ith sym bolic order, and with how symbolic order is structured. As with Saussure,
Levi-Strauss's con cern is not with tracing the history ot our concepts and categories in
order to reveal the most 'primitive' or 'authentic' form. What Levi-Strauss calls the 'savage
mind' is not more prim itive or origirnHy than the Western mind. ln his view, es entially the
same basic logical struc tures can be found among all human groups. Thus, instead of
searching for the most ancient or original or authentic, Levi-Strauss and Sau sure enjoin
us to look for the logical totality through which any individual elements of culture gain
their meaning and validity.
Difference and deconstruction: Jacques Derrida
Jacques *Derrida is regarded as the first French theorist to pioneer a turn away from struc
turalism in the classical sense toward what ha come to be called 'post-structuralism',
which
STRUCTURALISM AI\ID POST Si'Fli.lOURAUSIV' 203
can also be thought of as a kind of radicalization of structuralism. Derrida's numerous books

from the 1960s to the present day include OfGrmmnatology (1967), Writing and Vitfercncc
(1968a), Margins of Philosophy (1972), Glas (1974), Acts of Literature (1992), and a spate of
books since the 1990s treating more ethical and political themes, notably including
Spectres of Marx (1993) and Tile Politics o(Friendslzip (1994). Here we concentrate on two
of Derrida's earliest texts: first, his book O(Grammatology (1967), in which he expatiates
on the work of Saussure and Levi-Strauss; and second, his essay 'Structure, Sign, and Play in
the Discourse of the Human Sciences', reprinted in Writing and Difference. In this essay
Derrida analyses what he sees as structuralism's continued reliance on Western
philosophical
*metaphysics. It is in this essay and some other early pieces that Derrida introduces
his influential concepts of 'difference',*'deconstruction', 'decentring', and
*'logocentrism'.
Speech, writing, and logocentrism

In Of Grammatology, Derrida considers a chapter of Levi-Strauss's book Tristes
Tropiques, titled 'A Writing Lesson' (Levi-Strauss 1955). Levi-Strauss here describes an
encounter with the Nambikwara tribe, who had watched the Frenchman writing notes and
then began making lines on paper themselves. Levi-Strauss reports that in addition to
making marks on the paper, the chief of the tribe attempted to augment his authority
by pretending to read back to his fellow tribesmen from his own script. Reflecting on
this, Levi-Strauss experiences guilt. Levi-Strauss blames himself for destroying the
innocence of the Nambikwara by introducing them to writing. He suggests that writing
allies itself with falsehood, violence, and exploitation (Levi-Strauss 1955: 298 ff.).
Derrida sees this feeling of guilt in Levi-Strauss about introducing the Nambikwara
to writing as revealing an inconsistency in Levi-Strauss's own thesis about the
meaningless ness of 'origins'. Derrida treats this as a powerful example of the manner in
which the West has treated writing as a secondary transcription of speech, as
something that corrupts the innocence and non-violence of oral communication. Against
Levi-Strauss's Western image of writing, Derrida stresses that 'violence does not
supervene from without upon an inno cent language in order to supervise it' (1967: 106).
Rather, Derrida points to the 'originary violence of a language which is already a writing',
the violence of difference and of classifi cation itself (1967: 106). That is, words and
names themselves differentiate-not just writ ing. Therefore the absence of writing is not
equal to 'innocence'. Derrida detects in Levi-Strauss an 'ethic of presence, an ethic of
nostalgia for origins, an ethic of archaic and natural innocence, a purity of presence and
self-presence in speech' (1968b: 264).
The focus of Derrida's comments in O(Gramrnatology is a phenomenon much larger
than Levi-Strauss's anthropology. Derrida in fact raises claims against the whole
history of Western metaphysics for what he calls its 'logocentrism' and
'phonocentrism'. Derrida's term 'logocentrism' derives from the Greek word logos,
meaning both 'reason' and 'speech'. According to Derrida, Western philosophy since
Plato has been logocentric in the sense that it has thought of concepts as existing as
'pure intelligibility', prior to their means of expression in the 'outer' structures of
language, or langue. Derrida argues that Western
*metaphysics has viewed meaning as having essential priority over its form of
communica tion, such as through writing. Parole, in the sense of 'inner speech' or 'inner
thought', has been seen as essentially preceding langue. Derrida's other term
'phonocentrism' refers to
204 SkMANl <'A ASHEN DEN
what he sees as Western philosophy's privileging of speech over writing (from the Greek
word for 'voice' or 'sound', phone). Speech in Western culture has been regarded as a
capac ity immediately available to a self-present subject, such that writing becomes
derivative, a mere transcription of speech.
The importance of these concepts becomes clear when we consider that Derrida's con
cern is to deconstruct Western metaphysics from within. Against Jogocentrism and phono
centrism, Derrida develops what he calls 'deconstructive'writing. Deconstruction is a form
of criticism that operates through close readings of texts in order to pull apart their internal
logic and destabilize their self-presence. Its aim is to reveal that which is assumed but
repressed by the dominant frame of a text. Thus in Of Grammatology, Derrida examines
Saussure's work to disclose what it cannot describe-what has been excluded in order that
the text be constituted as it is.
A key step in Derrida's proposal for deconstruction concerns what he sees as a rather
problematic aspect of Saussure's distinction between 'signifier' and 'signified'. Derrida sees
this as a metaphysical distinction: a distinction between something regarded as essentially
sensuous or sensible (the signifier) and something regarded as essentially non-sensuous
and ideal or intelligible (the signified). The sensible is said to be exterior to a principle of
interior 'pure intelligibility'. The sensible constitutes merely an 'outside' in relation to an
'inside'. According to Derrida, Saussure's linguistics-and classical structuralism more
generally-remains caught in metaphysics insofar as it relies on what Derrida calls a
'transcendental signifier', an idea of pure intelligibility, which is expected to function as
the origin of all meaning. Derrida highlights the way in which Saussure treats writing as
derivative from, and possibly corrupting of, speech. He quotes Saussure's comment that
'language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole
purpose of representing the first' (Saussure in Derrida 1967: 30). Derrida comments that
this attributes to writing 'the exteriority that one attributes to utensils' (1967: 34). Derrida
argues that despite Saussure's conception of langue as an 'absent totality', Saussure views
spoken language as achieving full self-presence. Derrida argues that in this conception the
exteriority of writing threatens to contaminate language by producing an 'eruption of
the outside within the inside' (1967: 34), breaching the apparent self-presence of speech.
The intrusion of writing into the self-presence of speech threatens this self-presence by a
logic of the 'supplement'. In Derrida's view, Saussure wishes to place writing in an 'intra-
linguistic leper colony' to contain the deformations it may produce (1967: 42).
It is in this general sense that Derrida declares famously, and provocatively, that 'there
is nothing outside the text', or 'no outside-text' (il n'y a pas de hors-texte) (1967: 158).
Derrida implies that there can be neither a master speaking subject which precedes any act
of writ ing, nor any pure or natural 'external world' which stands outside the structuring
effects of writing as they are played out in texts. Ideas of 'pure mind' and 'pure world', the
'subjective' and the 'objective', the 'ideal' and the 'real', are metaphysical effects of the play
oflanguage and writing.
Difference, decentring, and the deconstruction of the subject

In 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' (1968b) Derrida
points to a recent 'event' or 'rupture' in the history of the concept of structure. He asserts
that 'the
STRUCTURALISM AND POST·STRUCTURAUSf 205
history of metaphysics ... is the determination of being as presence in all the senses of
this word' (1968b: 249). He points out the impossibility of thinking the concept of
structure without a centre. The centre refers to 'a point of presence, a fixed origin' that
organizes and delimits the free play of the structure, and yet is 'paradoxically, within the
structure and out side it' (1968b: 247-8). That is, the centre is simultaneously the thing
within a structure that governs the structure's structurality and that which escapes
structurality. 'The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not
belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere'
(1968b:248).
Derrida's thinking about the centre can be illustrated in several ways. We might think of
the centre as the self, as the ego which arranges the world around itself in its
conscious thoughts. But from a psychoanalytic point of view, the centre is not the
conscious self. The self finds itself 'decentred' in relation to the unconscious. The
centre appears to lie else where, other to the self; it is that on which the self is
dependent, and therefore is not the self's 'own'. The centre turns out to be not 'I' but'It':
the unconscious life of desire, or what Sigmund *Freud called the id. In an often quoted
phrase of the nineteenth-century French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, 'Je est un autre'
- 'I is an other'. Or as Freud wrote, equally famously:'WoEs war, entstehtdas Jch'-'Where
id was, there ego shall be' (Freud, 1933: 112). We may also think of the concept of
decentring as it has developed in postcolonial theory, notably among writers such as
Edward *Said (1978) and Gayatri *Spivak (1999). The West has historically regarded
itself as the centre-of Culture, Civilization, Rationality-but in order to constitute itself
as the centre, the West has required an 'Other' which is apparently not the centre. And to
the extent that the West depends on this Other in order to be a centre, the West is not
the centre but is 'decentred'. Both these examples attest to Derrida's wide-ranging
influence in cultural theory and criticism.
A further step in Derrida's argument concerns his reading of the idea of 'difference'.
The significance of writing for Derrida is that it is not a transparent means of
representation but a material process governed by a logic of differance, a word he
deliberately misspells in French with an 'a'. The concept of differance is drawn from the
French verb differer,meaning both 'to differ' and 'to defer', which becomes differant in the
French present participle. Derrida argues that Western philosophy's logocentrism depends
on a repressed logic of differance. Against the assumption that signifier and signified form
a transparent and self sustaining unity, he stresses that meaning has no point of origin.
Meaning is always already transitional, deferred through endless chains of signifiers. This
focus on a never-ending process of differance unsettles the *binary logic of structuralism.
It also shows that binary oppositions are typically hierarchical, that one element is
typically dominant, but that this hierarchical opposition is necessarily unstable since the
meaning of each of the terms depends on the 'trace' of the other. We may think of the
binary pairs male-female, mind-body, conscious-unconscious, nature-culture, presence-
absence, and so on.
These aspects of Derrida's thought illustrate his movement beyond classical structuralism.
Where Saussure and Levi-Strauss tend to conceive of language and myth as closed
semiotic systems, Derrida refuses this. Against any idea of the self-sufficiency of signifier
and signi fied, Derrida stresses differance, 'supplementarity', and the 'trace'. He not only
asserts that difference creates meaning but also that this chain of signification extends 'ad
infinitum' (1968b: 249), resulting in no closure. Furthermore, Derrida understands
difference as both spatial and temporal, as extending in a temporal process of deferring, so
that signification
206 iA"iAfHHA A<;IH:r uf
occurs only through 'traces', through moments of difference in an endless chain of signifi
cation. Derrida abandons structuralism's distinction between the diachronic and syn
chronic in favour of an argument that there can be no final reading of a text. Any
reading always generates a supplementary one. In this sense, any remedy to a deficiency
is always a supplement which generates a further deficiency. Therefore there can be
neither begin ning nor end, no centre or point of presence or 'fixed origin'.
Yet while Derrida believes structuralism to be problematically complicit with the
history of Western metaphysics, he does not simply proclaim the bankruptcy or 'end' of
meta physics. He emphasizes that 'there is no sense in doing without the concepts of
metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language-no syntax and no
lexicon-which is alien to this history' (1968b: 250). He stresses that deconstruction pre
supposes the tradition that it at the same time contests and unravels.
In general, Derrida's vision of deconstruction seeks critically to radicalize
structuralism's questioning of the idea of the centred autonomous human *subject.
Derrida declares that he does not 'destroy' the subject but that he 'situates' it (1968b: 271).
Against the 'meta physics of presence', he proposes a*'Nietzschean affirmation ... of the
freeplay of the world without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation'
(1968b: 264). His philos ophy 'affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and
*humanism, the name 'man' being the name of that being who, throughout the history of
metaphysics or of onto-theology in other words, through the history of all of his history-
has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the
game' (1968b: 264-5).
This concern to 'decentre' and to 'situate' the subject is also key to the work of Michel
Foucault. It is to Foucault's work that we now turn.
Discourse, knowledge, and power: Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault first came to prominence in Parisian intellectual life in the early 1960s
with a work titled Madness and Civilization (1961). This was a study of the rise of modern
medical institutions and discourses oriented to the scientific categorization and incarcera
tion of deviant individuals as clinically insane. In Foucault's thesis, this development sig
nalled the breakdown of an earlier medieval world-view marked by the unregulated
anarchic presence of fools in the community, as wel I as by religious languages of
possession by the devil and spirits.
After Madness and Civilization Foucault's reflections turned to the role of power, know
ledge, and discourse in Western civilization, incl udingthe role of criminology,
psychology, prisons, surveillance, discipline, education, and the state and the role of
scientific institu tions in definitions of the human person, especially concerning. l lis
major works are The Order of Things (1966), The Archaeology o{Knowlelf.'se (1969a),
Vi_ffipline and Punish (1975), and Tile History of Sexuality (1976, 1984a, 1984b) (in three
volumes). I!is writings have had an enormous impact in contemporary cultural and social
research-from philosophy, literature, and the history of ideas to criminology, education,
political theory, psycho analysis, *postcolonial studies, and feminist theory. A
homosexual, Foucault died of AIDS in California iri 1984.
STRUCTuRALiSM AND POST-STiiu- iUfiALISf 207
Together with Derrida, Foucault always rejected the label 'structuralist' and 'post
structuralist' as a description of his work (1966: p. xiv). Like Derrida, Foucault tended to
proclaim that structuralism is characteristic of a system of thought that is about to be
over come. Nonetheless, certain features of his thinking mark it out as 'structuralist' in
orientation. In the following discussion we look first at what Foucault describes as the
'archaeological' approach of the two major works of his middle period, The Order of
Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969a). Then we look at what he
describes as the more 'genealogical' orientation of his later work on sexuality and
subjectivity.
'Epistemes', discursive practices, and the 'end of man'

In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault describes his work as an attempt to reveal 'a
pos itive unconscious of knowledge: a level that eludes the consciousness of the scientist
and yet is part of scientific discourse' (1969a: p. xi). His aim is to discover 'on the basis of
what historical *a priori' (l969a: p. xxii) forms of knowledge become possible. That is,
Foucault aims to analyse the epistemological preconditions for systems of thought and
classifica tion from a radically historical point of view. He describes his book as an
'archaeology' whose focus is the 'episteme'.
By _Foucault means the study of the ru! .s o_f formation of discourse in any
gi'_'.en epoch. It is the attempt to discer historical conditions of possibilLty of forms of
knowledge. Foucault uses the term 'e ·steme' _o signify such rules of formation. By 'epi
steme', he means 'the total set of relations that unite, at.a given period, the *discursive prac
ti::s tha.!.§_i _f_!S;;_.!g_ episterriq'(ogl_carligw s; scien s. and possibly form a I is d s-y te;ns.. .
ti totality of relationU,hq_t (?11 b_e discovered, for a given period, between the sciences
wh oneana.Tyse'.;;'"'them t the level of discursive regularities' (1969a: 191 ). Archaeological
analysis is addressed 'to the general space of knowledge', to 'the mode of being of things
that appear in it', to 'systems of simultaneity', and to 'mutations' that form the threshold
of new systems and epochs ( 1969a: p. xxiii). Foucault argues that the 2resent order, the
episteme from within which we think today, 'dQC.5._UOthavc the sc:1me mode of being as
that of th.c..ClassLca.Lthinkers' of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe
(1969a: p. xxii). This difference is not, for Foucault, the result of progress, but rather of the
way in which conditions of possibility of knowledge have altered.
O;der of Things is concerned with mapping the history of systems of classification.
Foucault proceeds by considering what was common to the organization of the
disciplines of natural history, economics, and linguistics in three successive periods. He
argues that
Re!')aissanc-e c_i_ r1 e was characterized hy relations of !f!iC.!UhJa nce. What he calls the
'C_0.1 riod (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries)_ was characterized by systems
of re£_res ntatiOIJ.,. What he defines as the 'm.o.dern' period (from the rnneteenth century
onwards) has been characterized by the *'positivities' of life, work, and language. Foucault
argues that within each of these periods, different fields of study use the same rules of
formation to define their objects. The three successive epochs are characterized by different
rules for the formation of concepts and theories (1966: p. xxii).
Referring to the history of linguistics, Foucault comments on the way in which, from
the nineteenth century onwards, the idea of a fundamental link between schemes of
208 !il\MANTHA A'iHfl I·
representation and things of the world was eclipsed by a 'profound historicity' (1966:
p. xxiii). ln particular, Foucault nott>s that with the abandonment of systems of naturalis
tic representation at the end of the eighteenth century, the idea of the expressive
*humanistic subject entered the scene of Western history. Foucault declares that before the
e-nd of the eighteenth ce.n, tu•·-ry- ',-n-a..n. did no. . . t exist' ( 1966: 308). That is, the idea of
.
man as such, as an epistemological category, is an invention of the •Enlightell.!D.filt.

Foucault pro-
claims that today this idea of 'man' has grown old and is coming tq \1.n end. This 'rift in
the order of things', the 'ne.;-INri kie in o r-k;;o ledge' (1966·:--p.-xxiii)', has produced
the
double bind of philosophical humanism. That is, since the end of the eighteenth
century, the quest to disclose the nature of man through the development of
philosophical anthropology has produced a situation in which humans have been
interpreted simultan eously as knowing 5ubjects and as known objects of their own
knowledge. Thus the category 'man' designates what Foucault calls a 'transcendental-
empirical double', where 'man' is seen both as the prime agent within the world (an
empirical object) and as the prime 'condition of possibility' for the existence of the
world (a transcendental subject). According to Foucault, this doubling ties the
development of social institutions to processes of objectification and to forms uf
disciplinary discursive power under the rule of the 'human sciences'.
Foucault considers that modernity needs to be wakened from 'anthropological slumber'
(1966: 340). He looks for a method of historical analysb free from the assumptions of
philosophical anthropology (1969a: 16). He rejects *phenomenology and *hermeneutics,
claiming that instead of a theory of the knowing subject, what is necessary is a theory
of *discursive practices (1966: p. xiv). This leads Foucault to reverse traditional questions
of
*subjectivity and *agency. In his essay 'What is an Author?' (1969b) he asks: 'How, under
what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of
discourse?' (1969b: 118). foucault suggests re-examining the functions of the subject by
'depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator and analysing the subject
as a variable and complex function of discourse' (1969b: 118).
While Foucault does not rely on Saussure's structural linguistics to make this case, his
thinking in The Order of Things is guidl'd by a typically structuralist commitment to the
idea of the autonomy of discourse. What is striking is his conception of the structural
determination of epochs by overarching *epistemic principles. Foucault argues that the
systems of statements that are possible in an episteme form a totality, and he suggests
that the shift from one episteme to another takes the form of an epistemological leap.
This is comparable in certain ways to Thomas *Kuhn's conception of abrupt shifts be
tween incommensurable *'paradigms' in the history of science (discussed in Chapter 5 of
this book, pp. 123-4). It is in this sense that Foucault speaks of three successive 'epochs'
in The Order a( Tl1i11gs, each organized according to radically distinct epistemic criteria.
Like Saussure's linguistics and Levi-Strauss's anthropology, Foucault here operates with a
purely differential and nominalist account of meaning. His mode of analysis deliberately
brackets questions of propositional truth in order to analyse the internal ordering of
systems of statements. Foucault searches for the rules that underpin formations of
discourse in each of the three epochs he analyses, deliberately avoiding engaging with
the questions of truth and meaning raised by them. The archaeologist tries to produce a
pure description of an episteme.
STRUCTURALISM ANO PO'i· -STRUC' 1·- . 209
Genealogy, subjectivity, and power-knowledge

After The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault changed his mode of
investigation. While still using the tools of 'archaeology', his later work turned to more
spe cific accounts of the ways in which human beings become subjects of particular kinds
of knowledge and practice. Foucault here moved away from the concept of episteme to
the concept of 'apparatus' or 'dispositive' (dispositif).
Foucault saw a problem with the concept of the episteme in his earlier work. He
had spoken of the episteme both as grounding configurations of discourse and as
being grounded by configurations of discourse. It signified the totality of the
discursive regularities of an epoch, and at the same time it signified the preconditions
or *a priori rules of formation of knowledge in an epoch. The concept of the episteme
was thus rather circular. It tended to be closed to the role of non-discursive material
factors in the consti tution of discourses. Recognition of this problem led Foucault to
reconceptualize the relationship of discourse more explicitly to the role of material
practices and social insti tutions. Foucault describes this shift in terms of a move from
archaeology to genea/og;,', where the episteme is replaced by the concept of the
'apparatus' or 'dispositive'. Foucault now abandons his commitment to the autonomy of
discourse. He notes that 'the episteme is a specifically discursive apparatus, whereas the
apparatus (dispositi() in its general form is both discursive and non-discursive, its
elements being much more heterogenous' (1980: 196-7).
The notion of dispositive involves a recognition that discourses and practices are multi
ple and varied, that nooneoverarching totality exists under which all discourse can be said
to serve. Foucault thus explores ways in which discourses and practices articulate
each other to form different 'regimes of knowledge' (Foucault in Dreyfus and
Rabinow 1982: 212). The task of genealogy is to locate and uncover particular sets of
relations in which spe cific aspects of modern subjectivity are constituted by mapping
significant relations within these diverse practices. Foucault is directly interested in
questions of power and in the relation of 'power-knowledge' (pouvoir savoir) to what he
calls the 'politics of truth'. Foucault characterizes genealogy as providing an 'historical
*ontology of ourselves' (1984c: 45), a 'history of the present' (1976: 31). This he contrasts
with conventional historical writ ing. Where the latter claims to study that which is distant
from us in the name of objectiv ity, genealogy examines what is closest, but in an 'abrupt
dispossession, so as to seize it at a distance' (1984d: 89). Foucault's genealogies begin with
the present, not in order to affirm the present or to deny the present but rather in order
to interrogate how the present has come to be constituted as it is. The aim is to unseat
the naturalness of dominant ways in which aspects of our lives are thought about and
acted upon, to 're-problematize'. Foucault examines how specific aspects of experience
become figured as objects of knowledge and as sites of practical intervention. He asks how
our forms of knowledge and reasoning are tied to the exerche of institutional power, and
questions the limits and costs that such institu tions impose.
In his later work, Foucault pursues two basic concerns. The first relates to the
significance of discipline, punishment, surveillance, and what Foucault calls 'biopower'.
This is dis cussed in Box 24. The second relates to the history of human sexuality, to
which we turn next.
210
BOX 24. MICHEL FOUCAULT ON SURVEILLANCE, BIOPOWER, AND THE

PANOPTICON
During the 1970s Foucault studied the formation of the human subject through a series of substantive
enquiries into the relationship between power and the growth of mental and physical capacities. These
are laid out chiefly in his books Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality,
volume 1 (1976). Foucault argues that power and knowledge are mutually productive in the
constitution of human beings as specific sorts of subjects. He considers the entwinement of
power.and knowledge in specific sites, especially 1n discourses of sexuality and in mechanisms of
punishment.
Foucault suggests three maJor sets of practices that constitute subjects: (1) practices of division,
(2) practices of scientific classification, and (3) practices of subJectification. In relation to 'd1vid1ng
practices', Foucault 1nvest1gates various historical examples of schemes of binary oppositions between
people. For example, he examines the exclusion of lepers from medieval and ancient cities. He contrasts
the margin alization of lepers, their separation and rejection into the wilderness, with the
quarantining of plague victims. Unlike lepers, the plague victims were confined and subject to
supervision, as part of a positive attempt to preserve the health of the community (1975: 198-9). In
relation to scientific classification practices, Foucault considers the emergence of scientific categories
and practices that assign and distrib ute individuals to definite positions within a population. In this way,
all members of a population become subject to 'constant surveillance' each 'in an individual way',
thmugh institutional expertise (1975: 199). In relation to sub1ectificat1on practices, Foucault discusses
the ways 1n which individuals turn themselves into subjects. This concerns how 1nd1v1duals come to act
on themselves through such practices as religious confession, psychoanalysis, or sex therapy.
Foucault sums up these three lines of approach in the ;dea of 'biopolit1cs'. 'Biopolitics' refers to
the general form or rationality of modern power. 'Biopower' 1s 'power over life' (1976: 143). It is a
secular ization of the Christian concern with the pastoral relationship, a relationship in which certain
individuals, by virtue of their special qualities-such as closeness to God or possession of scientific
expertise-can lead others to salvation. Biopower combines two axes. One axis is centred on the
individual body as a machine to be made useful through discipline. Foucault speaks of an 'anatomo-
politics of the human body'. The other axis is focused on the supervision and regulation of the body of
the species. Foucault speaks of a 'biopolitics of the population' (1976: 139). These two axes of
power produce new possib ilities of knowledge, involving close 1nst1tutional examination of individual
case histories and the devel opment of statistics relating to demographic patterns. Foucault argues
that such individualizing and totalizing forms of knowledge operate through confessional
technologies as institutional sites for the emergence of new 'sciences of man'. What is distinctive
about biopower is that it exhibits a concern with enhancing life. It 1s bound up with the
development of the modern state in its attempt to manage and enhance its strength. The state has
a definite interest in the health of the population, in the man agement of sexuality and human
reproduction, and in the maintenance of 'normalcy' and the elimination of disease and 'd1sabil1ty'.
Medicine and psychiatry, therapy and surgery, in all senses of these words, become key to the
control and maintenance of a norm of societal well-being.
In Discipline and Punish Foucault elaborates these ideas 1n relation to Jeremy *Bentham's eighteenth
century *ut1l1tarian conception of the 'Panopt1con'. The Panopticon was Bentham's design for a new
type of prison in which individual cells radiate out from a central tower. In Bentham's plan, each cell
was to house one inmate who is permanently visible to the guard in the central tower. The
intended effect was that each prisoner would not be able to tell whether he or she was being observed
at any one moment. Each prisoner would therefore become self-policing. Foucault observes
that abstract
continues
STRUCTURALISM AND ?OST STRUCTURAL·_,'· 211
BOX 24 continue
techniques of power here combine with techniques for the control, supervision, and correction of
specific individuals. Power is linked to the formation of personal capacities and to the training of indi
viduals. These techniques develop in localized institutions with specific concerns, such as 1n control of
the factory workforce, punishment of prisoners, and disciplining of children in schools. Such institutions
function as observatories of individual behaviour and performance, as laboratories determining the
development of practices of correction and reform. Foucault suggests that such institutionalized
techniques make possible a certain kind of knowledge of the individual based on norms and
'normality'. This knowledge is gained by techniques of examination. It 1s one of the peculiarly demonic
features of modern societies that such techniques are organized simultaneously through scientific laws
and through the operation of normalizing judgements (see also Foucault 1980). Foucault's conception
of discipline and surveillance can be compared in some ways with Erving *Eoffman's work on stigma
and 'total institutions' (discussed in Chapter 5 of this book, p. 117)
In his last series of works, his three-volume The History of Sexuality (1976-84),
Foucault examines how a science of sexuality began to develop in Western culture from
the late eighteenth century onwards. He shows how this science of sexuality sought to join
the indi vidual and social bodies together and thereby to provide a new vector of power
over life. In volume 1, devoted to the modern era, Foucault attacks what he calls the
'repressive hypothesis' (Foucault 1976). With this phrase Foucault refers to an assumption
that power necessarily acts on sexuality through a repression of 'natural instincts'. The
assumption sug gests that a 'Victorian' era of repression has gradually been replaced by a new
era of 'sexual lib eration'. Although he mentions no names, it is possible to see Foucault's
target here as being at least partly in the attempts of *Frankfurt School theorists such as
Herbert *Marcuse and Erich *Fromm to synthesize Freud with Marx in an idea of liberation
from repressive control. In general, Foucault is sceptical of the idea that modem
enlightened knowledge about sex necessarily emancipates human societies from the
repressive superstitions of traditional religious teaching about the sins of the flesh. Instead
Poucault suggests that modern 'sexual science' is no less bound up with forms of power
than traditional religious ideas of the body. Foucault argues that power is exercised
through the production of, and incitement to, dis course about sex and sexuality.
Discourses on sexuality produce new mechanisms of power by constituting subjects who
understand themselves in terms of the truth of their sex. A pro liferation of discourses on
sexuality pins us to telling the 'truth of ourselves', of our 'private' 'secret' nature. This,
Foucault argues, constitutes not a freedom from subjection but rather the development of
new forms of subjection. A new 'technology of sex', constituted through medicine,
psychiatry, pedagogy, and psychoanalysis, has become a key clement of modern
institutional power (1976: 116). Through it, individuals come to think of themselves and
their desires in relation to scientific notions of normality. A modem scientia sexualis replaces
more ancient ideas of the ars erotica or 'art of love'.
Foucault's concern in this volume and in volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality (1984a,
1984b) is to denaturalize certain deep-seated assumptions of modern Western culture. I!is aim
is to re-problematize a dominant problematization, to disturb its naturalness, to shake its hold
over us and to open spaces for thinking and acting differently. In this project we can see
that while one of his early aims was to overcome structuralism, his later arguments and
methods still reflect some of its characteristic principles. In his middle-period writings,
Foucault
212 SAMANYHA ASHENOEN
asserted that structuralism and *phenomenology share common ground, rather than being
opposites to each other. He maintained that structuralist formalization and *hermeneutic
interpretation represent 'two correlative techniques' of the modem human sciences, the
one being to discover structural invariants, the other being to discover hidden meanings
(1966a: 299). Foucault saw structuralism together with phenomenology as destined to
reinstate the 'transcendental-empirical doubling' of modem *anthropocentric culture. But
we can see that Foucault's own work in genealogy exhibits some notable theoretical
continuities with struc turalism and hermeneutical phenomenology. These especially
concern his account of how the human subject is constituted as an object of knowledge. In
his concern to contest fixity and to suggest the possibility of our becoming otherwise than
we are, foucault continued to share ½ith Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and Derrida a refusal
to search for 'origins' in order to concentrate on symbolic structures and regimes of
discourse. In line ¼ith structuralist and post-structuralist thinking, roucault continued to
treat the human ;ubject not as a given or as a repository of meaning, but as an effect of
discourse. In his thesis, 'man' as such emerges only with the *Enlightenment. Modem
'humanity' brings with itself a specific prt>dicament that Foucault sees as tying us ever
more closely to the truth of ourselves as a relation of power.
Conclusion
French structuralist and post-structuralist theory has been as influential in the human sci
ences as it is controversial in its attribution to particular thinkers. This chapter has ought
to avoid suggesting any straightforward chronological transition from structuralism to
post structuralism in French thought. Such academic labelling tends to place more
inwstment in the packaging of thought than it does in examining the saliE'nce of ideas.
Post-structuralism cannot be understood either as a simple negation of structuralism or as
some form of repeat of it. If anything, it is perhaps best thought of as a qualified
radicalization of structuralism.
In considering the work of Saussure and Levi-Strauss, we have seen the importance of
the idea that language should be studied as a totality, where meaning is seen as a product
of dif ference. This logical and differential account of meaning provided Saussure with a
method ological solution to the limits of existing historical analyses of language.
According to Paul
*RicCl'ur (1969), it supplied Levi-Strauss with a *'Kantianism without a transcendental sub
ject'. That is, it enabled Levi-Strauss to analyse social life in terms of a universal scheme
of socially objectified concepts, leading him to develop rigorous and encompassing cat
egorizations of a wide range of anthropological material. For Saussure and Le,·i-Strauss,
the synchronic dimension was clearly marked out from and privileged over the diachronic.
In contrast, Derrida and Foucault break with the synchronic-diachronic distinction and
with the idea of totality. Instead, they focus on differ,rnce and on the historical ontology of
specific problematizationsof experience. Yet while both of these mows led away from
struc turalism in the classical sense, Derrida and foucault maintained a typically structural
view of meaning as imposed rather than disclosed, as generated by systems of formal
differencE's between signs. In these respects, all four thinkers provide illuminating ways
nf accounting for the human subject in ways that do not presuppose a prior human essence
or a primordial external reality called 'nature'. Rather, in all four writers, as well as in the
work of Roland
STRUCTURALISM AND ?OS'f HRU(TURALIS"• 213
Barthes, the subject is regarded as a product of differential functions ot language under

definite discursive modes of constitution.
This provocative way of thinking has been immensely influential in contemporary soci
ology and cultural studies. It has deeply affected debates about cultural identities, gender
and sexuality, about myth, symbolism and popular culture, consumption and the mass
media, ethnicity, nationalism, and race. The ideas of structurafom and post-structuralism
have been taken up into variants of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonial the
ory, and postmodernism and have provided a point of departure for numerous contempor
ary theorists, from Pierre *Bourdieu to Slavoj *Zi.zek, and from Judith *Butler to Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, among others.
What does Saussure mean by the arbitrariness of the sign?

2 How illuminating is Levi-Strauss's concern to explain myth and kinship relations in terms of
universal structures of language?
3 What similarities can be discerned between French structuralist theory and functionalist thinking
in the work of Durkheim or Parsons?
4 What does Derrida mean by 'deconstruction'? How illuminating 1s his conception of the privilege
of logos in Western metaphys1Cs and the 'priority of speech over writing'?
5 How do Foucault's methodological premises about discourse, knowledge, 'epistemes', and
'genealogy' guide his substantive analyses of the operation of power in modern societies?
6 What are some implications of the structuralist and post-structuralist 'decentring of the subject'
for discussions of human agency in social theory?
7 Why are themes of 'identity' and 'difference' important to social and cultural theory?
■ FURTHER READING
Some useful introductions to structuralism and post-structuralism are John Sturrock's Structuralism
(Fontana, 2nd edn. 1993), Terrence Hawkes's Structwalism and Semiotics (Routledge, 1978), Catherine
Relsey'sPoststructuralism:A Very Shortlntroduction (Oxford University Press, 2002), and Sarup Madan's
An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism (Harvester, 1993). Try also John Lechte's
Fifty Conlf'mporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity (Routledge, 1994). A good collection
of readings in structuralism with commentaries is John Sturrock's Structumlism and Since: From Levi.
Strauss to Derrida (Oxford University Press, 1979). A useful general reference source in cultural theory
is David Macey's Dictionary of Critical Theory (Penguin, 2001). More detailed studies are Richard
Harland\ Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Poststruct11ralism (Routledge, 1991 ),
J. G. Merquior's From PraguetoPari5: ACritiqueofStruct11ralism and Poststructumlism (Verso, 1986), Edith
l<urzweil's The Age of Structuralism: Levi-Stra11ss to Fo11ca11lt (Columbia University Press, 1980),
and Howard Gardner's The Quest for Mind: Piaget, Levi-Strauss and the Structuralist Movement
(Knopf, 1973). fora good comparison between Levi-Strauss, Durkheim, and American functionalism,
see Patrick Baert's Social Theory in the Twentieth Century (Polity Press, 1998). For a cogent critique of
214 SAMANTHA ASHENDEN
post-structuralism from the standpoint of critical theory, see Peter Dews's Logics of Disintegration:
Post-structuralist Thought and tile Claims of Critical Theory (Verso, 1987).
A good short introduction to Saussure isJonathan Culler's Saussure (Fontana, 1976). Equally good
isJonathan Culler's Bart/ies (Fontana, 1983) and the same author's broader study in literary and cul
tural theory Structuralist Poetics (Routledge, 1975). The recommended English translation of
Saussure's Course in General Linguistics is by Wade Baskin (Peter Owen, 1960). For an introduction
to Levi-Strauss, try Edmond Leach's Levi-Strauss (Fontana, 1974). Among Levi-Strauss's most
accessible works are his Totemism (Penguin, 1973), Myth and Meaning (Routledge, 1978), and Tristes
Tropiques (Penguin, 1973). Roland Barthes's Mythologies (Vintage, 2000) is fun to read. See.especially
his essay 'The Death of the Author', in Barthes's Image, Music, Text (Fontana, 1977).
For an introduction to Derrida, try Christopher Norris's Derrida (Fontana, 1987). For an in-depth
literary study, see Geoffrey Bennington's Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also
Roy Boyn e's Foucault and Derrida: Tile Other Side of Reason (Unwin Hyman, 1990). For a small
selec tion from Derrida's voluminous writings, try Peggy Kamuf's A Derrida Reader (Harvester,
1991).Some good places to begin reading Derrida are part I, chapter 2, and part II, chapter 1, in Of
Grammatology on Saussure and Levi-Strauss. See the essays 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences' and 'Cogito and the History of Madness' (on Foucault) in Writing and
Difference (Routledge, 1978) and the essay 'Differance', in Margins of Philosophy (University of
Chicago Press, 1982). Also useful is the collection of interviews with Derrida titled Positions (University
of Chicago Press, 1982). Some useful introductions to Foucault are J. G. Merquior's Foucault (Fontana,
1991), Lois McNay's Foucault: A Critical Introduction (Polity Press, 1994), and Barry Smart• Foucault
(Tavistock, 1985), as well as the editorial introductions to the three volumes in the Penguin series The
Essential Works of Mid1el Foucault(Penguin,1997-2000). Two verygood collections of essays and
extracts from Foucault are Paul Rabinow's edited The Foucault Reader (Penguin, 1984) and Colin
Gordon's edited Michel Foucault: Powe1/K1rowleJge (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980). A good place to
begin reading Foucault is his Discipline and Punish (Allen Lane, 1977). An excellent commentary on
Foucault is Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow's Michel Fouc,11/lt: Be,l'Olld Str11cturnlism am!
Hm11mez1tics \Uni\·ersity of Chicago Press. 1982). This book also contains an illuminating afterword by
Foucault, titled 'The Subject and Power'. See also Gary Gatting's edited Cambridge Companion to
Foucault (Cambridge University Press, 1994). For a very readable intellectual biography of Foucault, see
James Miller's Tile 1'11,,io11 o(Alic'lre/ Fo11c1111lt (Simon & Schuster, 1993). For an influential
development of Foucaultian ideas in the field of psychology in relation to the concept of
'governmentality',see Nikolas Rose's Powers of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 1999). For
feminist perspectives on Foucault, see Lois McNay's Foucault and Feminism (Polity Press, 1992). For
Foucault's relationship to the work of Habermas, see Samantha Ashenden and David Owen's edited
Fo11rn11lt contra Habcrmm: Rcc11.,trns tire Ui,1/oguc l><'111·cc11 Gem,//og:,·and Critin1l T/1con (Sage, 1999),
as well as Michael Kelly's edited C, itique and Power: Recasting the Fo11ca11/t/Habem1as Debate
(MIT Press, 1994) and David Hoy and Thomas McCarthy's Critical Theory (Blackwell, 1992).
WEBSITES
Semiotics at http://carbon.cudenver.edu/-mryder/itc_data/semiotics.html Prm ides nunwrous links

to sites on semiotics, including key texts and a 'semiotics for beginners' section.
Saussure's Lectures a I www.marxi sts.orgireference/subjectlphilosophy/workslfr/saussure.htm
Contains an on-line copy of the first chapter in Saussure's Course in General Linguistics.
Claude Levi-Strauss at www.marxists.org/reference/subjectlphilosophy/works/frllevistra.htm
Contains an on-line copy of chapter II from Structural Anthropology.
Lectures by Derrida http://prelectur.stanford.edullecturerslderrida/index.html Presents Derrida·s
Stanford presidential lectures, including a biography, excerpts from key works, and interviews.
Hchel t,oucault at www.theory.org.uk/ctr-fouc.htm Includes links to foucault's biography, essoys
on his work, and his relationship to queer theory.
10 Structure and Agency
Anthony King
What are 'structure' and 'agency'? 216

Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu:differences and similarities 217
Giddens's structuration theory 217
Structure, system, and 'tacit knowledge' 218
Bourdieu and the idea of reflexive sociology 221
Bourdieu'sOutline of a Theory of Practice 221
The habitus and the field 222
Cultural capital 224
Realist social theory: Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer 227
Problems of determinism and individualism in structure-agency thinking 228
Resolving the dilemma 230
Conclusion 230
FURTHER READING 231
WEBSITES 232
Structure and agency are key concepts in social theory. Structure refers to regular,
relatively fixed, objective, and generalized features o( social life. Structure usually refers
to social institutions or 'systems', 'forces', or 'currents'. *Agency, on the other hand, refers
to action. Agency usually refers to the action of human individuals or groups of
individuals. Social theorists generally argue that social tructure is reproduced by the
actions of individuals through the mediation of rules, roles, and other resources broadly
referred to as 'culture'. In this sense, structure refers to social facts that are independent of
the imlividual and are able to determine and constrain individual action. In contra t.
agency refers to the observation that while constrained by the realities of their world,
individuals are capable of choosing alternative courses of action. Individuals can choose
what to do, even though their choices are restricted and shaped in various ways by
structural realities.
216 ANTHONY KING
This chapter discusses the strengths as well as some shortcomings of this general
account of social life. We concentrate mainly on the work of two influential contemporary
the orists: Anthony *Giddens and Pierre *Bourdieu. We also look more briefly at two
other - writers associated with a *realist school in British social theory who also employ
the concepts of structure and agency. These are Roy *Bhaskar and Margaret*Archer. The
chap ter focuses particularly on Giddens's theory of *'structuration' and on Bourdieu's
influen tial concepts of 'practice', *'habitus1, and 'cultural capital'.
What are 'structure' and 'agency'?

The image of society as a dual reality of structure and agency appears to accord with
everyday experience. It seems self-evident that human individuals are confronted by
instit1.1tional realities over which they have no absolute or overall control. And it also
seems self-evident that human individuals retain a degree of freedom to act as they
wish or intend.The briefest consideration of persunal experience seems to confirm this
picture. On the one hand, I am constrained and conditioned to some extent in my life
by the type of family, class, income bracket, culture, religious group, or region of the
world in which I was born and brought up. I am deeply influenced by the society lo
which I belong, by its culture and politics. I cannot change these facts about my life
overnight, and I cannot change the way the world is overnight. On the other hand,
within these constraints, I can to some extent choose to follow what I want to do. I can
form particular intentions and plans of action. I can choose to follow one career rather
than another or to study one sub ject rather than another. I can to some extent resist the
way the world is, and I can influence people or reach agreements with them about
things that need to be done or changed.
For many social theorists, structure and agency are the premises from which all
investigation of society needs to proceed. For example, Derek Layder declares that 'an ade
quate account must come to terms with the fact that "society" and its constituent elements
are preconstituted and ohjcctive structures which constrain interaction' (Layder 1981: 1 ).
Similarly, Alex Callinicos affirms that society consists of structure and agents and that the
purpose of social theory is to reconcile these two distinct elements, that 'the explanatory
autonomy of social structures is not inconsistent with the orthodox conception of agents'
(Callinicos 1987: 38). Likewise, John Thompson underlines a concern 'to situate action
within an overall context ot social institutions and structural conditions' (1981: 1-!l; see
also Mouzclis 1995). Structure and agency are often described as the 'objective' and
'subjective' sides of social reality. The 'objective' elements refer to those aspects of society
that are not reducible to individual knowledge or activity, while the 'subjective' aspects
refer precisely to individuals and their personal capabilities.
In many discussions of structure and agency, the role of culture is often invoked as an im
portant connecting concept. Culture is seen as ensuring that different indi\ iduals act in
ways consistent with the reproduction of social structure as a whole. Culture ensures that
individual actions are coordinated in ways that produce and reproduce social structures.
It is argued that without culture individuals would act randomly, producing not a
structured way of life bul only chaos.
Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu: differences and similarities
Anthony *Giddens and Pierre *Bourdieu arc two prominent figures in social theory who
draw extensively in different ways and with different emphases on these twin concepts of
structure and agency. Giddens made his career in the early 1970s through work on class
structure, stratification, and Durkheim, developing a theory of 'structuration' in the 1980s.
*Bourdieu made his career initially as an anthropologist working on a study of the Kabyle
tribe in Algeria in the 1960s. In the 1970s, his interests became more sociological,
focusing especially on education, culture, and class in France.
Since his earliest writings, Bourdieu's leftist political orientation has been evident. After
his anthropological work on the Kabylc, Bourdieu dedicated most of his research to the
analysis and critique of French society. He has focused on the way in which the French class
system is reproduced through institutional and cultural mechanisms. Although Bourdieu
could not be described as Marxist, his interest in class reflects the concerns of *structuralist
Marxist theorists such as Louis*Althusser, Ralph *Miliband, and Nicos *Poulantzas who were
dominant in the early part of Bourdieu's career. Bourdieu has remained oriented to rigor
ously empirical research throughout his work, focusing on the details of everyday life in
different class fractions.
Giddens's work differs from Bourdieu's in notable respects. Giddens's early theoretical
work was not directly concerned with empirical data, and his more recent work has been
criticized for resting on rather thin sociological evidence. For many critics, Giddens's
recent work is characterized by an excessively optimistic and *individualistic account of
contemporary society under conditions of *post-Fordist employment practices. This view
was also taken by Bourdieu. In one of his last publications, Bourdieu described Giddens
as one half of 'a bicephalous Trojan horse' (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001). In Bourdieu's
view, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair was the other half of this miscegenation.
Bourdieu saw Giddens and Blair as contributing to an undermining of social democracy
through the surreptitious introduction of free-market values. Bourdieu became particularly
suspicious of Giddens's later writings on the *'Third Way', which he saw as merely
legitimizing the current social order, instead of criticizing it. Giddens's later work on the
'Third Way' and
*'reflexivity' is discussed in Chapter 13 of this book (pp. 287-9).
However, Bourdieu's political disagreements with Giddens should not blind us to some
notable similarities in their theoretical approaches. Bourdieu and Giddens follow compar
able strategies in the way they deal with ideas about structure and agency. Although they
employ different terminology, both seek to explain the reproduction of social structures
through the agency of individuals acting in conformity with cultural rules and resources.
In the following we deal first of all with Giddens's theory of 'structuration'.
Giddens's structuration theory

Giddens has always sought to produce new insights through syntheses of existing
ideas. His work on social class from the 1970s was an attempt to reconcile Marxist and
Weberian approaches in a theory of *stratification adequate to contemporary conditions
(Giddens 1979). What Giddens came to call *'structuration' is another example of his
synthetic approach. Giddens first developed the theory in the late 1970s in New Rules of
Sociological Method (1976) and Central Problems in Social Theory (1979). and subsequently in
its fully fledged form in The Constitution of Society (1984).
In part, structuration theory is a response to the shortcomings of Talcott *Parsons's
conception of *structural functionalism (discussed in Chapter 4 of this book). In his
middle period and later work, Parsons had proposed that the social system had certain
functional requirements that were met insofar as individuals fulfilled certain roles. Parsons
appeared to give the social system a determining power over individuals who merely
internalized certain values allowing them to perform roles. For some critics, Parsons
seemed to reduce individuals to mere 'cultural dupes' who were unwittingly determined by
certain systemic needs. According to Giddens, the social system could only operate
through the knowledge able activity of individuals. Giddens wanted to produce a theory that
avoided any 'deroga tion of the *lay actor', a theory that did not neglect the everyday
competences and rational self-consciousness of individuals (Giddens 1979: 71). Giddens
insisted that 'an adequate account of human agency must first be connected to a theory of
the acting subject' (Giddens 1979: 2). In order to develop a theory of the acting subject,
Giddens drew on the work of Erving *Goffman and Harold *Garfinkel (discussed in
Chapter 5 of this book). Giddens emphasized the importance of individual agency while at
the same time insisting that structuration theory amounted to 'a recovery of the subject
without lapsing into *sub jectivism' (Giddens 1979: 44).
Giddens was conscious that there are dimensions of society which cannot be reduced to
the individual. While he was sympathetic to the emphasis on individual agency in inter
actionist sociology, he criticized Goffman and Garfinkel's work for not accounting
adequately for institutional realities. He asserted that institutions are not reducible to
individual subjects and that 'society is not the creation of individual subjects' (Giddens
1984: p. xxi). In this sense, structuration theory is ultimately a synthesis of *interactionist
and *interpretive thinking on the one hand, with its emphasis on agency, understanding,
and subjective meanings, and *fimctiunalist and *structuralist thinking on the other hand,
with its focus on the operation of social systems and the resilience of objective structures.
Structuration theory is designed to explain the reproduction of institutional orders
through the knowledgeable agency of individuals. It is a kind of fusion of the work of
Durkheim and Parsons on the one hand and the work of Weber, *Schutz,* Mead,
Goffman, and Garfinkel on the other.
Structure, system, and 'tacit knowledge'

Giddens developed an elaborate *ontology to explain this active reproduction of the social
system. He began by distinguishing between three basic levels of experience in the life
courses of individual actors: a level of the 'unconscious', a levrl of 'discursive
consciousness', and a level of 'practical consciousness'. The unconscious refers to
subconscious motives, described by Freud in terms of psychoanalysis. *Discursive
consciousness refers to those aspects of knowledge that individuals can describe
reflectively and self-consciously. Jn between the unconscious and discursive
consciousness stands the level of 'practical con sciousness', which is crucial to
structuration theory (Giddens 1979: 2). Giddens describes
rl\liCURl ;:.ra; I\GENC" 219
what he calls practical consciousness or *'tacit knowledge' in terms of stocks of mutual

understandings between individuals that are assumed in everyday interaction. These
stocks of tacit knowledge are vital to social practice but are effectively invisible.
Giddens notes that the success of Garfinkel's *ethnomethodology and Goffman's inter
actionism lay in uncovering these shared understandings that are taken for granted in
social encounters (Giddens 1979: 80-1). Goffman and Garfinkel illuminated the back
ground rules that remain invisible because humans never experience an ordinary
social interaction without having already taken these rules for granted. Individuals
only note what is natural when someone misjudges appropriate conduct or when a
stranger does not know about these mutual stocks of knowledge. The purpose of
Garfinkel's breaching experiments was to demonstrate the importance of background
understandings to social life. Giddens's concept of 'tacit knowledge' thus seeks to capture
this routine, pre-given and unthematized character of everyday knowledge in ongoing
interaction. It refers ultimately to shared meanings which coordinate individual action
and allow individuals to interact in mutually acceptable and predictable ways.
While 'practical consciousness' and 'tacit knowledge' are important to structuration
theory, Giddens also posits three other decisive elements of analysis: the element of
'system', the element of 'structure', and the element of 'structuration'.The system refers to
a society's major institutions, to its state and legal and administrative systems, to its social
and class structure, and to its economy. Structuration refers to the process by which indi
viduals reproduce these systems through their activities. In this analysis, the most
decisive concept is that of 'structure'. According to Giddens, it is 'structure' rather than
tacit know ledge which finally ensures that individuals act in a way that reproduces the
social system as a whole. For Giddens, structure refers to rules and resources which exist
only when they are employed in social practice (Giddens 1984: 25).
Borrowing a phrase from the structural linguistics of Ferd inand de*Saussure (discussed in
Chapter 9 of this book), Giddens describes structure as 'a virtual order of difference'
(Giddens 1979: 46). Structure is 'marked by the absence of the subject' (Giddens 1984:
25). In his theory of structural linguistics, Saussure had argued that langue, or
language, con sisted of a system of arbitrary *signifiers-soundsor inscriptions on a
surface. The meaning of each signifier arose from its difference from other signifiers in
that language; the mean ing of each element was created by its non-identity with the
others. By a 'virtual order of difference', Giddens means that structure is a system of
rules of conduct, each of which differ from one another and imply one another. Like
Saussure's concept of langue, structure is essential to any social act but is not
immediately known to the agent. As langue frames everything that is said, limiting
speech to certain comprehensible forms, so Giddens states that virtual rules of conduct
'structure' individual actions. They ensure that actions take a recognizable and
predictable torm. Structure for this reason has the aspect of duality. It is, Giddens says,
both the medium of social action and the outcome of social action. Giddens illustrates
this *'duality of structure' with a linguistic example: 'the duality of structure relates the
smallest item of day-to-day behaviour to attributes of far more inclusive social systems;
when 1 utter a grammatical English sentence in casual conversation, l contribute to the
reproduction of the English language as a whole' (Giddens 1979: 77). In other words,
social agents reaffirm and reproduce the rules on which they draw in their actions. Just
as individuals necessarily draw on pre-given linguistic structures when they speak
and
220 ANTHO JY KING
thereby contribute to reproducing the entire linguistic system, so individuals contribute to

reproducing the whole system of social rules whenever they act. Structure underpins
social practice to ensure that it takes a meaningful and relatively predictable form.
Giddens's conception of structuration has been applied by a number of sociologists to
concrete problems in social research. One interesting context of applications has been
international relations research. This is discussed here in Box 25.
We shall shortly return to some problems with Giddens's use of the concepts of
structure and agency. But first we move to some comparable ideas in the work of Pi_erre
Bourdieu.
BOX 25. ANTHONY GIDDENS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY
One among several contexts of application of Giddens's idea of structuration has been international
relations research. In the 1980s, several reasearchers appealed to the concept of structuration in
an effort to overcome the so-called *'realist' paradigm that had been dominant in international
relations research since the Second World War (see further Wendt 1987). In drawing on the
concept of struc turation, these researchers showed how Giddens's theory could be applied not
only at the level of the actions of individual persons but also at the macrological level of the agency
of whole nation-states in a structural arena of global diplomacy.
Realism in international relations research has followed a different order of priorities from the ideas
signified technically by realism in sociological theory. During the Cold War, international relations
researchers In the realist school argued that international order consisted of strategies by individua l
nation-states aimed at a maximizing interests in power and advantage. The international order was
seen as having a particular structure, resting on a 'balance of power'. A nation-state's position in this
structure was seen as determining the strategies it was most rational for it to pursue.
Towards the end of the Cold War, several international relations theorists became dissatisfied
with this realist approach. They gave more emphasis to the cultural aspects and differences of the
actions of nation-states. They argued that important internal national norms affected the way a state
interacted with other states, and consequently that the international system did not have the rigid
structure affirmed by the realists. They developed a less deterministic account of the international
order, describing their approach as 'constructivist' rather that realist. They appealed to Giddens·s
theory of structuration insofar as it seemed to allow for elements of both individual agency and
structural constraint. Structuration theory allowed individual states more agency than under a realist
paradigm, while at the same time recognizing the existence of a constraining context to which nation-
states themselves con tributed through their actions. The international order was a 'medium' of state
action and an 'outcome' of state action. Individual states could transform the international order in
certain ways, while at the same time remaining bound by its relatively intransigent structure. Their
own transformative actions had the consequence of consolidating the structure, even as the
structure underwent change
In adapting G1ddens's theory in this way, the international relations researchers sought to steer a
middle path between both the *functionalist idea of an all-encompassing, all-determining global
system and the rational choice conception of advantage-maximizing actions by discrete nation-states.
They saw themselves as bringing together the two sides of the dichotomy in a more satisfactory
manner, emphasizing the interdependency of structure and agency and an interlacing of elements
of fixity with elements of transformation.
221
Bourdieu and the idea of reflexive sociology
Like Giddens, Bourdieu also sought a way of reconciling objectivist tendencies in social
theory with subjectivist tendencies. The *objectivist emphasis on structure is embodied
for Bourdiru in French *structuralist theory, especially in the work of *Levi-Strauss
(discussed in Chapter 9 of this book). The *subjectivist emphasis on agency is embodied
for Bourdieu in
*phenomenological and *hermeneutical philosophy, especially in the *existentialism of
Jean-Paul *Sartre.
When Bourdieu began propounding his theories in the 1970s, he rejected Sartre's exist
entialism as untenably *voluntarist. Bourdieu emphasized that human social life could not
always be viewed in terms of unique personal choices. But Levi-Strauss's structuralism
was equally problematic, because human culture could not be reduced to a product of
universal
*cognitive templates operating above the heads of individuals. Human agents had to be
seen as capable of recognizing the significance of the cultural products they themselves
create through their actions. Bourdieu therefore sought to develop a social theory that
explained the institutional realities of modern society without either obliterating individ
ual agency or relapsing into subjectivist individualism. Like Giddens's synthesis of func
tionalism and interactionism, Bourdieu wanted to rescue the positive aspects of the work
of both Levi-Strauss and Sartre, to find a critical middle way between structuralism and
phe nomenology.
We begin here by looking at Bourdieu's first systematic treatise from the early 1970s, his
Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972). This grew out of his anthropological studies oft he Ka
byle tribespeople in the 1960s and provided a theoretical basis for all his subsequent research.
We then turn to his influential concepts of the 'habitus', 'field', and 'cultural capital'.
Bourdieu'sOutlineof a Theory of Practice

Bourdieu considers that the social scientist's position as an ideally impartial observer who
is an outsider to the social processes under observation creates a problem for sociology
and anthropology. The 'objective' and external position of the social scientist can have the
consequence that the social life under study is misrepresented. Insofar as researchers are
outsiders to the social realities they are studying, they invariably construct maps, models,
and rules by which they orient themselves around this strange cultural landscape. The
observer 'compensates for lack of practical mastery, by creating a cultural map' (Bourdieu
1972: 2). In so doing, however, researchers run a risk of reducing cultural life to a wooden
system of rules which imposes itself on the actors. They face a danger of imposing their
own curious and contemplative relation to the culture in question onto the practices of
the natives. They need to gain insight into the way ordinary actors engage in social
relations with the skill of 'virtuosos', like accomplished musicians. Since the researchers,
as visiting intellectuals, have to think of social life in terms of rules and principles (because
they do not know it intimately), they assume that native agents share this curious
intellectualiz ing position. Bourdieu consequently calls for a *'reflexive sociology' in which
sociologists try to theorize rigorously their own position in relation to the practices of the
participants of their studies (Bourdieu 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). A key
requirement for such
222
a 'reflexive sociology' is a grasp of the agency of the participant actors under observation,
and of the agency of the researchers who study them.
For Bourdieu, social agents are 'virtuosos' in the sense they are not dominated by abstract
rules but rather know the script so well that they can elaborate and improvise on the themes
it provides (1972: 79). Bourdicu describes social actors as having a 'sense of the game',
referring to footballers and tennis players as examples of this virtuosic sense. These players do
not apply a priori principles to their play-only beginners need to do that. Confronted with
diverse situations, they have an automatic understanding of what is appropriate. They
know, for in stance, when they should run to the net (1980: 66-7, 81). This virtuosic 'sense
of the game' is not individualistic. It arises in social relations and refers to the
understanding that actors de velop about what other group members regard as tolerable.
rlourdieu's discussion of honour among the Kabyle highlights this intersubjectivesense of
the game:
The driving of the whole mechanism is not some abstract principle (principle of isotimy, equality in
honour), still less the set of rules which can be derived from it but the sense of honour, a disposition
inculcated in earlier years of life and constantly reinforced by calls to order from the group.
(Bourdieu 1972: 14-15)
Kabylian men's sense of honour is a shifting agreement established and transformed

through negotiation. Individuals do not solipsistically consult *a priori rules which deter
mine their actions mechanically. As members of groups, individuals act according to a
sense of practice which is established and judged by the group. The final determination of
correct action is not whether an individual rigorously follows a rule but rather whether an
individual's actions are interpreted as appropriate by others. Other members of a group
decide whether an action is acceptable or sanctionable given their shared sense of honour,
and they call those individuals to order who have acted against this socially agreed sense
of rightness. It is in this sense that agents act within a fluid context of structure, marked by
group expectations, norms of acceptable practice, sanctions, and relations of power.
The habitus and the field

In the Outline and other works form the 1970s and 1980s, Bourdieu developed a concept
of the *'habitus' to overcome the impasse between excessively objectivist and excessively
subjectivist approaches in social research (Bourdieu 1979, 1980, 1984). This term 'habitus'
had also been used earlier in the twentieth century by Max Weber and Norbert *Elias,
with different meanings. In Bourdieu's use of the term, the habitus overcomes subject-
object
*dualism by endowing subjective bodily actions with objective social force, so that the
most apparently subjective individual acts necessarily assume broader social significance.
Individuals have agency, but the kind of agency they have is prescribed by the culture of
which they are members. Following Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu insists that culture cannot be
understood in individualistic or voluntaristic ways. Culture has an objectivity which pre
cedes individual knowledge and understanding!>. The habitus comprises perceptual struc
ture and embodied dispositions which organize the way individuals see the world and act
in it. Bourdieu comments that 'the cognitive structures which social agents implement in
their practical knowledge of the social world are internalized, embodied social structures'
(Bourdieu 1979: 468).
223
The habitus derives from the structural socio-economic positions in which

individuals find themselves. Individuals routinely internalize objective social conditions
such as their economic class, with the result that they acquire the appropriate tastes
and perform the appropriate practices for their social position. According to
Bounlieu, the habitus facilitates the reproduction of social structure by imposing certain
dispositions on the indi vidual. Confronted by an autonomous social reality, individuals
assume various cultural predispositions appropriate to their situation. Borrowing a
phrase from *Nietzsche, Bourdieu argues that individuals evince an 'amor fati' ('a
love of destiny') in which they automatically fulfil the appropriate role ior their
objective situation (Bourclieu 1979: 244 ). Individuals display certain cultural tastes
that reflect their structural situation. The habitus inscribes tastes into the very bodies of
individuals. Bourdieu describes the way in which tastes imposed by social class are not
intellectual judgements but instinctive bodily reactions against those things that donot fit
that class's habit us (Bourdieu 1979: 486, 478). Actors feel inten e embarrassment and
even nausea when confronted with social practices that do not fit their habitus. The
habitus even moulds the human physique. For instance,
Bourdieu describes the bowed deportment of Kabylian women, which physically denotes
their subordination in the tribal society (Bourdieu 1977).
Bourdieu's emphasis on the body in hisdiscussion of the habitus is important. Corporeal
human conduct is central to social life. The human body is an important signifier in social
interaction, expressing social status and power as much as communicative intention.
A person's treatment by others is substantially determined by his or her bodily conduct.
Above all, bodily conduct has to become second nature to be successful. If actors do not
act 'naturally', their actions are likely to take on different meanings. They may be
interpreted as untrustworthy or insincere and encounters may go awry. Bourdieu is right
to emphasize the role of the body in social communication, interaction, and domination
(see also the discussion of the body in Chapter 11 of this book on feminist social theory,
pp. 236-7).
According to Bourdieu, the habitus operates in a wider institutional setting which
Bourdieu calls the 'field'. The 'field' refers to the structure of social relations in which an
individual is located. The structure of social relations is independent of the individuals
who occupy a field. This structure pre-exists individuals and determines struggles between
them. The habitus plays a crucial role because it effectively links individuals to their posi
tion in the field and ensures that they reproduce it by acting in appropriate ways.
Bourdieu argues that 'to think in terms of a field is to think relationally' (Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992: 96). The field has an objective status, similar to Gidden s's 'system'.
Bourdieu stresses that
what exist in the social world are relations-not interactions between agents and
*intersubjective ties between individuals but objective relations which exist 'independent of
individual conscious ness and will', as Marx says ... In analytic terms a field may be defined as
a network, or a config uration of objective relations between positions. (Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992: 97)
Bourdieu's concept of the field is intended to enrich the concept of the habitus.
Bourdieu shows how, in a field, groups struggle for supremacy and social distinctiveness.In
particular, he notes how, in contrast to the middle classes, the working class tend to value
functional clothing and food, making a cultural virtue out of an economic necessity. The
economic position of the working class conditions them to view the elaborate habits of the
bourgeoisie with disdain. Indulgence in certain tastes may come to seem repellent to the
working class.
224
Conversely, upper-class groups typically regard those beneath them in status as vulgar and
uncultured. At the same time, while superior groups try to monopolize certain cultural
prac tices, suhordinate groups attempt to adopt these practices in order to subvert the
status of superior groups. In adopting the practices of superior groups, subordinate groups
under mine the distinctiveness of these groups. We may think, for example, of the ways in
which expensive fashion accessories come to be acquired by middle-income groups in a
desire to imitate the rich and famous, and thereby gradually lose their distinctiveness.
The struggle for social distinctiveness is an empirically verifiable process which
Bourdieu usefully illuminates. One of his most revealing discussions appears in his
influential book from 1979, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. This is
discussed in Box 26.
Cultural capital
The habitus of an individual is a product of his or her position in the field. The field
is substantially formed by objective economic factors. The distribution of economic
resources in a society or more specifically the market determines the social hierarchy. In
a parallel to the structuralist Marxism of* Althusser, *Poulantzas, and *Miliband,
13ourdieu here maintains that an economic base finally determines the structural form that
a society can take. Dominant groups are those that monopolize economic resources, and
the *hege monic position of these groups over subordinate groups is a product of their
economic power.
However, in addition to this notion of economic determination, Bourdieu also develops
a concept of *'cultural capital'. Through the habitus, individuals and groups adopt certain
cultural practices. These practices reflect people's economic position, but the habitus and
the culture it imparts do not passively transmit the prior economic position in which indi
viduals find themselves. Through adopting certain kinds of cultural practices, individuals
can earn cultural capital. They can attain a higher status in the social order than their
purely economic position would allow by adopting and monopolizing cultural activities
that are admired and envied. Individuals and groups can develop cultural knowledge
which is arcane and which raises them above other groups, even above those more
economically powerful than them.
Bourdieu argues that intellectuals and artists, while relatively poor, have a rich habitus
that involves a commitment to difficult and time-consuming cultural forms. These groups
may not have the wealth of private sector professionals but they have the time and leisure
to be able to master respected cultural activities, to acquire 'refinement'. This is also true
of the traditional aristocracy. In this way, at least in France-which may or may not be a
spe cial case-possession of cultural capital allows intellectuals and artists to achieve a
social standing superior to their purely economic position.
In this sense Bourdieu's concept of the habitus suggests a formula for social *status. For
Bourdieu, social *status, defined as an individual's position in the social hierarchy, is a
product of an individual's economic and cultural capital taken together. While financiers,
stockbrokers, and bankers all have substantial economic capital, they are not automatically
dominant in the social field because they are low in cultural capital. In contrast, skilled
pro fessionals such as doctors and teachers, as well as state employees such as police
officers and
225
BOX 26. PIERRE BOURDIEU'S DISTINCTION: A SOCIAL CRITIQUE OF THE

JUDGEMENT OF TASTE
In his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979) Bourdieu adopts a
sociolo gical perspective on questions of taste, aesthetic judgements, and preferences in cultural
goods. He elucidates the social conditions that make people's different tastes in art and culture what
they are. His approach can be described as a form of sociological *Kantianism in the sense that his
conception of the habitus functions in an analogous manner to Immanuel Kant's eighteenth-
century philosophical conception of basic organizing *cognitive categories of human intellection
and action.
Writing in the 1780s, Kant had divided the realm of rational intellectual life into three domains:
the domain of theoretical reason (involved in science), the domain of practical reason (involved in
morality), and the domain of aesthetic sensibility (involved in tastes about art). In each domain, Kant
had sought to identify certain transcendental principles which make each of these aspects of
human existence what they are. Kant had proposed that various cognitive categories precede
human perception and make meaningfully ordered experience possible. These organizing
categories essentially make the world what it is for human beings. In Distinction, Bourdieu seeks
to show how these cognitive cate gories arise from prior socio-economic conditions, and that it is
the socio-economic features of these categories that make the world what it is for human actors. He
concentrates particularly on bringing to light the sociological dimensions of the categories involved in
aesthetic sensibilities and cultural tastes in a given society. In this sense, his book can be seen as a
sociological response to the last of Kant's three
philosophical treatises, The Critique of Judgement, of 1790.
Elaborating the habitus empirically, Bourdieu carried out extensive quantitative and qualitative research into the
habits and tastes of social classes in France in the 1970s. He divided French society into four main social
classes; the working class, the petty bourgeoisie (the lower middle class) and the professional classes (the upper
middle class), which he subdivided into private and public sector fractions. He called the private
sector professionals the 'right bank', and the public sector professionals the 'left bank'. This was in
refer ence to the River Seine in Paris. The north 'right' bank of the Seine has historically been
associated with finance and government (the side of the Champs-Elysees). The south 'left' bank has
historically been asso ciated with art and culture (the side of the Latin Quarter and the University). The
right-bank elite consisted of bankers, businessmen, lawyers, and brokers, while the left-bank elite
referred to teachers, academics, intellectuals, artists, and writers. Bourdieu accepted that class positions in
Paris were decisively determined by economic capital. Consequently, the right-bank elite were dominant.
Nevertheless, cultural capital also played an important role in a class's social status. The right-bank elite
possessed extensive economic capital but had little cultural capital. Cultural capital was substantially
monopolized by the left-bank elite. The right-bank elite engaged in 'hedonistic' activities which
conspicuously demonstrated their economic cap ital. They indulged in expensive foods and elaborate
holidays in exclusive locations. The left bank, by contrast, chose activities which did not require
significant economic capital but which demonstrated cul tural sophistication and, above all, the time
required to acquire these arcane tastes. In this way, the left bank distinguished itself from other groups.
The left bank favoured difficult modern music and engaged in inex pensive but personally demanding
sports such as cross-country skiing, mountaineering, and hill-walking.
Although not without its problems, Bourdieu's analysis of the left- and right-bank professionals
is suggestive because it recognizes growing divide between public and private sector professionals in
a context of *post-Fordist employment cultures. By contrast, his account of the working class and
the petty bourgeoisie is less convincing, and has not been seen as providing an accurate sociology of
these groups. It has been argued that Bourdieu exaggerates the extent to which the lower classes' lack
of the economic and educational advantages of elites predestines them to particular ways of lite.
Nevertheless, Bourdieu's book remains one of the most important sociological analyses of class
culture.
226 i rHIIGN\' KING
government officers, and relatively impoverished intellectuals and artists are able to
contest social dominance by the materially rich through their monopolization of
cultural capital. The social hierarchy is thus a product of a struggle between groups on the
basis of both economic capital and cultural capital. Cultural capital is conditioned by
economic capital but is not predetermined by it. For example, a graduate of an elite
university may have come from a wealthy family background, but if the graduate
then makes a successful career in the business world, it is the graduate's cultural capital
acquired at university which must be identified as the prime cause of the graduate's
success, rather than the economic capital of the graduate's family. Another graduate from
the same elite university but not from a wealthy family background might in principle
have the same chance of success, on the strength of the university-acquired cultural
capital alone.
Bourdieu's conception of cultural capital is very clearly illuminated both in his book
Distinction and in his study of the sociology of education, titled Homo Academicus (1984).
The latter text is discussed in Box 27.
BOX 27. PIERRE BOURDIEU AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION
In the field of education research, Bourdieu's concept of the habitus has been enduring. When the habitus
refers not to static cultural templates arising automatically from a prior material reality but more
dynam ically to exclusive group culture, 1t is very illuminating. Employing the concept in this way, Bourdieu
makes some interesting arguments about the reproduction of social inequality in schools and
academies. In the postscript to Homo Academicus (1984), his study of the French educational system,
Bourdieu contends that the examinations that students have to pass to receive their all-important
diplomas are not judged purely on objective academic criteria but also to some extent on criteria of social
fitness. In his provocative thesis, the French academy is founded on a system of cultural exclusion
where the values of the middle classes are imposed in the examining procedure. The physical
mannerisms and writing style of students become criteria for grading them, rather than purely impartial
pedagogical judgements. In his analysis of marking schemes, Bourdieu notes that 'the most favourable
epithets appear more and more frequently
as the social origins of pupils rise' (Bourdieu 1984: 198). Consequently, the academy remains closed to the
children of the working classes, while it is conveniently monopolized by the professional classes with the
requisite cultural capital
There are some problems with Bourdieu's argument insofar as he overemphasizes the closure of the 1
academy to non-professional social groups. He allows for no flexibility in the process, just as his formal
227
Both Bourdieu's and Giddens's reflections on structure and agency suffer from various
problems to which we must turn in a moment. But before doing so, we move now to a
third and last set of contributions to be found in the work of the British *realist theorists
Roy
*Bhaskar and Margaret *Archer.
Realist social theory: Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer
After his seminal contributions to the philosophy of science in the early 1970s, Roy
Bhaskar became a prominent figure in British social theory. In a similar fashion to
Giddens and Rourdicu, Bhaskar understands society in terms of the reproduction of
structure by individ ual agency through the mediation of culture. Bhaskar's realism claims
that society consists of certain dimensions of reality which cannot be understood by
reference to individual activity and belief alone. Social action has emergent properties
which exceed consciousness of the individual. Although no institutions would exist
without individuals to fulfil the roles that compose them, they have properties which
transcend the individuals who create the institutions. For Bhaskar, society consists of
irreducibly real social structures.
Bhaskar endorses Giddens's structuration theory and explicitly relates it to his own
work (Bhaskar 1979: 45). He describes his own realist theory as the 'Transformational
Model of Social Action', and regards this as compatible with structuration. The
transformational model of social action claims that society consists of structure and
agency. Structure precedes indi vidual agency but structure can only be reproduced and
transformed through individual agency. Individuals are confronted by a social structure
which constrains them but which does not finally determine them. In their actions,
individuals can manipulate the structure by reinterpreting their situation and thus developing
new forms of agency. In this way, individu als are able to transform the social structure.
In her 'morphogenetic social theory', Margaret Archer advocates a position close to
Bhaskar's (Archer 1995). Ry 'morphogenetic' Archer refers to the process by which
patterns or 'shapes' are generated in repeated social action. Like Bhaskar, Archer sees
society as consisting of real social structures irreducible to individuals. Archer berates
those social theorists who fail to recognize the dual nature of social reality, who either
collapse struc ture into individuals or assimilate individuals to structure. For her, society
consists both of objective structures and of individual agents. Neither of these two
dimensions can be derived or reconstructed from each other.
Archer maintains that Giddens collapses the objective institutional fact of society into
the individual. Unlike Bhaskar, she sees Giddens's structuration theory as a one
dimensional form of methodological individualism (Archer 1982: 458 ff., 1988: 72). In her
book Culture and Agency (1988), Archer argues that culture emerges out of individual
activity but that once it has been created, especially when it is embodied in physical
artefacts, it has an objectivity which transcends the individual. Architecture, artworks, books,
and mathematical formulas all attain an existence which is autonomous of everyday social
intercourse. According to Archer, the autonomy of culture is decisive in explaining social
reproduction and transformation. Individuals in a society are confronted by a cultural sys
tem which is independent of them. Often individuals draw automaticaily on the most
obvious elements of this culture to perform regular practices which reproduce the syst;;m.
228 ·, I.
However, Archer also argues that the autonomous status of culture facilitates change.
Since the cultural system docs not depend merely on what people here and now believe, it
can be drawn upon in different ways, or forgotten elements within it can be emphasized. In
this way, individuals can develop new forms of practice and thereby transform the
patterns of socio-cultural integration in their society. They can change the institutional
structures of a society by developing new relations to the cultural system. Particular
individuals may note and then eventually act upon potential contradictions between the
cultural system and everyday practice. Individuals can draw on autonomous cultural
resources to direct their everyday practice, producing either change or stasis.
Archer's criticisms of Giddens are not without merit. However, it can be argued that her
own 'morphogenetic social theory' in fact resembles Giddens's theory in certain respects
and arguably shares some of its problems. Her lexicon differs from Giddens's but her de
scription of the autonomy and function of the cultural system follows structuration theory
quite closely. It can be argued that her idea of the 'cultural system' operates in the same
way as Giddens's idea of 'structure'. Archer's 'cultural system' consists of diverse formulas,
rules, and ideas which are autonomous of individuals but upon which individuals must
draw if they are to act in a recognizable fashion. The cultural system mediates between the
institu tions of the social system and the individual. It channels individual practice so that
struc tural reproduction can occur, but it also allows for the transformation of the social
structure through the agency of individuals.
Some of the most general problems with this way of theorizing are brought together
in the next section. These problems can be described in terms of a basic dilemma of
determinism and individualism in debates about structure and agency.
Problems of determinism and individualism in

structure-agency thinking
Writers on structure and agency such as Giddens, Bourdieu, Bhaskar, and Archer tend
to face a rather difficult dilemma. This dilemma can be described as having the following
two sides. On the one hand, there is a side of *determinism. On the other hand, there is a
side of excessive methodological*individualism. Let us look first at the determinist
side.
Giddens, Bourdieu, Bhaskar, and Archer argue that social life is to be explained by the
postulate of rules which direct individual action. 13ourdieu claims that the habitus
imposes certain tastes on individuals so that they necessarily adopt social practices
appropriate for their class position. In Giddens's picture, individuals seem to have a more
active say in how they follow the rules of structure. But still, their practices are said
necessarily to instantiate structure and thereby to reproduce the wider social system to
which these rules are attached. In each of these writers, institutional forms are said to be
reproduced in accordance with cultural rules. These rules-be they Bourdieu's 'habitus'
or Giddens's 'structure'-are said to direct or to determine individual action.
The danger here is that if it is said that individuals are directed by rules which impose
on them and of which they are not fully aware, human agency tends to be denied.
229
It seems that individuals no longer consciously choose what to do but are merely directed
by these prior rules. This determinism is clear in Bourdieu's writing. His concept of
the habitus has a tendency to emasculate human agency, to reduce dynamic and
uncertain social interaction to the inevitable reproduction of institutional structures.
The habitus imposes certain forms of conduct on the individual. Individual agents
reproduce the insti tutional structure of the field because they are determined by these
unavoidable cultural predispositions.
The problem is similar for Giddens. Because of Giddens's emphasis on the creativity of
the individual, the determinist implications of his structuration theory are less immedi
ately apparent. But in fact, Giddens is not free from this problem either. Giddens emphas
izes that structure is inexorably attached to the social system and therefore that for the
most part individuals automatically reproduce the system. The implication of Giddens's
theory is that structure ensures that individuals always act in a way which is compatible
with that system. Although he does not explain this relationship, individuals necessarily
act in a way which is consistent with social order.
Now let us look at the individualist side of the dilemma. Giddens and Bourdieu are
right to want to reject determinism. Giddens is at pains to emphasize that his theory
allows for the fact that individuals can always choose alternative courses of action and
that whatever structural imperatives obtain, 'the individual could have acted otherwise'
(Giddens 1984: 75). Similarly, Bourdieu asserts that his theory allows for the persistence
of individual agency in the face of the objectivity of the habitus. Bourdieu has been
incredulous at those critics of his work who have interpreted the habitus in a deterministic
fashion (see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 134). Bourdieu sees the habitus as allowing
room for slip page: individuals, he claims, are not completely determined by the habitus
but can manip ulate the cultural resources available to them to develop new social
practices. He insists that individuals still have agency under the habitus.
Here the danger for Bourdieu and Giddens, however, is that if individuals are free at any
moment to do otherwise, it is possible that structure or habitus do not really constrain
what they do. It is possible that if individuals possess this freedom, structure or habitus are
not really guaranteeing that individuals act in appropriate ways-because at any time,
individ uals could adopt new forms of action at random. And if individuals can do
otherwise some of the time, they could do otherwise all of the time-so that neither
structure nor habitus prevent them from acting randomly. Therefore the danger in
Giddens's and Bourdieu's theory is that individuals only choose to follow structure or
habitus. And if they only choose to follow structure or habitus, they could at any moment
choose not to follow them. Regular social interaction here seems to be explained finally
only by individual choice.
The dilemma is thus this. Either structure-agency thinking tends to emasculate indi
vidual agency, claiming that individuals are determined externally by structures or habitus.
Or structure-agency thinking tends to overassert the agency of individuals, leaving the per
sistence and resilience of regular social institutions impossible to explain and endowing
individuals always with the possibility of acting otherwise. In this sense, structure-agency
thinking tends toward a danger of determinism on the one hand and a danger of
randomness of choices on the other hand. (For further discussions of this dilemma, see
Sewell 1992; Schatzki 1987, 1997; Taylor 1993; King 2000a, 2000b, 2004).
230 - iHrWNY l(IN
Resolving the dilemma

!'he dilemma presented here is a deliberately heightened formulation of some rather
abstract theoretical difficulties that ha,e repeatedly troubled contributors to social theory.
It should be emphasized that these theoretical difficulties do not mean that the concepts of
structure and agenq are useless for sociologists in empirical research. The concept of
structure is plainlv retrievable f r pragmatic purposes. In any sociological study, the
specific practices under e,amination h,n-e to be situated in a wider social and historic con
te,t. This background can usefull) be called 'structure', with the pro\'iso that 'structure'
amount5 to liYnanuc relations between actors in different times and places. Structure
should not be seen as referring to anv *mt'taph_vsirnl entity which exists above and beyond
all imhnduals and their relations. At then most sustainable, realist theorists such as Archer
or Bhaskar me structure in a pureh *heuristic (non-metaphysical) way.
Social theo1, can avoid many difficulties with the concepts of structure and agency
\\-ht'll 1t 111.11-:t· ,111 dt,,rt t,, rt'g,1rd ,,, i.1I lite k in tnm ,)f mdi,·idual.igency 'reproducing'
structure in any mechanical sense and more in terms of ongoing dynamic interrelations
between aLtors. Human beings do not 'reproduce' structure 'by means of' culture. Rather,
t,,g,'th,'t lium,111 i11tt'r,1ct "1th c.1(11 ,,til,'r b, rdt'rt•nn·tt) sh.ired understandings. l'hrough
these interminable interactions, the social relations which compose a society are sustained
and transformed. Thus a society should not be seen as consisting *ontologically or
metaphysicallv of two basic substanct:s one substance called 'structure' and one substance
called 'agency' Rather, it should be seen as consisting of social relations between individ
ual actor• all ol whom act under \'anous constraints which we call 'institutions', 'forces',
'trends', 'power' or 'powers', and so on. In these webs of social relations, both the regularity
and the ueati\ it) of indi, 1dual action become more explicable. Together, individuals
orient themselves to, ards shared gl als, and together they are able to develop new forms
of practice. !'he social realit) of r lations between human persons should not be reduced to
a static ,md *du.1listic image of indiYiduals confronting objective structures.
Individual
,Ktors d0 not \·0nsult' cultural rul sin their relationship to structures. Rather, they come
t,, mut 11.li 111hkr,t.111d111p ,,f\, lut c,,n titutL'' -1pp1,1pri,1ll' .idi,111, and arc able to bind
each other to these appropriate forms of conduct.
Conclusion
Structure and agencv ha"e been key concept. in social theory In general, it is common
place to aq,'l1e tlldt social structure is reproduced b\ mean of the agency of individuals,
through the mediation of ultural rule and re ources. There are certain problematic
!t'nd,·th 1,·, 111 t111, 11.n ,,t thinking \\·h1d1 111,1, k.1d tu .111 imp,issc bct,1'L'l'I1 O\'erly objectivist
or dftm11i11ist 1ccotmts and owrly subjectiYist or individualist accounts of the dynamics of
,,,,·1.ll l1k. t ru,·tu1, ,1g,·11,, t hinklllg ,'It 11,•r ru11, .i ri,k t1f ,'ma,cul.iting indi,·idual
agency i11 ,,rd,'r t,, cq,l.1111 st rudur.1l rq,r,,duct i,H1. ,,r it ru11s .1 risk pf un·remphasizing
individual freedom and thereby leaving structural reproduction mysterious.
I I 231
Nevertheless, the concepts of structure and agency continue to hold pragmatic value for
empirical social research. The theoretical analyses of Giddens, Bhaskar, Archer, and espe
cially Bourdieu have been fertile for sociologists, and the value of their work particularly
comes into view when structure and agency are not thought of as rigid or static ontological
poles but rather in terms of dynamic contexts of social relations between interacting indi
viduals and groups. Human groups are not determined by rules which impose upon them,
nor do they follow rules in private isolation. Individuals are able to act relatively
predictably and to create social order because they routinely accept certain common
understandings of what is appropriate, and these understandings become binding and
constraining. It is the task of sociologists to analyse the historical significance ofsocial
processes that emerge from these dynamic relations.
How useful are the concepts of structure and agency for social analysis?
2 How similar and how different are the social theories of Giddens and Bourdieu?
3 What is meant by an objectivist standpoint on social life? What is meant by a

subjectivist standpoint? How are the problems of the two standpoints to be avoided?
4 How illuminating is Bourdieu's assertion that cultural tastes and educational achievements are
functions of 'cultural capital'?
5 What differences are to be noted between the concept of class and the concept of habitus?
6 In what sense is socio-economic inequality a cultural phenomenon?
FURTHER READING
For useful introductions to the work of Giddens, see Lars Bo Kaspersen's Anthony Giddens:
An Introduction to a Social Theorist (Blackwell, 2000), Kenneth Tucker's Anthony Giddens and
Modern Social Theory (Sage, 1998), Ira J. Cohen's Structuration Theory (Macmillan, 1989), and Ian
Craib's Anthony Giddens (Routledge, 1992). For a good overall account of Giddens's theory of
structuration, seeJohn Parker's Structuration (Open University Press, 2000). The best collection of sec
ondary work on structuration theory is David Held and John B. Thompson's edited Social Theory of
Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and his Critics (Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also
Christopher Bryant and DavidJary's edited Giddens' Theory ofStructuration (Routledge, 1991) and].
Clark, C. Modgil, and S. Modgil's edited Anthony Giddens: Consensus and Controversy (Falmcr
Press, 1990). For a wide-ranging collection of essays, see Christopher Bryant and David Jary's
edited four volumes Anthony Giddens: Critical Assessments (Routledge, 1996). The key texts for
Giddens's theory of structuration are The Constitution of Society (Polity Press, 1984), New Rules of
Sociological Method (Hutchinson, 1976), and Central Problems in Social Theory (Macmillan, 1979).
For an incisive critique of Giddens, see Alex Callinicos's two articles 'Anthony Giddens: A
Contemporary Critique', Theory and Society, 14 5 (1985), 133-66, and 'Social Theory Put to the Test
of Practice: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens', New Left Review, 236 (1999), 77-102.
232 ANlHONY KING
Some good studies and guides to Bourdieu are Derek Robbins's two books The Work of Pierre
Bour,1ieu (Open University Press, 1991) and Bourdieu and Culture (Sage, 2000), David Swartz's
Culture
,111.! /'111-11'1:·1lw.\ociolns_rof l'iem• /lu11ri/i('II (( :hicago University Press, 1997), l(id1ardJenkins'sBourdieu
(Routledge, 1993), Bridget Fowler's Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory (Sage, 1997), and Jen Webb,
Tony Schirato, and Geoff Danaher's Understanding Bourdieu (Sage, 2002). An excellent advanced col
lection of essays on Bourdieu is C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma, and M. Postone's edited Bourdieu: Critical
Perspedives (Polity Press, 1993). In this collection, see especially the contribution by Charles Taylor,
titled 'To Follow a Rule'. See also the discussion in Craig Calhoun's Critical Social Theory (Blackwell,
1995), as well as Richard Shuster man's edited Bourdieu: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1999) and Derek
Hol>i>im\ l'ditvd four volunws l'iC'trC' Bourdinr (Sage, 2000). A meful selection from Bourdieu's works
isJohn B. Thompson's edited J,anguage and Symbolic Power: Pierre Bourdieu (Polity Press, 1991), A good
place to begin reading Bourdieu is his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
(Routledge, 1984), as well as his co-written book with Lale Wacquant An Invitation to Reflexive
Sociology (Polity Press, 1992). For further developments in French and American sociology influ
enced by Bourdicu, see Michele Lamont and Laurent Thevenot's edited Rethinking Comparative
Culturul Sociology ( am bridge University Press, 2000).
For a guide to Bntish realist theory, sec Andrew Collier's Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy
Hhaskar's Philosophy (Verso, 1994)..Margaret Archer's key works are Culture and Agency (Cambridge
University Press, 1988) and Reulist Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Jose
L6pez and John Scott's useful guide Social Structure (Open University Press, 2000) and Charles
Crothers's Sociul Structure (Routledge, 1996). For a comparative critical study of Giddens, Bourdieu,
Archer, and realist theory, see Anthony King's The Structure of Contemporary Social Theory
(Routledge, 2004).
Iii WEBSITES
Homepage of Anthony Giddens at www.lse.ac.uk/Giddens/ Includes a bibliography of key works

and links to various lectures by Giddens.
Structuralion Theory at www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/mod/gidcns.htm Contains an excerpt
from a key text by Giddens dealing with structuration.
Roy Hhaskar <11 www.raggedclaws.com/criticalrealism/archive/rts/rts.html l'ruvides an on-line
transcription of a text of Bhaskar on realist theory of science.
Pierre llourdieu at www.utu.fi/erill/RUSE/blink.html ( :ontains links to sites on ourdieu, with
bibliographies, review articles, and excerpts from key works.
Bourdil'u in l'er pective at www.isj1text.b1e.org.uk/pubs/isj87/wo1freys.htm Presents a lengthy
article on Bourdieu's contributions to sociology and French intellectual life generally,
r------------------------------i
11 Feminist Social Theory

Lisa Adkins
Women in classical social theory: the exclusion of women from the social 234
Feminist perspectives on Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel 235
The body as an 'absent presence' in classical and contemporary theory 236
Women and socialization: labour, reproduction, and sexuality 237
Feminism and Marxism 238
Modernity as a gendered construct 239
Constructions of femininity and masculinity 240
The sex-gender distinction 243
Heterosexuality and homosexuality 245
Gender and its relation to exclusion 246
Feminism and postcolonial theory 247
Conclusion 249

FURTHER READING 250
WEBSITES 251
There are a number of ways in which the history of feminist social theory has been
thought and told. One of the most often rehearsed is the idea that feminist social theory
has moved away from the ideals of *Enlightenment thought, associated with *universalist
values of rationality, reason, and equality. It has been claimed that feminist social theory
has moved instead towards 'post-Enlightenment' values, associated with ideas of 'differ
ence', 'specificity', and *'particularism'. In this sense it has been suggested that feminist
social theory has contested the ideals that classical social theory both embodied and
contributed towards-ideals exemplified in the work of figures such as Marx, Weber,
Durkheim, and Simmel.
While this narrative is widely told and certainly sheds light on some important traject
ories of feminist social theory, it is misleading to speak of any straightforward shift from
234 £ l'>A AOK rJS
Enlightenment to 'post-Enlightenment', or to *'postmodern', thinking in contemporary

feminist theory. This assumption overlooks a number of ways in which contemporary
feminist theorists have rethought and are rethinking the social categories of gender in
full recognition of the problems associated with the traditions of Enlightenment
thought. To understand this ambivalent and multi-sided legacy, this chapter provide:, an
overview of feminist social theory by setting out three key moments or phases in the
history of feminist interventions in social analysis. The f"irst moment or phase involves
the observation that both classical and contemporary social theory tends to exclude
women from the object-domain of social theory and that masculinity remains routinely
privileged in accounts of sociality and modernity. The second moment or phase involves
attempts to correct this exclusion by means of a thoroughgoing historicization and soci
ologization of the category of woman, notably by means of the concept of *'gender'. The
third moment or phase lnvolves qualified criticism of feminist projects which seek to his
toricize and socialize the category of woman. This has involved the observation that
sometimes such projects may simply add women into pre-existing theoretical frame works,
leaving the assumptions of such frameworks untouched and ignoring their fun damentally
gendered character.
We begin by looking at feminist analyses of the association of modernity with
masculinity in classical social thought. We then discuss some of the most important
themes in contem porary feminist social theory concerning labour, reproduction,
sexuality, and gender and the relation of gender to class and ethnicity.
Women in classical social theory:the exclusion

of women from the social
Classical social theory sought to come to grips with the changes associated with
industrial ization, capitalism, urbanization, *rationalization, and the condition of
modernity in the broadest sense. In this project, early feminist interventions in classical
sociology pointed overwhelmingly to a privileging of the masculine subject in
descriptions of the modern condition and to an apparent exclusion of women from the
experiences and sensations of modernity. Whether it was from the dizzying experiences of
rapidly urbanizing cities, or the political consciousness of wage labour, or experiences of
alienation or*anomie, feminists have argued that the classical tradition tended to associate
these experiences more with masculinity than with femininity. Feminist commentators
have observed out that this exclusion of women took place in a variety of ways, but
crucially revolved around an association of women with sets of relations deemed to be
outside the institutions and experiences of the modern. ln many classical narratives,
women were typically associated with irrationality, tradition, corporeality, and the private
and domestic spheres. They were not seen as directly part of the worlds of rationality,
capitalism, the urban, and industrial ism, represented hy the public realms of wage labour,
bureaucracy, and politics. Women's relations were almost seen to be pre-industrial or non-
capitalist. Thus it has been argued that classical social theory tended to locate women in
an antithetical relationship to the
r.f'v11NIST SOCIAL 'fiHOR. 235
modern, indeed as outside the very object of social theory-the social. This can be
illustrated in various aspects of the work of Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel.
Feminist perspectives on Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel

An important focus of attention for feminist critics has been Max Weber's conception of
the transition from personal traditional forms of power to impersonal, legal-rational forms
of *domination. Weber postulated that traditional modes of power are characterized by
*patriarchal domination, by the rule of the father and the husband. This was a direct
mode of domination that found its ideal-typical form in household groups organized via
kinship arrangements and legitimized via the sanctity of tradition. Under this mode of
domina tion, Weber saw women and children as subject to the authority of the patriarch.
However, while Weber understood the power of the patriarch to be social in origin, he
understood the domination of women to take place through unchanging characteristics of
the relations between men, women, and children. Weber wrote that 'the woman is
dependent because of the normal superiority of the physical and intellectual energies of
the male, and the child because of his tsic] objective helplessness' (Weber 1922a: 1007;
see also Sydie 1987: 59). In short, Weber assigned the household domination of women
(and of children) to nature, and men's power to culture.
While Weber understood this mode of domination to be limited in scope and
historically specific, he saw it as forming the bedrock of subsequent forms of power
relations and social formations. Thus he understood the emergence of
bureaucratization and processes of rationalization as involving a transformation of
patriarchal domination. Rationalization involved a transformation from direct,
patriarchal rule to impersonal, public modes of domination. In his writings, modern
rational-legal power is imagined as an indirect, impersonal form of male power.
It can he argued that Weber's theorization here relies explicitly on a gendered *dualism
where masculinity is overwhelmingly associated with rationalization and femininity is
associated with the irrational. The operation of this dualism works to position both women
and femininity outside the experiences and social relations of modernity; that is, outside
the culture of rationality. This is evident in the ways Weber imagines the Protestant ethic
and its control and suppression of emotions and desires as a masculine ethic. Associating
women with irrationality, Weber tended to position women as unable to achieve the
rational lifestyle that he saw as characterizing the condition of modernity (compare
Bologh 1990; Wolff 1990; Hekman 1999; Gerhard 2003).
In general, feminist critics have argued that classical social theory typically understands
social action as a matter of the dominance of mind over hody, as a task of transcending
and transforming the constraints of corporeality. In this sense classical social theory tends
to deny or ignore the role of the body for both human subjects and social action,
constructing a disembodied, abstract, rational subject as the ideal subject of modernity.
Feminist com mentators have pointed to ways in which such mind-hody dualism is
distinctly gendered, associating the body overwhelmingly with women (compare Grosz
1990; Weiss 1999). In classical narratives women are often positioned as unable to
transcend corporeality.
236 LISA ADKINS
They are often presented as being unable to achieve the mental condition required for
participation in modern forms of social action. In Suicide Durkheim writes that man is
'almost entirely the product of society', while woman is 'to a far greater extent the product
of nature' (Durkheim 1897: 385; see also Sydie 1987: 32). Durkheim also asserts that man's
'tastes, aspirations and humour have in large part a collective origin, while his companion's
are more directly influenced by her organism' (Durkheim 1897: 385; see also Sydie 1987: 32).
This is held to be so even for those women who participate in public life. In
ThcVivisionofLabourinSociety, Durkheim writes of such women: 'Certain classes of women
participate in artistic and literary life just as men ... But, even in this sphere of action,
woman carries out her own nature, and her role is very specialized, very different from
that of man' (Durkheim 1893: 19-20).
In Simmel's two notable essays 'The Relative and the Absolute in the Problem of
the Sexes' and 'Female Culture' (1911b, 1911c), women are similarly positioned as
unable to achieve the capacities for participation in the social. Two aspects can be
observed in these essays. On the one hand, Simmel is unique in classical sociology in his
concern to criticize the equation of masculinity with modernity. For Simmel, women's
experience of life operates as a challenge to the alienating, contradictory, and dizzying
experiences of modernity. Women possess a 'non-differentiated wholeness'; they
remain centred, or 'grounded', in themselves. In contrast, Simmel saw men as
suffering the ill fortune of experiencing all the fragmenting, alienating, and
differentiating forces of modernity. On the other hand, Simmel locates femininity and
women outside the socio-historical time of modernity. They remain outside the socio-
cultural arrangements and experiences his the ory describes. This is the case for Simmel
as the 'non-differentiated wholeness' of women ensures that women do not, and cannot,
experience or achieve the detachment and critical reflection necessary for participation in
the cultural and institutional forms of modernity. In Simmel's social theory, women
cannot transcend their being-a being which Simmel defined primarily in terms of
sexuality-in order to become social agents. Femininity and feminine culture occupy a
zone of 'being', rather than a zone of 'becoming', one of imman ence rather than of
transcendence. As Marshall and Witz comment, in the early socio logical imaginary of
Durkheim and Simmel 'women are locked into and overwhelmed by their corporeality,
whilst men rise above it and are defined, determined and distinguished by their sociality'
(Marshall and Witz 2003: 28; see also Felski 1995; Witz 2001).
The body as an 'absent presence' in classical and contemporary theory

While it is important to point to an exclusion of women from classical visions of the
so cial, it is also important to note some ongoing legacies ot this tradition today. In
this con nection, several feminist commentators have detected a reinstatement of the
privileged masculine *subject of the classical tradition in more contemporary forms of
social the ory-even though it is frequently claimed that women and men are being
released from the constraints, rules, and norms of gender associated with classical or
'high' modernity. Lois Mc Nay ( 1999, 2000), for example, argues that the emphasis in
recent social theory on increased possibilities for the self-fashioning of identity in late
modern cultures recuper ates classical notions of a privileged masculine subject. Mc
ay points particularly to Anthony Gid<lens's widely cited analysis of late modern identity
in terms of *'reflexivity' (discussed in Chapter 13 of this book, pp. 287-9). This is the case,
McNay argues, since the
HMINIST SOCIAL THEORY 237
idea of a self-fashioned identity fails to take into account certain embocliecl, embedded,
and habituated aspects of identity, especially those connected to gender and sexuality,
which are not straightforwardly available to self-fashioning. Mcl\ay is not suggesting here
that gender and sexual identities arc tixcd. Rather, following 13ourdieu (1972), she argues
that there are aspects of identity which are not accessible to self-conscious transforma
tion. She suggests that sexual desire and maternal feeling are relatively entrenched and
pre-reflexive aspects of identity which are not open to deliberate alteration. McNay
suggests that in emphasizing increased capacities for the self-fashioning of identity and
overlooking issues of habit and embodiment, recent social theory reinstates the idea of an
abstract, disembodied, rational and masculine subject found so commonly in the classical
tradition.
The influence of the classical tradition has been detected in branches of contemporary
theory which at face value appear to break with this legacy. In particular, recent sociologi
cal writing on the body has drawn attention to problems of mind-body dualism in classical
sociology, but has not always sufficiently recognized the gendered aspects of this dualism
(see for example, Turner 1984; Williams and Bendelow 1998). Writers on the body have sug
gested that mind-body dualism can be countered by discovering embodied themes and
subplots in the works of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel. Thus Shilling (1993) notes
an embodied subplot in Marx's writings on emerging modes of capitalist modes of regula
tion. Specifically, Shilling suggests that in Marx's writings, capitalist forms of regulation
develop not simply through consciousness (the mind) but also through the body.
Capitalist technology ties and subordinates both working minds and bodies to machinery.
Such contemporary accounb suggest that rather than being entirely absent, the hody is an
'absent presence' in the classical tradition. It is, however, important to emphasize that such
mind-body dualism is also a gendered dualism (Witz 2000). Contemporary sociologists of
the body have not always sufficiently registered the fact that the classical tradition tended
to associate specifically women with the body. As a result, the forms of embodied
sociality that social theory discovers and makes explicit are in danger of remaining
predominantly masculine.
Women and socialization:labour, reproduction,

and sexuality
The legacies of classical social theory have led to an overwhelming impulse among
feminist sociologists to sociulize women. That is, feminist writers have sought to
demonstrate how, rather than being outside the social, women are full agents in the social
field and particip ate in all of the key facets of life delineated by the classical tradition.
This project has been multifaceted and has both theoretical and empirical dimensions.
In the 1970-1980s, feminist sociologists developed projects that sought to establish how
women experience alienation at the workplace, no less than men (see Pollert 1981;
Westwood 1984). Existing sociological class analyses were criticized for their exclusion
of women, especially the assumption that the class position of women is determined by,
and can be read off from, the class position of men-for example, from husbands or fathers.
New class schemes were developed to allocate social class positions to women and hence
modern forms of political consciousness to women (see Crompton and Mann 1986).
Existing sociological studies of work and industry were criticized for their focus on
occupa tions that have been predominately associated with men, including particularly
manufac turing work, and for their assumption that women's employment in some way
deviates from a masculine norm (see Beechey 1988). Feminist sociologists have instead
examined occupations that have tended to be associated predominately with women,
including cler ical, secretarial, and care-based occupations (see Crompton and Jones 1984;
Pringle 1988).
This project of 'socializing' women has involved a reassessment of those areas of life
that the classical tradition located outside the domain of the social. Considerable attention
has been paid to establishing the social organization and regulation of those aspects of life
hith erto coded variously as 'natural', 'corporeal', or 'private'. Thus feminist sociologists
have ex amined the social organization and regulation of human reproduction, including
especially the role of medical institutions and technology in producing distinct forms of
the regula tion of reproduction and hence of the regulation of women (see Stanworth
1987).
Numerous writers on gender have also examined the socio-historical construction of
sexuality. Following a groundbreaking essay by Adrienne Rich (1983) on the institutional
construction of heterosexuality, much early work in this area delineated the social and
pub lic organization of heterosexuality, showing how heterosexuality is imbued with
relations of power and constitutes an occluded source of women's oppression. One strand
of this work has interrogated the significance of visual media, especially representations
of women in advertising, film, and television. Such studie have noted how the
representation of women invariably takes place with reference to sexual codes that position
women as objects of a sex ualizing male gaze (compare Pollock 1988; Mulvey 1989). This
work underscores how some of the key institutions and characteristics of modernity,
including the culture industries and the mass media, typically frame women as passive
objects and men as active sexual subjects. A further element in the project of socializing
women has involved interrogations of household and domestic arrangements. In one of
the best known of these interventions, Ann Oakley argued that housework needs to be
understood as work, as a job 'analogous to any other kind of work in modem society'-
rather than as a naturalized extension of femininity (Oakley 1974a: 2; see also Oakley
1974b). This has been a central tenet of
feminist engagements with Marxism in social theory, to which we now turn.
Feminism and Marxism

The decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw a particularly intense series of debates about the
relationship between Marxism and feminism. A key focus of discussion concerned the
relations between domestic labour and the reproduction of labour power (see Secombe
1974). At issue was an attempt to confer on domestic labour both exchange value and
surplus value-am! not simply use value. That is, at issue was an attempt to understand
domestic labour as central to the workings of capitalism. This was significant as Marxist
the ory traditionally tended to exclude domestic Jabour from analyses of production,
ignoring the preconditions that made wage labour possible. Given the tendency of
traditional Marxist thought to view women almost exclusively in familial and domestic
terms, notably as family dependants of the proletariat, the extension of the concepts of
production and
FEl\lliNiH SO(iAl THFOW 239
labour relations to include domestic production was significant. Feminht re-workings of

Marxist social theory allowed women as domestic labourers-as servicers of wage labourers
and as bearers and rearers of children-to he included in the very sets of exchanges and rela
tionships which Marx saw as defining industrial capitalism. This modification endowed
women with modern forms of social and political identity, instead of excluding them from
the modes of *subjectivity and *agency associated with modernity. It allowed for the articu
lation of distinctly feminist modernist claims such as 'wages for housework'.
A further line of argument came in the form of a questioning of *ideology in the constitu
tion of inequality and power relations between men and women. One of the earliest and
fullest accounts of this kind was provided by Michele *Barrett (1980; see also Barrett and
Phillips 1992). Barrett made two central claims: first, that 'women's oppression is not a
theoretical prerequisite of capitalism but is historically embedded in its social relations and
thus material'; and second, that 'the role of ideology in this process should not be underes
timated' (Hamilton and Barrett 1986: p. iv). Barrett underlined that moves to rethink ideology
outside economistic frameworks-where ideology tended to be understood as a mechanical
reflection of an economic base-opened up an important space for feminist social theorists
concerned with gender divisions, gender identities, and capitalist social formation. As she put
it, 'it has become possible, within a new form of Marxism, to accommodate the oppression of
women as a relatively autonomous element of the social formation' (Barrett 1980: 31).
Barrett rejected the view that women's oppression can be accounted for purely with
reference to the 'needs' of capitalism; that is, via a purely *functionalist account, in the
vein of Talcott *Parsons's work on the family (discussed in Chapter 4 of this book, pp. 99,
103). Barrett argued that the role of domestic and familial ideology was also crucial.
Writing against the background of *Gramscian and *Althusserian Marxism, she claimed
that unequal gender divisions of labour between men and women in both the workforce
and the domestic sphere are grounded in what she termed a heterosexual familial ideology,
which defined both women and children as dependants upon on a male breadwinner's
family wage. Barrett showed how state welfare provisions and capitalist systems of wage
labour embodied this familialist model. She also noted how gender identity and family
ideology are 'embedded in our subjectivity and our desires' (Barrett 1980: 226), claiming
that 'it is only through an analysis of ideology and its role in the construction of gendered
subjectivity that we can account for the desires of women as well as men to reproduce the
very familial structures by which we are oppressed' (Barrett 1980: 251). Highlighting the
operation of a specific ideology of gender-the duality of masculinity and femininity
Barrett challenged gender-neutral assumptions in Marxism and expanded Marxist
concepts to include not only women but also power relations between men and women. In
short, Barrett articulated some distinctively Marxist-feminist principles.
Modernity as a gendered construct
Marxist-feminist and other approaches in the theoretical socialization of women have

contributed greatly to correcting the one-sided terms and propositions of mainstream, or
'malestream', social science. One general objection to such approaches, however, is that
240 ! ISA ADKINS
they tend to be concerned largely only with filling in the gaps of maintream research.
They advert to various occluded elementsof women's experience in appropriate ways, but
with out always questioning the fundamental organizing concepts and categories of
main stream thinking. In general, it is possible to qualify this work as 'correctionist' in
character. It represents an attempt to modify an androcentric bias via a strategy of
inserting women into already existing theoretical discourses and narratives. This strategy
continues to be of great importance, but it often tends to leave the major assumptions of
the canon un touched in unfortunate ways. As a consequence, it sometimes fails to
grasp adequately a crucial characteristic of the very narratives and discourses it seeks to
correct, namely, that these narratives are gendered in character.
In contrast, some of the most important feminist work in recent years has sought not
sim ply to include women in modernity, but also to explore what can be called the
*gendering of modernity. In the words of Janet Wolff, such work has raised not simply 'a
question of dis covering women's point of view, or making visible those obscured by a
masculinist view of modernity, or of promoting the hidden features of a "feminine
sensibility" in modern life'. Rather, it has involved a 'project of the critical analysis of the
discourses of modernity, in order to confront directly their constructions of masculinity'
(Wolff 2000: 37-8; see also Harding 1986; D. E. Smith 1987).
In confronting this gendering of modernity, more recent feminist work has moved
beyond correctionist writing in two respects. First, it has registered that the project of
socializing women has tended to rely on a rather problematic dualistic distinction between
'sex and gender'.Secondly, it has shown how the woman who was animated in the project
of the socialization of women was too homogeneous and in particular too exclusively
endowed with white European bourgeois and heterosexual characteristics.
The remaining sections of this chapter discuss three further elements of feminist social
theory in this latter framework: first, the idea of modern culture and society as a gendered
construct; secondly, debates around the meaning of gender and the sex-gender distinc
tion; and thirdly, debates about the relationship of gender to other dimensions of inequal
ity, including 'race', ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
Constructionsof femininity and masculinity

We have seen that both classical and more contemporary forms of social theory have
tended to operate by excluding women from the domain of the social in favour of a
masculinist vision of modernity. However, it is not true to say that women do not figure at
all in classical visions of the social. In the nineteenth century, women often did figure in
such visions, particularly those produced by poets, artists, and essayists; but it tended to be
only certain categories of women who were made visible (compare Wilson 1991; Felski
1995).
In this connection,Janet Wolff notes that in Charles 13audelaire's essays on the experiences
of nineteenth-century European cities, urban spa-.-es are not the exclusive domain of men.
Women appear very often in Baudelaire's writings as 'the prostitute, the widow, the old
lady, the lesbian, the murder victim, ,md the passing unknown woman' (Wolff 1990: 41).
Wolff notes the ambivalence that Baudelaire displays towards such figures in his writings.
For instance, the prostitute and the lesbian are simultaneously figures of admiration and
figures of disgust. Wolff notes how it was commonly assumed that women participating in
the nineteenth-century public sphere on terms similar to men were manifesting
masculine
FEMINIST SOCIAL THEORY 241
traits. Thus widows, lesbians, and prostitutes are described in Baudelaire as possessing
masculine characteristics and mannerisms. Indeed Baudelaire's 'mixed admiration for the
lesbian has much to do with her supposed "mannishness"' (Wolff 1990: 42).
Yet while the prostitute and the lesbian may have occupied some of the same city
spaces as men, nineteenth-century writings ascribed heterosexual bourgeois women to
entirely different city spaces. These typically included the rapidly developing sites of
bourgeois consumption, notably the department store (compare Reekie 1993). The
department store was an ambiguous space, both in a public and a private sense. The
purchases made there by middle-class women were not simply for themselves but for the
bourgeois family and home. The development of such bourgeois sites of consumption
stemmed from, and was in part constitutive of, the rapidly developing bourgeois private
sphere. As Wilson (1991) points out, in such public spaces middle-class women looked
and were looked at. What counted in such spaces was respectability. The spaces of
consumption and its very process were central to the development of respectable middle-
class femininity (see also McClintock 1995; Lury 1996; Davidoff and Hall 1987).
What is important in these observations of the place and categorization of women in
the literature of modernity is that they make explicit what is often left hidden in canonical
social theory. They reveal that the changes and upheavals which classical social theory
sought to illuminate rested on an increasing separation of public and private spheres of
activity. The rise of sociology itself in the nineteenth century was closely bound up with
this separation. It is important to note that the emergence of forms of differentiation be
tween public and private was both classed and gendered. The backdrop to much classical
social theory was the emergence and legitimation of new bourgeois ideals regarding the
place of men and women in the social, as well new ideals of masculinity and femininity.
The latter concerned the elaboration of ideals of a competitive masculinity and a domestic
nurturing femininity, ideals which were realized in the formation of separate spheres of
public and private. As Felski (1995) points out, while these arrangements were feasible
only for a minority of middle-class households, the model of a *binary opposition
between the sexes crystallized in the notion of separate spheres, underscoring a host of
institutional practices and conventions. The latter included the sexual division of labour
and the sexual division of political rights.
Seen in this light, we may say that the ambivalence displayed towards women who
participated in the public sphere in the nineteenth century, including their very identi
fication and classification as non-respectable women-for instance as prostitutes, widows,
or labouring women-was made possible by new ideals of respectable femininity. We can
understand classical sociology's naturalization of women's place in the domestic sphere,
its romanticization of women's role as nurturing mothers, and its positioning of women
as unable to transcend their corporeality, indeed as corporeality, in terms of a binary
opposition between 'femininity' and 'masculinity'. It is in this sense that classical socio
logy made sense of modernity via 'a deeply gendered analysis of social life'-even as it laid
claim to impartial universal validity (Marshall 1994: 2). While basing itself on a series of
binary distinctions-between public and private, economy and family, universal and
particular-social theory has not often considered the gendered character of its guiding
distinctions. Such distinctions have led to a misleading conflation of modernity with
masculinity, a classification of non-bourgeois women as non-respectableor 'mannish', and
an assignment of bourgeois women to domesticity.
242 i ISA ADKINS
BOX 28. NANCY FRASER ON HABERMAS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
The US feminist Nancy *Fraser has examined an interesting subplot about gender in Jurgen
*Habermas's influential conception of the *'public sphere' (discussed also in Chapters 7 and 13 of
this book, pp. 164-5, 279-83). Referring to Habermas's view of modernization as involving an
uncoupling of 'system' and 'lifeworld', Fraser suggests that Habermas's conception rests on a
gendered subtext which prioritizes masculine identity.
Habermas argues that modernization involves a colonization of the 'lifeworld' by the 'system'.
Criticizing this process of colonization, Habermas argues that the systems of the state and the
mar ket ought to be embedded in, and constrained, by lifeworld institutions. Habermas argues that
the private sphere becomes dominated by the economic system and that the public sphere-the site
and space of political participation-becomes dominated by the state system. He argues that this
domination of the private- sphere takes place via a set of exchanges conducted in the medium of
money. It provides the economy with labour power in exchange for wages and demand for goods
and services (commodities). In Habermasian social theory, as Fraser puts it, 'exchanges between fam
ily and (official) economy ... are channeled through the "roles" of worker and consumer' (Fraser
1989 123)
Intervening in this theory, Fraser points out that these roles of worker and consumer in capitalist
societies are also distinctly gendered. This gendering means that the relations between the private
sphere and the economy must be understood to take place via the medium of modern gender
identity-not only by the neutral medium of money. In capitalist societies, the role of the worker has
been gendered as male, at least until relatively recently (compare Lovell 2000; Adkins 2002). Thus the
role of the worker has been historically associated with masculinity, embodied in struggles for a
fam ily wage. These struggle assumed that a worker is a man with a dependent wife and children.
Given this gendering of the worker as male, women in capitalist societies have typically not been
employed on the same terms as men (compare Adkins 1995; Pateman 1988; Pringle 1988; Walby
1986). As Fraser puts it, there has been 'a conceptual dissonance between femininity and the work
role in classical capitalism [which] confirms the masculine subtext of that role' (Fraser 1989: 125).
Moreover, the role of the private sphere in consumer capitalism is far from neutral: it has historically
been overwhelmingly associated with women. It is women who have been typically charged with
the work of domestic consumption, including the work of domestic display and taste-making, or
what Bourdieu (1979) terms social 'distinction' (see also Delphy and Leonard 1992; Game and
Pringle 1984; Hollows 2000; Lury 1996). Fraser thus concludes that Habermas fails to appreciate
that one of the most important media of exchange in capitalist societies is gender identity. Habermas
only understands the categories of 'worker' and 'consumer' in gender-neutral language of monetary
exchange.
We can see here how Fraser makes several important conceptual moves. First, she shows how
the problem with mainstream social theory is not so much that women have been straightforwardly
excluded from the social but rather that gender remains a hidden and taken-for-granted component of it.
Secondly, in her rethinking of the categories of worker, consumer, and exchange and the relations
between public and private spheres, she does not simply correct the bias of social theory by merely
adding women into an
already existing framework. Rather, she engages in a reconceptualization of modernity along
gendered lines.
FEMINIST SOCIAL THEOR 243
One revealing exposure of a hidden subplot about gender in contemporary social theory
is the work of the US feminist theorist Nancy Fraser in relation to Jurgen Habermas's
con cept of the public sphere. This is discussed here in Box 28.
The sex-gender distinction
We turn now to a second object of contention in feminist writing aimed at revising purely
'correctionist' research. This is the distinction between 'sex' on the one hand and
'gender' on the other.
In her classic work The Second Sex, the French feminist philosopher Simone de *Beauvoir
famously declared: 'One is not born a woman, one hecomes one' (1949: 295). for feminist
theorists and sociologists, de Beauvoir's leitmotif has been vital to the project of
socializing women. De Beauvoir explained how the social position, identity, and
consciousness of women are products of a form of interaction which systematically
positions woman as Other to a universal subject, a subject who is unmarked as Man. From
de Beauvoir's standpoint, the hierarchical and antagonistic positioning of men and women
was to be seen as socially produced. It was this injunction that allowed for a modern
feminist concept of gender, a concept which, as Donna *Haraway puts it, was 'developed
to contest the naturalization of sexual difference in multiple arenas of struggle' (Haraway
1991a: 131). The concept of gender was developed as a foil to the view found in much
classical social theory that women exist outside the socio-historical time of modernity,
typically via an association with nature. It was through the concept of gender that feminist
theorists placed women inside the contours of the social and allowed for an elaboration of
the category of woman as both collective and historical. It allowed women to be written
into history.
There is, however, a problem with the concept of gender when it is formulated in this
way, insofar as it relies on a rather problematic distinction between 'sex and gender'.
'Sex' has been defined as anatomical, physical differences between men and women, while
'gender' has been understood as the social meanings given to such differences. Sex has
been understood to be biological; gender has been thought to be cultural. Sex has been
typically understood as a neutral inscriptive surface, onto which external social meaning is
mapped.
It was in this sense that Michele Barrett took issue with feminists in the 1970s whom
she saw as invoking universalizing, ahistorical, and biologistic notions of male
dominance. Barrett argued that such accounts failed to grasp 'the distinction
between sex as a biological category and gender as a social one' (Barrett 1980: 13). In
the 1970s, the social category of gender provided a powerful platform to contest women's
association with corporeality and nature and women's exclusion from the social and
historical.
In retrospect, however, it is clear that the sex-gender distinction suffers from certain
problematic *metaphysical assumptions. Specifically, the sex-gender distinction relics on
a philosophical dualism between mind and body, society and nature, and history and
nature. It associates gender with the mind, consciousness, history, and society; and sex
with the body and nature. What these linkages crucially ignore is the historicity of the
body, the historicity of the categories of sex, and the significance of materiality in the
making of
244 ll5A ADKINS
BOX 29. JUDITH BUTLER ON DISCOURSE AND THE SEX-GENDER DISTINCTION
Following Michel *Foucault (1976, 1984a), Judith *Butler argues that sex is not a simple fact or static
condition. Sex is a regulatory ideal that produces the bodies it governs. Sex Is a discursive construct,
a construct of discourses about the body. It is a regulatory force that has productive power: 'the
power to produce-demarcate, circulate, differentiate-the bodies It controls' (Butler 1993: 1). Thus,
rather than being a given or passive surface upon which gender is imposed, sex is an ideal whose
materialization is compelled through highly regulated practices. Butler invites us to ask the following
questions:
Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different history or histories? Is there a history of how the
duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary oppositions as a variable
construction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses
in the service of other political and social mterests? ... (P]erhaps this construct called 'sex' Is as culturally
constructed as gender ... with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to
be no distinction at all. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of
meaning on a pre-given
sex gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are
established. (Butler 1998 279)
Butler concludes that gender is not to culture as sex is to nature. Rather, gender is the cultural means by which
a 'natural sex' is established as pre-discursive, as 'nature'. In challenging the sex-gender distinction, Butler
highlights how the use of this distinction has a purely 'correctionist' character. That is, it leaves the conven
tional philosophical dualisms of society-nature and mind-body untouched.
Repudiating any correctionist strategy, Butler does not simply seek to insert women into the social.
She asks how tis that in Western thought sex is established as pre-discursive or pre-social. In so doing, she does not simply add wo
'gender' (compare Laqueur 1990; Martin 1994). One of the most influential critical voices
in this regard has been the US theoristJudith Butler, whose work is discussed here in Box
29. This significance of the historicity of sex and the body and the materiality of gender
has been underscored by several recent feminist writers. These authors examine
historically changing relations between nature and culture, and in many cases they argue
for a thor oughgoing dismantling of differences between the two. In one notable instance
of this, Celia Lury (2002) examines the process by which a human social type becomes a
consumer 'brand' with definite gendered as well as racialized characteristics. For example,
the iconog raphy of Benetton, the global fashion company, illustrates this process well.
Lury notes how the culturalization of human categories of genre, kind, or type is central to
Benetton's brand image and marketing strategy. Hence in Benetton, the iconography of'
"race" is pre sented not as a matter of skin colour, of physical characteristics, as the
expression of bio logicalor natural essence, but rather of styir'' (Lury 2002: 591).
Differences previously coded as nature are here rewritten as culture, or as Lury puts it 'not
... gender, race and class, but
lifeforms™ and lifestyles TM' (Lury 2002: 599).
What is important about such constructions of boundaries and theirvarious processes of
breakdown is, as Donna *Haraway puts it, that they unsettle the dualisms that 'have been
systematic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature,
FEMiNIST SOCIAL THEORY 245
workers, animals' (Haraway 1991b: 177). In her own 'Cyborg Manifesto', Haraway
(1991b) draws attention to a range of boundary and dichotomy breakdowns, including
those between human and animal, nature and culture, organism and machine. These
breakdowns mean that we 'find ourselves to be *cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras'
(Haraway 1991b: 177; see also Haraway 1997). ln documenting such boundary breakdowns,
writers such as Haraway and Lury note how new forms of power relations can emerge in
such contexts, showing how the categories of gender, race, and class come to be rewritten
in some surprising ways.
Heterosexuality and homosexuality

Further problems for the sex-gender distinction in feminist theory have turned on the
issue of sexuality and sexual orientation. In particular, the distinction has tended to imply
that gender is organized in terms of masculinity and femininity, that 'the sexes' are
organized as a binary and complementary pair-with sexuality as an extension of this
gender order. In short, the distinction has assumed a certain pervasive heterosexuality.
Historians and sociologists of sexuality have made clear that the modern sexual identity
of heterosexuality and the very idea that sexuality makes up part of a person's embodied
subjectivity is as much a specific historical product as the emergence of class identities
(compare Foucault 1976; Seidman 1997; Smith-Rosenberg 1975). The historian Jeffrey
Weeks (1981) shows how our modern concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality
emerged in the struggles of the middle classes to differentiate themselves from the older
aristocracy and the emerging labouring classes. These concepts especially emerged in at
tempts by members of the middle classes to position themselves as morally superior to
ex isting and emerging social groups. In a similar vein, other historians have delineated
the emergence of a modern conception of the lesbian, demonstrating that the naming and
identification of the lesbian as a category of person was not widespread until the early to
mid-twentieth-century (Faderman 1981).
While sociologists and historians have challenged the view that sexuality is part of
a pre-discursive nature, other writers have also asked-in much the same register
as Butler-how it is that social theory imagines sexuality. How is it that a thinker such as
Durkheim could declare: 'Precisely because man and woman are different, they seek each
other passionately'? (Durkheim 1893: 17). For Steven Seidman (1996, 1997), the answer
lies in the pervasive operation of a distinctly modern hetero/homosexual binary in social
theory which both normalizes and universalizes heterosexuality. This normalization and
universalization can only take place through, indeed requires, a positioning of homo
sexuality as other to heterosexuality. That is, social theory, and much early sociology of
sexuality, including that which focused on homosexuality, did not question 'the social
functioning of the hetero/homosexual binary as the master category of a modern regime
of sexuality' (Seidman 1997: 88). Seidman argues that confronting this binary necessarily
leads to reconceptualization: it provides grounds for a critique of the organization of
social theory'skey concepts and premises around a normative heterosexuality and for a
rewriting of the texts of classical social theory. In Scidman's words, such a
reconceptualization should make clear that 'the making of hetero-and-homosexualized
bodies, desires, identities and societies ... [are] master themes analogous to the rise of
capitalism, the bureaucratization of
246 LISA ADKINS
social worlds, or modernization as social differentiation' (Seidman 1997: 96; see also
Fuss 1991; Sedgwick 1990; Weston 1998).
Gender and its relation to exclusion
Some contributors have examined certain exclusionary effects of the concept of gender
itself. Several writers have pointed to ways in which the concept of gender sometimes
embodies unexplored dimensions of class and racial privilege. They have argued that
in some cases the concept enacts certain modern ideals of liberalism that have only
been imaginable and desirable for particular women from particular class and racial
backgrounds, most notably from white middle-class backgrounds.
One object of criticism has been the view that the social categories of men and women
are constituted in capitalist societies by indirect patriarchal control of women's labour
power in the paid labour market, expressed in the horizontal and vertical gender segrega
tion of paid work-the phenomenon of 'men's job's and 'women's jobs'. This view, which
rontains elements of both Weberian and Marxist theory, found popularity in the 1980s,
particularly through the work of Heidi Hartmann (1979, 1981). It was the view that the
segregation of women in paid wage labour encourages women's material dependency on
men and hence relative powerlessness and exploitation in the domestic sphere. The main
criticism that can be made of this account is that it fails to address the situation of women
who are arguably not positioned in these ways, either in regard to the labour market or the
domestic sphere. This criticism has particularly been articulated by African-American
feminist writers.
African-American feminists have underlined how the household cannot always be
imagined simply as a site of patriarchal oppression for women. They have shown how the
household has also served historically as a site of resistance and solidarity-a 'homeplace'
to use bell *hooks's phrase (hooks 1990)-against pervasive institutional racism, including
the racism of the labour market. From this point of view, foregrounding women's segrega
tion in paid wage labour only captures the situation of a select number of women, those
who are relatively free to sell their wage labour as a form of alienable property . Such an
assumption overlooks the complex historical positioning of a range of women in relation
to labour as a form of property. Patricia Hill-Collins (1990) shows how the assumption
ignores the historical po itioning of African-American women in the political economy,
including the historical ghettoization ot black women in domestic work who live with and
care for white families. Similarly, Carby (1982) criticizes received concepts of the family,
patriarchy, and reproduction in feminist theory, suggesting that the common assumption
that domestic labour contributes to social reproduction fails to understand the complexity
of the positioning of black women. Carby asks: 'what does the concept of reproduction
mean in a situation where black women have done domestic labour outside of their own
homes in the servicing of white families? In this example they lie outside of the industrial
wage-labour relation but in a situation where they are providing for the reproduction
of black labour in their own domestic sphere, simultaneously ensuring the reproduction
of white labour power in the "white" household' (Carby 1982: 392).
FEMINIST SOCIAL THEOR\' 247
Examples abound of how some uses of the concept of gender can be exclusionary. The
early emphasis in feminist sociology on the social condition of the housewife has been
taken to task for its concern only with the problems of white middle-class Western
women-the women who came closest to living a domestic ideal of femininity. Thus hooks
(1984) criticized Betty *hiedan's (1963) The Feminine Mystique for focusing on the 'plight
of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women
housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who
wanted more out of life ... careers' (hooks 1984: 1). hooks maintains that a focus on the
condition of the housewife ignores huge numbers of women working in jobs that neither
liberate them from dependency on men nor make them economically self-sufficient.
Similarly, while much basic endorsement has been given to claims that women should
have liberal political rights over their bodies, for instance reproductive rights, including
the 'right to choose' abortions, some critics have emphasized that such claims can some
times rest on a rather problematic notion of ownership of the body-on a liberal notion that
the body is a 'property' of the self. The histories of race and class show that many women
have' been prevented from acceding to such an ideal of 'self-ownership' (compare
Haraway 1991a; Pateman 1988).
Feminism and postcolonial theory

A final key zone of feminist engagement has involved *postcolonial analyses of the situation
of women in non-Western contexts. Objection has frequently been taken to the ways in
which Western feminist theorists have represented women from non-Western contexts.
Thus Mohanty (1988, 2002) criticizes the ways in which particular Western feminist
texts construct a 'Third World woman' as homogeneous, tradition-bound, and lacking in
modern political rights. In her view, such texts tend to present an idealized image of
Western women as, in contrast, 'modern', 'educated', 'liberated', and in control of their
lives. Mills (1998) suggests that this practice can be related historically to colonial
processes, and especially to ways in which white women living in colonial territories (for
example British women in Africa and India) campaigned for the rights of colonized
women whom they considered to be more oppressed than themselves (see also Ware
1992). In this sense, the colonized women acted as a vehicle for white colonial women to
obtain a modern political subjectivity for themselves-one from which they could view
themselves as privileged, modern, and enlightened. In this case it can be argued that some
feminist dis course runs a risk of performing another act of domination: a kind of
'discursive coloniza tion' of the lives and struggles of 'Third World women' (Mohanty
2002: 501). Drawing on the writings of other postcolonial critics such as Edward *Said
(1978), Mohanty argues that what frames such textual strategics is a discursive system of
classification which underlies Western Enlightenment knowledge systems. Such
knowledge systems are based on a bi nary logic which repeatedly confirms and legitimizes
the centrality of the West. This logic defines the non-Western as Other to the West, a
definition which allows the West to repre sent itself as the 'centre'.
The Indian-American theorist Gayatri *Spivak (1988a, 1988b, 1992) also draws attention
to colonizing tendencies in Western feminist theory. Spivak argues that what is called
248 LISA ADKINS
'feminism' must be recognized as part of the heritage of the European Enlightenment,

suggesting that the colonial object is constructed through long-standing European
theories. Commenting on debates in the USA, Spivak remarks that as long as feminism
'remains ignorant of its own [theory], the "Third World Woman" as its object of study will
remain constituted by those hegemonic First World intellectual practices' (Spivak 1988a:
81-2). She argues that such hegemony can occur even as attempts are made to attribute
historicity and agency to colonial subjects. In her essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', Spivak
(1988b) criticizes aspects of colonial historiography for its tendency to focus on elite
indigenous subjects in colonial contexts, especially those performing administrative func
tions for colonial authorities. This focus excludes *subaltern subjects, that is, non-elite
subordinated groups, even though such groups have historically been often involved in
insurrections against colonial authorities.
What the arguments of Spivak, Mohanty, and others demonstrate is that some of the
key concepts of Western feminist thought can be exclusionary unless suitably revised. The
postcolonial critics show how not all women have been able to inhabit the category
'woman', as imagined by Western feminists. Some commentators have seen these argu
ments as demonstrating that the only reliable forms of knowledge that can be produced
about women must be situated, partial, and local ones. In this respect it has been argued
that post-Enlightenment values of difference, specificity, and particularism must rule.
From this perspective, the history of feminist social theory is understood as an unfolding
history of difference, a process of the release of the particular from the universal. As Rita
Felski (2000) observes, in many feminist quarters the idea of 'difference' has become a
doxa (see also Ahmed 1998).
However, a more nuanced way of evaluating these arguments might be to say that
both the particular and the universal need to be thought atone and the same time. It would
be preferable to seek strategies of critically reconstructing Western Enlightenment values
and ideals while at the same time subjecting these values and ideals to rigorous sociolog
ical scrutiny. Of particular importance must be a recognition that gender is structured
by, and is structuring of, divisions of race, class, and sexuality, as well divisions of
'First world'/'Third World', 'Westem'/'non-Western', and 'North'/'South'. This has been
made visible not only by postcolonial feminist theorists such as Mohanty and Spivak but
also by historical studies such as that of Anne McClintock (1995). McClintock's study is
discussed here in Box 30.
Feminist research such as McC!intock's and others neither jettisons universalizing
Enlightenment values of justice, freedom, and equality nor upholds these values in any
cul turally one-sided, Western-centred way. It shows how the categories of gender are not
stable or culturally invariant and how they are historically constituted by and constitutive
of divisions of race and class that are at the root of social inequality and oppression. It
indicates a feminist theory of gender can and must be, simultaneously, a theory of racial
difference in specific his torical conditions of production and consumption. It suggests how
it is possible and why it is important to rethink gender outside culturally short-sighted
frameworks, while at the same time holding on to far-reaching *emancipatory ideals. In
thC' words of Donna Haraway, the explanatory power of the category of gender depends
on 'historicizing the categories of sex, flesh, body, biology, race, and nature in such a way
that ... binary, universalizingoppositions
... implode into articulated, differentiated, accountable, located, and consequential theories
FEMINIST SOCIAL THEORY 249
BOX 30. ANNE McCLINTOCK ON FEMINISM AND 'COMMODITY RACISM'
In her study Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, Anne McClintock
(1995) examines the emergence of an ideal of white domestic femin1n1ty 1n nineteenth-century European consumer cultu
a white colonial female audience. Mcclintock shows how soap and other domestic products such as
tea and biscuits were often presented in commodity imageries as embodying a colonial mission.
Advertisements routinely located such products 1n colonial landscapes. The usually black people
represented in such images were presented not as subjects but as a frame for the exhibition and
display of commodities. As Lury puts it, the black woman's or man's 'function was to act as cipher,
enabling a white perspective on imperialism to be conveyed' (Lury 1996: 160) McClintock shows
how these advertisements did not display the uses to which the commodities were to be put-
notably for domestic cleaning and laundry. Nor did they thematize the people who would use them,
namely women, both black and white. The advertising imagery related instead to emerging ideals of
bourgeois femininity which figured the proper white middle-class woman as one who did not work-
and espe cially not for profit-and defined housework as a labour of love. In this sense, the
commercial imagery of the nineteenth century can be understood as contributing to a consolidation
of raced, classed, and gendered divisions. Specifically, this imagery wrote the new cult of
domesticity through the script of a colonial imaginary which positioned colonized peoples as
objects for an emerging European consumer culture. The middle-class ideal of white domestic
femininity was figured through a new form of racism, which McClintock terms 'commodity racism'
(see also Ahmed 2000}.
of embodiment *Phallogocentrism was the egg ovulated by the master subject, the brood
ing hen to the permanent chickens of history. But into the nest with that literal-minded
egg has been placed the germ of a phoenix that will speak in all the tongues of a world
turned up side down' (Haraway 1991a: 148).
Conclusion
This chapter has documented three key moments in the development of frminist social
theory. The first involved examining a certain exclusion of women from modernity in the
classical tradition, via an association of modernity with masculinity. The second encom
passed diverse projects of historicizing and socializing women with the aid of the concept
of gender. The third element has involved various attempts to move beyond purely
'correc tionist' thinking in feminist research by foregrounding the idea of the 'gendering of
modernity'. The idea of modern culture and society as a gendered construct has led to
a need to interrogate the guiding philosophical assumptions underlying distinctions
between 'sex' as physical on the one hand and 'gender' as social or cultural on the other
hand. It has given rise to a problematizing of dualisms of mind and body, culture and
nature; and it has led us to see how the concept of gender can itself perform certain
exclusionary effects when it is not adequately theorized, especially in regard to issues of
'race', class, and sexual orientation.
250 LISA ADKINS
We have considered the view that certain forms of Western feminist theorizing enact
discursive structures of hegemony as a consequence of insufficiently reflective reliance on
Western Enlightenment knowledge systems. For some writers, these problems give cause for
mistrust in Enlightenment values and lend support to the view that feminist theorists
should abandon any attempt at general explanatory theories and should instead concen
trate on the particular over the universal, on difference over sameness, and on the
localover the general. However, it is also important to consider the arguments of many
feminist theo rists who, rather than simply reversing the values of the Enlightenment,seek
to rethink the conventions of Western political discourse in a rigorously self-criticil 1
manner. Such essays in reconstruclion demonstrate a need for ongoing elaboration of the
social categories of gender and lay the ground for the future of feminist social theory.
Can classical social theory be described as masculinist?
2 In what ways do classical and contemporary social theories exclude women

from the social field?
3 What is meant by the 'gendering' of modernity?
4 How illuminating is the distinction between 'sex', and 'gender'?
5 Is feminism only relevant to Western women? If not, why not?
6 Can the history of feminist social theory be described as involving a shift from
Enlightenment to post-Enlightenment values?
■ FURTHER READING
A good general introduction to feminist social theory is Sara Delamont's Feminist Sociology (Sage,
2003). A classic statement in feminist methodology and epistemology is Dorothy Smith's Tile
Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Open University Press, 1987). Some other guides
and studies are Rita f'elski's The Gender of Modl'rnity (Harvard University Press, 1995), Mary Evans',
Gender and Sucial Theory (Open University Press, 2003), Lois fcNay\ ( ;ender ,md AgfllC)' (Polity
Press, 2000), Barbara Marshall'sE11gcndering Modrrnity (Polity Press, 1994), and Barbara Marshall and
Anne Witz's edited En;1erzdcring t/1e Social: frminist t:ncowrtcrs with So< iologica/ Theory (Open
University Press, 2004). For some analyses of gendered subplots in classical and contemporary social
theory, see Lisa Adkins's Revisions: Gender and Sexuality in Late Modernity (Open University Press,
2002), Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips's edited Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist
Debates (Polity Press, 1992), Carol Pateman's The Sexual Contract (Polity Press, 1988), and Carol
Pateman and Elisabeth Grosz's edited Feminist Challe11ses: Social and Political Theory (Northeastern
University Press, 1987).
Two useful studies in feminist theorizatiom of patriarchy are Sylvia Walby\ Theorizing Patriarch)'
(Blackwell, 1990) and Anne Witz's Professions and Patriarc/Jy (Routledge, 1992). Among notable
contributions to feminist positions in postmodernism are Sara Ahmed's Differences that Matter:
Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Rita Felski's Doing Time:
Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York University Press, 2000), Donna Haraway's
EMINIST SOClr\l 251
Modest_ Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience

(Routledge, 1997), and E. Probyn's article 'Bodies and Anti-Bodies: Feminism and the Postmodern',
Cultural Studies, 13 (1987), 349-60. Some influential examples of feminist contributions to theoriza
tions of race and racism are Patricia Hill-Collins's Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (Routledge, 1990) and bell hooks's Ain't I a Woman?
Black Women and Feminism (Pluto, 1982).
Some influential analyses of gender from a philosophical point of view have come recently from
Judith Butler and Donna Haraway. See particularly Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and tire Subversion
of Identity (Routledge, 1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of'Sex' (Routledge, 1993),
as well as Haraway's 'Gender for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word' in her book
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991). See also Moira Gatens's
Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (Routledge, 1995).
For debates in feminist social theory about recognition, identity, and social justice, see particularly
Seyla *Benhabib's Situating the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Nancy Fraser's Unruly
Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender inContemporary Social Theory (Polity Press, 1989), as well as Fraser's
co-written book with Axel *Honneth Recognition or Redistribution? A Political-Philosophical Exchange
(Verso, 2003). See also Nancy Fraser's debate with Judith Butler about the cultural and the socio
economic dimensions of identity in New Left Review, 227 and 228 (1998).
WEBSITES
The Feminist Theory Website at www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/enin.html Provides useful

research materials and information about the women's movement.
In the Web of Feminist Theory at
www.womensstudies.umd.edu/wmstfac/kking/teaching/602/602web.html Provides a wide range of
links to sites on feminist theory and women's movements.
The Feminist Archive at www.femarch.freeserve.eo.uk/ Includes material predominantly
on second-wave feminism, with newsletters, articles, and links to related sites.
The Genesis Project at www.genesis.ac.uk Displays a site devoted to women's history
in Britain containing information on collections in libraries, archives, and
museums.
Activist and Feminist Resources at http://sobek.colorado.edu/POLSCI/RES/act.html
Provides links to resources in women's studies and global feminist debates.
12 Modernity and
Postmodernity:Part I
Barry Smart
Postmodernism and postmodernity as terms of debate 253

Which theorists are 'postmodernist'? 253
Precursors to postmodernism 254
Postmodernism since the 1980s 256
Helpful and unhelpful uses of the terms 'postmodern' and 'postmodernist' 258
Jean-Fran ois Lyotard: legitimation and the 'end of grand narratives' 259
Crises of scientific knowledge 260
Capitalism and technocracy 261
Jean Baudrillard: the consumer society and cultural analysis 263
Simulation, simulacra, and the mass media 264
Fredric Jameson: postmodernism and 'the cultural logic of late capitalism' 265
Zygmunt Bauman: ambivalence, contingency, and 'postmodern ethics' 266
Conclusion 268

FURTHER READING 271
WEBSITES 271
Since the closing decades of the twentieth century social theorists have been preoccupied
with the possibility that processes of change taking place in key aspects of social, cultural, and
economic life arc symptomatic of a wider transformation in modernity itself. A number of the
orists have sought to underline the historic significance of such transformations by
referring to the emergence of a new relationship to modern forms of life. For some
analysts the trans formations are considered to signify the appearance of relatively novel
social, cultural, and economic forms and the possibility that 'new times' might be emerging.
In some instances the argument has been presented that a qualitatively new social
configuration has been taking
MODERNITY AND POSTMODtRNITY· PAHT I 253
shape. This is the broad context in which conceptions of the postmoclern of*postmodernism
and postmodemity-have proliferated in debates about the character of our times.
This chapter introduces some central debates about *postmodernism and
postmoder nity and the ideas of the theorists most often associated with these terms. We
begin by re viewing several precursors to ideas about a postmodern turn in twentieth-
century culture and society and their relationship to French *post-structuralist thought
from the 1960s. Then we look at the contributions of four well-known theorists of
postmodernity. These are Jean-Franc;:ois *Lyotard,Jean *Baudrillard, Fredric *Jameson,
and Zygmunt *Bauman.
Chapter 13, which follows immediately after this one, introduces a second set of contri
butions to the same terrain of debate from a slightly different set of theoretical traditions.
Both this chapter and the following chapter should be read in conjunction.
Postmodernism and postmodernity as terms of debate

Postmodernism and postmodernity are contentious terms. There has been considerable
debate over the meaning and value of these terms for understanding the contemporary
world and there has also been discussion and disagreement about how, or whether or not,
to identify particular well-known authors with postmodern conditions or styles of
thought. It is to a broad consideration of those theorists whose works are frequently
design ated as 'postmodern' or 'postmodernist' that we turn first.
Which theorists are 'postmodernist'?

When reference is made to postmodern conditions, the works of French theorists are often
invoked. The writings of Michel *Foucault, Jacques *Derrida, Jean-Frarn.;ois *Lyotard, and
Jean *Baudrillard are frequently regarded as important influences on what has been called
a postmodern condition, or as contributing to the development of theories of
postmodernity. In contemporary discussion, these authors are frequently identified as
sharing a common post-structuralist orientation. This is an intellectual position whose
claim to coherence derives from its critical relationship to another problematic unity
known as *'structuralism' (discussed in Chapter 9 of this book). It is argued that these
theorists draw attention to a 'crisis of representation' and an associated instability of
meaning in our understanding of cultural forms. Their work has been seen as challenging
received views about language as a transparent mediator of the thoughts of speaking
subjects. They show that the 'representa tional character of language is problematic'
(Poster 1990: 12). Such questioning of the rela tionship between words and things leads to
language, discourses, and texts being accorded a prominent place in cultural commentary.
A corollary of this theme in post-structuralist thought is the absence secure foundations
for knowledge and the retreat of confidence in the
*Enlightenment assumption of an *autonomous rational *subject. Such ideas of thought
have been viewed either as preparing the ground for postmodern social analysis, or as
being indistinguishable from postmodernism (compare Dews 1987; Boyne and Rattansi
1990; Lemert 1990, 1997).
254 r ll
Various attempts have been made to clarify the relationship between post-structuralism
and postmodern ism. Commentator have remarked on some affinities between 'postmod
ern currents' and 'post-structuralist theories of desire'. A notion of postmodernism has
been employed to describe a range of approaches that include post-structuralist contribu
tions to literary theory, history, and philosophy, as well as developments in *pragmatist
philosophy and post-positivist philosophy of science, and a textual orientation in cultural
anthropology (compare Lash 1990; Callinicos 1990; Bernstein 1991). However, such
exten sions of the term postmodern ism have been acknowledged to be problematic. It
should be emphasized that post-structuralism and postmodernism are not identical.
According to Andreas Huyssen (1984: 37-8), post-structuralism is to be viewed as
'primarily a discourse of and about modernism'-not postmodernism. Huyssen comments
that the works of the French post-structuralist theorists are more appropriately
described as providing us 'primarily with an archaeology of modernity, a theory of
modernism at the stage of its exhaustion' (Huyssen 1984: 39).
With the notable exception of Jean-Frarn;ois Lyotard, relatively few extended and
explicit uses of the terms 'postmodernism' and 'postmodernity'can be found in the works
of the French figures usually identified with these notions. For example, when invited to
cla rify the relationship between his work and contemporary social thought, Michel
Foucault (1983) indicated that he did not understand what was meant by the term
'postmodern'. In his essay 'What is Enlightenment?', in which he responded to
Immanuel *Kant's famous essay of the same title from 1784, Foucault was
deliberately dismissive of the term. He stressed that 'rather than seeking to distinguish
the "modern era" from the "pre-modern" or "postmodern", I think it would be more
useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has
found itself struggling with attitudes of counter modernity' (Foucault 1984c: 39).
Similarly, whileJacques Derrida's work is concerned to develop an ethical-political critique
of assumptions intrinsic to modern Western philosophy, it too is not adequately
represented by notion of postmodernism. To assoc.iate Foucault's and Derrida's writings
with postmod ernism in any sweeping way would be to subject them to considerable
misinterpretation (compare Smart 1992, 1993, 1996). In contrast, both Lyotard and Jean
Baudrillard doarticulate a notion of the postmodern, and their contributions will be
discussed shortly. But before we turn to their works, it is necessary to consider some
earlier precursors to ideas about a post modern turn in Western culture-bdore the period in
which these ideas rose to the centre of intellectual fashions in the 1980s.
Precursors to postmodernism
Jt has been argued that various ideas of the postmodern can be traced to currents of
thought in European culture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
particular, an idea of the postmodern has been associated with the critical stance towards
Western metaphysics expressed by the German philosophers Friedrich *Nietzsche and
Martin *Heidegger. Both these figures que tioned certain foundational elements of modern
Western thought-notably the assumption that history moves by progressive
enlightenment on a universal stage, or the idea of 'universal history'. Nietzsche and
Z!iS
Heidegger are celebrated for their interrogations of ideas of ultimate guarantees and
unimpeachable grounds for 'reason', 'knowledge', and 'truth'. A certain affinity exists
between their challenges to Western philosophy and the more recent thinking of figures
such as Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Lyotard (see also Vattimo 1985).
Other early traces have been identified in the works of Max Weber and Georg Simmel.
Both these thinkers have been seen as suggesting examples of a postmodern way of think
ing insofar as they look sceptically at the achievements of modernity as a rational project.
Weber spoke critically of modernity's relentless prioritization of means to ends over ends
themselves, and of processes of inexorable 'value fragmentation' and spiritual 'disenchant
ment'. It has been suggested that Weber's work challenges us to consider 'which kinds of
charisma and *rationalization will shape the "postmodern" world?' (Roth 1987: 89).
Similarly, Simmel hasbeen described as 'the first sociologist of postmodernity'insofar as
he offers analyses of the crisis of modern culture and the exhaustion of modern cultural
forms (Stauth and Turner 1988: 17). The work of the German critical theorist
Theodor*Adorno is also argued to have anticipated 'many postmodern motifs' in his
preoccupation with their rational dynamics of rationalization and the paradoxical
consequences of Enlightenment
*universalism (Best and Kellner 1991: 225).
Since the middle decades of the twentieth century, various references to a postmodern
thematic can be found in disciplines such as literary criticism and architecture, as well as
in sociology, history, and philosophy. A conception of postmodernism was used to
describe developments in the poetry of Spanish and Latin American writers around the
first decade of the century (Calinescu 1977). Writing in the 1940-1950s, the British
speculative histor ian of civilizations Arnold *Toynbee drew a contrast between a
'modern' era of Western his tory, extending from the end of the fifteenth century to the
beginning of the twentieth century, and a subsequent 'post-modern age'. The latter was
seen as commencing with the First World War, which Toynbee described as 'the first
post-modern general war' (1954: 422). Toynbee identified an unparalleled predicament
facing Western civilization arising from lack of correspondence between powerful and
rapid developments in technology and slower, more uneven changes in humanity's
spiritual, moral, and political capacities. Technological innovation was seen as rapidly
outstripping society's ability to adapt to change.
A comparable notion of the postmodern is evident in the work of the American socio
logist C. Wright *Mills. Reflecting at the end of the 1950s on the changing characteristics
of the era, Wright Mills commented that people's basic understandings of social and
cultural life were being 'overtaken by new realities' (1959: 184). Liberalism and socialism
had 'vir tually collapsed as adequate explanations of the world'. The result was that with
increasing rationalization of modern society, 'the ideas of reason and freedom have
become moot' (1959: 184, 185-6). Insofar as events called into question values and
assumptions rooted in the Enlightenment, especially the idea of an intrinsic relationship
between reason and freedom, Wright Mills speculated on 'the ending of what is called the
Modern Age' and the emergence of 'a post-modern period' (1959: 184).
These reflections suggest a degree of continuity between earlier currents of thought and
the wave of interventions from the 1980s more familiarly assembled under the banner of
postmodernism. It is to these more recent commentaries that we turn now.
256 '3A R\' SMART
Postmodernism since the 1980s

Since the 1980s a conception of the postmodern has been employed in at least two key
respects. As postmodernism, the term has been used to refer to aesthetic, literary, and
archi tectural styles, as well as to styles of thought. It has particularly been employed to
describe a reaction to the culture of aesthetic modernism. In architecture, the term was
first used to refer to building aesthetics reflecting 'an eclectic collage of contrasting
architectural styles pillaged from disparate periods of history' (Burgin 1986: 45). As
postmodemity, the term has been employed to designate a particular social condition, a
new 'social configuration'. In general, what is called into question in debates about
postmodernism are the ideals, aspirations, and consequences of modernity. At issue are
the consequences of courses of action predicated on the assumption that increases in
rationality necessarily lead to in creases in freedom. What is placed under suspicion is the
rule of reason, including espe cially the rule of an increasingly *instrumental rationality
which accords priority to the efficiency of technical means. Postmodern consciousness
turns away from the rule of a cal culus that permits no 'interference of ethical norms or
moral inhibitions', in the words of the British-Polish theorist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman
comments that the development of increasingly efficient technical means unquestioned
ends 'gave human cruelty its distinct ively modern touch and made the Gulag, Auschwitz
and Hiroshima possible' (Bauman
1989: 23,219).
Postmodernity in this sense is a mood of radical doubt, following from an undermining
of the idea that our narratives and world-views can be rationally grounded or secured.
Fragmentation of basic values is associated with a discrediting of permanent ahistorical
foundations for knowledge and mistrust of notions of universal truth, notably as explicated
in the work of the contemporary American pragmatist philosopher Richard *Rorty (1980,
1989). In the postmodern condition, existence is experienced as contingent. There is an
awareness of uncertainty as more than a temporary condition. Indeterminacy and ambi
guity are recognized as being corollaries of modernity, as effects of the modern way of
life. Such an appreciation of 'contingency as destiny' can be seen as exemplifying a
'postmod ern awareness', a discomfiture associated with what Bauman has called our
'postmodern discontents' (Bauman 1991, 1997).
At a more material level, one of the most often cited elements of a postmodern social
condition is what has been called the transition to a 'post-industrial' phase in the develop
ment of Western capitalism. In the 1970s this thesis was unfolded particularly by the
American sociologist Daniel*Bell, whose work is discussed in Box 31.
The French theorist Jean-Frarn;ois Lyotard identifies three general themes in debates
about postmodernity. First, there is the theme of declining confidence in the idea of
progress, especially scientific progress, and an associated loss of faith in *emancipatory
nar ratives. Secondly, there is the theme of postmodernist aesthetics, a a movement in the
arts, literature, architecture, and in popular culture and media culture. Thirdly, there is the
theme of structural societal ch,mge, associated with *post-industrialism, *post-Fordism,
consumer capitalism, and neo-liberal economic policy (Lyotard 1982).
Commenting on the first of these themes, Lyotard remarks that the development of
tech no-science appears to be self-propelling and ceases to be responsive to demands com
ing from human need. The consequences appear to be a deterioration and destabilization
MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY: PART• 257
BOX 31. DANIEL BELL ON POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
In the 1970s, in a consideration of signs suggestive of a change in 'the social framework of

Western society', the US sociologist Daniel *Bell identified a relative shift in economic activity from
goods to service production. Bound up with this was an increase in professional and technical
workers and the creation of what Bell called a new 'intellectual technology' (Bell 1973: 9, 14). Bell
described non manual knowledge skills as forming the axial principle of a new *'post-industrial
society'. These changed conditions have also often been described as a 'knowledge society' or
'information society', with particular emphasis being placed on non-material mental capacities,
'post-material values', access to information, and access to information technology. In this post-
industrial scenario, Bell par ticularly identified technological innovation as ordering 'human
experience within a logic of efficient means and ... and as becoming virtually self-propelling (Bell
1980: 20). Similar observations are made by the Spanish sociologist Manuel *Castells in relation to
globalization and the role of net works and global flows of information, capital, labour and migration
(discussed in Chapter 14 of this book, pp. 296-7).
These developments are to be seen in a context of decline in the traditional manufacturing bases
of the European and North American economies, joined with competition from Asian countries
especially, for example, in the Japanese car industry. Key accompanying factors have included
down sizing of labour forces, cost-cutting, computerization of tasks, increasingly casualized or
'flexibilized' or *post-Fordist employment practices, and recurrent redundancies in heavy industries
such as coal mining, metallurgy, and shipbuilding. Such gaps have been filled by an expansion in
the services sector, particularly in financial services, and in leisure and consumption outlets,
typically involving widespread de-skilling for large elements of the traditional working class and the
phenomenon of 'McJobs'. Equally important have been production strategies aimed at small niche
markets, growth in small businesses, typically including 'dot.corns' linked to the 'new economy' since
the 1990s, as well as increased use of franchising and outsourcing arrangements, and exponential
growth in computer software companies such as Microsoft.
In a similar vein, writers in the 1980s such as *Hall and Jacques (1989) and Hebdige (1989) spoke
of an ethos of 'New Times', marked by an ideological discrediting of socialism in public opinion and
the mass media. These writers commented on the impact of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations
in Britain and the USA and their relationship to a new services-led economy. They pointed to the emer
gence of 'yuppies' and other commercial elites, as well as to the rise of a politically powerful
property owning lower middle class increasingly influential in national elections dominated by populist
policies. Since the 1990s a new brand of economically liberal and socially conservative politics
catering to the self-employed and to the ex-industrial electorate has been evident in the
phenomenon of Republican 'middle America' or in the rise of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party
in Italy, among many other
258 CARRY SfJiAR"f
of social conditions. Humanity appears divided into those facing the problem of
responding to the challenge of increasing complexity and the others who continue to face
the 'terrible ancient task of survival' (Lyotard 1979). Lyotard here draws attention to the
way familiar cultural objects, social roles, and traditions have been destabilized or
'derealized' through the continuing development of the capitalist economy. There is also
confusion about 'taste'. The aesthetic hierarchy implied by distinctions between 'elite' and
'mass' appears to collapse into an orgy of eclecticism in which 'anything goes', creating a
'degree zero of con temporary general culture' (1982: 76).
We look in detail at Lyotard's work in a moment. But first it is necessary to clear up a
few common misunderstandings in uses of the terms 'postmodern' and
'postmodernist'.
Helpful and unhelpful uses of the terms 'postmodern' and

'postmodernist'
The difficulty of writing about postmodernism and postmodernity is that these terms do
not clearly designate unambiguous realities. There is wide disagreement among contrib
utors about appropriate uses of these terms. A further problem is that significant nuances
among writers associated with postmodern ism have at times been neglected by critics
who have rushed to judgement. Sometimes criticisms are based on a parody of the
thinkers at issue.
Certainly there are some ideas and slogans associated with postmodernism that
have limitations and warrant criticism. Neglect of structural social and economic
conditions and an excessive preoccupation with texts, with symbolic literary
figuration, metaphor, rhetoric, and aesthetic forms, have been an obstacle to
politically responsible, problem solving analysis and critique. Deeply problematic
have been tendencies in some forms of postmodernist writing to draw exaggerated
and gratuitously *nihilistic conclusions from observations about ambivalence and
indeterminacy in uses of language, about radical 'incommensurable' clashes between
*'paradigms' and 'language games' and about wide-ranging cultural differences
between moral belief systems. It is one thing to assert that objects and events of
people's experience are always *'socially constructed', always laden with different
cultural structures of perception according to differences of historical time and
cultural space. It is quite another to assert that no rationally sustain able statements
can be made about the world as something existing independently of any particular
people's representations of it, as an objective reality. Although we can no longer to
think of indubitable *'foundations' for knowledge-guaranteed by God, or by the
certainty of our organs of sense, or by the self-evidence of logical thought-it does not
follow that different social groups cannot arrive at rationally debatable agreements
and understandings with one another about the nature of the world and about the
meaning of moral and political values. It does not follow that claims to knowledge
and truth and to principles of justice and morality become impossible to sustain. An
impor tant danger in some forms of postmodernism in this regard is a self-defeating
kind of scepticism and *relativism.
However, such dangers of scepticism and relativism are not appropriately represented
as weaknesses common to all writers who deploy a notion of the postmodern. In
particular, it is a mistake to associate these dangers with Jacques Derrida's deliberately
provocative
MODERNiTV AND POSTMOOERNiTV• PART I 259
statement that 'there is nothing outside the text' or with Michel Foucault's conception of
radical epistemic shifts in 'regimes of truths' through history (discussed in Chapter 9 of
this book). Derrida's and Foucault's writings break decisively with naively empiricist
and positivist assumptions about scientific progress and with complacent ideas about
the advance of reason in human history. But in no sense do these thinkers turn their backs
on the value and moral necessity of rational self-questioning and the idea of
'enlightenment'. In this regard, one example of a rather unfair position on
postmodernism and post structuralism is that taken by the German theoristJilrgen
*Habermas. For Habermas, post modernism represents little more than a conservative
reaction to shortcomings associated with the project of modernity. It constitutes a form of
anti-modernism promoting an aban donment of the 'unfinished task' of Enlightenment
(Habermas 1980, 1985). (For further discussion of Habermas's position, see Chapter 13 of
this book). These views of Habermas do not do justice to the range and diversity of
commentaries on the postmodern. Against Haber mas, it can be argued that a concept of
postmodernity can be upheld in fruitful ways, so long as it is understood as referring to
aspects of critical reflection on the modern and to a critical reworking of our ideas of the
modern. It is in this sense that Lyotard describes the postmodern as 'undoubtedly a part of
the modern ... Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the
nascent state, and this state is constant' (1982: 79). Similarly, a conception of
postmodernity can be legitimately deployed to designate a par ticular relationship to the
moral ambivalence, uncertainty, and lack of secure foundation that is now an intrinsic
feature of modern social life. It is in this sense that Bauman speaks of
postmodernity as 'modernity without illusions' (1993: 32). Bauman refers to
the modern mind taking a long, attentive and sober look at itself, at its condition and its past
works, not fully liking what it sees and sensing the urge to change. Postmodernity is modernity
coming of age, looking at itself at a distance ... making a full inventory of its gains and losses
... coming to terms with its own impossibility; a self-monitoring modernity. (1991: 272)
In these instances, references to the postmodern do not signify that the modern is being
left behind. Rather, they signify that our relation to modern forms of life has been trans
formed, that we now stand in a different relationship to things modern. Postmodernity
does not represent the passing of modernity, for modernity has not come to an end. Any
notion of a radical rupture between modernity and postmodernity should be rejected.
Therefore it is important to emphasize that postmodern analyses do not so much represent
alternatives to modern forms of life as attempts to establish critically how our experience
of the modern project has changed. It is to this more sociologically sensitive meaning of
the term 'postmodern' that attention is directed in this chapter. We move now to the work
ofJean-Frarn;ois *Lyotard.
Jean-Fran ois Lyotard:legitimation and the 'end of

grand narratives'
Lyotard's book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge first appeared in French
in 1979. Lyotard here introduces a notion of the postmodern to describe the status
of
260 '>'4RRY SMt,RT
knowledge in 'highly developed societies' (1979: p. xxiii). Yet Lyotard's use of the term in
this text is somewhat tentative. There is an implication that the term was adopted
because it was already common currency among writers in North America. Lyotard
states that 'the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the
postindustria I age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age' (1979: 3). The
focus of the book falls on the ways in which culture in general and knowledge in
particular have been transformed since the end of the nineteenth century, concentrating
changes in the way scientific knowl edge is legitimized. Whereas scientific knowledge
formerly achieved legitimacy through appeal to particular *'meta-narratives' or 'meta-
discourses'-such as the progressive eman cipation of reason, or the liberation of
labour, or the enrichment of humanity
*legitimation today seems to be bound up with *performativity. By 'performativity'
Lyotard means control over contexts of information, notably control over reality under the
aegis of science and technology.
Lyotard traces the discrediting of legitimatory 'grand narratives' to a series of develop
ments that gathered momentum after the Second World War. These have included the
continuous dominance of techniques and technologies of social organization that have
deflected public discussion about the ends of action toward an increased preoccupation
with means and instruments. Concern about the intrinsic value of knowledge has dimin
ished as interest in the use of knowledge for optimizing efficiency of performance has
increased. Lyotard comments that 'the seeds of "delegitimation" ... were inherent in the
grand narratives of the nineteenth century' (1979: 38). Lyotard enumerates two main fac
tors for this current 'scepticism toward meta-narratives'. The first concerns crises in the
foundations of scientific knowledge. The second concerns processes of co-option of
knowledge into forms of capitalist *technocracy. We look at these in turn.
Crises of scientific knowledge

Legitimation through performativity arises from a crisis of scientific knowledge. This crisis is
synonymous in Lyotard's picture with increasing recognition of forms of instability, indeterm
inacy, and undecidability in scientific categories and structures of inference. Lyotard refers to
disturbances of divisions and boundaries between existing disciplines, as well as to
overlaps between sciences and the appearance of new analytic spaces and territorie,. These
contribute to a collapse of any grand hierarchy of learning that might regard physics as a
foundation for all the sciences or that might privilege philosophy as the queen or judge of
all disciplines.
With this comes a parallel decomposition in grand narratives of social and politic al
legitimation. The assumption that science can gain legitimation through service to social,
economic, and political practice comes to appear problematic. A scientific statement
describing a situation may be deemed 'true', but it does not follow that a 'prescription
statement based upon it ... will be just' (Lyotard 1979: 40). Science loses any automatic
warrant for legislating over other 'language games' and supervising the arrangement of
social affairs. Science ceases to be something believed always capable of delivering
'greater justice, greater well-being and greater freedom' (Lyotard 1986: 76). Lyotard
describes this transformation as 'an important current of postmodernity' (Lyotard 1979:
40).
At the same time, Lyotard emphasizes that the normative principle of science is not
to develop through a 'positivism of efficiency'. On the contrary, science proceeds, or ought
MODERNITY AND POSYMOOERNITY; PART I 261
to proceed, in terms of a questioning, a challenging of the known, and a delineation of

'the unknown' (1979: 54, 60). In this sense science is unpredictable. As a practice, its
pursuit of greater precision or accuracy leads not to more control but to new forms of
uncertainty. While he acknowledges that research 'under the aegis of a paradigm tends to
stahilize', Lyotard adds that in respect of scientific pragmatics it is dissension rather than
consensus that needs to be emphasized, for the prevailing order of reason is always
disturbed (1979: 61).
Capitalism and technocracy

Lyotard argues that transformations in the structures of society have affected the acquisi
tion, classification, availability, and exploitation of knowledge. With the complexity
of capitalist organization and a concomitant rise in the deployment of information
techno logy 'comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions
determining which statements are accepted as "knowledge" statements' (1979: 4).
Increasingly, he proposes, if a statement is to count as knowledge, it will need to be
translatable into a language of computerization. In this process, the relationship
between producers and users of knowledge assumes more and more the form of a
commodity relation. As know ledge production and use becomes subject to
commodification, so knowledge ceases to be 'an end in itself' and becomes an
informational commodity. Increasingly the question demanded-by the state and by
other supervisory institutions and client groups-'is no longer "Is it true?" but "What
use is it?" In the context of the mercantilization of know ledge, more often than not
this question is equivalent to: "Is it saleable?" And in the con text of power-growth: "Is
it efficient?"' (Lyotard 1979: 51). Lyotanl here draws attention to a development first
identified by Marx, where knowledge comes to be closely articul ated with
production. Knowledge is, in Marx's phrase, reduced to a 'direct force of production'
(Marx 1858: 706).
Lyotard states that when philosophical and political narratives of legitimation have
become problematic, reliance on 'performativity' or 'control over context' rises more and
more to the fore. Lyotard describes an increasingly close affinity between technology and
wealth, science and capital, a world in which legitimation is bound up with performance
improvement. As commercial imperatives orient scientific research 'first and foremost
toward technological "applications"', so 'corporate norms of work management' gain
more and more of a hold over the research environment (1979: 45-6). What counts under
these conditions is the contribution of learning and research to the performance of the
social system. The relationship between those generating and transmitting knowledge and
those receiving it is transformed into a relationship of production and consumption, based
on an exchange value. Knowledge fields unable to demonstrate a contribution to system
improvement are 'abandoned by the flow of capital and doomed to senescence' (Lyotard
1979: 47).
What is crucial for Lyotard is the incompatibility between the internal norms of
scientific enquiry and the criterion of performance favoured by *technocratic authorities.
Lyotard contrasts the idea of science as an 'open system', as something potentially critical,
reflexive, and counter-cultural in its practice, to an emergent rule of *technocracy.
Reflecting on the growing prominence of managerial procedures, Lyotard remarks that
262 BARRY SM/.\rll
individuals are persuaded to '"want" what the system needs in order to perform well'
(1979: 62-4). Refusal to cooperate comes at a substantial cost, including withdrawal of
funding. The postmodern condition of knowledge is thus one of tension between 'the
imaginative development of knowledge' and attempts to subjugate knowledge to criteria of
utility and system performance (1979: 64).
In these respects it is clear for Lyotard that modern values of scientific enlightenment
and democratic struggle remain valid, and that in this sense 'modernity has not come to an
end' (1993: 25). fully in line with his early involvement in 1960s French Marxist circles,
the overriding problem of contemporary social life for Lyotard remains that of capitalism.
Lyotard highlights 'the redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism after its retreat under
the protection of*Keynesianism during the period 1930-60, a renewal that has eliminated
the communist alternative and valorized the individual enjoyment of goods and services'
(Lyotard 1979: 38). In this context he speaks particularly of capitalism's subjugation of
'the infinite desire for knowledge that animates the sciences' to 'the endless optimalization
of the cost/benefit (input/output) ratio' (1993: 25). Capitalism penetrates into language,
turning words into units of information, in tandem with the rise of a hegemonic system of
information technology and an emergent 'computerization of society' (1993a: 27).
Similar reflections on the imbrication of capital ism, information, and technocracy
occur in the work of the British sociologist Scott Lash, who is discussed in Box 32.
Processes of transformation associated with the advent of an 'information age' have been explored by
several sociologists. One wide-ranging approach can be found in Scott Lash's analysis of the impact of
global communication flows on social and cultural life (Lash 2002). Lash notes how modern social
institutions have increasingly been subject to processes of displacement under the rule of a new order
of information. In the transition from a 'national manufacturing society to a global informational
cul ture', there is a shift from 'exploitation' to 'exclusion' as the predominant form through which
power operates (2002: 26, 28). At issue is the way in which social structures become eroded and
displaced by a process of 'postmodern1zation' through flows of 'information, communications,
images, money, ideas and technology' (2002: 28). Lash comments that 'postmodernization involves
the displacement of normatively regulated, more or less unwieldy societal institutions and
organizations(... ) by smaller, value-inscribed, intensively bonded, more flexible cultural forms of life'
(2002: 28). A new order of flex ible enterprise wears away at embedded institutions in the areas of
education, health, legal aid, culture, and the arts. Implied rn this analysis is a shift from manufacturing
capitalism to a neo-liberal capitalism in which service sectors and informational sectors achieve
dominance.
Similar analyses have been developed by Manuel *Castells in relation to the 'network society'
(dis cussed 1n Chapter 14 of this book, pp. 296-7), as well as by Claus Offe in relation to the theme
of 'dis organised capitalism' (Offe 1985), and more broadly by Peter Wagner in relation to a
transition from 'organised modernity' to 'disorganised modernity'. See also Lash (1999), Lash and
Urry (1987, 1994), Urry (2000, 2003), Poster (1990), and Stehr (1994, 2001).
MODERNITY AND PGSH/•ODfRNITY· i>ART 1 263
Jean Baudrillard: the consumer society

and cultural analysis
We turn now to the second French theorist most often associated with postmodernism,
Jean *Baudrillard. Like Lyotard, Baudrillard began his early work under the influence of
Marxism and the French 1968 movement. But in the 1970s Baudrillard came to discard
many of the classical tenets of Marxism in favour of a new type of cultural analysis
indebted to *semiotics and French structural anthropology.
Baudrillard is often viewed as the key analyst of postmodern consumer culture (com
pare Kroker et al. 1989; Kellner 1989; Best and Kellner 1991; Gane 1991, 1993). In his
books The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970), Baudrillard sought
to extend a Marxist critique of capitalism to aspects of social and cultural life 'beyond the
scope of the theory of the mode of production' (Poster 1988: 3). In subsequent works,
commencing with The Mirror of Production (1973), Baudrillard criticizes Marxism for mir
roring the primacy of the economy, claiming that it did not break radically enough with
the theoretical perspectives of capitalist industrial societies. Advocating a more cultural
turn in critical enquiry, Baudrillard argues that categories and concepts drawn from
political economy are no longer meaningful for understanding 'the passage from the
form-commodity to the form-sign' (1973: 121). The important issue in his view is 'the
symbolic destruction of all social relations not so much by the ownership of the means
of production but by the control of the code. Here there is a revolution of the capitalist
sys tem equal in importance to the industrial revolution' (1973: 122). In the consumer
soci ety, individuals not only like to slot into roles and to slot objects into categories, to
enjoy a 'system of objects'-of house furnishings, appliances, gadgets, fashion
accessories, and the like. Consumers also like to consume signs, signs of fashion and
distinction, such as the designer label. The important object of consumption is not the
material sub stance but the image, sign, or symbol, which achieves distinction only by
relations of semiotic difference to other signs-to other brands, other fashion labels,
and so on within a mediated system. ln these connections Baudrillard notes how
consumption, signification, knowledge, and the whole field of culture have been subject
to social ab straction. The work ethic has been dislocated as consumption has become the
'strategic element' and people have been 'mobilized as consumers' (Baudrillard 1973:
140-4). At the same time, while consumption becomes the strategic element in
capitalist survival, it is also 'placed under the constraint of an absolute finality which is
that of production' (1973: 128).
Baudrillard can be seen as critically extending Marx's analysis of the articulation of pro
duction and consumption (compare Smart 2003). But whereas Marx sought to dissect the
distinctive features of a developing industrial society in the nineteenth century,
Baudrillard seeks to make sense of late twentieth- and twenty-first century consumer capi
talism. He comments that whereas it was formerly necessary to socialize 'the masses as
labour power', what is now increasingly required is to 'socialize them as consumption
power' (1970: 82). While industrial production still remains important, Baudrillard
emphasizes how-just as Marx had in fact anticipated-the application of science and
264 BARRY SMART
technology to production entails that wealth creation becomes less and less dependent on
manual labour time or on pure quantities of labour. Whereas industrial capitalist
society was fundamentally a society of production, contemporary capitalist society
especially engages its members in their capacity as consumers.
Baudrillard is also preoccupied with problems arising from the way in which
Western thought since the Enlightenment has presented itself as 'a culture in the
universal' (1973: 88-9). Concepts developed to make sense of modern forms of life-in
the case of Marxism, concepts predicated on the metaphysics of the market economy-
have been transported to other societies in often misleading ways. In Baudrillard's
work, the cul tural turn away from political economy leads to a focus on sign
structures, on multiple symbolic orders and diverse informational networks of
communication (Baudrillard 1987a). It is in this context that a number of references to
the postmodern emerge in his writing. He writes of a 'ciestruction of meaning' and a
'state of excess', leading people to live with 'fatal indifference' to past movements of
liberation (Baudrillard 1989, 1992a). Here there are some similarities between
Baudrillard's comments an banality and 'banal strategies' and Lyotard's statement that
'progress carries on, but the Idea of Progress has vanished ... Such is the banal destiny
of all great ideals in what could be called post modernity' (Lyotard 1986: 236).
Elsewhere, however, Baudrillard comments that it is not clear whether postmodern ism
or the postmodern have any meaning when used purely as labels (see Crane 1993: 22).
Simulation, simulacra, and the mass media

The conventional aim of social theory has been to account for reality, to represent the truth
of the real. Baudrillard, however, contends that such a conception of theorizing can no
longer be sustained, at least in a literal sense. [n a provocative and rather contentious
move, Baudrillard declares that a 'precession of *simulacra' has undermined the possibility
of ap peal to an independent external referent or objective reality. By simulacra (or
'simulacrum' in the singular) Baudrillard refers to mediated simulations of reality. He
describes a world in which electronic media of communication pervade every aspect
of daily life-from television and film to the Internet and mobile phones. It is a world in
which 'reality' is not independent of media. Rather, reality is so saturated by media
simulation that taken for-granted distinctions between the real and the imaginary
constantly break down. Baudrillard declares that 'the age of simulation ... begins with a
liquidation of all referen tials' (Baudrillard 1981: 4). He introduces a notion of the
'hyperreal' to describe a new situation where there is no independent referent. With
simulation there is a 'generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal'
(Baudrillard 1981: 2). Instead of the real, there are merely signs of the real. In
consequence, distinctions between 'true' and 'false', 'real' and 'imaginary', become
increasingly problematic. Raudrillard points to the work of the Canadian media theorist
from the 1960s Marshall *McLuhan, who famously coined the slogan 'the medium is the
message'. Baudrillard speaks of an implosion of mes sage and meaning in the medium,
indeed of an 'implosion' of the real in the medium. He asserts that the 'medium and
the real are now in a single nebulous state whose truth is
MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY: PART I 265
indecipherahle' (Raudrillard 1982: 103). Baudrillard addresse a mediatized condition of

life in which it is very hard, if not impossible, to imagine the world without television.
The world is one in which the flickering screen makes everything appear virtually
equivalent, a world experienced more and more 'as shown on TV', a world viewed
through the screen and as a screen. Penetration of televisual media into social life
contributes to and com pounds attitudes of political indifference, apathy, numbness, and
information overkill that are a consequence of the global diffusion of market exchange
relations and the commodifi cation of more and more areas of social life.
There are, however, some rather controversial aspects of Baudrillard's work. Baudrillard
contends that in a universally mediated world of this kind, there can be no deep truths for
social theory to claim to uncover. He proclaims that insofar as the social is being buried
'beneath a simulation of the social', the objectives of social theory become problematic
(1982: 67). He proposes a substitution of 'fatal theory' for critical theory, where theory con
stitutes an 'event in and of itself' (1977: 127). What seems to be implied in this shift is a
no tion of theory as provocation, as forcing things to their extremity, theory as an event
that constitutes a 'challenge to the real' (Gane 1993: 122). Baudrillard proclaims that the
value of theory lies 'not in the past events it can illuminate, but in the shockwave of the
events it prefigures' (1987b: 215). His 'fatal theory' is a style of thinking that sets out
deliberately to place question marks around universalizing normative ideals, such as
'emancipation', 'class struggle', 'enlightenment' and other articles of faith of the traditional
Left canon. One can, however, retort that such gestures have the air of the gratuitous
about them. Baudrillard's analyses of media culture and the consumer society are
illuminating, but his characteristically polemical remarks on the political illusions of social
theory are less persuasive. In his book on the first Gulf War of 1991, titled The Gulf War
Did Not Take Place (1991 ), Baudrillard draws some rather facile inferences from the way in
which the US forces' use of high-tech laser-guided bombs effaced the brute reality of the
deaths of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians. While it is true that both this war and
the second assault on Iraq of 2003 played themselves out through a frightening distance
from reality, Baudrillard's assertion that the real has 'imploded in the medium' has to be
treated with great care in this instance.
Fredric Jameson: postmodernism and 'the cultural

logic of late capitalism'
The US theorist Fredric *Jameson has also been an influential commentator on
postmodern cultural forms. In his influential book Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson develops the thesis that the place and status of culture
has been radically transformed under conditions of late capitalist liberalization. For
Jameson, postmod ernism refers to an idiom of representation emerging from a process
of material transfor mation of the cultural sphere. Contemporary culture bears a
relationship to the late capitalist economy which is neither one of functional autonomy
nor one of direct casual dependence. The new features of culture include an erasure of the
boundary between 'high'
266 BARRY SMART
and 'mass' or commercial culture, expansion of the *culture industries, and an associated
proliferation of popular cultural forms. There is a 'new depthlessness' exemplified by a
'new culture of the image or the simulacrum', as well as a 'weakening of historicity' and a
simul taneous emergence of new emotional intensities. These motifs are bound up with 'a
whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system'
(1991: 6). Postmodcrnism arises from 'the bewildering new world space of late or
multinational cap italism' (Jameson 1991: 6). Cultural forms no longer shock, surprise, or
threaten. Where modernism came to be canonized and institutionalized, today
'aesthetkproduction ... has become integrated into commodity production generally'. In
this sense, postmodern cultural forms have become 'one with the official or public
culture of Western society' (Jameson 1991:4).
On the one hand, Jameson discerns a culture of aesthetic modernism dominant largely
in the earlier decades of the twentieth century, which resisted the constitution of cultural
forms as commodities ior consumption and was largely hostile to the rhetoric and reality
of the market. On the other hand, he finds a new postmodern affirmation of the market as
a vehicle for the popular reception of cultural goods. Whereas modernist forms of artistic
ex perimentation and avant-gardism frequently engaged in a critique of commodification,
postmodernism is 'the consumption of sheer commodification as a process' (Jameson
1991: p. x). Jameson traces a connection between the relative displacement of modernism
by postmodern ism and the development of capitalist modes of production from an earlier
munopoly form to what Jameson describes as a 'new multinational and high-tech muta
tion' (1991: 157). Culture and the arts have lost the autonomy and critical distance they
might once have had, or at least strove to achieve.
Jameson here sees a retreat of utopian politics, a disappearing public consciousness
of alternative forms of social life, leading to an endangering of the possibility of critique.
The corollary of processes of commodification is that everything has, in a certain
sense, be come 'cultural' (Jameson 1991: 48). Essential differences between the
'purely cultural' value of an artistic, scientific, or intellectual object and the 'purely
economic' value of a physical object or substance appear to break down. As the
boundaries between art and money become blurred, everything seems to take on the
form of 'culture'. The profit mo tive, long associated with the development of a culture
industry producing entertainment commodities for a mass market, becomes more
prominent in the arts and in public goods. Com modification and the market system give
rise to a new commercial order entering into the heart of the cultural realm.
Zygmunt Bauman: ambivalence, contingency,

and 'postmodern ethics'
The Polish-British writer Zygmunt *Bauman has been another prominent contributor to
idea, about postmodernity. In his books Legislators and Interpreters (1987) and Modernity and
tile I lolocau t ( 1989)-discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, Box 3-Bauman describes a
crisis in We tem modernity's understanding of itself as a civilization oriented to universal
values.
MODERNITY AND PO<;TMOO , ,. PART i 267
In place of *'legislative' ideas of universal laws, typical of European Enlightenment

thought, a condition of sceptical self-distance and cultural relativity has established itself.
Bauman describes this shift as expressing a more 'interpretive' texture of reason, averse to
order designing and order-managing pretensions.
The meaning of the postmodern for Bauman is not that existence is no longer modern.
Rather, postmodern is to be seen as a part of the modern, insofar as everything that is
received has become questionable for us. l'ostmodernity is the condition of thinking and
acting that has become subject to modernity and that has consequently given rise to
reflection on modernity. It is the condition that exists after recognition of the conse
quences of modernity, constructive as much as destructive. It is the state we find
ourselves in after attempts have been made, through more modernization, to remedy
deficiencies and unwanted effects-only to find, yet again, that the pursuit of order and
certainty through design begets yet more unexpected forms of disorder and uncertainty.
Postmodernity thus signifies a realization that modernity has limits, and that even as fur
ther rounds of modernization attempt to overcome or resolve these limits, yet more obsta
cles and contradictions are generated. In short, what is figured by the postmodern is not
modernity at its end but 'modernity without illusions' (Bauman 1993: 32).
Bauman reflects on the prospects for nurturing modern values of increasing both 'the
volume of human autonomy' and 'the intensity of human solidarity' (Bauman 1992: 107).
But here, like Jameson, Lyotard, Baudrillard, David Harvey (1989), and many other com
mentators, Bauman notes how a new consumer society has emerged from processes of
cap italist restructuring. As science and technology become direct forces of production, so
the dignity of labour in the process of capital accumulation diminishes. With the
development of an information-driven reflexive capitalism in which economic life is
increasingly aes theticized, the structural importance of consumption increases. In a
welter of texts, includ ing Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), Postmodemity and its
Discontents (1997), and Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998a), Bauman analyses a
shift of emphasis from a work ethic to an aesthetic of consumption as the predominant
factor in the reproduction of forms of *subjectivity.This involves a shift from an ethic of
deferred gratification-marked by *ascetic self-control, lifelong planning, and rationalized
domination over desire, famously outlined by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic-to a new
condition immediate consumption and deferred payment. It is exemplified by the 'buy
now, pay later' philoso phy promoted by credit-card companies. With this shift, social
integration comes to depend more on the persuasive powers of seduction wielded by
cultural intermediaries and less on directly coercive forces. The formation of a neo-liberal
market society is associated with the strapping-in of individuals into a services-led
economy marked by skill destruction and the constitution of the consumer as a subject of
seduction. It is the fragile confidence of consumers, rather than the planned diligence of
producers as members of industrialcollectives, which increasingly seems to hold the key
to the fortunes of the global economy.
A further aspect of Bauman's writing on post-modernity relates to the role of morality
and ethics in social life, where experiences of ambivalence and uncertainty increasingly
seem to prevail. According to Bauman, modern moral thought and its legislative practice
has been predicated on an assumption of universally secure foundations. But such 'modern
268 BARRY SMART
ambitions' have not been realized. Today there is little widespread belief in the possibility
of an absolutely firm moral code. Bauman therefore explores what he describes as
*'postmodern ethics', taking his inspiration partly from the thought of the French *phe
nomenological philosopher Emmanuel *Levinas. Here Bauman seeks to expose the
impossibility of a 'universal and unshakably founded ethical code' (1993: 10), promoting
the idea of individual moral responsibility as 'the most personal and inalienable of
human possessions' (1993: 250). Such a 're-personalizing morality' means giving recogni
tion to our unique unconditional responsibility towards the other. In this Levinasia vision,
every ethical situation is unique. There are no hard-and-fast rules on which we can rely
for answers to our moral dilemmas. The individual must decide for him- or herself on the
right course of action, in the face of the manifest needs and vulnerability of the Other-of
theother person or people, of the friend orthe anonymous stranger. Yet as Bauman Points
outs, a constant problem under postmodernity is that this ethical freedom of the individ
ual is in danger of collapsing into sheer consumer freedom. The absence of definite
prescriptions about how to act may simply degenerate into egoism.
In later work, Bauman followed the German sociologist Ulrich *Beck in developing his
own version of the thesis of 'second modernity' or 'reflexive modernity' (for full discus
sion of Beck's idea of *'reflexive modernity', see Chapter 13 of this book, pp. 286-7).
Bauman describes the passage from one form of capitalism to another later form as a shift
from a 'solid' to a 'liquid' modernity (Bauman 2000). This represents an acknow ledgement
of the continuing relevance of the analysis offered by Marx and Engels at an earlier stage
in capitalist modernization, presaged in their famous dictum in The Communist Manifesto
that 'all that is solid melts into air' (Marx and Engels 1848: 83). Marx and Engels
described how the competitive character of the capitalist mode of pro duction leads to
continual innovation, bringing about perpetual transformations of 'the whole relations of
society'. There is an 'uninterrupted disturbance of all social condi tions' as established
relations are 'swept away' (Marx and Engels 1848: 83). Prevailing forms of life become
fluid and convertible, through constant processes of moderniza tion. Although in a sense
modernity has always been fluid, the process of modernization did not come to an end
with the displacement of traditional forms by modern forms. Rather, modern institutions
and forms of life have themselves become subject to contin uing rounds of modernization.
One loose assortment of themes that brings together the ideas of Bauman, Jameson,
and other commentators on postmodern ism relates to the renewed rise in religious fun
damentalism as a reaction to feelings of insecurity, fragmentation, alienation, and disaf
fection from the global order. These themes are discussed here in Box 33.
Conclusion
Turbulence is an intrinsic feature of the condition termed postmodernity. To a great

extent, the current global unrest is a corollary of the development of a more flexible or
'disorgan ized' capitalism. For many critics, it is a consequence of the pursuit of a
*neo-liberal
MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNiTY· i>ART I 269
BOX 33. POSTMODERNITY, FRAGMENTATION, AND RELIGIOUS

FUNDAMENTALISM
Several commentators have seen one manifestation of 'postmodern discontents' in the

phenomenon of religious fundamentalism. This resurgence has been described as a reaction to
increased insecurities and risks generated by a global society. The increased prominence of Islam in
world politics has been seen as part of a series of what Bauman has called 'postmodern responses
to postmodern fears' (Bauman 1997: 184). One way of understanding the resurgence of
fundamentalism-not only in Islam, but also in Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism-is to see it as the
symptom of a global tide of destabi lization and *'disembedding' in cultural communities, of a
breakdown of trust and solidarity in eco nomic relations, and of new and more extreme forms of
social inequality.
The reprise of assertions of ethnicity and religious identity also presents a particular challenge to the
modern nation-state. The Islamic writer Akbar Ahmed has commented on the imposition of the
form of the modern nation-state in the Middle East in the twentieth century. Ahmed notably
concentrates on the case of the construction of Iraq as a nation-state by British colonial authorities
after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. Ahmed emphasizes the
insensitivity of the European nation-state form to ethnic differences in respect of language, custom,
culture, and kinship lineage. Ahmed remarks on the plight of the Kurds in the 1990s, 'split between
half a dozen nations', and on the way in which ill-informed nation-building continues to devastate
the Middle East (Ahmed 1992: 133) Differences in ethnicity and religion rarely coincide with
nationality, and the tensions that result are clearly evident in the current climate of world politics.
Reflecting on the impact of Western institutional forms and resistance to them with the global
expansion of their influence, Ahmed refers to the 'post modernist era' as a turbulent time marked by
'permanent strife', in which some elements of the Islamic world and some elements of the Western
world enter on a needless and destructive 'collision course' (Ahmed 1992: 264).
Increased global interdependence has produced a simultaneous increase in global disorder. The
events of 11 September 2001 made clear both the extent of global interdependence and the illusion of
global security. Global space, as Bauman puts it, now assumes 'the character of a frontier-land' (2002:
90). The frontiers around which conflicts occur are continually ebbing and flowing, and alliances like
wise are shifting and flexible. Uncertainty and insecurity are endemic in a world of space-time com
pression, a world that Manuel *Castells describes in terms of global high-speed 'flows of capital, flows
of information, flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds and
symbols', and flows of migrant people (Castells 1996: 412). Today we witness the emergence of a
disordered and increasingly dangerous world, a world in which the USA appears simultaneously all
powerful and vulnerable. In this scenario, Fredric Jameson suggests that 'postmodern culture is the i
internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American, military and economic
domination throughout the world', where 'the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and
terror' (1991: 5). It follows that, the global impact of free-market informational capitalism, the long
shadows cast by two American-led Gulf Wars, and the declaration of a 'war on terrorism' must
occupy centre stage in any analysis of the condition called 'postmodernity' or 'globalization' or the
'new world (dis)order'. For a variety of positions on the case of '9/11', see Baudrillard (2002), Virilio
(2002), Chomsky (2001), Zizek (2002), and Borradori (2003). See also the concluding statement by
the editor of this book pp. 313-6.
270
ideology in economic policies. The movement from an industrial, manufacturing, and

organized capitalism to an informational or knowledge- based and deregulated capitalism
has led to increasing insecurity in people's lives both at home and at work. As Pierre
*Bourdieu remarks, 'insecurity, suffering and stress' are outcomes of a system that has un
dermined 'all the collective structures capable of obstructing the logic of the pure market'
in µursuit of greater corporate flexibility and profitability (Bourdieu 1998: 96; see also
Gorz 1999; Beck 2000a).
It can be argued that postmodernity accompanies to capitalism in its 'consumer phase',
reproduced in part through the equation of individual freedom with consumer freedom.
Equally, as the economic independence of nation-states becomes subject to a global
market place, social existence becomes more precarious. Bound up with this contingency
is the articulation of global flows with local cultural forms and the emergence of
numerous hy brid forms of social identity. Postmodern conditions in this sense reveal
juxtapositions and collisions of different histories and transformations of space. It is this
unsettled quality of contemporary social life that critics have identified with the labels of
'late modern' or 'hyper-modern' or 'postmodern'.
What is important in this discussion is the precise nature of the changes that have
occurred, not the seemingly endless debates over different terms with which to
describe them. In any event, there is much more common ground between the various
accounts of 'late', 'reflexive', and 'post' modernity than some critics have been ready to
acknowledge. What is clear today is a heightened scepticism about modern
assumptions, a loss of faith in the idea that modernization will inevitably produce
progress, or an enhancement of human well-being, or a safer, more egalitarian and
humane future. At the same time, growths in scientific knowledge have not often led
to greater certainty in everyday life. The world in which we find ourselves is changing
rapidly in the face of far-reaching economic and technological developments and the
pace and direction of change are not easy to predict. In such a fast-moving world,
social theorizing becomes more important than ever.
What do the concepts of postmodernism and postmodernity reveal about our relationship to
modern forms of life?
2 Have modern values been discredited by postmodern ideas?
3 What does the term 'postmodern' contribute to debates about the conditions in which know
ledge is produced and consumed?
4 How far is postmodernity a condition in which consumption has become paramount?
5 To what extent are postmodern forms of social and cultural life a corollary of the neo-
liberal restructuring of capitalism?
6 Should contemporary religious groups take account of postmodernism?
MODERNITY AND FOSTM'WERNITY: PART 1 271
Iii FURTHER READING
Some good overviews of debates about postmodernism and postmodernity are Barry Smart's three
books Postmodernity (Routledge, 1993), Modern Conditions, Postmodern Controversies (Routledge,
1992), and Facing Modernity (Sage, 1999), as well as David Lyon's Postmodernity (Open University
Press, 1994), Gerard Delanty's Modernity and Postmodernity (Sage, 2000),Jim McGuigan's Modernity
and Postmodern Culture (Open University Press, 1999), and Christopher Butler's Postmodernism: A
Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002). Also useful is Victor Taylor and Charles
Winquist's edited Encyclopedia of Postmodern ism (Routledge, 2001) and the same authors' four
ed ited volumes of collected essays Postmodernism: Critical Concepts (Routledge, 1998). Some
useful collections of readings are Thomas Doherty's Postmodernism: A Reader (Harvester, 1993),
Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon's A Postmodern Reader (State University of New York Press,
1993), and Lawrence Cahoone's From Modernism to Postmodernism (Blackwell, 1996). Some
valuable critical assessments are Richard Bernstein's The New Constellation (Polity, 1991), Steven
Seidman's Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era (Blackwell, 1998), Pauline
Rosenau's Post modernism and the Social Sciences (Princeton University Press, 1992), and Steven
Best and Douglas Kellner's two co-written books Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations
(Macmillan, 1991) and The Postmodern Turn (Guilford Press, 1997). See also the Further Reading
section to Chapter 13 of this book.
Informative studies of postmodernism in relation to cultural and religious pluralism are Akbar
Ahmed's Postmodernism and Islam (Routledge, 1992), Couze Venn's Occidentalism: Modernity and
Subjectivity (Sage, 2000), Bryan Turner's Orienta/ism, Postmodernism and Globalism (Routledge, 1994),
and Scott Lash's The Sociology of Postmodernism (Routledge, 1990). Two notable studies of postmod
ern art and literature are Andreas Huyssen's Afrer the Great Divide (Indiana University Press, 1986)
and Hans Bertens's The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (Routledge, 1995). Two illuminating contri
butions have been David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodemity (Blackwell, 1989) and Fredric
Jameson's Postmodern ism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Verso, 1991), as well as the
shorter article version of this book published in New Lefr Review, 146, Quly-Aug. 1984), 52-92.
Further sources are Zygmunt Bauman's four books Legislators and Interpreters (Polity Press, 1987),
Intimations of Postmodemity (Routledge, 1992), Modernity and Ambivalence (Polity Press, 1991), and
Postmodernity and its Discontents (Polity Press, 1997), as well as Bauman's two books on questions of
ethics, Postmodern Ethics (Blackwell, 1993) and Life in Fragments (Blackwell, 1995). See also Peter
Beilharz's A Bauman Reader (Blackwell, 2001). Baudrillard's writings can be approached through Mark
Poster's edited Jean Baudri/lard: Selected Writings (Polity Press, 1988) or through Baudrillard's own
Simulacra and Simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1994). In Lyotard's The Postmodern
Condition, the reader should begin with the essay appended at the end, 'An Answer to the Question:
What is Postmodernism ?'
WEBSITES
Contemporary Philosophy, Critical Theory and Postmodern Thought at

http://carbon.cudenver.edu/-mryder/itc_datalpostmodern.html Provides a good resource with a range
of links to writers associated with critical theory and postmodernism.
Postmodernism On-line at www.postmodernity.connectfree.eo.uk/periodicals.htm Contains links
to on-line periodicals addressing aspects of postmodern conditions.
Everything Postmodern at www.ebbflux.com/postmodern Displays a comprehensive
eight-page site with links to numerous resources.
272 BARRY SMART
Baudrillard on the Web at www.uta.edu/english/apt/collah/haudweb.html Contains informative

writings by Baudrillard and commentaries on his work.
Lectures by Jameson at http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/jameson/ Provides a resource
from Jameson's Stanford presidential lectures, including a biography, excerpts, and
interviews.
13 Modernity and
Postmodernity:Part II
GerardDelanty
Three problems with postmodernism 274

Modernity and the radical imagination: CorneliusCastoriadis
andAgnes Heller 275
Modernity and the growth of communicative reason: Jurgen Habermas 279
Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action 279
Colonizationof the lifeworldby the system 281
Discursivedemocracy and the ruleof law 281
Criticismsof Habermas 283
NiklasLuhmann's systems theoryof modernity 283
Reflexive modernization 286
Ulrich Beck on reflexive modernity and the risk society 286
AnthonyGiddens on reflexivity and individualization 287
Conclusion 289

FURTHERREADING 290
WEBSITES 291
This chapter completes the discussion of modernity and postmodernity begun in

Chapter 12 of this book. The range of approaches to be discussed reflect a variety of con
cerns, but an underlying theme is the view that modernity entails dimensions that are not
fully appreciated in more extreme forms of *postmodernist writing. The chapter concen
trates particularly on the work of theorists who have sought explicitly to defend the project
of modernity against unsustainable forms of postmodernism that have proclaimed the
wholesale bankruptcy of modern values and *normative ideas. As discussed in the
previous chapter of this book by Barry Smart, there has been a notable preference in
recent social
274
theory to view postmodernism as part of modernity. The idea of the 'end of modernity' is
not to be taken literally. There is a consensus that the notion of a radical rupture between
modernity and postmodernity should be rejected. In general, postmodern ism can bC' best
understood today as a revolt against just one tendency within modernity, rather than as
a movement against modernity as a whole.
The theories discussed in this chapter build on some of the positive gains made by
postmodemism and at the same time go beyond postmodernism. We look primarily at
the work of six theorists: Cornelius *Castoridias, Agnes *Heller, Jurgen *Habermas, Nikias
*Luhmann, Alain *Touraine, and Ulrich *Beck, as well as the later writings of Anthony
*Giddens on *'reflexivity'. We begin with a brief summary of the main criticisms that can
be made of postmodern ism's more extreme formulations.
Three problems with postmodernism
Three broad evaluative points can be made about postmodernism from the standpoint
of modernity as a normative project. The first is that modernity needs to be seen as an
ongoing process with many dimensions. It is advisable to think of modernity as being 'on
endless trial', as the Polish theorist Leszek Kolakowski (1990) puts it. This is a way of
think ing evident in many of the major names of contemporary social theory. It is even
evident in the work of]ean *Baudrillard who has addressed ideas about postmodernism
not in terms of the 'end of the illusion' of modernity but rather in terms of the 'illusion of
the end' of modernity (Baudrillard 1992h). In many ways it is helpful to see
postmodernism as a cri tique of certain tendencies within modern thought, but not as the
proclamation of an en tirely new kind of society. This is certainlytheway*Foucault and
*Lyotard understood their projects, and it is especially evident in Foucault's emphasis on
what he called 'the permanent reactivation of an attitude', on 'a permanent critique of our
historical era', oriented to finding out 'how the attitude of modernity, ever since its
formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of "counter-modernity"' (Foucault
1984c: 39).
A second point is that certain tendencies in postmodernist writing in the 1980s-1990s
suf fered from an overemphasis on the idea of societies as texts capable of simple
*deconstruction. Over-relying on literary theory, some kinds or postmodemism have not
been fruitful for sociological thinking and have not dealt adequately with questions of
power and material social structures, as problems that need to be analytically distinguished
from questions about representations, signs, and symholic images. While much
postmodernist writing has opened social theory to new dimensions, it has not always
provided adequate accounts of the distinctive nature of structural social processes. But it
should also be noted that preoccupa tion with exclusively cultural and symbolic matters
has heen questioned even within some strands of avowedly postmodern thinking itself.
Increasingly we find postmodernist thinkers writing about new conceptions of the social
dimensions of affairs, as dimensions to be distinguished from the more narrowly cultural.
One contribution to this redirection is the idea of 'social postmodernism' proposed by
Nicholson and Seidman (1995).
A third criticism is that some postmodernist writers have not always offered plausible
grounds for normative political engagement. In some cases, the idea of a rational foundation
MODERNITY AND ?OSTMODERNITY: FART 11 275
for collective struggles has been uncritically dismissed as an illusion generated by the
European eighteenth-century *Enlightenment. In contrast, many recent feminist and
*postcolonial theorists have demonstrated that while postmodern ism offers a useful start
ing point for critique, not all of its diverse strands have been able to offer guidance for an
*emancipatory political project. This is an observation made in the discussion of feminist
theory in Chapter 11 of this book.
It is worth remembering that postmodernism as a term was primarily a theory of
cultural developments, and that while it was compatible with developments in French
*post structuralist thought, it was never intended to be a social or political theory as such.
Originally, postmodernism was a movement in architecture, literature, and the arts,
expressing revolt against the rigid formalism of aesthetic *modernism, which it sought to
revitalize through an emphasis on emancipating 'content' from the structured and
ahistorical 'form' of the modernist aesthetic (compare Burger 1974). In bringing art and
life closer together, postmodcrnism brought the aesthetic imagination to the brink of
radical politics, but it has not succeeded in demonstrating aesthetics to be a fully self-
sufficient arena for social critique (compare Delanty 2000: 131-55; Harrington 2004: 177-
206).
The renewed theorizations of modernity to which we turn in this chapter take
account of various limitations in the notions of modernization espoused by some
twentieth century social scientists. The theorists under consideration proffer new
readings of his tory in areas as diverse as historical sociology, *world systems theory,
cultural history, international relations, and postcolonial studies. They are critical of
conventional mod ernization theory from the 1950s in the work of Talcott *Parsons and
others, which tended to reduce modernity to a Western-centred view of the world,
neglecting the multidirec tional and conflict-ridden character of modernity. It is in this
respect that several recent commentators have come to speak of 'multiple modernities',
most notably the Israeli his torical sociologist Shmuel *Eisenstadt (whose earlier work is
discussed in Chapter 6 of this book) (see Eisenstadt 2002). These accounts respond
increasingly to the view that moder nity is not exclusively defined by the European
Enlightenment and that there are many routes into and through it (compare Therborn
1995). The implications of globalization in this context will be discussed in the next
chapter, but for the present it can be noted that debates about globalization and related
issues of multiculturalism and *cosmopolitanism provide an important context in which
to approach the ideas of the theorists discussed in this chapter.
We begin by looking at the work of Cornelius *Castoriadis and Agnes *Heller.
Modernity and the radical imagination: Cornelius

Castoriadis and Agnes Heller
Several commentators have remarked on the significance of creativity as a dimension of
social action (Joas 1992). This idea can be related to a conception of modernity as a
project of transformation driven by the capacity to imagine alternatives. It is a theme
central to the two theorists under discussion here.
276 GERARD DELANTY
In his major work The Imaginary Institution of Society, published originally in French
in 1975, the Greek-born theorist Cornelius Castoriadis shifted debate about modernity
away from an exclusive concern with capitalism, as was typical of Marxist approaches,
and also away from concerns with an all-inclusive power, such as in the work of
Foucault (see also Castoriadis 1990, 1991). For Castoriadis, the defining feature of
modernity is the struggle between the radical project of *autonomy and the institutional
project of mastery. Modernity is defined by a struggle between these two forces, and
cannot be reduced to either of them. To the extent that there is something underlying
these contrary forces, it is the imagination. All societies possess an *imaginary
dimension, since they must an swer certain symbolic questions as to their basic
identity, their goals and limits. Modernity has come to rest on two kinds of imaginary
significations: the imaginary of rational technical control, on the one hand, and the
radical imaginary of autonomy, on the other hand. The purpose of Castoriadis's social
theory is to defend the latter against the former.
Castoriadis does not equate technical control and mastery with capitalism; he sees
them as also including the dis,iplinary regimes of power associated with the modern
bureaucratic state. He argues that the distinctive feature of the radical imagination is
human autonomy, which resists both economic and political power and institutional
systems of *domination. He stresses the dimension of self-confrontation and especially
cre ativity, which can never be fully institutionalized. Modernity contains within it the
vision of an autonomous society. It thereby indicates a condition of perpetual resistance to
insti tutional frameworks which attempt to domesticate the radical imagination and
strip it of its creative agency. The focus on creativity offers an alternative theorization of
modernity echoing the idea of *homo faber in Aristotle and Marx: the idea of society
as an artefact created by human beings.
With this argument, Castoriadis established a route out of the narrower and more
dogmatic forms of postmodernism on the one hand and Marxism on the other.
Where Marxism in his view had a tendency to reduce radicalism to class
*emancipation, postmodernism led to a retreat from autonomy and became obsessed
with denouncing modernity (Castoriadis 1990). He emphasizes that radicalism
involves openness to the future, but is not based on disavowal of the past-for the past
can be a source of creative inspiration. Capitalism, as Marx demonstrated, created the
conditions for some of the most creative struggles in human history. These struggles con
tine to define the modern condition and have spread into wider domains, in the arts and
culture, in the self, in inter personal relations, and politics. But capitalism and class
conflict are no longer the sole ter rain of struggles for autonomy. Some examples of this
expansion in radical politics are the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and the rise
of 'new social movements' since the 1970s. In these movements we find an expression of
the radical imaginary on the terrains of gender and sexuality, 'race', ethnicity, and
environmental activism, as well as in the arena of class exploitation. In general
Castoriadis's work has led to a new thinking of modernity in terms of a 'field of tensions'
on diverse 'sites of resistance' (compare Amason 1989, 1991; Wagner 1994; Delanty
1999).
The Hungarian-born theorist Agnes *Heller reiterates some of Castoriadis's key
ideas. She especially endorses the idea of a central conflict at the heart of modernity
MODERNITY ANO POSTMODERllilTV· PART II 277
which creates possibilities for freedom but also undermines it. Heller's social theory can
be read as a response to the circumstances of central and Eastern Europe under
communism and is especially pervaded by a sense of the helplessness of *civil society in
the face of powerful institutions. Her early work sees the central conflict of modernity as
lying between institutions and 'everyday life' (Heller 1984). The concept of everyday
life entered modern social thought via the writing of *Heidegger and other *existentialist
philosophers. Heller developed the concept to refer to the primary nature of society
as *intersubjective, which she sees as the basis of the transformative capacity of society.
Modern ideas of universality, critique, and *reflexivity are anchored in the structures
of everyday intersubjective communication and gain their political force in resisting
power.
In A Theory of History (1982), Heller outlined a conception of modernity that stressed
three logics of development. First, there is the capitalist logic of' development, involving
private property, inequality, and domination. This is then confronted, secondly, with
democracy, based on ideas of equality, decentralization of power, and citizenship. These
are the two central logics of civil society and are in tension. However, alongside them
lies a third logic of development, that of state-directed industrialism. By this logic, the state
tries to provide a solution to the problems presented by the conflict between capitalism
and democracy. Socialism has been an expression of this logic in modernity, even though
capitalism in the West has had the upper hand. It is this variable and fluid condition that
constitutes what Heller sees as the basic 'dynamic of modernity' (see Heller 1990). It is
a dynamic of perpetual change and an attitude of questioning that leads to constant
negation of tradition.
In her book A Theory of Modernity (1999), Heller also stresses technology as a key logic
of modernity. Technology is seen as facilitating certain emancipatory possibilities and as
at the same time threatening them. Modernity in this picture is not a homogenized or
totalized whole, but 'a fragmented world of some open but not unlimited possibilities'
(Heller 1999: 65). There is no promise of total freedom, and autonomy in Castoriadis's
sense is not concentrated solely in democracy; it can also be found to a certain extent in
technology. But neither technology or industrialism, nor capitalism, nor democracy, offer
unambiguously progressive forces of development. Heller has continued to believe that
democracy is the key to the emancipatory promises of modernity, but increasingly she
recognizes that perhaps all that is possible is a balancing of the three or four logics of
deve lopment (Heller 1993; Heller and Feher 1988).
In sum, Castoriadis and Heller offer important contributions to social theory by charac
terizing modernity in terms of struggles between different agencies, rather than in terms of
a single logic of transformation. Castoriadis's work thematizes conflict between the
project of autonomy and the project of mastery. Heller's work emphasizes tension between
the logics of industrialism, technology, capitalism, and democracy. Emerging from these
theo ries is a relational view of modernity as a process of social transformation that
unfolds through conflict between contrary forces.
One illuminating connection in which these ideas can be joined together with the work
of Habermas, Touraine, Beck, and Giddens is the revolutions in Eastern Europe of 1989.
This case example is discussed in Box 34.
278
BOX 34. SOCIAL THEORY AND THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1989
The democratic revolutions that occurred In Eastern Europe in 1989-90 offer an interesting application
of the social theories discussed in this chapter. The revolutions would appear to refute postmodernist
notions of the 'end of modernity'. What came to an end in 1989 was not modernity tout court but
just one kind of modernity, namely a modernity oriented to the project of state socialism. While it is
possible to see the revolutions as demonstrating the end of a certain 'grand narrative' in *Lyotard's
sense, it Is
also possible to seem them as re-establishing modern democratic principles of potitical
legitimacy. Where *Baudrillard (1992b) sees the revolutions as an expression of the
'deconstruction of history', another perspective suggests a reconstruction of modernity. The events
appealed to a new application of classical * Enlightenment ideas about liberty and * civil society
(compare Dahrendorf 1990). The ideals that inspired the revolutions were the modern ideas of
democracy, liberty, and justice, which had been preserved in the civil societ9 movements of the
communist period and which reasserted themselves in 1989 when a general structural crisis occurred
in the Soviet system.
*Castoriadis's approach suggests a view of the 1989 revolutions as an expression of the radical *imagi
nary and a continuation of the mode·rn struggle between democratic *autonomy and state-imposed
sys temic mastery. For *Heller and other East European writers such as Vaclav Havel, they are an instance
of the eventual triumph of organic social agency over systemic institutional control-a vindication of what
Havel called the moral 'power of the powerless· (Havel 1990). *Habermas described them as
'catching-up' revolutions. involving delayed attempts to institutionalize modern liberties (see
Habermas 1991). From Habermas's perspective, the revolutions were the result of social
movements emanating from the
*'lifeworld' and asserting themselves against the 'system'. In 1989, state power was challenged by civil
society and given legitimation by intellectuals. In the language of Alain *Toura1ne's social theory, the
revolutions can be seen 9s a renewal of the capacity of society to create itself, to establish itself
by autonomous popular agency.
One notorious view of these events in the early 1990s was put forward by the American
political commentator Francis Fukuyama, who declared that the revolutions represented the 'end
of history' (Fukuyama 1992). In his thesis, they spelled the end of ideological strife between East
and West and the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. The
illusions and political prejudices of this view have been borne out by the subsequent course of events.
One outcome of the revolutions was a rise in nationalism, xenophobia, right-wing extremism, and anti-
Semitism. This situ ation is far from the end of ideological strife that Fukuyama claimed to predict.
The triple transition-to capitalism, to democracy, and in many cases to national autonomy-has not
been smooth. It has had diverse consequences, ranging from descent into ethnic war in the former
Yugoslavia to the peaceful break-up of the former Czechoslovakia, as well as to German unification
and the recent enlargement of the European Union (see further Otte 1996). At the same time, new
forms of inequality, poverty, and unemployment have arisen as a consequence of the introduction of
free-market capitalism in the for mer Eastern Bloc, while intense ideological battles continue to be
played out elsewhere in the world in the name of religious values and cultural identities, notably in
the Middle East but also in the West.
These developments indicate that the categories and institutions of modernity are still with us,
however much they have been reshaped and reworked. To speak in the language of Ulrich
*Beck, modernity has become more *reflexive. Modernity today is unable to escape the legacy of
history and has constantly had to come to terms with problems created by earlier phases of
modernity. The revolutions in Eastern Europe therefore cannot be reduced to conservative, or
*technocratic or extreme postmodernist arguments about the obsolescence of projects of real social
self-determination. They are pertinent examples of the incompleteness of the proJect of modernity.
MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNiTY· PART i' 279
Modernity and the growth of communicative reason:

Jurgen Habermas
JUrgen *Habermas is a staunch critic of both anti-modernist and postmodernist currents in

contemporary thought. Habermas rejects the postmodernist notion that modernity has
reached its limits. In a controversial essay, he dismissed the French post-structuralist
theorists-chiefly Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault-as nihilists who preferred to give up on
politics and critical thought (Habermas 1980, 1985). This was a gross simplification of
their work, as the previous discussions in this book have shown (Chapter 9, Chapter 12,
pp. 202-12, 258-62). In other, more subtle ways, however, Habermas has continued to ad
here to the idea of modernity as a progressive emancipatory project. In his polemical
rejec tion of postmodernism, he establishes the need for an immanent critique of
modernity. This entails the view that modernity contains *normative promises that are yet
to be ful filled. It is in this sense that Habermas speaks of modernity as an 'unfinished
project' (1980, 1985). There are many dimensions to modernity, but the ones that are most
important are those that enable society to contest power and domination through self-
transformation, critique, *reflexivity, and the struggle for *autonomy. We look at each of
these aspects of Habermas's thought in turn.
Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action

Habermas's major work of 1981, The Theory of Communicative Action (published in two
volumes), presents an elaborate theory of modernity that considerably refines his earlier
writing from the period of his attachment to the *Frankfurt School (discussed in Chapter 7
of this book, pp. 164-5). This work can be seen as the central text in the second generation
of critical theory, the first generation being represented by*Adorno, *Horkeimer, *Marcuse,
and others. In this work Habermas responded to the changed political environment of the
1960s and 1970s when new social movements arose and took critical theory in a new
direction. Against the idea of an all-pervasive capitalist bureaucratic system that
Horkheimer and Adorno identified with modernity in their pessimistic work The Dialectic
of Enlightenment (1947), Habermas argued for possibilities of democratic transformation
through a notion of social action as *communicative. The basic idea is not too far removed
from Castoriadis's idea of modernity as a conflict between autonomy and mastery.
Modernity in Habermas's mature approach is a struggle between two kinds of rationality:
communicative rationality versus *instrumental rationality.
Drawing on a wide range of approaches, from developmental psychology, social
evolutionary theory, and the philosophy of language, Habermas argues that language is
the key normative medium of social interaction. In this view, linguistic communication is
con stitutive of social relations; it is the basis of socialization and of legitimation
processes and democratization. The structure of communication is not so much the sign
or the text but
*intersubjective dialogue oriented to problem-solving, to processes of critical agreement
and to rational consensus formation. Communicative action involves 'validity claims', such
as assumptions about truth, moral rightness, and sincerity in any given assertion, utterance,
or exclamation by an individual speaker. While everyday communication does not always
280 6ERARD DELANTY
involve explicit validity claims, the very activity of communication presupposes the
possibility that communication can be 'unconstrained'; that is, that it can arrive at unco
erced consensus, where social actions are initiated not by intimidation or manipulation but
by valid reasons. Habermas stresses the capacity of human communication to foster a
more reasonable society. lt is a theory governed by the belief that through *deliberative
argumen tation and reflection, people can resolve differences and reach agreement.
In his philosophical writings, Habermas proposes a radical consensus theory of truth,
based on the hypothesis of an 'ideal speech situation'. Habermas developed this theory
partly through dialogue with the work of the German linguistic theorist Karl-Otto *Apel,
who introduced the ideas of the American *pragmatist philosophers to German-speaking
audiences in the 1970s. On this theory, truth is not what happens to be agreed upon by a
given bunch of people. lt is what could and would have to be agreed upon by everyone,
were everyone to have a free and equal opportunity to participate in the conversation and
exchange rationally debatable grounds for their views-without exclusion, manipulation,
or coercion. In this way Habermas establishes a normative foundation for critical social
the ory, bringing it out of the impasse of the earlier Frankfurt School's more pessimistic
*ideo logy critique. The critique of ideology in his work now becomes the critique of
'systematically distorted communication'.The concept of *dialogical rationality replaces
Adorno's concep tion of 'negative *dialectics'. The critical enterprise is focused on those
points where power is resisted by the force of communicative reason. So long as people
are able to engage in social action that obeys openly available rules of communication,
there is the possibility that social action can resist unjust uses of power. Habermas is not
saying here that commu nication is always a rational reflective process; but he is saying
that it can be, and often is rational, especially in those critical moments when people
challenge power.
According to Habermas, the history of modernity can be rewritten as the progressive
extension of communicative forms of rationality. Habermas's social theory is an evolu
tionary one, albeit one divested of *teleological assumptions. Social evolution cannot be
explained by recourse to historical or natural laws of any kind. Instead, Habermas's theory
of modernity rests on a conception of societal learning processes (Habermas 1976).
Synthesizing elements of the work of Durkheim, G. H.*Mead, and Talcott *Parsons,
Habermas argues that learning occurs both at the collective level of whole societies and at
the level of individuals. Learning happens simply because not-learning is not possible. In
this approach, which is also influenced by the developmental psychology of Jean *Piaget
and Laurence *Kohlberg, learning is based on the acquisition of communicative com
petences. It involves *cognitive processes that cannot be reduced to rote imitation or
*behaviouristic responses to an external environment. Learning and language use are a
'generative' competence, in the sense in which Noam *Chomsky uses this term. Habermas
argues that the evolution of societies can be theorized in terms of generative trans
formations in cognitive competences and moral consciousness. Modernity emerges when
societies solve problems in post-traditional and post-conventional ways, investing
reflexive universalizing principles in the formulation of social norms, organizational rules,
political practice, and legal systems. The transition to modernity occurs with the institu
tionalization of deliberative processes in the constitution of positive laws, and in the
idea of the autonomy of art, in the primacy of human rights, and in the *secularization of
religion.
MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY: PART Ii 281
Colonization of the lifeworld by the system

In the second volume of The Theoryo(Communicative Action (1981 b), Habermas introduces
a distinction between what he calls the *'lifeworld' and the 'system', both of which involve
different forms of *integration. Drawing on and modifying the work of David *Lockwood
(discussed in Chapter 4 of this book, p. 102), Habermas sees the lifeworld as based on
'social integration'. In contrast, the system is based on 'system integration', organized
through the economy and through juridical-administrative steering by the state. Whereas
the lifeworld presupposes a rationality that is primarily communicative, the system is
driven by instru mental rationality. The tension between these two rationalities gives
modernity its basic animus.
In this conflict of rationalities between the lifeworld and the system, communicative
reason is threatened by instrumental reason. Habermas speaks of a 'colonization of the
lifeworld' by the system, involving *commodification, instrumentalization, and over
legalization of social relations. This danger of system colonization results in distortions of
communication and social pathologies. However, Habermas also argues that communic
ative action in the lifeworld has the capacity to resist colonization by the system. Key
agencies in this connection are the role of social movements. Social movements carry the
normative consciousness of modernity and defend the lifeworld against the system. These
include not only traditional class struggles but also new movements such as the ecological
movement, the women's movement, and anti-imperialist movements.
An analogous theorization of social movements that illustrates Habermas's ideas in
certain ways occurs in the work of Alain *Touraine, who is discussed in Box 35.
Discursive democracy and the rule of law

In his later book Between Facts and Nonns (1992), Habermas pulls back from the very
sharp contrast he drew in his work in the 1980s between the 'lifeworld' and the
'system'. In this book he emphasizes that *communicative logics also extend into the
system. The basis of the new approach is a theory of *'discursive democracy'. Where the
older approach stressed non-institutionalized emancipatory practices, Habermas
became increasingly interested in democratization as a process extending into all parts of
society, including the highly in stitutionalized spheres of a society's legal system.
Perhaps because of the rise of new na tionalist and xenophobic movements from the
lifeworld, communicative rationality in his later work is no longer confined exclusively to
the lifeworld. Habermas's idea of discursive democracy entails a more positive view of the
role of law, which is no longer seen simply as a medium of 'juridification', or over-
legalization. Habermas argues that law is an essential dimension of democracy.
Although he has been criticized for abandoning the radical ambitions of critical social
theory in its original Frankfurt vintage, it is important to see that Habermas's later work
dif fers from liberal political theory in at least one major respect. The version of
deliberative democracy he proposes is not characterized by a concern with compromises
over private interests, in ways typical of liberal theories of justice , such as that of John
*Rawls. Habermas's conception of discursive and deliberative democracy does not take
private interests as given, and then seek for a principle of just redistribution of
resources and
282
BOX 35. ALAIN TOURAINE ON SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND COLLECTIVE AGENCY
Like Castoriadis, Habermas, and other writers, the French .ociologist Alain *Touraine argues that a
*post-industrial society based on consumers, service workers, and information brings about new kinds
of social movements, beyond that of the traditional working class (Touraine 1969).
In the 1970s, in opposition to both orthodox Marxism and *structural functionalism, Touraine
(1973) developed a theory of social action around the concept of historical renewal through
social transformation. He wrote that 'society is not just reproduction and adaptation; it is also
creation, self-production' (Touraine 1973: 3). The concept of 'self-production' indicated here is
very different from Niklas *Luhmann's use of the same term (discussed later in this chapter). For
Touraine, self-production refers to the ability of social actors to transform society reflexively by
acting upon it. He wrote that 'Society is not merely a system of norms or a system of domination: it is a
system of social relations, of debates and conflicts, of political initiatives and claims, of ideologies
and alienation' (Touraine 1973: 30). Touraine related this idea to social movements, which are the
agents of historicity.
In hrs more recent book Critique·of Modernity (Touraine 1992), Touraine argues that contemporary
society reflects a field of tensions between two polar tendencies: the tendency of collective •agency,
based on *normative communication, which he calls the tendency of the *'SubJect', and the tendency
of systemic *rationalization, which he calls the tendency of 'Reason' (equivalent to 'instrumental rea
son' in Habermas's lexicon). The challenge of modernity is to unify these tendencies. But the problem
for modernity is that the chances of a principle of unity are slight. According to Touraine, four main
forces have dominated modernity: sexuality, commodity consumption, the business corporation, and
the nation. These correspond to the spheres of personality, culture, economics, and politics. The prob
lem today, however, is that these domains have become so fragmented that there is no longer a princi
ple of unity. For instance, the personal order has become divorced from the collective order, and
production and consumption have lost any ability to bring the two orders together.
Touraine sees some truth in describing the current situation as 'postmodern' insofar as this reminds
us that the twentieth century has been a century not of progress but of crisis and dissolution of any
over arching collective agency. Touraine's thesis is that the only unity that currently exists is that
provided by instrumental rationality. On the one hand, Toura1ne postulates the idea of the 'Subject', or
subjectivat1on the *communicative agency of individuals-as a counterforce to the rule of 'Reason' or
systemic ra tionality. On the other hand, he is in insistent that the Subject cannot by itself unify the
shattered fragments of modernity. He writes th-at 'Society can no longer be defined as a set of
institutions, or as an effect of a sovereign will. It is the creation of neither history nor the Prince. It is
a field of conflicts, negotiations and mediations between rationalization and subjectivation, and they
are the complementary and contradictory faces of modernity' (Touraine 1992: 358).
Touraine rejects both postmodernism and paternalistic *communitarianism as solutions to
these problems (Toura1ne 1994, 1997, 1999). He sees the only solution in forms of democracy
rooted In active otizenship. While his notion of the 'Subject' is somewhat vague, the strength of
his work is his argument that the creative impetus of social action represents a challenge to power
In this respect he demonstrates how economic globalization has not undermined the capacity for
oppositional political action. Even the most marginalized groups in society are capable not only of
resisting domination but also of articulating new conceptions of society with an orientation to equal
ity and solidarity.
MODERNITY AND PART ii 283
opportunities for individuals to maximize their intnests. Rather, it argues for principles of
collective democratic communication capable of determining the very formation of
the interests that come to be claimed as 'private' and thereby shaping these interests in
ways that can express social solidarity and trust. In this sense, discursive democracy
for Habermas can exist in any part of society, not only in the institutionalized spheres
of law and constitutional politics but also in the private sphere and interpersonal
relations.
Habermas also stresses the importance of discursive democracy to the challenges of
globalization, and more especially to European integration (Habermas 2001). Insofar as it
is the site in society where power is contested, it is no longer confined to the state or to
the bourgeois public sphere. The normative claims of democracy are now to be found
everywhere, and have extended beyond the traditional confines of the nation-state (see
Habermas 1996, 1998). It is also in this sense that Habermas speaks of a 'post-national
constellation' in European politics.
Criticisms of Habermas
Habermas's work is the 1970s and 1980s brought critical social theory out of the impasse
of the first generation. It established a new way of theorizing modernity, emancipation,
and social action and provided a normative foundation for critique. But Habermas's
confident shift away from Adorno and Horkheimer's bleak view of instrumental reason
has not been without problems. Many critics have taken issue with Habermas's
unsympathetic attitude to post-structuralism, with his staunchly *universalist mode of
argumentation, with his attempt to generate a grand evolutionary theory of society free
from *metaphysical assump tions, and with his insistence on rational linguistic
communication as a realistic agency of progressive social transformation.
Among some writers, sometimes described as representing a 'third generation' of critical
theory, there is a certain dissatisfaction with Habermas's over-rationalized conception
of the social as grounded in formal structures of language (compare Wellmer 1986).
Habermas's neglect of the dimension of values and cultural experience has led to an
em phasis on new questions in the writings of Axel *Honneth, a student of Habermas.
Central to these concerns is the question of *'recognition' (Honneth 1985, 1990,
1992). For Honneth, it is the 'struggle for recognition' rather than the struggle for
agreement that is the most fundamental fact about social action. With this argument,
Honneth shifted attention toward ethical issues around injured cultural identities,
gender equality, and respect for diversity of value spheres. Honneth's work on
multiculturalism and the 'politics of recognition' here shows affinities with the approaches
of North American theorists such as Nancy *Fraser, Seyla *Benhabib, and Charles
*Taylor.
Niklas Luhmann's systems theory of modernity

The concept of communication is also central to the leading German representative of
*'systems theory', Niklas *Luhmann. However, for Luhmann, communication is not the
foundation of critique and democratization, as it is for Habermas. According to Luhmann,
284 GERARD DELANTY
communication is a condition entirely disconnected from language and social action. For
Luhmann, it is systems that communicate, not social actors. Luhmann replaces the idea of
society with systems of communication.
Luhmann was a contemporary of Habermas who began publishing in the 1960s, devel
oping much of his work through a dialogue with Talcott Parsons's *functionalism, and also
with *cybernetic theory. In his major work Social Systems (1984), Luhmann proposes that
modern society comprises a functionally differentiated system whose subsystems have
become autonomous of each other and of the social system as a whole (see also Luhmann
1970, 1992). This theory has its origins in Parsons's evolutionary functionalism but it
differs from Parsons in several major respects. Luhmann denies the possibility of an overall
systemic unity. He also rejects the idea of modernization as a unilinear evolutionary
process, and he does not view the social in terms of symbolically constructed realities or
'lifeworlds' based on modernizing social integration. Against Habermas, Luhmann argues
that system integration is a more useful concept than social integration, and against both
Habermas and Parsons, he denies the idea that normative values provide the glue that
holds society together. Luhmann shifts the emphasis from integration io *differentiation.
He proposes that every subsystem is self-reproducing, where subsystems are seen as
*'autopoietic', or 'self-creating'. Each subsystem tends to reproduce itself, and it does this
by distinguishing itself from its environment. Systems are ultimately flows of information.
Luhmann describes them as 'operationally closed' in the sense that they do not require
'meaning' in order to function. For this reason 'society' as such does not exist. All that
exists is communication between social systems.
The implications of this are significant for politics, which Luhmann sees as no
longer occupying a functionally central position in society. Luhmann in fact argues that
modern society is centreless, and that there is no one central subsystem, such as the
state or civil society. Not too surprisingly, this led to a dispute in the 1970s with
Habermas, who strongly opposed the suggestion that politics has no central role to play
(Habermas 1976; Habermas and Luhmann 1971). According to Luhmann,
contemporary societies are characterized by complexity as a result of functional
differentiation. The consequence is that political communication has become just one
mode of communication among others. Habermas saw this as a very *technocratic
view of society, a view he also rejected with the simple empirical argument that
politics has always been a prominent motor of historical change. In reply, Luhmann
argued that Hahermas's theory presupposed a simplistic conception of system
integration being confronted by social integration. He insisted that the point of
systems theory was to demonstrate that it is through differentiation, not integration,
that society functions. It is through the creation of differences or functional
distinctions that social changes occur.
The notion of 'distinction', involving systemic societal production of differences, is of
central importance in Luhmann's social theory. The basic codes by which information is
processed are binary ones, creating a distinction between 'inside' and 'outside'.
Luhmann's argument is that distinctions can be made only from within a given system.
There is no absolute independent point from which society can observe or represent itself
(such as God or the State or the Emperor). It is no longer possible to represent society as a
whole. All external positions from which observation might proceed have disappeared
MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNiTV: PART ii 285
today. Instead, Luhmann argues that all observation must take the form of 'self-
observa tions', or, as he also says, 'self-descriptions'. Subsystems must make self-
observations in order for them to distinguish themselves from their environment, i.e.
from other subsys tems. In this respect, the subject as codifier and narrator-in the
sense of old European philosophies of history, in *Hegel and Marx or *Comte-is
replaced by a subject as observer.
Luhmann's idea of an increase in second-order observations can be seen in many areas
of society. For instance, in politics since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, public
opinion has increasingly functioned like a mirror for different groups in society, making
power contingent. In artistic production, second-order observations are replacing first
order observations insofar as art no longer represents something largely outside itself,
such as the 'natural world': modern art has become predominantly *self-referential. In
science, questions of methodology have become all important, for scientific truth is not a
matter of proclamations but of method. In law, recourse to second-order observations is
evident in the salience of questions of procedure (Luhmann 1990).
Luhmann argues that the future in modernist thought was a means of extending the
present beyond itself. Modernism saw the present as a work of self-projection. Today,
instead, the future is experienced increasingly in the form of risk (Luhmann 1991, 1992).
Risks concern possible but not determined events. Risks are improbabilities resulting
from a decision. It is through risk that we cognitively construct the future, which has no
re demptive solutions to offer us. At most, this suggests a conception of the future as a
strategy for the reduction of complexities and contingencies, but not as a utopian dream.
Luhmann's social theory is close to postmodernism in the central importance it gives to
'difference'. It is, however, important to note that for Luhmann modernity is already char
acterized by difference, by differentiation, and by what he calls 'loss of reference'.
Difference is not simply a condition of postmodernity. Luhmann's systematic and
chal lenging theory of modernity rivals that of Habermas and others. Read in the light of
inter ests in global complexity and indeterminacy, it represents an innovative way of
thinking about contemporary society is able to address issues of *non-linearity in self-
organizing systems. It work suggests a view of society that is no longer to be understood
in the tradi tional terms of nation-state territory or key institutions, or 'collective
values' or 'cultural representations'. Society is not something spatial that is integrated
by particular actors or powers or institutions. It is rather to be conceived of as a system of
differentiated processes of communication.
However, Luhmann's work suffers from various difficulties. Apart from the obscurity of
much of writing style, the main problem is his neglect of social acHon. I Iis theory of com
munication is based on a simplistic notion of his binary codes that leaves little room for
other kinds of communication and interaction that cannot be reduced to this *cybernetic
logic. Luhmann also overstates the capacity of social systems to reproduce themselves,
and pays insufficient attention to issues of crisis, *legitimation, conflicts and opposition.
Politics is very inadequately theorized as 'steering'. Lastly, while Luhmann does empha
size what Parsons called *'interpenetration', this idea still plays a limited role in his theory.
The result is a failure to take into account mixed organizational forms and mixed cultural
forms.
Reflexive modernization
We now turn to a final body of work which explores the ideas of Habermas, Luhmann,
and others in a more empirical vein. This work can be brought together under the theme of
'reflexivity' and 'reflexive modernity'. It is particularly represented by the work of Ulrich
*Beck and Anthony *Giddens.
The idea of *reflexivity is a topical issue in social theory. As mentioned in Chapter 10,
Pierre *Bourdieu defended what he called a *'reflexive sociology' (Bourdieu anti
Wacquant 1992). Reflexivity here means the application of something to itself. In this
case a reflexive sociology is one that applies to itself the critical attitude that it directs to
its research object. Reflexivity suggests self-confrontation. In the methodology of social
science it entails a questioning of the position of the researcher in relation to the research
process. In Luhmann's social theory, reflexivity is the logic of *'self-reference' by which
systems repro duce themselves under conditions of contingency. In the work of Alain
J'ouraine, discussed earlier in Box 35, reflexivity is suggested by the idea of historicity
and by the capacity of so ciety to act upon itself. The notion of reflexivity is also central to
Habermas's conception of a critical *dialogic rationality. In the following discussion, we
look at ideas of 'reflexive modernity' and 'late modernity in the work of Beck and
Giddens.
Ulrich Beck on reflexive modernity and the risk society

Beck proposes that modernity itself has become 'subject to modernization' (Beck 1986,
1997, 1998; Beck et al. 1994). Contemporary social life has become more fluid, more
insec ure and uncertain, as modern forms of life have been recast through continuing
processes of modernization. In a similar manner to *Lyotard and *Bauman, Beck speaks
of a process of transformation from an earlier industrial form of modernity to a later
'second' moder nity; but Beck eschews the idea of a condition of postmodernity in favour
of a thesis of 're flexive modernization'.
Beck argues that the current form of modernity is especially shaped by the social impact
of risk. His book The Risk Society was first puhlishrd in German just aiter the disaster of
the nuclear reactor that exploded at Chernobyl in the then Soviet Union in 1986. Much of
the interest of Beck's book and the significance it attaches to environmental risk can be
explained by the tremendous impact of that event. Beck here writes that 'just as modern
ization dissolved the structure oi *feudal society in the nineteenth century and produced
the industrial society, modernization today is dissolving industrial society and another
modernity is coming into being' (Beck 1986: 10). What the term 'risk society' draws
attention to is less a logic of modernity than a catastrophe inherent in modernity gener
ated by the resources and liabilitie, of technology. The primary function of the state in this
'second modernity' is to deal with the societal consequences of risk, which have been
engendered by primary modernization.
Risk for Beck is not strictly the same as physical danger or natural hazard. It does not
come trom nature alone. It derives primarily from uciety and is esst'ntially human-made.
More specifically, risk derives from science and technology: 'Risk may be defined as a
systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by
MODERNITY AND POSTMOlHl.:NIIY i'AHT I' 287
modernization itself' (13eck 1986: 21). The growing power of technology in modern
society leads to a situation of gigantic risks, and the need to control these risks becomes
more and more important. It is no longer a question of the pursuit of an ideal condition
but rather of the prevention of the worst. The state in this sense ceases to be any kind of
utopian agency oriented to planning and social engineering and instead take on the role of
a pragmatic crisis-managing expedient.
Beck notes that oneof the most distinctive features of risk is its abstract character. Risk
is not immediately observable. Radioactivity, greenhouse gases, microbiological entities,
and pollutants of vanous kinds are not visible in the way that natural hazards such as
hurric anes, floods, or earthquakes are. Most risks are depersonalized; they are detached
from particular social actors, and make the attribution of responsibility difficult.
Moreover, risks are very often global. They are not always nationally specific and cannot
easily be con trolled by national governments. Given these characteristics, managing risk
is not easy. The problem is that risk is primarily a matter of incalculable side effects,
which means that it becomes a condition of perpetual crisis.
Yet Beck also comments that the risk society tends to encourage new forms of politics.
Risk induces reflexivity because there are no certain answers to its problems. Central to
the politics of the risk society is the collapse of the self-legitimation of expertise. In the
risk society everyone is potentially an expert, since expertise can no longer hide
behind the mantle of scientific authority. It is no longer merely a question of the
availability of information but of the definition of risk. It is a question of how we judge
risk, and of where the burden of proof lies, of how to judge compensation, and of whom
to trust. The risk society in this sense is a 'discourse society' (Beck 1986: 128-9). By this
Beck means the pub lic contestation of scientific claims and the clash of lay and expert
voices. Under 'primary modernity', science was an instrument to scientize nature. Under
'second modernity' science has scientized society to the point that science has become the
primary ground on which conflict takes place. Public platforms such as pressure groups
and *NGOs contest the claims of experts, but they also rely upon and make use of science
in order to frame their contestation and do not simply turn their back on science. Reflexive
modernity is thus a condition in which science is now applied to science, by public actors
as well as by experts.
Anthony Giddens on reflexivity and individualization

There is a further theme in Beck's theory of politics in the risk society which is also
central to the later work of Anthony *Giddens. This is the theme of 'individuation' or
'individualization'. According to Beck and Giddens, in the risk society, individuals are set
free from the constraints of industrial society and tradition. Agency breaks free from
previously constraining structures. Individuation gives rise to 'suh-politics', by which they
mean the shaping of society from below.
Giddens's earlier contributions to the theory of *'structuration' are discussed in
Chapter 10 of this book. In his later work, Giddens theorizes modernity as a process of
'de-traditionalization'. In his books TheConsequences o(Modernity (1990) and Modernity
and Self-Identity (1991), Giddens describes the institutional orders of modernity as
being
(1) capitalism, (2) industrialism, (3) social control of information, and (4) military power.
But he also states that modernity is driven by dynamicsof 'time-space distantiation' which
288 GERARD DELArn··
increasingly generate a glohal world. Central to this is the development of

*'disembedding' mechanisms by which social relations are lifted out of local contexts,
together with the emergence of 're-embedding' mechanisms that attach new and more
abstract meanings to social life. Societies are viewed as reflexive in their capacity to
adapt to change and as undergoing various processes of emancipation.
Giddens argues that in pre-modern societies reflexivity was subordinated to the inter
pretation of tradition, which was passed on without transformation. With modernity, the
interpretation of tradition is replaced by reflexivity: 'The reflexivity of modern social life
consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light
of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their
character' (Giddens 1990: 38). Giddens see modern individuals as utilizing knowledge in
order to shape their lives in ways that had previously been impossible due to the
constraints of particular social structures and traditions (Giddens 1991). Similarly,
Giddens sees contemporary institutions as no longer fixed and structured but as reflexive
in organization. An example of this is trust. In modernity, trust plays an important role
because of the need to deal with depersonalized and abstract systems which often concern
technical apparatuses. But trust also exists in daily life, especially in personal relations.
The self has become more reflexive in the sense that the identity of individuals is
constituted increasingly in 'self-monitoring' and 'self-control'. The individual reflexively
appropriates expert knowledge. Giddens writes that 'expert knowledge is open to
reappropriation by anyone with the necessary time and resources to become trained; and
the prevalence of in stitutional reflexivity means that there is a continuous filtering back of
expert theories, concepts and findings to the lay population' (Giddens 1994: 91). In the
sense the self has become considerably empowered. Giddens presents a view of the
individual as someone who can shape his or her own life project.
Both Giddens's and Beck's ideas about reflexive modernity are open to criticism. Both
writers give too much weight to the idea of modernity as a process of de-traditionalization
leading to individual autonomy. Tradition is rather poorly theorized as something that
declines with modernity and is replaced by a 'post-traditional' order based on indi
viduation. This leaves no room for collective action, social movements, and community
action, which arguably become more important in modernity than in pre-modern soci
eties. In Giddens's theory in particular, we find a naive view of modernity as a process of
individual empowerment. The background to Gidden s's later work in the 1950s is the rise
of what he called *'Third Way' politics, which claimed to be a new politics 'beyond Left
and Right', in which elements of each are combined (Giddens 1998). A central tenet of this
doctrine is that individuals take responsibility for themselves and do not depend on the
state. Giddens seriously overlooked the susceptibility of such discourse to appropriation
by apologists for the dismantling of social democracy and for the rule of neo-liberal
economic policies, most notoriously by the British New Labour government of Tony Blair
after 1997. Lacking the critical dimension of Beck's work but sharing Beck's
individualistic approach to politics, Giddens tended to see only the positive dimensions of
capitalist modernity. While his earlier work drew attention to violence in modernity (see
Giddens 1985), his later work jettisoned critical engagement with the negative
consequences of modernity. Very questionable was his proposition that societies are
always capable of adapting to disembedding mechanisms. It can be argued that the line
between Giddens's concept of
MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY· ?ART II 289
reflexivity and business discourse of 'flexibility' is a thin one. It has been suggested that
Giddens's idea of self-monitoring might better be regarded in terms of what Michel
Foucault described as disciplinary technologies of power over the self.
Conclusion
This chapter has considered the work of some major social theorists writing in the 1980s
and 1990s. All the approaches discussed offer interpretations of modernity from positions
generally hostile to postmodernism in its extreme forms. In addition, with the exception
of Luhmann, all the writers under discussion began their careers by taking part in debates
in
*Western Marxism, while subsequently coming to recognize inadequacies with Marxist
thinking.
Three themes can be highlighted in the theories discussed in this chapter. The first
concerns social movements and resistance to power. According to Heller, Castoriadis, and
Touraine, modernity has been based on the revolutionary dream that society can create
itself without a state. The dream has been shattered, but the impulse still lives on at both
ends of the political spectrum. In Castoriadis's terms, there is a strong emphasis on
modernity as the imagination of alternatives. A second theme is the idea of autonomy,
relating to the capacity of social action to shape society in the image of moral and
political ideals. This is represented in different ways in the social theories of Habermas,
Touraine, and Giddens, as well as Heller and Castoriadis. A third theme concerns
continuity in the project of modernity. The theorists arc agreed that modernity entails an
ongoing proces of renewal and does not simply come to an end. It is in this sense that
modernity involves a condition of constant social transformation. Habermas in particular
speaks of the 'unfin ished project of modernity'.
Drawing on the ideas of these theorists, we can characterize modernity as a condition
of self-confrontation, incompleteness, and renewal in which the past is reshaped by
a globalized present. Modernity expresses self-confidence in the transformative project
of the present as liberation from the past. Modernity involves the belief in the possibility
of a new beginning based on human autonomy. In sum, it refers to a promise that the
world can be continuously reshaped by human agency in diverse social contexts.
In what ways do the theorists discussed in this chapter depart from ideas associated with
postmodern ism?
2 In what ways do theorists discussed in this chapter depart from Marxism?
3 What does it mean for actors in society to be, or to strive to be, collectively autonomous?
4 Is Habermas's theory of communicative rationality sociologically naive?
5 Is Luhmann's systems theory sociologically technocratic?
290 GERARD OELIHHY
6 What does it mean for individuals to be 'reflexive'? What it does it mean for institutions to be
'reflexive'?
7 What features of contemporary life best describe the concept of the 'risk society'7
FURTHER READING
Some good general guides lo themes covered in this chapter are Gerard Delanty's two books
Modernity a11cl f'ost111odemity (Sage, 2000) and Social Tlicory in a Changing World (Polity Press,
1999), Peter Wagner's two books Sociology of Modernity (Routledge, 1994) and Theorising Modernity
(Sage, 2001), Nigel Dodd's Social Theo,)' and Modernity (Polity Press, 1999), and Bryan S. Turner's
edited Theories o(Modernity and Postmodernity (Sage, 1990). An informative text is Jeffrey
Alexander's essay 'Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo: How Intellectuals Have Coded, Narrated, and
Explained the "New World of Our Time"', in his book Fin de Siecle Social Theory (Verso, 1995).
See also Peter Wagner's A History and Theory of the Social Sciences (Sage, 2001). A good anthology
of key readings in the area is Anthony Elliott's edited Blackwell Reader in Contemporary Social Theory
(Blackwell, 1999). An inform ative collection of essays that distinguish an acceptably sociological
conception of postmodernism from more free-wheeling textualist versions is Steven Seidman and Linda
Nicholson's edited Social Postmodemism: Beyond Identity Politics (Cambridge University Press,
1995). One of the best critical assessments of postmodernism is Perry Anderson's The Origins of
Postmodernity (Verso, 1998). Some polemical critiques of postmodernism are Alex Callinicos's
Against Postmodernism (Polity Press, 1989), Christopher Norris's The Truth about Postmodernism
(Blackwell, 1993), Terry Eagleton's The
!llusions of Postmodemis,n (Blackwell, 1996),John O'Neill's Tlte Poverty of Postmodernism (Routledge,
1995), and Timothy Bewes's Cynicism and Postmodemity (Verso, 1997). See also the interesting study
by Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical problem (Blackwell, 1991).
Some useful introductions to Habermas', work since 1980 are Robert C. Holub's Jurgen Habennas:
Critic i11 the Public Sphere (Routledge, 1991), Martin Matustik's /iirgen Habmnas: A Political-P/Jilosophical
Profile (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), William Outhwaite's Habmnas: A Critical Introduction (Polity
Press, 1994), and David Rasmussen's Reading Habermas (Blackwell, 1990). Also very informative,
although limited to Habermas's earlier work is Thomas McCarthy's The Critical Theory of Jurgen
Habennas (MIT Press, 1978). Some good studies of Habermas's relationship to the earlier Frankfurt
School are Seyla Benhabib's Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical
Theory (Columbia University Press, 1986), Raymond Geuss's The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge
University Press, 1981), and Deborah Cook's Adorno, Habermas and the Search for a Rational
Society (Routledge, 2004). Some good studies of Habermas's work on communication, democracy, law,
and discourse ethics are Stephen K. Whitfs 111e Recent Work of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge
University Press, 1987), the same author's edited Cambridse Comp,111io,1 to Haber11111s (Cambridge
University Press, 1995), Erik Eriksen's Understanding Ilabermas: Communication Action and
Deliberative Democracy (Continuum, 2004), Rene Schomberg and Kenneth Baynes's edited Discourse
and Democracy:Essays on Habem,as' 'Between Facts and Norms' (State University of New York Press,
2002) and Peter Dews's edited Hl1/Jcrnw1: .4 Critic,1/ N,·,1dcr(Blackwl'll, 1999). A useful collection of
readings from Haber mas is William Outhwaite's edited The Habennas Reader (Polity Press, 1996). For
Habermas's relationship to Foucault, see Michael Kelly's edited C1itiq11emul Power: Ncwsting the Fouc
ll11lt/Haber111asVrliate (MIT Press, 1994) and David Hoy and Thoma, McCartlly's Critirnl
Thcory(Rlackwell, 1992). For normative debates about civil society in the thought of Habermas, Arendt,
Foucault, and Hegel, see Jean Cohen and Andrew i\rato's Civil Society and Political Theory (MIT Press,
1992).
The be t general introduction lo the work of Luhmann in English is William Rasch's Nik/as
Lulzmarm's Modemity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation (Stanford University Press, 2000). Luhmann
himself is rather difficult to read and has not been widely translated in English. His major work is
Social Systems (Stanford University Press, 1995). A more accessible place to begin is his Observations
on Modernity (Stanford University Press, 1998).
MODERNITY AND POSTMODi.'RNITY· PART Ii 291
Anthony Giddens's ideas about reflexivity are laid out in his accessibly written The Consequences
of Modernity (Polity Press, 1990) and Modernity and Self-Identity (Polity Press, 1991). One among
many critical responses to Giddens's writings on the 'Third Way' is Christopher Bryant and
DavidJary's edited The Contemporary Giddens: Social Theory in a Globa/ising Age (Palgrave, 2001).
■ WEBSITES
Modernity Resources at www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/mod/ Provides a good collection of links

to sites on the relationship between modernity and postmodernity.
Postmodernity and its Critics at www.as.ua.edu/ant/Facultylmurphy/436/pomo.htmContains
critiques of postmodernism from a predominantly anthropological perspective, with
definitions of terms, accounts of theorists, and links to related sites.
Cornelius Castoriadis at www.agorainternational.org Provides a useful resource with a
bibliography of Castoriadis's works and links.
Who is Habcrmas? at www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/habermas.htm Provides links to numerous
commentaries on Habermas's thought.
Niklas Luhmann at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann Displays pages from a free
on-line encyclopedia, summarizing Luhmann's ideas, with links to related terms.
14 Globalization
Robert Holton

What is globalization? Towards a working definition 293
Globalizing trends: the idea of the 'transnational' 294
Processes of globalization 296
Globalized markets 296
nme-space compression and global cities 296
Networks, flows, and 'disembedding' 297
Governance and regulation 298
Isthe nation-state being weakened? 298
Problems of economic determinism 300
Legal, political, and cultural globalization 300
Is legal and political globalization driven by economic globalization? 301
Two case examples: global business regulation and the development of the Internet 303
Global culture and 'glocalization' 304
Universalism and particularism 305
Differentiation and integration in globalization theory 307
How new is globalization? Some historical contexts 308
Conclusion 310

FURTHER READING 311
WEBS,TES 312
The term 'globalization' conjures up many images. We think of processes of free trade and
the movement of capital and labour around the globe, or of institutions such as the World
Bank and the International Monetary fund and a host of multinational companies, or of
new technologies such as the Internet, or of the actions of non-governmental organiza
tions (*NGOs) such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International. For some commentators,
the predominant image is one of progressive economic advance. Others will think of street
protest against global injustice. Both sinners and saints, it seems, inhabit the global
domain. The tormer are represented by exploitersof cheap third-world labour and abuse of
GLOBALIZATION 293
the natural environment, the latter by the courage of humanitarian bodies such as the
health professionals of Medecins Sans Frontieres and the like.
What if anything do all these images and conjectures have in common? They seem
to point to such a wide-ranging set of issues that it may be asked whether the word
'globalization' has any consistent meaning. The aims of this chapter are first to ask
what globalization means and to arrive at a working definition. We then move to ask
whether globalization is a multiple set of changes or a purely economic phenomenon, whether
globalization is new, and why globalization matters to social theory. The chapter looks
first at the economic elements of globalization, and their relationship to the idea of flows,
networks,*'disembedding', and the sovereignty of nation-states. Then we look at the more
legal, political, and cultural aspects of globalization. We conclude by setting out some
broader historical contexts for ways of thinking about globalization.
What is globalization? Towards a working definition
The relationship between globalization and social change raises important questions
about the nature and dynamics of modernity and about long-run trajectories of change
across millennia. Modernity has been seen as taking increasingly decontextualized forms,
as not only restructuring work, culture, space, and time but also creating new forms of
*'transnational' and 'trans-local' connection. for classical social theory in the nineteenth
century, some of the most important social changes were set by the interlocking impact
of the French and Industrial Revolutions. For social theory since the last decade of the
twenti eth century, it is the question of globalization that has dominated attention.
For some, however, globalization is simply a hyped-up way of talking about contemp
orary life. On this view, rather than the discovery of new matters of sociological
importance, all we really have here is a new word for older social trends and issues. Some
writers have taken the view that if globalization simply means cross-border movements of
goods, people, and ideas, it is not new: it has been going on for hundreds, possibly
thousands of years.
From an analytical point of view, there is certainly confusion as to the kind of concept
or theory that globalization amounts to. James Rosenau (1996: 249) poses the following
chal lenging questions. He asks: 'Does globalization refer to a condition, an end-state, or
to a process? Is it mostly a state of mind, or does it consist of objective circumstances?
What are the arrangements from which globalization is a departure?' In short, would we
perhaps be better off without a concept prone to the twin problems of rhetorical overload
and analytical incoherence?
The main difficulty with the term globalization is not that it is meaningless but rather
that it has become an umbrella term for many different social changes. And it is also a
term loaded with a lot of moral and political baggage. This is not something for us to shy
away from, but rather a puzzle we must try to unravel. The position taken in this chapter
is that to abandon the concept would be, on balance, more problematic than retaining it.
What is required is a critical review and refashioning of the terms. This is above all
because debates
294 ROBERT HOLTON
around globalization engage with some very real social changes and theoretical
challenges, some with long-run historical origins, others very recent.
As a first approximation, globalization may be thought of as a range of evolving
processes, relationships, and institutions that are not contained within the borders of nation
states and have significant that transnational elements. While globalization has become
part of the rhetoric of the contemporary liberal economic order, its meaning and useful
ness is far broader. There are many important empirical and theoretical issues that make
little sense without a term of this kind. The term 'international' is not atisfactory because
it retains a notion of social life as conducted between nation-states rather than beyond
them. The term 'transnational' attempts to capture this idea of processes and interactions
inside particular nation-states which affect the way of life of other nation-states and jump
across nation-state boundaries in many diverse, complicated, and largely unregulated,
disorderly ways.
Theorists now debate whether globalization is a new type of social change creating new
identities and new forms of social organization. To the extent that it is a new type of
social change, questions have arisen as to whether globalizing trends represent a
juggernaut of economic power, seemingly beyond human control, or a renewal of market-
and technol ogy-driven changes able to rescue the world from hunger and conflict. The
moral challenge is whether globalization functions only to the advantage of the rich and
powerful, or whether it represents an opportunity for new forms of *cosmopolitan virtue
that somehow transcend the confines and discords of nations and ethnic groups. Political
debates have centred on whether globalization can be managed in a stable manner, and
how far political institutions can he created to establish global demo.:racy.Such debates
are clearly i nterdis ciplinary in scope, implicating a wide range of disciplines.
Contributions to the study of globalization are evident across the span of disciplines from
political science, economics, and geography to law, anthropology, and cultural studies.
We begin by analysing more closely the meaning of the term 'transnational'.
Globalizing trends: the idea of the 'transnational'

Globalization has been identified with an assumption that nation-states have ceased to be
a significant unit of analysis for the study of social life. This contrasts with what has
been seen as the predominant 'methodological nationalbm' of nineteenth-century
social enquiry (compare A. D. Smith 1983: 26; Wimmer and Schiller 2002). For previous
genera tions of social theorists, the nation-state was indeed the core unit of social
organization. While they were very aware of international developments, classical
social thinkers such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim tended to identify 'society' with
ocial processes that were politically centred upon nations and upon interstate
relationships. Modern society tended to be seen as an amalgam of trends evident in
Rritish society plus French society plus German society, and so on. The idea of a global
domain was, at most, associated with international activities uch as trade, empire, and
war. While bridges beyond the meth odological nationalism of classical social theory are
evident notably in the work of Marx, it is only in recent decades-after the work of
comparative historical sociologists such as Immanuel *Wallerstein (1974, 1976,
1979) and others-that this framework has fully
295
broken apart. (For further discussion of Wallerstein's work, see Chapter 6 of this
book, pp. 149-50).
However, this is not to say that the nation-state focus has been abandoned in any
wholesale fashion. It lives on notably in the various 'realist' schools of international
relations research. *'Realist' writers in international relations studies take the nation-state
and the practice of *Realpolitik as the fundamental basis for world affairs. They point to
the robustness of the nation-state as an institution, claiming that much of what is seen as
'transnational' effectively remains international in scope. Any working definition of
globalization should therefore be carefully designed to encapsulate both the trends that
have been associated with challenges to nation-focused thinking and the counter
responses of realist political science. Why should we think of the world as something
more than a system of nation-states, inhabited by national governments and
nationally situated businesses? The answer will have to do with the significance of certain
key globalizing trends.
The key trends generally associated with globalization are at least one or more of the
following:
• intensified movement of resources, ideas, and peoples across boundaries, and patterns
of social organization and power within which such movements take place;
• greater interdependency between different parts of the globe, including regions, cities,
and localities as much as national societies;
• growing consciousness of the world as a single place, a 'global consciousness'.
Beyond this point, some fundamental choices have to be made in taking this
definition much further. Can we speak of a singular economic phenomenon, or should we
speak of a multidimensional set of processes that may include economic, political, and
cultural elements, all of them moving in different directions, rather than in any one
unitary pattern?
The economic interpretation of globalization is certainly widespread and draws
attention to some fundamental features of our contemporary world. These include the
global distribution of commodities, capital, and labour markets; the power of multina
tional corporations; new communication and information technologies; global consumer
consciousness; and ideologies of free trade and global deregulation. However, the
problem with predominantly economic definitions of globalization is that they can be
overextended. While goods, capital, and technology flow across boundaries, so do
political, cultural, and religious institutions, processes, and forms of thinking. It would not
seem that human rights, popular music, Islam, or Christianity are any less global in their
transnational origins, mobility, and impact than markets or money. Similar global flows
seem to extend across the arbitrary boundary separating the economy from the rest of
society. Accordingly, an increasing trend in recent work has been to define globalization
in broader ways, drawing attention to multiple features, rather than any singular
characteristic (compare Holm and Sorensen 1995; Held 1995; Holton 1998). In addition to
economic globalization, there are elements of a global *polity and a global culture, and
these latter elements do not all necessarily point in the same direction as economic
developments.
296 ROBERT HOLTON
In this sense globalization is a set of processes with 'autonomous logics', rather than a
single master process (Beck 2000b: 11).
Processes of globalization
What, then, are the main processes of globalization, and what are the links between them?
These questions direct us to relationships, institutions, and types of social actors. In the
fol lowing, we look at the role of five factors: markets; time-space compression; networks,
flows, and *'disembedding';*governance and regulation; and the nation-state.
Globalized markets
A first obvious candidate for factors driving globalization is markets. Markets would
appear to be easier to globalize than forms of government or cultural identity. Global
markets for capital, money, labour, goods, and services are fundamental features in all
major theories of globalization. They are characterized by high levels of mobility across
boundaries and are typically evident in significant levels of convergence in commodity
prices, share prices, interest rates, and forms of managerial best practice (compare Sklair
2001; O'Rourke and Williamson 1999). While nation-states find it difficult to regulate the
least mobile factor of production, namely labour, they find it almost impossible to track
the most mobile processes such as electronic transfers of money-let alone impose tax on
such transfers.
However, markets are not entirely unstructured or unregulated. Markets do not
reallocate all resources on a daily basis through the price mechanism (see Williamson
1975). They rely on continuities in management, in levels of accumulated knowledge, on a
predictable and reasonably dependable set of property rights, and on significant levels of
trust between market participants. This is especially true in cross-border activity
conducted within a range of culturally and politically diverse settings, against tight time-
lines and in highly competitive settings. for formal organizations such as multinational
companies, regulat ory bodies and legal systems help to structure markets alongside more
informal interper sonal networks. The human actors involved are not only corporate
executives and their workforces but also market-oriented professionals, public relations
and media personnel, and regulators.
Time-space compression and global cities

The broader dimensions of economic globalization have been analysed by a range of
political economists, economic sociologists, and geographers. Such analyses typically
emphasize changes in the relationship between globalization and changes in the social
organization of time and space. For writers as diverse as *Giddens (1998), Harvey (]996),
*Hauman (1998b), Virilio (1998), and *Castells (1996, 1998, 2000), globalization in its most
general sense involves time-space compression. Very rapid communication and human
movement renders the constraints of space less salient. As space becomes compressed, the
structuring of human activity becomes dominated by a single global time. The social
GLOBALIZATION 297
organization of space becomes increasingly transnational. For Saskia Sassen (1994), the
transnational structuring of global capitalism takes place in global cities rather than in
nation-states. Cities such as New York, London, Frankfurt, and Tokyo represent key
centres of economic power and are the location of the core producer services on which
corporate activity depends. Spatial maps of global power have less and less to do with
national bound aries and more to do with relations between global cities.
Networks, flows and 'disembedding'

For Manuel *Castells, economic globalization is best understood through the notion of
the 'network society' (Castells 1996, 1998, 2000). While nation-states depend on the idea
of sovereign power centres regulating a given territory, the emerging global order depends
on multi-centred networks linking capital, information, and power. What matters is not so
much physical proximity in a given territory but simultaneous processes that are
increasingly separated in space and highly mobile. In what Castells refers to as the 'space
of flows', several interconnected patterns are evident. These include circuits of electronic
impulses-the technological vehicles of globalization-comprising nodes and hubs where
flows are strategically directed, such as through global cities. They also involve the
forma tion of a *cosmopolitan managerial elite, who are the key human actors in the
process. In these respects, a transnational network society comes to replace national
societies.
According to Carnoy and Castells (2001), state institutions redefine their boundaries
both outwardly on an international or supranational basis through insertion into long
chains of decision-making and governance, and inwardly through regional devolution. At
the same time, those excluded from networks are left spatially immobile and knowledge
poor. This latter group inhabits the space of place rather than the space of flows. In this
process, the positive normative associations of cosmopolitanism tend to be reversed. They
change from a virtuous democratic ideal of transnational peace to the class consciousness
of elite globalizers, operating the space of flows through networks of power and personal
mobility. Meanwhile, the space of place tends to breed *'identity politics' as a defensive form
of popular mobilization. From this perspective, the prospects for democratic global
politics tend to look bleak. They seem to be reduced to defensive operations mounted
from the spaces of place against the dynamic pace-setting spaces of flows. As *Bauman
(1998c) puts it, 'globalization for some, localization for others'.
Economies are always connected with wider aspects of human society, and the types of
connection that may be found range from high levels of economic autonomy at one
end of the spectrum to high levels of what Karl *Polanyi called cultural-historical
'embedded ness' at the other (Polanyi 1944) (for further discussion of Polanyi's work, see
Chapter 1 of this book, Box 1). Economic autonomy is associated with the erosion of
this embedded ness, or with *'disembedding'. It is associated with ideas of
deregulation of markets, free trade, and what is termed laissez-faire. The assumption
is that economies can operate without constant and intensive intervention of a political
or moral kind. For some commentators, this not only does happen but should happen,
because it is believed to generate higher levels of efficiency and productivity and
hence to increase human wel fare. An embedded economy, by contrast, means that
economic, political, and cultural life is tightly interconnected. For opponents of
economic globalization, disembedded
298 ROBERT HOLTON
economies are seen as elevating economic values above all others, leading to high levels
of global inequality and injustice.
Governance and regulation

Between the two ends of this spectrum-tightly emhedded economies on the one hand,
openly discmbedded economies on the other-a range of possibilities can be observed. One
important way of connecting economy and society is through the concepts of global
regula tion and *'governance'. While government is typically based on an idea of state
sovereignty, 'governance' includes the broader rules through which multiple sets of actors-
both state and non-state actors-organizesocial transactions. Regulation through
governance occupies a range of mid-points between market freedom and state control. It
may be institutionalized in formal organizations.. or it may be conducted in more informal
networks. Economic 'deregulation' in this context is something of a misnomer, because
market economics rely on a range of regu \atory arrangements, better captured through the
notion of 'governance'.
Well-known institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade
Organization seek to regulate aspects of economic life such as global financial stability
and multilateral trading rules. Alongside them, a host of less well-known bodies include
the Codex Alimentarius Commission which is concerned with food standards and the
International Labour Organization involved with labour standards. More informal
networks include the elite groupings around bodies like the World Economic Forum
which acts as a strategic discussion forum for economic global governance.
The extension of global economic analysis beyond markets to regulatory arrangements
and governance networks represents the most recent form taken by older-established tradi
tions of political economy. These have sought to examine the power relationships in
which markets operate and their implications for economic development and social
inequality. These approaches represent an important bridge towards a multidimensional
understanding of globalization, by linking economies with power, political institutions,
and public policy.
An unresolved issue in political economy approaches is the extent to which market
derived economic power dominates political and cultural life. One line of argument is that
economic globalization is so dominant that it creates political, legal, and cultural forms of
globalization in its own image. If this is so, we may have to conclude that there is only
one master process of globalization, namely economic glohalization. But if it is not so, we
will have to speak of multiple forms of globalization, whose different characteristics may
involve conflict and antagonism, rather than unilinear consistency or mutual reinforce
ment. The remaining sections of this chapter test out these two propositions. We turn next
to the position of the nation-state and the question of whether it is being weakened under
economic globalization.
Is the nation-state being weakened?

The idea of one master process of globalization involves a number of possible
mechanisms. One rather simplistic proposition that has come under increasing criticism is
that eco nomic globalization undermines or hollows out the legislative and executive
powers of existing nation-states (Ohmae 1990, 1996). This amounts to a theory of
globalization as
0BALIZAT'Of 299
anarcho-capitalism. One of the main problems with this is that it ignores the robustness of
nation-state administrations, and specifically their involvement in new regulatory
functions. It is true that some regulatory functions of the nation-state have receded in
prominence, particularly state enterprise and interventionist macro-economic planning.
But many nation-states have taken on new regulatory functions in recent years; for
example, social regulation of personal relations affecting children, women, divorce, and
abortion (compare Mann 1993b: 118). In Europe, the supranational legislative agency of
the EU has adopted a significant number of the regulatory functions previously exercised
by national governments, and it has sought to promote liberalizing policies that enhance
the global competitiveness of European businesses. But in general, EU legislation has
complemented and added to the regulatiory capacities of member states more than it has
taken away from them. In addition, contrary to widespread perception, national welfare
state expenditure is positively correlated with economic openness (Rodrik 1996; Evans
1997; Therborn 1999). That is to say, states with liberal economic policies open to foreign
investment are not, on the whole, states with reduced welfare expenditure for the national
population. However, what does seem clear is that economic globalization requires states
and cultural formations that are conducive to the protection of private property rights. It
requires nation-states to provide physical infrastructure and human capital for market use,
and, at the very least, it encourages a global consumer consciousness (Carnoy 1993; Sklair
2001). Global economic competition can lead state governments to step up their powers of
protection over domestic industry, but it can also encourage them frequently to relax
legislation and legislative powers perceived to limit the competitiveness of national
businesses in the global market place.
The idea of a global consumer consciousness has been theorized by George *Ritzer
under the catchword 'McDonaldization'. Ritzer's thesis is discussed in Box 36.
BOX 36. GEORGE RITZER ON 'McDONALDIZATION'
For some theorists of globalization, the linkage between economy and culture produces what has been
referred to as the 'Coca-Colonization' or 'McDonaldization' of the world. According to George *Ritzer
(1993), the *rationalization of production and service delivery methods harnessed to standardized
global marketing creates globalized consumers. Global corporations, media conglomerates, and
advertising agents organize mass markets around standardized and predictable production formats and
consumption routines. These involve globally recognizable products subsumed within global brands,
and controlled through local franchise agreements that tightly prescribe how products are delivered.
According to this theory, economic globalization creates global cultural convergence around
standardized and privatized consumerism. The public domains of democratic politics and political
participation are seen to decline accordingly (compare Barber 1996).
Whether such arguments are completely convincing has been hotly debated. One problem is the
assumption that consumers are cultural dopes, rather than knowledgeable agents capable of making
choices. One question to be asked is whether producers can simply create the consumers they require,
or whether the many failures in consumer marketing suggest that a conception of relatively less
standardized marketing strategies aimed at consumer niches would represent a more plausible
sociological account. Further aspects of the debate about whether economic globalization causes
cultural 'homogenization' are explored later in this chapter, in Box 37.
300 ROBERT HOLTON
Problems of economic determinism

Claims for a single master process of globalization driven by capitalist economic interests
have a good deal of empirical credibility and are widely believed by many critics of global
ization. But these claims are susceptible to problems of economic *determinism. The idea
of a single prime mover of globalization rests on the assumption of a single overarching
dimension to social life. This is commonly assumed to be linked to the operation of some
kind of core social function. According to some commentators, the core function is the
drive for material survival and the pursuit of material self-interest. According to others, it is
the search to realize social creativity through cooperative labour. Roughly speaking, the
one viewpoint is vigorously pro-capitalist, or pro-liberal, while the other viewpoint is
vigorously anti-capitalist, or Marxist. But in each of these two viewpoints, the economic
reductionism that sees,globalization in fundamentally economic terms rests on some
version of a prime mover argument. For some partisans of the global anti-capitalist view
point, globalization is seen as driven by the pursuit of self-interest among the economically
powerful at the expense of everyone else, or by a conflict between individual self-interest
and collective *emancipatory struggle. In these kinds of arguments, the multiple dimen
sions of globalization tend to be reduced to a single unitary logic. The overriding difficulty
is that there are other social processes, which meet the definition of globalization given
above, but which are hard, if not impossible, to see as simple outgrowths of globalized mar
kets and economic power. It is in this connection that we must turn now to some important
legal, political, and cultural aspects of globalization.
Legal, political, and cultural globalization
One way of thinking about global multidimensionality is suggested by the British

political sociologist David *Held (1995). Held speaks of global challenges to nation-states
and national sovereignty brought about not only by developments in the world economy
but also by a range of other processes that include international or transnational
developments in law, political decision-making, and culture. A considerable literature
now exists on what have been called 'alternative globalizations' or 'different
globalizations' (compare Therborn 1999; Geyer and Paulmann 2001; Hopkins 2001).
In the legal sphere, international law has increasingly recognized powers, rights, and
duties that go beyond the sovereignty of nation-states (Held 1995: 101). Symbolized by
the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, a significant trend has been toward the recognition of
irreducibly universal human rights for individuals. This emergent global norm stands
above and beyond the idea of national citizenship rights secured at the level of nation
states. Parallel conceptions of a common heritage of humanity have been articulated in
environmental debates. Such norms have become globalized very quickly. It must be
admitted that such norms have tended to remain more at the level of declaration than
implementation. But it is clear that agencies such as the UN, along with some national
governments and numerous NGOs such as Amnesty International, animated by global
social movements and activists, have struggled greatly to secure implementation of such
GLOBALIZATION 301
norms. In this connection, many critics of global corporations cite instances of corporate
indifference or violation of human rights and environmental standards. It is hard to
attribute the dynamic behind these developments purely to economic globalization,
either from the positive liberal viewpoint or from the negative Marxist viewpoint.
In the political sphere, decision-making involves both governments and 'governance'.
National governments in Western countries typically retain greater control over some
matters such as taxation or immigration policy than over other matters. In a governmental
sense, aspects of national sovereignty have clearly been pooled upwards, toward regional
or global institutions. In Europe, this is evident at the level of the EU. It is also evident in
matters of trade rules and agreements, as set by the World Trade Organization. On the
other hand, it is less evident in the case of the UN: here even where some sovereignty is
pooled or diluted via global harmonization of rules and standards, nation-state retain
formal juridi cal sovereignty. In this case, transnational arrangements still require the
consent of nation states. It is for this reason that Held here speaks of international rather
than transnational political decision-making. But still, on the whole, having signed upto
bodies that operate in some sense beyond national mechanisms, nation-states have
increasingly become sub ject to processes and procedures administered by transnational
bureaucracies and articul ated by transnational bodies of expertise. By signing up to
transnational systems of rules, they become susceptible to transnational moral pressures
to honour and comply with what has previously been agreed. This is not to deny that such
pressures may be ignored, espec ially by more powerful states, notably by the USA. But
still, the *normative pressure to comply with supranational requirements remains an
effe(·tive factor in contemporary political decision-making.
Is legal and political globalization driven by

economic globalization?
At this point, in order to be fully clear about the significance of legal and political global
ization, let us once again pose the question of economics. Could it be objected that the
kinds of legal and political globalization described so far have arisen primarily only in
response to the challenges of economic globalization-as consequences of the latter, or
perhaps as ideological 'functions' of it?
The question would seem to apply in two basic senses. The first is where economic actors
support institutions to strengthen or stabilize the functioning of global markets. The
second is where the operation of such markets creates effects on the natural environment
and broader patterns of social and cultural life that are deemed unacceptable on grounds of
economic sustainability and social stability.
In the first sense, many of the stronger regulatory bodies such as the World Bank or the
WTO are explicitly charged with economic policy functions and interpret their mission
very much in support of economic globalization. Corporations are major players and
lobbyists in transnational fora. The EU itself has developed at many key moments very
much as a market bloc to rival American capitalism. In the second sense too, much of the
social and environmental debate encapsulated in the phrase 'globalization and its discon
tents' is engaged with an agenda set by economic globalization (compare Sassen 1998;
Stiglitz 2002).
102
However, these narratives still have their limitations. Broader global processes need to
be seen at work, and a broader theoretical framework needs to be defined. As Ulrich *Beck
puts it, 'the various autonomous logics of globalization-the logics of ecology, culture,
economics, politics and civil society-exist side by side and cannot be reduced or collapsed
into one another' (Beck 2000a: 11). Another way of making the same general point is to
advert to the globalization of processes such as the search for personal and social security
and the elaboration of a meaningful identity, together with movements for human rights,
greater political and social justice, and greater fairness in the distribution of resources.
In the latter connections, two useful examples can be given as illustrations. The
first concerns active debates in the public sphere about the advantages and
disadvantages of a market-driven global economy. Economic globalization, insofar as
it has exploited low cost labour or generated adverse environmental effects, is indeed
responsible for the processes that its critics.find unacceptable. But the moral criteria that
are applied by critics are not in any direct sense the product of economic globalization.
They draw instead on a range of traditional and modern precepts and attitudes towards
nature, community, democracy, and social justice. Ideas such as living in harmony with
nature or rights to pop ular self-government did not have to wait until the intensified
processes of contemporary economic globalization to emerge, even though the capacity to
organize coalitions of crit ics has depended in large measure on low-cost
communication, information, and trans portation technology.
The second example concerns links between globalization and issues of human security,
including both geopolitical and personal security. These questions have been rather
neglected by sociologists. Thomas *Hobbes's seventeenth-century conception of the
*'state of nature', which saw life as 'nasty, brutish and short', raised in acute form the ques
tion of how to achieve personal and collective security. The answer for Hobbes centred on
the creation of a strong sovereign power. For sociologists, this issue has typically been
pur sued through an analysis of the internal workings of the nation-state and through an
in terest in the economic causes of insecurity. The fragility of social life was only brought
into focus recently with the emergence of a 'sociology of risk' (discussed in Chapter 13 of
this book, pp. 286-9). Meanwhi.le, the study of international security tended to be left to
the dis cipline of international relations.
In this second example of insecurity, one may argue that public perception of global
threats to quality of life have more to tell us about the construction of the UN and its
agencies such as the World Health Organization than merely patterns of corporate
economic power. War may certainly be fought over economic issues, but the fear of war
cannot be reduced to an economic calculus. Personal insecurity in the face of global
environmental risk may come to centre on the actions of corporate or state polluters, but
the search for understanding and effective redress is a far broader matter that many people
see as involving the globalization of moral and political rights and responsibilities. The NGO
slogan 'Think globally, act locally' is symptomatic of the world-view of many critics of
economic g!obalization, implying a com plex relationship between global aspiration and
local competence.
To sum up the answer to our question 'Is legal and political globalization driven by
economic globalization?', we may say the following. Legal and political globalization is
both normatively independent of economic globalization and functionally related to it,
but not functionally reducible to it.
:; l O"f U Z,C
i O ''" 303
Two case examples:global businessregulation and the

development of the Internet
A more multidimensional framework for thinking about globalization can be illustrated
with two case examples. These are global business regulation and the development of the
Internet, which we discuss in turn.
In their study of global business regulation across thirteen policy areas, Braithwaite and
Drahos (2000) lend empirical depth to the idea of global complexity, emphasizing the
involvement of multiple actors in global decision-making and governance. These include
corporations and states, but they also involve intellectual communities of scientists,
experts, and professionals, NGOs, and social movements. On the one hand, Braithwaite
and Drahos conclude that the most influential actor in securing the globalization of
regulation is the US government, and they also conclude that the most regularly effective
interests in enrolling the power of global regulatory institutions are US corporations. On
the other hand, the authors also conclude that a range of other actors have varying
amounts of influence. In the environmental policy sector, Braithwaite and Drahos list nine
different types of players, presented in Table 14.1.
Regulatory outcomes arise from complex interactions, conflicts, and accommodations
between players. States sometimes act as agents for national business and sometimes as
agents of domestic environmental movements. Businesses may sometimes support a
deregulatory 'race-to-the-bottom'scenario, but sometimes they may encourage states such
as Germany to support environmental regulation of sectors in which corporations have a
Green competitive advantage. In this analysis, we are a long way from the sharply
polarized and heavily moralized portrayals of global environmental good and global
corporate evil.
In general, globalization of regulation typically proceeds through contests over prin
ciples and mechanisms of control. Contests of principles include familiar debates over dereg
ulation versus regulation, and national sovereignty versus universal transnational norms. But
they also include matters of process such as transparency and accountability and conflicts
Table 14.1 Influential actors in global environmental regulation
Organizations of states OECD, EU, G-7, World Bank

States USA, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands
International business organizations Business Council on Sustainable Development,
Industry Council for Ozone Layer Protection
National business organizations US Chemical Manufacturers Association,
Japanese Whaling Association
Corporations DuPont, ICI, Lloyd's Register of Shipping
International NGOs Greenpeace, International Organization

for Standardization, World Rainforest Network
National NGOs Environmental Defense Fund (USA)
Mass publics Emerge episodically around events such as Bhopal

and Torrey Canyon
Individuals Rachel Carson, author of S,ient Spring
Source: adapted from Braithwaite and Drahos (2000: 466).

304 ROBERT HOLTON
over coercive mechanisms such as the use of military power as a mechanism of global
secu rity, as well as the economic coercion entailed by conditionality requirements of the
IMF. These contests indicate that global agendas are not entirely dominated by the
powerful. The influence of the numerous protest events that followed in the wake of the
Seattle meet ing of the WTO in 1999, including the foundation of the World Social
Forum at Porto Alegre in Brazil in 2001, also give ample indication of this.
A second case example worth considering in this connection is the Internet. Here we
have a communications technology that emerged from two rather disparate sources. The
first was the US state, and more especially the US military, which funded research into a
multi-centred communication system able to withstand nuclear attack. The second source
comprised disparate groups of information technologists in California and elsewhere who
wished to explore the possibility of interpersonal communications networks accessible by
individuals-by individuals from below as well as by organizations from above. In the ini
tial stages, the driving forces were bigly variegated and owed comparatively little to
corpo rate economic influence. Although corporate influence rapidly grew to prominence
after 1980, symbolized by Microsoft, the legacy of an accessible tool of communication
has con tinued. Many influential software engineers continue to supply technical expertise
to the public domain, even while corporations seek to defend their intellectual property.
The Internet as an engine and medium of globalized communication has clearly
developed from multiple sources, and continues to reflect multiple user perspectives.
Global culture and 'glocalization'
Global cultural life is also an arena in which multiple and often competing or
contradictory trends are in play. It can be argued that the picture is more complex and
paradoxical than simple theories of McDonaldization and cultural imperialism would
suggest (compare Holton 2000). At least three intersecting developments are evident . The
first includes processes of homogenization in which the rationalized standardization of
companies like McDonald's, Nike, and Starbucks does indeed prevail. Here it is certainly
the case that powerful economic interests seek to create and dominate global consumer
markets. But a second trend is resistance to global culture in its standardized consumerist
form. This has been associated with a strong tendency for individuals and groups to
identify with particu lar places and cultural repertoires and with the robustness of national
identities, but not only in a blatantly nationalist form. The third has been the development
of inter-cultural fusions or hybrids in which cultural elements from different sources are
combined, such as in 'world music' and in a host of *syncretic fashion styles.
The complexity of cultural trends requires considerable analytical attention. The
fore most reason for this is that the relationship between global culture and other
national or local cultural forms and institutions is by no means easy to define. While it is
conventional to think in terms of sharp distinctions between global, national, and local
levels of activity, it is not obvious that such 'levels' can be distinguished from one
another in any decisive way. The reality seems to be rather one of *interpenetration
across highly permeable boundaries.
GlOBALilATiON 305
One influential way of proceeding has been through the notion of *'glocalization',
developed by the British sociologist Roland *Robertson (1992, 1995). Robertson orginally
developed the idea of a fusion of the global and the local to understand the *syncretic
character of Japanese religion. A characteristic of Japanese religiosity, according to
Robertson, is the borrowing of elements from different religions, notably Buddhism,
whose influence came to Japan from the Asian mainland, and Shinto, the Japanese state
religion. Japanese people may appeal to both for different purposes, rather than viewing
themselves as either Buddhist or Shinto in affiliation. Robertson's discussion of global
local fusions involves an ambitious theory of social life in terms of mediation between the
universal and the particular. Social life is localized or particularized in time and space but
it is equally implicated in globalized or universalized discourses about the nature of the
cosmos and humanity, embracing fundamental questions of meaning. In this respect,
Robertson's key concepts are ontological, in the sense that they pertain to human social
being, to aspects of the human condition. 'Glocalization' is, so to speak, our human fate.
While possessing certain local roots, different peoples cannot understand their existence
without an engagement with the global, which necessarily leads people to relativize the
perspectives of their received cultural, religious, and historical traditions.
One revealing instance of ambiguities between the global, the national, and the local in
the arena of popular culture is the Eurovision Song Contest. This case is discussed in Box 37.
Universalism and particularism

Roland Robertson's analysis of glocalization is set in a broad conceptual framework. At
its most general level, the 'global field' is constituted through interactions between four
com ponent elements, namely individual human agents, national societies, societal
*world systems, and lastly 'humankind' in some general sense (Robertson 1992: 27).
Such inter actions indicate varieties of interpenetration of the universal and the
particular. Robertson speaks of 'the universalization of *particularism, and the
particularization of universalism' (1992: 100). The premise of this thesis is that in a
globalizing epoch, there are no longer any individuals or societies immune from
global influence, even though the particular ties of space and time still matter. The
global and the local are mutually self-constituting.
The idea of a 'universalization of particularism' can be seen in the global diffusion of a
particular social form such as the free-market system or the nation-state form, which once
arose in a specific historical context, namely in early modern Europe. The idea of a 'partic
ularization of universalism' can be seen in the adaptation or relativization of general insti
tutions and precepts to particular contexts. An example of this is the adaptation of the
universal norm of human rights to particular needs and the incorporation of universal
ideas of rights into particular national systems of citizenship. ln the West over the last 200
years, the women's movement has brought about a concrete particularization of the
abstract universal idea of the 'rights of man'. In these examples, we can see ideas of
universal values coming to transform particular arrangements in definite contexts; and
conversely, we can observe a counter-movement in which particular contexts inform and
alter people's understanding of the meaning of the universal.
306
BOX 37. THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST: CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

OR LOCAL SYNCRETISM?
In the Eurovision Song Contest, contestants represent different countries, each of which organizes a
national contest to determine the European representative. On the night of the Contest, votes for each
song are organized through national systems of voting. One interesting observation is that voters in
particular countries often appear to support contestants from countries that border on their own, or
with which they have historic ties. Here we may ask whether the Contest gives an example of
national resistances to globalization. What would seem to speak against this is that elements of folk
music and national costume have been relatively limited in the show. The overall musical idiom is
the pop song, fusing Afro-American with European elements without any particular national point of
reference. The contestants themselves are also often recent immigrants, again providing a
multicultural rather than national element to the pie;ture.
Hannerz (1992), writing of Sweden's contribution to one of the Contests in the late 1980s, reports
the confusions that have arisen concerning the national integrity of the process. In Sweden's
national contest, organized to determine a 'Swedish' entrant for the wider EurovisIon Contest, 'it
was quite acceptable that the ... first runner-up had been performed by a lady from Finland, and
the second by an Afro-American lady ... Both [migrants] were thought of as representing the new
heterogeneity of Swedish society ... What was controversial was the winning tune, the refrain of
which was "Four Bugs [a brand of chewing gum] and a Coca-Cola" ... Of the two, Coca-Cola was
more controversial ... as a central symbol of "cultural imperialism" ... What drew far less attention
was that the winning tune was a calypso' (Hannerz 1992: 217) The favourite song of the Swedish
contest thus drew all at once on Finnish, American, Afro-American, and West Indian elements.
The challenge here lies in determining not simply whether this is more of a global phenomenon
or more of a national phenomenon. There is the third possibility that it represents an
interpenetration of the global and the national: some kind of *'glocal' fusion of the global and the
local. If so, we may ask: how widespread is this global or 'glocal' *syncretism1 And this question
raises several others. What is
this glocal syncretism driven by? If it is driven primarily by global1zed capitalist entertainment industries,
why does it take the complex cultural forms that It does? If the cultural imperialism argument has less
purchase, may we speak of certain kinds of emergent national, regional, or trans-local identity? This
raises the question of the extent of the independence of global audiences from processes of global
mass media production. Lastly we can also ask how significant such events really are for an under
standing of globalization. Are they trivial events, or are they salient in a more subtle way, perhaps as
banal forms of cultural syncretism, analogous to the taken-for-granted forms of national symbolism
discussed by Michael Billig (1995) in terms of 'banal nationalism'?
Another line of approach to these issues has developed around ideas of *'cosmopolitan
democracy'. These have been formulated by David Held and others in terms of normative
ideals of 'global civil society' or 'cosmopolitics' (Held 1995; Archibugi and Held 1995;
Kaldor 2003). Debates about cosmopolitan democracy invoke universal values of trans
parency, accountability, peace, and justice in world affairs, and try to show how these
values can be reconciled with, and enriched by, the particularistic cultural traditionsof dif
ferent national societies. Many would also see the development of transnational social
movements as emergent indicators of cosmopolitan democracy founded on dialogue
307
between the global, national, and local. The World Social Forum indicates processes of
convergence in global social understanding from very diverse standpoints, issues, and
agendas.
Differentiation and integration in globalization theory

To speak of multiple dimensions of globalization is to draw on a core idea in social theory
about *differentiation. According to *functionalist theory, society becomes differentiated over
time between different component systems, each performing distinct social functions or
sets of activities. In one very simple model, the economy deals with production, distribu
tion, and consumption, the polity with the allocation of public resources in a legitimate
manner, while culture provides meaning and a repertoire of symbolic and practical
resources for social actors. Such differentiation has been said to provide advantages
of specialization, with distinct sets of institutions such as markets, governments, and
religious organizations occupying relatively autonomous places in the overall social sys
tem. Functionalist theory was propounded chiefly by Talcott *Parsons and Robert
*Merton, but the idea of 'multiple dimensions' and 'multiple autonomous logics of
development' is also to invoke the continuing legacy of the ideas of Max Weber.
The major challenge accompanying the idea of differentiation relates to how far it is com
patible with social *integration. Can differentiation become excessive, leading to instability?
Or has the need for strong forms of social integration been exaggerated? These issues,
posed originally in the context of nation-states, become much more acute when we
consider the transnational domain. A number of integration problems have been identified
by com mentators. One of the most serious is that the global economy appears to be in
some sense out of control. At the very least, it is insufficiently regulated by political
mechanisms and by public collective agency. Markets are unstable and prone to
significant levels of risk, while corporate power backed by regulatory bodies such as the
lMf lacks responsibility and legitimacy. A profound 'global democratic deficit' is evident
insofar as the economy has globalized more rapidly than political institutions have been
able to keep step, preventing them from responding in fully effective and democratic
ways.
A further integration problem is the robustness of local and national identities, and the
rather limited actual development of cosmopolitan consciousness, creating a deficit of
*solidarity between peoples and individuals. The difficulty is that processes of
globalization have led to extensive differentiation between the economy, the polity, and
culture, which has incited, and has been compounded by, the revival of particularistic
cultural identifica tions and affiliations or what is often referred to as *'identity politics'.
One way of interpret ing globalization and its discontents in this connection is to refer to a
conflict between tendencies to further differentiation on the one hand and tendencies to
de-differentiation on the other, where 'de-differentiation' does not necessarily mean the
same as 'reintegra tion'. Robertson's idea of the global field draws attention to processes
of attempted integra tion of the general with the particular. The 'glocal' in this sense is an
*ontological feature of the human condition, linking universal aspiration with particular
context. Even here, however, it remains unclear whether sustainable forms of integration
can be achieved by glocal means, or whether the glocal simply subsumes conilicts over
the distribution of global goods. Even if states and social movements see themselves as
glocal, this does not
308 ROBERT HOLTON
mean that populations will necessarily be reconciled to the world order as it currently
stands-not least in the present condition of profound economic inequalities and
injustices between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak.
How new is globalization? Some historical contexts
So far in this chapter we have been concerned with globalization from the standpoint of
very recent socio-economic developments. We end our discussion now by standing back
from the contemporary situation in order to consider some more historical contexts for an
understanding of the term.
Movements of people, goods, and ideas across wide political and cultural borders have
been taking place for centuries, if not millennia. Movements of population in search
of food, land, and freedom or trade between tribes, city-states, and regions go back a long
way in human history. The question we must ask, however, is whether, or how far, such
histor ical movements constitute meaningful instances of the concept of globalization.
The crucial indicators would appear to have to do not only with cross-border
movement but also specifically with closer interdependence between spatially
separate social groups, together with a sense of the world as some kind of single
place. Globalization may not require that individuals feel themselves to be global or
develop global identities and attachments; but it almost certainly means that
individual and group activities must take account of global interdependencies,
whether economic, technological, political, or cultural. The need to take account of
global interdependencies may denote a quality of becoming globalized through
external constraint, by default. It suggests that individuals become enmeshed in
something above their heads or beyond their personal control. This is indeed how many
anti-globalist critics interpret the world. Lack of choice or democratic consultation about
patterns of globalization is certainly the source of much discontent. But there are two
alternative ways in which we can think about how individuals relate to globalizing
processes in a historical context.
The first involves individuals actively participating in cross-border processes and global
culture. They may be merchants or pilgrims, explorers or migrants, multinational
managers or world musicians, colonizers or environmental activists. Activity of this type
involves some kind of enlarged cross-border orientation, whether as a 'citizen of the
world' or as an imperialist, a Muslim or a Jew or a Christian, a free trader or a member of
a world wide diaspora. The second, less overtly global orientation involves all of those
people who make use of material and symbolic resources and repertoires that have an origin
beyond their country of origin, whether technology, foodstuffs, political institutions,
religious practices, or art and literature. Involvement in these social patterns may require
no e,pecially global consciousness; hut such ideas, institutions, and resources may,
nevertheless, have a long pre existing cross-bonier history, whether they are key concepts
in mathematics or forms of eco nomic organization or world religions (compare Curtin
1984).
Some of the most ambitious attempts to produce long-run historical accounts of interac
tions and interdependencies along these lines have been produced by Andre Gunder Frank
and his associates (Frank and Gills 1993). One of Frank's most radical claims is that a
world
GLOBALIZATiOfll 309
system has existed for around 5,000 years, rather than 500 years. This proposition rests on
evidence such as long-distance trade, market exchange, and forms of capital
accumulation. Frank's main aim is to demonstrate the existence of an expansive capitalist
core in world history. This position is significant for two reasons. First, it revises the
familiar thesis that global capitalism originated in the period from the fifteenth century
onward, symbolized hy Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas. Second, it
emphasizes the non-Western origins of globalization.
Another significant contribution to historical ways of thinking about globalization is
A.G. Hopkins's edited volume Globalization in World History (Hopkins 2002). This centres
on a fourfold typology of globalization, portrayed in Table 14.2. The typology is not
organized around variations in some single structural principle, such as Marx's 'mode of
production' or Weber's 'form of legitimate domination'. Rather, the typology is based on
changes in institutional patterns of social organization in time and space. The four types
of globalization sketched by Hopkins and his associates are not intended to be a
Procrustean bed on which complex bodies of historical evidence are stretched until they
fit neatly into
Table 14.2 Four historical types of globalization
Archaic Pre-dates industrialization and nation-state Associated with empires, cities, and
trading diaspora
Present in Asia, Africa, and parts of Actors involved include
kings, warriors, priests, and
Europe traders
Multi-centred s0urces of
Proto Emerges between c. 1600 and 1800, indigenous change, including
with state reconfiguration and improved management of
commercial expansion sea-borne commerce
Actors include explorers, slave
Present in Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa traders, merchants, and
pilgrims
Modern Conventional Western-centred phase, Involves both free trade and

post-1800, associated with imperial expansion, and
industrialization and the rise of the improved manufacturing,
nation-state military, and communications
technology
Domestication of earlier forms
Increased involvement of non-Western
of cosmopol1tanism
nations in later phase
Actors involved include imperial
Emergence of global civil society
colonizers, manufacturers,
scientists, activists from non
governmental organizations
Post-imperial
Postcolonial Post-1950 emergence of a decolonized
Revival of cosmopolitanism
world, with new types of supra-territorial
organization and regional integration
Actors involved include business
Continuing non-European sources
and political elites, migrants and
of globalization, including Islam, as
asylum seekers, global civil
well as syncretic 1ntercultural
servants,
fusions such as jazz and world music.
radical social movement activists,
virtual networks around the 'nternet.
Source: adapted from Hopkins (2002: passim).

310 ROBER"f HOLTON
an appropriate category. Rather, the aim is *heuristic: to provide a plausible framework in

which further historical data can be usefully organized.
One specific area in Hopkins's scheme where further debate is warranted concerns the
analytical coherence of the fourth 'post-imperial' phase. The intensification of a globally
interventionist US foreign policy since the turn of the millennium throws some doubt on
any 'end of empire' thesis. Writers such as Michael Hardt and Antonio *Negri (2000) ;md
David Harvey (2003) argue for a return of the forces of empire. Global market integration,
it seems, is insufficient to create global security in an epoch of continuing interstate
conflict and global terrorism. What remains unclear b whether this signifies a return to
imperial modes of attempted global integration through military force, 1 ikely to be doomed
to failure like previous empires, or whether it signifies the beginnings of a phase of de-
globalization around violent modes of national or regional Realpolitik. The latter questions
are raised by Michael *Mann (2003) with reference to the US-led occupation of Iraq that
began in 2003.
Conclusion
Globalization matters to social theory because it raises many of the core issues in social
enquiry about the nature and direction of social change, mobility and settlement, power
and inequality, conOict and order, solidarity and identity, and complexity in social organ
ization. But globalization also matters because it provides important examples of what
Robert *Merton (1949c) called *'middle-range' theorizing, as against more speculative
forms of *'grand theory'. The will to grand theory reflects several aspirations, from the
search for a unified theory of society to the more activist vocation of prophecy. In the
prophetic mode, analysts have seen globalization both as a harbinger of global riches and
equally as the enemy of social justice, democracy, and community. The emotional
appeal of such views has been eroded in considerable bodies of empirical research by less
grandiose and more complex explanatory approaches. Accounts of globalization are
littered with failed general theories and prophecies, from the assumption of the end of the
welfare state and the nation-state to the idea of cultural homogenization and universal
wealth distribution. In the study of globalization, methodological nationalism has been
challenged hy a new methodological globalism. In its most radical forms, methodological
globalism sees the fluidity of people, images, and resources across space as a new axial
principle (compare Urry 2000). At the same time, however, we should be clear that not
everything is in flux. The robustness of resistances, re idues, and attachments to the ideal
of a stable sense of security built around particular places and contexts constitutes
limits to globalization (compare Scott 1997). The same is true of the many 'glocal'
fusions in which would-be globafom seeks an anchorage in specific fC'gional contexts.
This applies whether we are speaking of the search for new markets around particular
niches, or the search for general
cultural meanings among populations that differ in tradition and identity.
It should be emphasized that the case for regarding globalization as in some sense long-run
does not mean that nothing is new. While flows and interdependencies stretch out over
time and space and must essentially be understood in historical dimensions, the velocity
and intensity of cross-border transactions has increased dramatically in recent years.
This
GLOBAUZATEOI\I 311
undoubtedly has to do with developments in communications and information technology

associated with the Internet, with the digitalization of information and penetration of the
mass media into popular culture. Yet the strong resonance of a sense of virtually
instantan eous time should not blind us to the historical complexity of the phenomenon of
global ization. Rather than a single global time, there exists a complex array of temporal
dimensions. These include a continuing sense of 'glacial time' or what the French
historian Fernand *Braudel called longueduree, associated with slower-moving changes in
relationships between humankind and the natural environment (Braudel 1967). They also
include forms of cyclical time in which patterns of global expansion and de-globalization
occur, often in response to failed projects for global integration. In all of this, globalization
has helped stimul ate an upsurge of interest in sociological accounts of space and time and
in the historical transformations of the structures of human civilization.
Ill QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 14
Is globalization another name for economic imperialism?
2 Is there one globalizing logic or more than one1

3 What relationships can be discerned between economic aspects of globalization and political,
legal, and cultural aspects?
4 How far does globalization undermine the sovereignty of nation-states?
5 How new is globalization?

6 Are there any limits to globalization?
7 Can there be such a thing as a 'global civil society'?
■ FURTHER READING
Some excellent general introductions to controversies about globalization are David Held and
Anthony McGrew's two books Globalization/Anti-Globalization (Polity Press, 2002) and Global
Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Polity Press, 1999), as well as the same authors'
use ful collection of edited readings The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the
Globalization Debate (Polity Press, 2000), especially the introductory chapter titled 'The Great
Globalization Debate'. Also good is Leslie Sklair's Globalization: Capitalism and its Alternatives
(Oxford University Press, 3rd edn. 2002). Other useful guides are Jan Aart Scholte's
Globalization: A Critical Introduction (Macmillan, 2000), Malcolm Water's Globalization
(Routledge, 1995), and Robert Holton's Globalization and the Nation State (Macmillan, 1998).
Some influential statements have been Ulrich Beck's What is Globalization? (Polity Press, 2000),
Zygmunt Bauman's Globalization: The Human Consequences (Polity Press, 1998), Martin Albrow's
The Global Age (Polity Press, 1997), Barrie Axford's The Global System (Macmillan, 1995), and
Anthony Giddens's Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping our Lives (Routledge, 2000).
Roland Robertson's Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (Sage, 1992) was one of the first
books to place globalization on the intellectual map. A major contribution is Manuel Castells's The
Information Age, in a three-volume series The Rise o(the Network Society (Blackwell, 1996), Tile Power
of Identity (Blackwell, 1998), and End of Millennium (Blackwell, 2000). Some path-breaking
empirical
312 ROBERT HOLTON
studies are John Braithwaite and Peter Drahos's Global Business Regulation (Cambridge
University Press, 2000) and Leslie Sklair's The Transnational Capitalist Class (Blackwell, 2001).
See also John Urry's two books Sociology beyond Societies (Routledge, 2000) and Global Complexity
(Polity Press, 2003). The most sceptical view of globalization in relation to the fate of nation-states is
Paul Hirst and Graham Thompson's Globalization in Question (Polity Press, 1996). Some
important studies of global cities, finance and capital flows are Saskia Sassen's three books Cities in a
World Economy (Sage, 2nd edn. 2000), The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton
University Press, 2001), and Losing Control? The Decline o(Sovereignty in an Age of Globalisation
(Columbia University Press, 1996).
For cultural aspects of globalization, see Ar jun Appadurai's Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). For some examples of thinking
about global ization by geographical theorists, see David Harvey's Spaces of Capital: Toward a Critical
Geography (Routledge, 2001), Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies (Verso, 1989), Mike Davis's
Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Ima1ination of Disaster (Vintage, 1999), and Nigel Thrift's Spatial
Formations (Sage, 1996).
In the activist mode, an important piece of investigative journalism is Naomi Klein's No Logo
(Flamingo, 2001). Left-leaning texts areJustin Rosenberg's The Follies o{Globalization Theory (Verso,
2001), Alex Callinicos's An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (Polity Press, 2003), and Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri's much-discussed Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000). Richard Sennett's The
Corrosion of Character (Norton, 1998) is a very readable study of the 'flexible' entrepreneurial indi
vidual. Another major treatise on this phenomenon in France is Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's
Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Galli ma rd, 2000). On the side of liberal defences of globalization,
two important books are Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and its Discontents (Penguin, 2002) and
Jagdish Bhagwati's In Defense of Globalization (Oxford University Press, 2004). For conceptions of
'cosmo politan democracy', see David Held's Democracy and the Global Order (Stanford University
Press, 1995), Mary Kaldor's Global Civil Society (Polity Press, 2003), and James Bohman's article 'The
Globalization of the Public Sphere', in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 24/2-3 (1998).
■ WEBSITES
Centre for the Study of Globalization and Regionalization (CSGR) at

www.warwick.ac.uklfadsoc/CSGR/ Provides links to discussion groups, activities, research areas,
and publications.
Globalization Research Centre-Africa (GRCA) at www.globalization-africa.org/ Contains links
to current projects, events, and research papers on globalization with a focus on Africa.
International Forum on Globalization (IFG) at www.ifg.org/ Provides information hy an
alliance of activists, scholars, economists, researchers, and writers on joint activity and public
education about globalization.
The Global 500 at www.fortune.com/fortunelglobal500 Contains information on the top 500
global companies.
Amnesty International (AI) at www.amnesty.org Displays the homepage of Amnesty
International, a worldwide NGO devoted to the recognition and realization of human rights.
Conclusion:Social Theory
for the Twenty-First
Century
Austin Harrington
Our time at the start of the new millennium appears to be one of considerable uncertainty.
For many people, the most significant ending of the twentieth century was not the formal
passing of the year 1999 but the fall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union between 1989 and 1993.These events marked the end of the Cold War and
the end of the bifurcation of the world into the two opposing ideologies of capitalism and
communism. Bleak as it was, the bipolar system that dominated the second half of the
twentieth century created a degree of predictability in international relations, economic
forecasts, and general social expectations that has today mostly disappeared. Today the
world strikes us as a highly volatile place, marked by ever-widening gaps between the
world's richest and poorest nations, by increasing environmental destruction, and by a vast
imbalance of power between political entities of the West such as the USA and the
European Union and the world's diverse other regions, continents, societies, and cultures.
At present, the world offers little evidence of any framework of global civil society
capable of holding the world's most powerful economies and governments to account and
ensur ing a fairer distribution of resources. Certainly no current global legal system
secures all peoples an equal chance to determine their own livelihoods in an autonomous
and simul taneously peaceful way.
If the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 marked the end of the twentieth century, the
symbolic beginning of the twenty-first century for many people was the crashing of four
hijacked aeroplanes by Jslamist terrorists into the World Trade Center in New York and
the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001. This event brought home to many
people the vulnerability, the volatility, and the complacency of our current global life in
the most dramatic and traumatic way. It would appear that intolerant and intolerable acts
such as these are consequences of renewed rises in religious fundamentalism, nationalism,
ethnic hatred, racism, and xenophobia in our world today, as much in opposition to the
West as within the West. Without doubt, they are symptoms of a certain degradation of
global social solidarity, reflecting the absence of any system of shared social, economic,
and political life capable of fostering a mutual concern with the collective welfare of the
species. We should remember that the world that saw 3,000 people die on 11 September
2001 is the same world that sees 2.3 million Africans die each year from HIV, partly as a
result of the shortage of cheaply available drugs.
314 i:\USTIN HARRIN
Since 11 September 2001, world politics appears to have entered a new or 'second'
phase of globalization with an increasingly imperialistic and militaristic face. In a context
of a general shift of the axes of world conflict from the capitalist-communist divide of the
sec ond half of the twentieth century to the oil-rich territories of the Middle East and
the Islamic people who inhabit these lands, the system of Western-led neo-liberal
economic policies that drove the boom of the final years of the last century has become
conscious of a profound crisis in its resources of moral and political legitimacy. At a time
stamped in delibly by the US-led 'war of pre-emption' on Iraq of 2003 and the revelation
of subsequent torturing of Iraqi prisoners of war, and by the seemingly endless failure of
attempts to establish peace and justice for the people of Palestine under Israeli
occupation-to name only two among countless sites of conflagration-the world's dominant
economic system seems compelled to maintain itself by force in the name of a 'war on
terrorism'. If the clos ing years of the twentieth century ushered in what the French writers
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2000) call a 'new spirit of capitalism' based on a
new type of flexible individual open to all opportunities for career advantage, the opening
years of the twenty first century appear to be ushering in a new international *state of
nature in which all efforts to develop genuinely impartial legal bodies with universal
transnational jurisdic tion are being systematically undermined by the concerns of the
world's most powerful states for 'national security'.
It is this coexistence of complex and unjust global conditions that makes rigorous social
analysis so important today. When so much of our political life seems to be clouded by
dis tractions from reality, by insuperable quantities of information, by manipulative
publicity campaigns, by 'spin' and 'hype', or by the cult of media celebrity, critical social
analysis has never been more important. At a time when political representation seems
to be increas ingly fashioned in the image of cinema and becomes less and less able to
distinguish between fact and fiction, social theory is a vital tool of response. Sometimes it
is tempting in this climate to throw up our hands in despair at the problems of the
world, or to withdraw into a life of purely private apolitical concerns, or to fixate on
single objects of blame at the expense of complexity and contradiction. This kind of
ieaction is dangerous for several reasons.
Firstly there are facts to be discovered and stated about the causes of our malaise,
through rigorous research. There are illusions, prejudices, and lies to be purged from the
spaces of our public and private lives. But we also have to accept that the answers to our
problems are not always unambiguous or clearly given. When the ancient Greek
philosopher *Plato compared ignorance to the perception of shadows on the walls of a
cave lit by a dim fire, he made an assumption of the ultimate separateness of truth and
enlightenment from the daily contexts of life in which people ordinarily experience the
world. Today this kind of assumption is not possible for us. Today our reality is
intrinsically a reality of shadowy appearances and shifting forms, of mediated images and
messy contradictions. Our reality is not Plato's pure bright light of day outside the cave.
This implies that in banishing false hood and prejudice from politics and society, we
cannot assume our answers to be always the true ones. However intractable or deluded the
world may appear to us, we have to try out our answers in the here and how. We have to
engage with the world as it is and try to transform it from within, through reasoned
deliberation and communication.
NCLUS!'.H' 315
The various schools of social theory discussed in this book offer a few conceptual tools
for dealing with such troublesome realities. They offer techniques of analysis with a
variety of empirical applications in practical contexts. It should b(' stressed that no
particular school has a monopoly on authority. Each should be treated critically, as one
among possible others. This does not mean that all schools and theories can be mixed
together in one great soup. Not all of the theories arc mutually compatible. Tensions and
contradictions remain between some of them. Nor is it the case that if we could mix them
all together, we could cream off the best parts and discard the rest. But many kinds of
productive synthesis and mutual criticism are certainly possible, and it is for this reason
that allthe schools discussed in this book deserve equal consideration. Social theory, as
with all scientific debate, is a pluralistic engagement marked by unity and disunity, at
once by continuity and by discontinuity.
In a most general sense, social theory is a way of thinking about social life that helps us
to address two perennial questions of human existence: Who are we? What should we do?
These questions take on a special importance for us in modern times. To think about who
we are and about what we should do is essentially to ask what it means for us to be
modem, and it is this distinctive question of modernity that lies at the centre of social
theory. The very exist ence of social theory as a scientific project is itself a creation of
modernity. For societies that we today call 'ancient' or 'traditional', social theory is not a
possible structure of thought, at least not in the sense in which we understand the word
'theory' today. Only modernity could have thought of applying a scientific conception to
the making and shaping of its own world. Although ancient societies present us with many
answers to the question of who we are and what we should do, these answers are no
longer our answers, and they are not the answers of social theory. Ancient people thought
about their world and about what they should do in it, but they did not believe their world
to be capable or needful of radical change, to change from its roots. They did not,
fundamentally, believe their world capable of rational transformation through collectively
organized human agency.
To think about who we are and what we should do is to think about our time, about our
place in time and our relationship to time. The thought of the significance of time and of
being-in-time has been a recurrent motif for many of the most influential philosophers of
modernity, from G. W. F. *Hegel to Friedrich *Nietzsche and Martin *I Ieidegger, as well as
for more directly social and political thinkers such as Karl *Lowith (1949), Alexandre
*Kojeve (1933-39), Hans *Blumenberg (1966), Eric *Voegelin (1952), Hannah *Arendt
(1958, 1971), and many others. As these thinkers make clear, ancient people certainly also
thought about their time; but ancient people believed their time to be for the most part
given to them, not made by them. Ancient people believed their time to be given to them
by some being or beings beyond time, by God or by gods or the spirits. In contrast, while
beliefs in God or gods or the spirits still remain very much with us as intellectual and
emotional forces, modern ity contains the idea that we human beings alone are responsible
for making our world and our time. We who live in this world are the agents of our own
destinies. We alone are the agents of history and politics, not gods or spirits. Certainly we
are reminded repeatedly that we are not immortal, and that human beings are only one
species of nature to inhabit this earth. No matter how far we may be capable of extending
our longevity through medicine and natural science, each and every one of us is destined
to die. Death is the insuperable
316 .AUSTIN HARRINGTON
horizon of all our existence. But the distinctive idea of modernity is that human beings are
less and less capable of thinking of death as the gateway to some unchanging realm or to
the start of some new life beyond time-called Heaven or Eternity. In the time of moder
nity, we come to realize more and more that nothing exists beyond death except time. We
realize that nothing exists otherthan being-in-time and non-being-in-time: endless
coming to-be and ceasing-to-be. To be true to our time is to be modern, and to be modern is
to face up to this predicament and seek ways of comprehending it.
Social theory contributes a few ways of addressing this predicament-along with the
ideas of philosophy and the experiences of art and poetry. Social theory gives us reasoned
accounts and diagnoses of attempts by modernity-sometimes beneficial attempts, some
times disastrous attempts-to take possession of time and to compensate for death in our
immediate and only real world: our social world of material inequalities between people,
of violence and injustiGe. When Karl Marx declared that philosophers have only ever
interpreted the world but that the point is to change it, he expressed only a more funda
mental maxim of all modernity and of all modern theorizing. This maxim is that*theoria
'contcmplation', as the ancient Greeks defined it-finds nogenuine truth unless and until
it is mediated with praxis, with practical engagement with the tasks of the here and now:
the tasks of politics, the tasks of using society's shared constituted powers to make its
conditions of life better: freer, fairer, and happier for everyone. It can be said that the
maxim of modernity is that though we remain mortal, we possess the power and the
responsibility to make the best of our existence, by creating a world that offers everyone
an equal chance for a fulfilling social life. Insofar as we are modern and want to be
modern, we want to improve our conditions of shared life, not by ignoring the past or
forgetting the past and not by repeating the past. We cannot have a rational will to want a
future that is always the same as the past. We can only have a rational will to want to
change the world for the better, as best we can.
■ GLOSSARY OF TERMS
The purpose of this glossary is to provide additional explanation for common technical terms occurring usually on more
than one occasion in this book. It is not, however, intended to be a comprehensive dictionary of sociological
terminology. With the exception of a few key terms that have deserved repeated definition in succinct form, the
glossary does not cover terms explained at length m the main chapters of this book under particular section or
subsection titles. It omits explanations for terms which the reader will find adequately described at the relevant page
references listed in the index to this book. It has been designed to fill in some of the gaps between names for major
sociological topics and unfamiliar words defined in any ordinary dictionary of the English language.
absolutism historical term referring to the absolute autopoietic term from the Greek word for 'creation',
power of the sovereign over all subjects, typically under poies1s; used by Nik/as Luhmann with the meaning
the European absolute monarchies of the seventeenth of 'self-generation'.
century; for example under the rule of Louis XIV of
base-superstructure term referring to the simplest
France See further pp. 148-9.
form of the Marxist theory of ideology in which culture
action frame of reference term in the work of Talcott and politics are said to be determined by an underlying
Parsons denoting the conceptual framework to be base of economic forces. The expression occurs in
presupposed in all social enquiry, focusing on the agency Marx's Preface to 'A Contribution to the Critique of
of actors in contexts of structure. See further pp. 93. Political Economy' (1859: 389) but nowhere else in his
writing in any explicit form. The term is usually used to
agency term meaning the ability of individuals to act in
describe the more reductive and deterministic forms of
pursuit of goals, in a context of constraints, determinants,
'vulgar Marxism' prevalent in Soviet doctrine and rejected
and influences on their actions. See further pp. 215-16.
by most of the Western Marxists. See further pp. 155.
anomie term in the work of f:mile Durkheim, meaning a
behaviourism term referring to an approach in
condition of 'normlessness' or moral vacuum, resulting
psychology initiated by J.B. Watson and continued by
from a weakness or absence of rules regulating social
B. F. Skinner, which ignores mental activity and focuses
intercourse; negation of the Greek word for 'law', nomos.
purely on observable behaviour.
See further pp. 54--5.
binary term from the Latin for 'two', binarius;
anthropocentric term meaning any way of thinking that elaborated by Jacques Derrida and used in structuralist
places human images of the world at the centre of the
and post-structuralist theory and feminist theory; refers
universe, naively over-affirming the sovereignty of human
to examples of logical opposites or pairings between
beings as makers and knowers of existence.
two ideas, where one idea is said to be meaningful only
a priori Latin term in philosophy meaning logically true by dependence on the other idea. The two ideas are
and necessary, independent of observation in experience. said to prop each other up, usually with the one
enjoying implicit or explicit dominance over the other;
asceticism term referring to self-denying abstention from e.g. mind/body, rational/irrational, culture/nature,
comforts and pleasures for the sake of a higher goal or
masculine/feminine.
inner truth; used by Max Weber to describe the rise of a
See further pp. 201.
Protestant 'work ethic' in relation to capitalism in early
modern Europe and North America. See further pp. 70. civil society term prevalent in political thought from the
eighteenth century onwards, referring to social relations
autonomy term from the Greek words auto and nomos, that mediate between the private economic interests of
meaning 'self-law', or the ability freely to determine one's
individuals and families on the one hand and the
own actions and to be responsible for oneself; not to be administrative-bureaucratic interests of the state on the
subject to indoctrination or inducement by manipulative other hand. Civil society is the site of the public interest
influences; a term originating in the philosophy of or public sphere, embodied in political institutions and
Immanuel Kant, used particularly by critical theorists associations. Marx saw civil society as little more than a
such as Jurgen Habermas. cover for the interests of the bourgeoisie. Other thinkers,
318
from both liberal and Marxist backgrounds, have

community and the moral priority of community over
regarded the concept in a more sympathetic light. See
self-interest; associated with the work of Charles Taylor,
further pp. 48--9, 53-4, 157-9.
Alisdair Macintyre, Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel,
civilizing process term used by Norbert Elias for AmataI Etz1oni, and others.
increasingly dense and complex social forms based on
cosmopolitan term from the Greek words cosmos and
relatively stable power monopolies, such as royal courts or
polis, meaning literally 'universal city'; suggesting the
central state bureaucracies, tending toward levels of
ideal of a global political community based on awareness
pacification, self-control, and the rise of cultures of
of the existence of multiple political forms beyond the
manners and civility. See further pp 141-4.
horizons of one's own locality
class term referring to the position of individuals in social
structures as members of categories of people defined by
critical theory/critical social theory term referring
either (1} specifically to the programme of the early
unequal economic advantages and disadvantages, which
Frankfurt School, as formulated in Max Horkheimer's essay
also condition the access of these categories of people to
'Traditional and Critical Theory' (1937); or (2) more
other horizons of life, including power, status, education,
generically to recent generations of theorists loosely
and cultural resources. The term'is defined classically by
influenced by the Frankfurt School but not necessarily
Karl Marx and Max Weber. See further pp,168-72.
closely aligned with it. In literary theory, this term may
closure term referring to completion, resolution, simply mean the 'theory of critiosm'. See further pp 160-5.
wholeness, or finality. These ideas are increasingly thrown
into question by modern experiences of ambivalence,
cultural capital term used by Pierre Bourdieu to describe
contingency, and complexity. benefits of education, knowledge, status, and cultural
distinction used by their bearers in an analogous manner
cognitive term deriving from the Latin word for to economic capital for purposes of long-term social
'thought'; refers to the mental input of actors who not advantage. Such benefits are typically based on possession
only act upon desires, feelings, instincts, or stimuli but of economic capital in indirect, though not always
also think about what they desire, forming systems of immediate, ways. See further pp. 224-7.
belief about the phenomena of their world.
culture industry term coined by Theodor Adorno and
collectivism term referring to the view that society Max Horkheimer to denote the production of a mass
is 'more than the sum of its parts' and that culture through processes of industrialization driven by
explanation should proceed not from the individual commercial ImperatIves; supplying ideological leg1t1mation
but from for capitalist consumption and production through
supra-individual phenomena; a view defended by Emile broadcasting, fashion, advertising, film, and other forms
Durkheim and by functionalist theorists; the opposite of the mass media See further pp. 160-1.
of methodological individualism.
cybernetics term from the Greek word for 'steering' or
commodity fetishism, commodification term used by 'control', kubernan; refers to theories of self-regulating
Marx, denoting the form in which commodities under systems based on closed circuits of information
capitalism exercise power over their producers and feedback; coined by the mathematician Norbert Wiener
rnnsumers, appearing as alien ob1ective forces; real social in the 1940s; developed in electronics and computer
relations between humans are said to appear as social science, originally In US military research technology of
relations between things. See further pp. 46-7. the 1950s; applied to comparative analysis of man-
communicative term in the work of Jurgen Habermas; made and biological systems by the anthropological
denoting non-instrumental, non-strategic social relations theorist Gregory Bateson, influenced N1klas Luhmann's
oriented to forms of normative agreement and systems theory of society Cybernetics remains a fertile
understanding through reasoned dialogue between resource for
actors; emphasizing the role of language and everyday contemporary theories of the media, the Internet, and of
linguistic competence In the shaping of soc,al relations complex systems and organizations.
toward morally acceptable and rational ends. Habermas's cyborg term coined by Donna Haraway, referring to
'communicative' or 'dialogical' formulation of critical
hybrids of organisms and machines; emphasizing
theory is usually contrasted with the earlier Frankfurt inseparability and ontological continuity between
School's more 'd1alect1cal' formulation, anchored more human beings, machines, and animals; criticizing
closely in Hegelian Marxism. See further pp 279-80. dualistic conceptions of culture and nature and human
communitarian term for strands of recent North distinctness; highlighting the role of intelligent
American political philosophy emphasizing the idea of non-human technological agencies in contemporary
society. See further pp. 249.
319
deconstruction term coined by Jacques Derrida,

Foucault 'discursive practices' are said to be bound up with
referring to a practice of reading texts and other
forms of social organization, power, and control. In the
meaningful objects that results in a dismantling or laying
work of Jurgen Habermas, 'discursive' refers to deliberative
bare of the often hidden organizing principles or
reflective communication. See further pp. 207-12, 281 -3
metaphysical assumptions that confer an appearance of
unity, naturalness, or self-evidence in the item under disembedding term in the work of Karl Polanyi describing
consideration. See further pp. 204---6. an aspect of the experience of processes of modernization
where different dimensions of social life lose a sense of
deductive term referring to processes of reasoning from
meaningful interconnectedness or 'embeddedness' in
given premises or starting points to logically valid
received ways of life. These processes crystallize around
conclusions. 'Deductive' is the opposite of 'inductive',
functionally autonomous systems, most notably in the form
which refers to conclusions arrived at by observations
of a global capitalist market place. See further pp. 297-8.
from experience.
division of labour term meaning specialization of the
deliberative term in the later work of Jurgen
economy around functionally interdependent trades, as well
Habermas, referring to open and inclusive political
as specialization and coordination of tasks within each trade;
debate as a model for reasonable social communication
theorized originally by Adam Smith; regarded by Emile
in general.
Durkheim as a source of cohesion in modern societies, when
determinism term referring to problems of excessive correctly regulated. See further pp. 45-7, 53-4
causal attribution of observed phenomena to particular
domination term from the Latin word dominus meaning
conditions, most typically to economic, material, or
'rule' or 'rulership'; used technically in sociology to refer
physical conditions which are regarded as structures
to structures of organizational subordination, particularly
placing heavily constraining limits on human agency,
in the work of Max Weber, who used the German term
freedom, and consciousness.
Herrschaft. See further pp. 72-5, 235, 246-7.
diachronic term used in functionalist and French
dramaturgical model of action term in the work of
structuralist theory, referring to the transformation of
Erving Goffman and others, stressing the theatrical aspect
phenomena over time. 'Diachronic' is the opposite of
of social life, self-presentation, and role performance.
'synchronic', which refers to the states and
See further pp. 110, 116-17
interrelationships of phenomena at any given
moment in time. dualism term in philosophy, referring especially to the
philosophy ot Rene Descartes, denoting the doctrine of
dialectic term in the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel,
the division of reality into two substances, mind and
denoting logical progression in history based on
matter. Cartesian dualism has been criticized in modern
contradictions between two sides of an idea resolved in a
social thought for its inadequate understanding of the
movement of synthesis. 'Dialectical materialism' was the
interrelationship and interdependence of mind and
official Soviet interpretation of Marx's application of
body, thought and existence, culture and nature. See
Hegel's dialectic to economic analysis and the critique of
further pp, 235.
capitalism. See further pp. 42, 162-4.
duality of structure term in the work of Anthony
dialogic term in hermeneutics used by Jurgen Habermas
Giddens, describing structure in social life as the
to refer to the argumentative dimensions of intersubjective
framework in which agents act and as the product that
communication; also used in different senses by the
results from agents' actions, i.e. as both 'medium' and
Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and the religious
'outcome' of social action. See further pp. 217-20.
philosopher Martin Buber.
egalitarian term denoting principles of equality between
differentiation concept originating in the work of Emile
human beings and the desirability of political, social, and
Durkheim and Talcott Parsons; referring to the process by
economic equality.
which social practices, institutions, and systems become
speciaiized around distinct functions, driven by the division emancipation term meaning liberation from
of labour, also involved in Max Weber's conception of subservience or servility, originally from the bondage of
autonomously rationalized 'spheres' in modern social life. the slave or the serf. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
See further pp. 53-4, 97-9. Europe, emancipation meant possession of full civil rights
(especially for the Jews). Since the twentieth century, the
discursive adjectival form of 'discourse', denoting
term has widened to include freedom from oppressive
instances of structured regulated communication through
moral and political norms, or from illusory beliefs, or from
spoken or written language and other systems of symbolic
social conservatism, or from social injustice.
inscription or representation. In the work of Michel
320 GLOSSARY OF TERMS
empirical term referring to knowledge based on science and technology; associated with the writings
observation from experience, from data given to the
of Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and others.
senses.
exploitation term in Marxism referring to the extraction
empiricist term denoting the doctrine that all knowledge
of surplus value from human labour power for the benefit
is based only on observation from experience, from data
of the ruling class, especially for the purpose of profit
given to the senses, denying the validity of other possible
under capitalism; depriving workers of the time, resources,
sources, methods, or forms of knowledge involving the
and freedom to lead fully humane lives. See further
labour of the mind, the imagination, language, and
pp. 46--7.
cultural commun cation.
feudalism term referring to socio-economic relations in
Enlightenment term referring to the eighteenth-century
the Middle Ages in which landowners ('lords') grant
Age of Reason in Western culture (when spelled with a
protection and maintenance to the labourers of the land
capital 'E'); also referring more generically to social
('vassals') 1n return for services in kind, especially service
consciousness guided by rational thought and by critical
in war. In Marxism, feudalism is seen as a mode of
scrutiny of existing ideas and·nstitut1ons, with an
production in which surplus value is extracted from labour
orientation to realizing universally JUSt laws and norms
power in the form of personal ties of obligation to
(when spelled either with a lower-case 'e' or with a
paternalistic authority figures With the rise of capitalism,
capital 'El See further pp. 17, 160-5.
these traditional ties are gradually replaced by the
epistemological, epistemic term from the Greek word anonymity and impersonality of the wage contract. See
for 'knowledge'; refers to the theory of knowledge, or to further pp 147-9
the modes and methods by which knowledge is
obtained. foundational, foundationalist term referring to the
idea of unshakeable grounds for knowledge, founded in
essentialism term referring to questionable notions of self-evident logical truths or in the certainty of sense-data.
basic, fixed, and unchanging identities in particular These grounds are said to remain constant across history
things, ideas, persons, or cultures; for example, the
and across cultures. The idea is criticized in postmodern
notion that women are 'essentially passive', men
and anti-positivist thought, particularly in the work of
'essentially active'.
Richard Rorty.
ethnocentric term referring to habits of thought that
Frankfurt School term referring to the associates of the
misunderstand the distictness,of people who differ in their
lnstitut fur Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research)
basic cultural values, beliefs, or ideas of the world from
founded at Frankfurt University in 1923 and to its
those people who claim to explain their behaviour.
influence on several German-born Marxist theorists active
ethnography term referring to the practice of researching after the Second World War in Europe and
in detail a whole small-scale society or other social the USA; including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno,
structure or process, using qualitative methods, usually Herbert Marcuse. Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse,
involving a lengthy period of participant observation; a Jurgen Habermas, and others. See further
standard pp. 160-1.
practice in anthropology but increasingly favoured also in
sociology and even political science. functional equivalent term used by Robert Merton,
suggesting that some social functions may be necessary
ethnomethodology term referring to the work of but need not be met always 1n the same way. For example,
Harold Garfinkel and his associates; stressing microscopic it might be said that sport is a functional equivalent for
participatory study of the ways in which people produce religion.
meaning and social order through ongoing interpretations
of each other's actions. See further pp. 117-19. functionalism term referring mainly to the work of
American sociological theorists active in the middle
Eurocentrism term referring to ways of thinking that decades of the twentieth century, represented by Talcott
unJustifiably extend the validity of European historical and Parsons, Robert Merton, and others; influenced by mile
cultural experiences to all cultures and civilizations of the
Durkheim and by the scientific anthropology of Bronislaw
world. See further pp. 32-3
Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown; holding that a
existentialism term denoting a movement in twentieth society is to be studied in terms of interdependent
century European philosophy, stressing the fragility and 'systems' and 'structures' that perform interrelated
finitude of human existence and the responsibility of the 'functions' for the society as a whole: also known as
human person in the face of a soc,al universe that is no 'structural functionalism'. See further pp. 87--8.
longer able to believe in God or to follow conventional
moral norms and that 1s sceptical of the social benefits of
Geisteswissenschaften term in German for the

mediate between the individual, the market, and the
'humanities' or 'human sciences', meaning 'sciences of
state.
the mind' or 'sciences of the works of the human mind'; a
term central to German hermeneutic thought. habitus term used especially by Pierre Bourdieu for
distinct sets of attitudes, accomplishments, and habits
Gemeinschaft term 1n German for 'community',
determining how particular classes, cultures, or social
especially in the work of Ferdinand Tbnnies, where it is
groups behave in the world and look upon the world; also
contrasted with the term Gesel/schaft ('society')
used by Norbert Elias and Max Weber in related senses.
See further pp. 30-1. 37.
See further pp. 222-4.
gender term referring to problems and assumptions
hegemony term from the Greek word for 'leader',
involved in defining human agents in society as 'men' or
hegemon; defined by Antonio Gramsci as 'intellectual and
'women', insofar as men and women are not only
moral leadership', involving a combination of force and
biological organisms differentiated by two types of organs
consent. Hegemony 1s a more sophisticated concept of
of sexual reproduction but also self-interpreting members
domination than the classical Marxist concept of ideology
of contingent historically changing cultures, characterized
insofar as it involves an element of willing submission to
by definite social structures that distribute roles, functions,
leadership, which is at the same time subtly coerced.
identities, advantages, and disadvantages to men and
But Gramsci also speaks in a more positive sense of a
women in different and frequently unequal ways. See
possible working-class hegemony, arguing that the task
further pp. 243-5 See also gendering and sex-gender
of the working class is to recover hegemony from the
distinction.
bourgeoisie. See further pp. 157-9.
gendering term used by feminist theorists to stress that
hermeneutics term from the Greek word 'to interpret',
gender is not fixed or given but constructed, changing,
and processual in character, and that many central hermeneuein; refers to theories of understanding and
interpretation, emphasizing the importance of
concepts in social theory often regarded as neutral with
interpreting the meanings that motivate actors to
respect to gender are not neutral but intrinsically gender
act or speak as they do, or 'putting oneself in the
relevant; for example, the concept of the 'public sphere',
other's shoes'; associated with the thought of
which implies a gender-relevant concept of the 'private
Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg
sphere'. See further pp. 239-40.
Gadamer, and more loosely with Max Weber's
Gesellschaft term in German for 'society', especially in interpretive sociology. See further pp. 65, 125-7.
the work of Ferdinand Tbnnies, where it is contrasted
with the term Gemeinschaft('community'). See further, heuristic term meaning a construction of thought or
mental tool that assists 1n producing knowledge of
pp. 30-1, 37.
something; not to be confused with 'hermeneutic'
glocal term coined by Roland Robertson, referring to
fusions and interactions between simultaneously historical materialism term referring to Marx's
global and local processes. See further pp. 304-5. theory of history, based on transitions from one mode of
production to the next, driven by contradictions between
governance term denoting processes of social regulation relations of material production and the legal, political
distinct from traditional state-centred forms of and cultural forms that arise out of these modes of
government; applies to organizations as well as to broader production. In Marxism and in social theory and
national and global arenas, typically involving consensus, sociology generally the term 'materialism' is most often
rule-setting, and decision-making among the organized used in a technical value-neutral sense, not in the more
interests party to it; often seen by critics as divorced from commonly value laden sense of 'acquisitive' or 'money-
full public scrutiny. See further pp. 298. grubbing', as in the phrase 'so-and-so has a materialistic
grand theory term used by critics of Talcott Parsons attitude to life'. A materialist in social theory is someone
to describe his project for 'general unified theory' in who emphasizes explaining social behaviour by
social science. See further pp. 92. reference to basic physical essentials of life (such as
food, shelter, power, or freedom to act on one's needs
guilds term referring to professional associations among and desires, including freedom from suffering, disease,
craftsmen and merchants of the Middle Ages formed for violence, or slavery) in relation to the life chances of a//
mutual aid and protection in specific trades; regarded by people, rich or poor, whether 'money grubbing' or not. In
Emile Durkheim as pre-democratic precursors of the Max Weber's sociology, 'materialist' theories of social
modern trade unions and other 'occupational groups' that life are balanced critically with 'idealist' or 'interpretive'
theories. which emphasize not only
322 HOS'SARY OF HRMS
the physical essentials of life but also the ideas, values,

identity politics term referring to forms of political
languages, and spiritual beliefs of individual actors..
mobilization around issues of cultural identity, leading to
historicism term referring to theories emphasizing the demands for resources for particular groups in a different
historical specificity of social and cultural life and the way from traditional welfare-state models of uniform
significance of historical time In human experience; either citizenship rights. Identity politics emphasizes special
in the form of a determ1rnst1c scheme of development communities of interests organized around ethnicity,
(Hegel's philosophy of history) or in a non-deterministic religion, gender, nationality, reg1onality or sexual orientation.
framework emphasizing historical relativity and diversity
(the writings of Wilhelm Dilthey and others).
ideographic term coined by the Neo-Kantian
philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, referring to the
holism term meaning the 'view of the whole', detailed interpretive study of individual cases; associated
especially the view that the parts of something can only with the methods of the humanities, as against those of
be understood in terms of their contribution to the the natural sciences.
whole and that the whole Is more than a ·,um of the
parts'; a term close in meaning to 'collectivism' as a
imaginary term used as a predicative noun by the
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, referring to projections of
methodological precept.
sense by the individual self; more widely used in social
homo faber term in Latin meaning 'man the maker', theory to refer to ways in which societies or social
indicating the idea that society is an artefact, something collectives represent ideas of their own identity and goals
made by man, rather than given in nature. for change, especially in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis
See further pp. 181-3, 275-6.
humanism term referring particularly to modern ways of
thinking that affirm the agency and dignity of human individualism term with at least three distinct contexts
beings as makers of their own world in a context of of use which should not be conflated: (1) methodological
scientific enlightenment and scepticism toward religion; ind1v1dualism, referring to the view that social phenomena
regarded by the French post-structuralist theorists as a are explicable only in terms of the actions of individuals
complacent form of self-understanding, compromising the and relations between them (not in terms of collective
philosophies of Hegel, Marx, phenomenology, and entities, as with methodological collectivism); (2)
ex,stentialSm. economic individualism, referring to the modern social
phenomenon of independent business or career initiative
idealism term in philosophy referring to the view that
by individuals concerned to maximize their interests
the world Is made by the mind or made of ideas, not
without significant regard for the welfare of others; (3)
given to the senses; refers in social theory to traditions
moral individualism, referring to the view that the basis of
of thought emphasizing the constitutive role of meanings
and mental images in social life, especially in morality is individual autonomy and respons1b11ity, rather
nineteenth-century German thought than passive deference to tradition or received custom.

(t.mile Durkheim defended individualism in the third of
ideal type, ideal-typical term in the work of Max these sense.s, and only partly in the second sense, but
Weber, referring to conceptual constructs deliberately not in the first.)
devised by the social scientist in order to categorize,
analyse, and compare observed phenomena In the social instrumental reason term coined by the Frankfurt
world In a systematic way. An ideal type can be thought School to denote modern capitalist practices of
of as a notional benchmark, in relation to which any subordination of all dimensions of social life to the most
actual phenomenon may either approximate or deviate. efficient achievement of economic profit and
See further pp. 65-6. administrative order; adapted from Max Weber's concept
of 'purposive rat1onal1ty' or 'means nds rationality',
ideology term used either in a strongly value-laden denoting the most efficient use of available means to
sense or in a relatively neutral descriptive sense, or- given ends, without deliberation on the value of the ends
more commonly-in various cnt1cal rnmbinations of
themselves.
these
two senses. In the value-laden sense, ideology means integration term developed by functionalist theorists,
socially generalized false belief, illusion, or 'false indicating that social systems typically maintain an orderly
consciousness', typically serving the interests of a character through coordinating mechanisms, even during
dominant ruling group. In the more neutral sense, times of conflict. For example, fascism provided a means
ideology refers to any system of ideas expressed In of integration for European societies during the 1930s
cultural self-images and shared beliefs of particular depression, albeit a very unstable one. Integration is often
social groups regarded as the functional counterpart to differentiation.
See further pp. 53-4, 97, 102.
GLOSSARY OF TEP.MS 323
interactionism term developed originally in the work of

legitimation term meaning the rendering of something
Herbert Blumer and associated with the work of the
as legitimate in the eyes of certain people; referring to
Chicago School; also known as 'symbolic interact1onism';
uses of symbolic resources that result in a given state of
used in a broader sense for approaches stressing the
affairs appearing morally and legally sanctioned for
dynamic and creative aspect of social life as sustained by
particular social agents, disregarding the question of
individual human actors in ongoing exchanges and
whether the state of affairs in question really is,
interpretations. See further pp. 127-9.
intrinsically, legitimate
interpenetration term in functionalism, emphasizing
lifeworld term originating in the phenomenological
the interconnectedness and mutual impact of
philosophy of Edmund Husserl; also used by Alfred Schutz
disparate social systems upon each other.
and by Jurgen Habermas, referring to the everyday world
interpretive, interpretivist term referring to as meaningfully experienced by ordinary actors in a
approaches emphasizing the meaningful character of pre-reflexive, non-scientific manner, distinguished by
social life and the need for interpretation of this Habermas from the 'system', based on economic and
meaningfulness; in preference to, or in addition to, administrative organization. See further pp. 113,281.
quantitative analysis, measurement, and behavioural
logocentrism term coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to
observation; specifically used in English translation for
the highest authority awarded in Western philosophy to
Max Weber's term verstehende Sozio/ogie, where the logically ordered thought, above play, semblance,
German word verstehen means 'understanding'. See ambiguity, and metaphor, especially in the philosophy of
further pp. 127-9. Plato; derived from the Greek word logos, meaning
intersubjective, intersubjectivity term originating in 'reason' or 'speech'. See further pp. 203---4
the later phenomenological philosophy of Edmund materialism see historical materialism.

Husserl; also present in the work of Alfred Schutz, G. H.
Mead, and Jacques Lacan; adopted in later twentieth means-end relation term referring to the difference
century social theory by Jurgen Habermas, Anthony between what I want (my end) and my ability to get or
Giddens and others, referring to communicative exchange produce what I want (my means). See further pp. 75-6, 93.
between interacting human agents, emphasizing that messianic term used to describe Jewish theological
identities of the self are formed through social interaction themes in the Marxist writing of Walter Benjamin, Ernst
and communication and that reference to the world as an Bloch, and others, referring to the idea that a future
objective reality is achieved only through shared communist society can be affirmed but not 'imagined' or
understandings between actors. 'represented', because it marks an unforeseeable and
Kantianism see Kant (1n Biographies of Theorists) incalculable break with existing historical structures of
thought and behaviour, like the coming of the Messiah to
Keynesian see Keynes (in Biographies ofTheorists) the earthly world.
lack term in the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, meta-narrative term used by Jean-Fran ois Lyotard,
suggesting that culture, morality, and identity represent denoting generalizing accounts of history or science that
forms of compensation for more basic experiences of subsume disparate contexts of experience under a single
privation, denied pleasure, or bodily disorientation in overarching frame of reference. See further pp, 256-8.
sensory life.
metaphysics term in philosophy referring to systematic
lay actor term meaning any ordinary person who is not a conceptions of the fundamental structures of reality,
social scientist; or more precisely, any ordinary person regarded by some twentieth-century philosophers as
except in the case when this person acts as a social responsible for generating confusions in ordinary
scientist. Professor X is a lay actor whenever he or she is language.
out shopping or catching a train, but not when he or she
middle-range theory term coined by Robert Merton
is doing scientific fieldwork.
recommending that theory be grounded in specific empirical
legislative term referring to prescriptive modes of problems for explanation, in preference to 'grand', abstract,
thought preoccupied with universal moral laws, especially or speculative theory. See further pp. 90--2, 102,310.
in the Enlightenment philosophy of Immanuel Kant; used
modernism term denoting cultural, intellectual, and
by commentators on postmodernism, such as Zygmunt
artistic movements that express, interrogate, or celebrate
Bauman; not to be confused with the standard sense of
ideas of modernity; a term with a relatively precise
the lawmaking power of government.
temporal reference, usually thought of as the period
between about 1880 and 1970 In the arts and intellectual

contexts; associated with the methods of the natural
culture; to be distinguished from the term 'modernity',
sciences, as against those of the humanities
which refers to generalizable modern social conditions
and experiences with no definite chronological reference. non-linear term used by Niklas Luhmann, referring to
Modernism refers specifically to ways of expressing and developments over time in many different directions, not
articulating these conditions and experiences in late in a single direction.
nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, especially in
norm term meaning an established standard of behaviour
the West.
shared by members of a social group to which each
naturalism term in the philosophy of science, denoting member is expected to conform. According to Emile
the view that social science shares essential characteristics Durkheim, norms counteract tenderic1es towards egoistic
in common with the natural sciences; a view criticized by actions that disregard the public good, especially during
interpretive hermeneutic traditions of thought. The most the rise of modern market societies. In the absence of
familiar form of naturalism has been 'positivism'. However, norms, societies are susceptible to anomie
in the last third of the twentieth century, proponents of
'realism' or 'critical realism' have,developed non-positivist normative term referring to discourse about how the
versions of naturalism, which allow for some social world ought to be (or not to be), in contrast to
distinctiveness in the social sC1ences. discourse that claims solely to describe and explain how
the social world is. as a matter of fact, without expliot
Neo-Kantian term referring to the revivaf of elements of judgement of right or wrong. In the work of Talcott
Immanuel Kant's philosophy by German philosophers In Parsons, 'normative' refers particularly to the function of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centunes, moral norms in generating social integration See further
influencing debates about the methodology of the social pp 7-9,54--5,95-7,324.
sciences, notably in the thought of Heinrich Rickert and
Wilhelm Windelband. These philosophers held that normlessness term in the work of !:mile Durkheim,
human knowledge divides into two complementary explicating the concept of anomie; referring to an absence
domains of competence each governed by distinctive of norms, or to a state in which the regulating authority of
scientific principles, namely the 'sciences of nature' and norms over the conduct of individuals is very weak.
the 'sciences of culture'. See further pp 54--5.
neo-liberalism term referring to economic policy object relations term in psychology, especially in the
prevalent since the 1980s, involving a return to classical writings of the psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Donald
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economic principles Winnicott; refers to the emergence of a sense of self in
of non-interference by governments in the workings of a the child by differentiation from a surrounding world. The
free market; a central term in contemporary debates child experiences a sense of limitation caused by objects
about globalization and the demise of socialism and social which are not part of the child and cannot be changed by
democracy. the child (such as the breast of the mother).
NGOs term used as an abbreviation for 'non objectivist term referring to approaches to social enquiry
governmental organizations'; referring to non-profit that overemphasize the relative importance of structural or
organizations that are neither attached to the state nor systemic constraints on the actions of individuals, and
constituted as private businesses and are established for underestimate the relative importance of individual agency
political or altruistic purposes, typically with charity in relation to structures and systems; usually nvolves an
status; for example, Oxfam, Amnesty International, excessively narrow and strict definition of objectivity,
Greenpeace. sometimes with an appeal to the natural sciences as a
nihilism term deriving from the Latin word for 'nothing', model for social research; typically involves neglect of the
nihil; refers to forms of extreme sceptIcIsm about the expressive, 'subjectively meaningful' character of socio
possibility of cross-cultural agreement over values, cultural life
especially about truth, goodness, justice, and morality;
ontological term deriving from the Greek participle of
often associated with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
the verb 'to be': refers to enquiry about what exists, or
and postmoderrnsm.
does not exist, in the world; or about what kinds of
nomothetic term from the Greek word for 'law', entities are believed by people to exist; for example,
spirits, ghosts and witches or-alternatively-atoms,
nomos; coined by the Nee-Kantian philosopher Wilhem
Windelband; referring to the study of law-like regularities neurones, H20, electricity, DNA. The term can also be
and generalities rather than historically specific cases used to refer to enquiry about what social life consists of;
and for example,
about whether social life consists of real structures or only

ordered logical thought in Western philosophy above play,
of bundles of individuals.
semblance, ambiguity, and the like. See further pp. 249.
Orientalism term referring to Western discourse about
phenomenology term deriving from the Greek word for
the East, the Orient. Edward Said (1978) defines
'appearance' or 'appearing'; referring in philosophy to the
'Orientalism' as the West's essentializing construction of
method and school of thought founded by Edmund
that which is 'Other' to itself See further pp. 34.
Husserl, involving description of things in the world insofar
paradigm term meaning a scientific framework or as they appear to consciousness as objects of experience
theoretical construct. In the work of Thomas Kuhn, for subjects who are conscious of them.
science 1s said to proceed by discontinuous leaps and Phenomenological analysis proceeds by bracketing
bounds from one paradigm to another, rather than by questions about the causation or purpose of objects of
ever-closer steps to an independently existing objective experience in order to concentrate on describing the
reality. See further pp 123. manner in which such objects appear to subjects as
objects with particular meanings. For example, the
particularism term referring to cultural beliefs, values,
phenomenolog1st concentrates on describing the meaning
identities, or traditions said to possess local or limited
of someone's raising his or her arm as a sign or indication
significance rather than general universal significance; a
to or for someone, rather than trying to identify the
term with contested uses. According to some writers,
physical stimuli that may have caused the person to raise
'particularistic' describes something lacking general
his or her arm. Phenomenological philosophy influenced
relevance, such as a 'single-issue agenda'. According to
interpretive sociological writers such as Alfred Schutz. See
others-€specially feminist and postcolonial writers-this
further pp. 3, 112-14.
negative way of using the term is problematic, indicative
of prejudice against voices constructed as being in the polity term referring generically to any unit of politically
'minority', such as the voices of women or non-white organized power, such as modern nation-states (e.g.
people. See further pp. 305-7. France, the UK) or empires (e.g. the USSR, the Roman
Empire) or ancient or medieval city-states (e.g. ancient
patriarchal term meaning rule by men or male
Athens, Renaissance Florence) or, most recently, new
domination, especially (but not only) in traditional or non
governmental entities emerging above the level of
democratic societies; a term either with a relatively narrow
meaning, referring to male domination in the organization the nation-state, such as the European Union.
of families; or with a broader meaning, referring to more positive science term meaning empirical science,
generalized, indirect, institutional forms of male cultural claiming to be free from metaphysical speculation;
and political hegemony. See further pp 235. 'positive' in the sense of observing what is given or
'posited' in experience, though not necessarily in the
patrimonial term referring to inheritance of positions
sense of 'optimistic' (although this sense is often implied).
of power and especially property by younger men from
older male authority figures, originally by sons from the positivism term coined in the nineteenth century by
father of the family. Auguste Comte, referring to the strongest form of
performative term coined by the philosopher J. L. Austin, empiricism which holds that experimental observation is the
referring to linguistic utterances which create the state of only valid source of knowledge and rejects all other sources
affairs to which they refer in the act being uttered; for of understanding-such as theology, metaphysics, or
example, the utterance of the priest at a wedding, 'I hereby poetry-as incapable of rigorous validation. Positivism found
pronounce thee man and wife'. many adherents in the early twentieth century, including
notably the members of the Vienna Circle, also known as
performativity term referring to the idea that speech the 'logical positivists'. See further pp. 27-8, 203-4.
and language involve not only description of the world but
also action and performance in the world, typically positivity term referring to social experience insofar as it
involving the transmission of relations of power. is felt to be given or 'posited', as it it were a thing of
Alternatively the term may simply mean 'efficiency of nature, impervious to change or negation by criticism.
operation'.
postcolonialism term meaning the study and theory of
phallogocentrism term in feminist theory, coined by cultures, societies. and history 1n the light of Western
Julia Kristeva and Helene C1xous, combining the term colonial conquest. See further pp. 34, 166, 205, 247-9.
'logocentrism' (coined by Jacques Derrida) with the word
post-Fordism term meaning the observation or thesis
'phallus'; used to refer to a masculine privileging of
that modern industrial production has moved away from
326 'iLOSSARY OF TERMS
mass production In large fdctones-as pioneered in the

sphere ought to consist in what the eighteenth-century
1920s by the American automobile manufacturer Henry
philosopher Immanuel Kant defined as the 'free use of
Ford-towards specialized markets based on small flexible
public reason', unmanipulated and undistorted by state
units of production and flexible labour forces. See further
propaganda or by commercial interests that corrupt the
pp, 257-8.
transparency, veracity, and maturity of the media and the
post-industrial term referring to the declining position political arena. See further pp. 164-5, 242, 281-3.
of manufacturing industry in Western economies since the
queer theory term referring to theories of the construction
1970s and the dramatic expansion of sectors of the
of sexual orientations under definite social and historical
economy devoted to services, finance, leisure, and
conditions, concentrating on homosexuality but also
consumption. See further pp. 257 8.
examining heterosexual relations. See further pp. 245-6.
postmodernism term referring to 'the contemporary
rational choice term denoting a school of thought
movement of thought which reJects totalities, universal
influenced by economic theory and by utilitarianism,
values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to
holding that social I fe is best analysed in terms of
human existence and the possibility of obJective
decisions and calculations by individual actors aimed at
knowledge. Postmodernism is sceptical of truth, unity and
maximizing advantages through strategies of cooperation
progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends
and non-cooperation with other actors; preceded in 1960s
towards cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism,
sociology by the contributions to exchange theory
discontinuity and heterogeneity'. This succinct
developed by George Homans and Peter Blau; associated
definition has been quoted from Eagleton (2003· 13).
more recently with the work of the economist Gary
post-structuralism term referring to a style of theorizing Becker, as well as James Coleman, Jon Elster, and others.
influenced by the first wave of French structuralist writers See further pp. 104--5.
that radicalizes or critically transforms their ideas in
rationalization term in the work of Max Weber and all
various ways, emphasizing instability in textual meanings
theorists influenced by him; refers to the penetration of
as functions of unbounded systems of differences
spheres of modern social life by rational principles of
between signifying elements; often associated with the
organIzatIon, oriented especially to bureaucratic efficiency
thinking of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, although
and procedural systematicity. Weber proposed that under
not accepted by them as a label for their work< See
processes of rationalization, modern social life divides into
further pp. 212-13.
discrete spheres of autonomous validity, each sphere
pragmatism term with a technical meaning in following an independent logic of development These
philosophy in the USA after the nineteenth-century include the market, the state, and the judiciary, as well
philosopher C. S. Peirce; refers to the view that the as science, religion, art, morality, and erotic life.
content and validity of concepts and ideas consists in their Following Weber, sociologists do not normally use this
practical applicability, effectiveness. or usefulness for life; term in a normative sense; that is, in the sense of
associated with the thought of William James, George something necessarily good (or bad). 'Rationalization'
Herbert Mead, and John Dewey; a major influence on is thus to be distinguished from more value-laden
early twentieth-century American sociology and social phrases such as 'the growth of reason' or 'the progress
psychology See further pp. 114--15. of reason' See further pp, 75-6, 254-5.
praxis term in Greek, meaning 'practice', also spelled realism term in the philosophy of science, referring to
with an 'x' in German; a key term in Western Marxism, commitment to belief In the independent existence of
especially among those strands with an orientation to natural and social reality and its ,rreduc,biilty exclusively to
phenomenological and anthropological thinking, such as discourses, representations, or mental constructions by
in the work of Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, and individual human agents, holding that scientific theories
Gy6rgy Luk cs. are potentially true statements about reality, rather than
public sphere term first coined In the 1960s by Jurgen merely convenient fictions useful for action in the world,
Habermas (translating the German word Offentlichkeit), associated in Britain with the work of Roy Bhaskar, Rom
denoting the set of institutions, fora, and agencies in Harre, Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier, and others. In
civil society that mediate between private economic international relations theory, realism has a distinct
interests on the one hand and state administrative meaning, referring to the view that relations between
interests in order and control on the other hand. The states are best understood in terms of struggles for power
publ1c sphere is the site of public opinion formation, and sell-preservation, disregarding all differences of
most notably in the media. In Habermas's normative political ideology. See further pp. 227-9, 264--5, 295.
definition, the public
GLOS'iARY OF TERMS 327
Realpolitik term in German, deriving originally from the

in this sense 'relative' to the latter, It Is not the case that
leadership of the nineteenth-century Prussian chancellor
such values and beliefs are wholly incapable of being
Otto von Bismarck, involving ruthlessly realistic and
rationally argued about and agreed upon by different
opportunistic foreign policy; today used in the context of
participants from different cultural standpoints. See
international relations to refer to state interaction and
further pp. 120.
conflict involving hard-headed diplomacy or aggressive
defence policy or warfare without a specific or explicit restitutive term used by Emile Durkheim to refer to
ideology, modern legal systems in which disputes between parties
are mediated by an impartial third authority (the lawcourt),
recognition term originating in the philosophy of
which compensates the victim and protects the
G. W. F, Hegel, associaied more recently with the work of
perpetrator from reprisal by the victim.
Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth; refers to the striving of
social groups and individuals for respect as particular retributive term used by Emile Durkheim to refer to
groups or individuals with particular identities, rights, and pre-modern or tribal Justice systems in which offenders are
entitlements before the law and in civil society. punished directly in public by their victims or in the name
of their victims.
redemptive term originating in Judaeo-Christian
theology but not necessarily to be used in a religious secularization term deriving from the Latin word
sense; refers to the rescuing, compensating, or making saeculum, meaning the 'temporal age', in the sense of
good of something in history that has suffered violence, 'the order of time', not eternity; refers to the thesis that
derision, or oblivion in the present, by everyday habit or members of modern societies both gradually cease to
by a majority consensus believe in God and gradually cease to sustain structures of
organization in which religious faith determines the
reflexive sociology term in the work of Pierre Bourdieu,
constitution of public, legal, and political institutions,
meaning any practice of sociological enquiry capable of
including especially the relation of the state to the
considering itself as a possible object of sociological
Church, Seefurtherpp.21, 57-8, 75,266-9,
analysis and explanation.
reflexivity term meaning 'reference to oneself', self-reference term with a technical meaning in the
work of Niklas Luhmann, denoting the manner in which
'application to oneself', or 'reflection on oneself' The
an entity refers to itself in the act of referring to anything
subject of an action is simultaneously the object of the
which is not itself, as having an identity only insofar as it is
action (for example in the French reflexive verb s'habiller,
not something else. Luhmann's use of this term can be
'to get dressed' or 'to dress oneself'). The term implies
compared to structuralist and post-structuralist theories of
self-awareness, self- monitoring, and usually, though not
meaning in terms of relations of difference between
necessarily, self-criticism Reflexivity can pertain to
individual persons or to institutions. See further pp, 221-2. signifiers.
reification term deriving from the Latin word for 'thing', semiotics term deriving from the Greek word semeion,
res; used in Marxism with the meaning 'reduction to a meaning 'sign'; refers to theories of the generation of
meaning in texts and other symbolic objects through
thing', i.e. the reduction of persons, ideas, sensory
differential relationships between signs. See further
qualities, or expressive agencies to commodities or to pure
pp, 198-200,
objects of consumption, administration, or quantitative
categorization sex and gender terms conveying a distinction between
relativism term with a variety of contested definitions. In sex as an anatomical condition and gender as a cultural
the narrowest and least sustainable definition, relativism condition. Sex is said to be given, while gender is said to
is the view that any one person's point of view is as good be non-given, changing, and constructed. The distinction
as another's, or that 'anything goes'. More broadly, it is has been useful to feminist theorists in overturning
the view that truth (or other ultimate values such as essentializing definitions of woman and femininity, but has
been criticized by more recent feminists for overlooking
goodness or beauty) is not universal or absolute in its
the degree to which anatomical categories of sex and the
meaning or content but is best understood as what is
body are also historically changing and discursively
'accepted as true', or as 'what counts as true', for people
in particular cultures, societies, and periods of history. In constructed. See further pp. 236-7, 243-5.
social theory and philosophy, relativism is often used as
signifier and signified terms in semiotics and structural
a term of criticism, emphasizing that while values and
linguistics, where 'signifier' refers to a sign which denotes
beliefs have meaning only in definite social-historical
or connotes some meaning, and where 'signified' refers to
contexts and are
meanings signified by this sign. For example, in the US

philosophers; used today in international relations
national flag, the Stars and Stripes functions as the
contexts and globalization theory to refer to conflict
signifier and the USA functions as the signified.
between sovereign nation-states unregulated by any
simulacrum term in postmodernist theory, used higher legal or moral authority, like beasts of nature
principally by Jean Baudnllard, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre fighting for survival 1n the absence of common norms.
Klossowsk1, denoting copies that cannot be distinguished A 'global state of nature' would be the opposite of the
from the original things that they copy, thus collapsing all concept of a 'global ovil society'.
distinction between originals and non-originals, or
status group term used by Talcott Parsons to translate
between the 'real' and the 'fake'. In medieval theology,
Max Weber's 'Stand' which has the meaning of 'status·
simulacrum 1n Latin meant a false image of God. Beyond
and also the older meaning of 'estate'. Typically used in
these technical uses, 'simulacrum' usually means a
historical contexts, the term refers to groups 1n society
superficial (but untrue) likeness. See further pp. 264-6. possessing cultural advantages or positions of power that
social constructionism term refe,ring broadly to any may be cond1t1oned by economic factors and may lead to
theories that regard reality as socially 'constructed' or economic advantage but that are not themselves
'constituted' by individuals in contexts of interaction, as economic in nature; for example, priests, intellectuals,
an outcome of interpretive 'definitions of the situation'. lawyers, knights, or other members of the aristocracy. See
More narrowly, the term refers to pos1t1ons in the further pp. 72, 328.
sociology of science that regard scientific concepts not in- stratification term referring to hierarchical divisions in
terms of references to independently existing natural social structures, based on layered bands or 'strata' of
phenomena but in terms of aspects of social interaction types of individuals possessing different advantages and
and communication between scientists and their disadvantages according to different degrees of wealth,
laboratory environments; especially as used in the work of power, status, and education; a more technical term
Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, David Bloor, and others. for 'social inequality'.
See further
pp. 123-5,203-6 structural functionalism term synonymous with
the term 'functionalism', emphasizing the concern
societal term sometimes used in preference to 'social', of functionalist sociologists with sooal structures
denoting the more structural-systemic properties of and systems.
social life.
structuralism term referring to the work of French
solidarity term developed originally in the work of mile intellectuals in the middle decades of the twentieth
Durkheim, meaning the 'cement of society'; technically century influenced by the 'structural linguistics' of
referring to the nature and degree of integration Ferdinand de Saussure, as applied to diverse domains of
between constituent members of social collectives, the humanities and social sciences, referring to the work
irrespective of class differences and other inequalities. of Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan,
For Marxism, solidarity can obtain only within classes, in a Louis Althusser, and others. See further pp. 196-7.
consciousness of common class interests See further
pp. 53-4, 89, 97 structuration term in the work of Anthony Giddens,
synthesizing the concepts of structure and agency;
species-being term in the early writings of Marx, referring to the process by which a social system is
translating the German word Gattungswesen; taken from reproduced by individual actors through the mediation of
the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach; used to mean the true sornl structures See further pp. 217-20
sooal nature of human beings, which 1s said to be
distorted and degraded under conditions of capitalist subaltern term originally in the work of Antonio
alienation and market individualism. Gramsci, referring to the exclusion of working-class voices
from bourgeoisculture; more recently used in postcolonial
speech-act theory term referring to the work of the theory, especially by Gayatri Spivak (1998a) and in
linguistic philosophers John Austin and John Searle, Indian cultural studies, referring to dominated or
defining speech as involving action and performance oppressed groups who are excluded from hegemonic
in the world and as depending for its logical validity discourses
on the extent to which utterances by particular and are unable to find a hearing for their cause, in
speakers can be meaningfully responded to by other contrast to other dominated or oppressed groups
speakers in practical situations of interaction. See who do have a hearing within hegemonic discourses
further pp 125. and who attempt to advance their cause in terms of
state of nature term originating in the political thought these discourses.
of Thomas Hobbes and other seventeenth-century
subject term in philosophy referring to any being that is

understandings between ordinary people in everyday lrfe
capable of consciousness, which can speak, think about
that enable conversation and rnteractron but are not
itself, refer to itself and refer to objects, and be responsible
usually made an object of attention.
to itself or for itself. The subject is the ego, the 'I' Many
uses of this term In social theory imply an idea of the type technocracy term meaning technological domination,
of human personality that is exemplary for an entire either by the ubiquitous employment of machines and
epoch of history, or for the present. It can be said that the technical instruments or by systems of management and
subject of Western modernity is the rationally administration that prioritize technically efficient solutions
self-determin ng autonomous ind v1dual. to perceived problems, neglecting values of social and
political dialogue and respect for human dignity and
subjectivist term witlI the opposite meaning to
uniqueness. See further pp. 35.
'objectiv1st', referring to approaches that overemphasize
the relative importance of the subjective attitudes and teleological term with two basic contexts of use:
agency of individual participants in a research project, in (1) from the Greek word for 'goal', telos, referring to
contrast to the social scientist's observations about general action oriented to goals; or (2) referring to belief systems
social facts beyond the immediate awareness of any given that regard the universe or nature or history as having an
participant or group. The term can also refer to ultimate goal, purpose, or end-state. One example of a
approaches that allow the subjeruve attitudes of social teleological belief system is the medieval Christian
scientists themselves to have too much influence on the world-view of God's design in nature, viewing each
content of a piece of research. ltvrng creature as havrng a natural allotted purpose in
the order of things. More modern examples of
subjectivity term referring to the self-consciousness of
teleological ways of thinking have been ideas of the
the subject or the ego, implying inner life, self-reflection,
onward march of history toward liberal democracy (for
and autonomy, but also emotions, feelings,
example, Victorian liberalism) or toward communism
embodiment, desire, vulnerability, and f1nitude.
(for example, Soviet state doctrine).
subject-object term in Western Marxism, taken from
theoria term in Greek meaning 'contemplation', origin of
the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, particularly from the
our modern word 'theory'. See further pp. 1-3.
'd1alect1c of master and slave', defining the proletariat as
the initially passive object of capitalist exploitation which 'Third Way' term used in the later work of Anthony
gains insight into the production process and thereby Giddens, denoting the idea of an alternative to
becomes the active subject of history, seizing power in a state-directed sacral democracy and free-market
revolution; used especially in the idealistic writings of economics, based on a liberalized form of sacral
Gyorgy Lukacs. See further pp. 156-7. democracy appropriate for a global age. See
further pp 217.
synchronic term in functionaiism and French
structuralism, referring to the states and interrelationships totalitarian term referring to the one-party state
of phenomena at any given moment in time, in contrast to regimes of Nazi Germany under Hitler and the Sovret
'diachronic', referring to the transformation of empire under Stalin and his successors, more abstractly
phenomena over time. referring to any social and political regime based on total
integration of the 1ndiv1dual rnto a system of uniform
syncretism term referring to practices of creating cultural
expectations reinforced by the threat of violent sanction;
compounds or 'hybrids' from disparate elements with
for example, the 'Big Brother' society of George Orvvell's
multiple origins in different languages and societies
Nineteen Eighty-Four
systems theory term referring to the work of Niklas
totality term common in Western Marxism and French
Luhmann and other theorists; regarding society as
post-structuralist thought, suggesting the idea of a fully
consisting not of individuals or institutions but of systems
integrated, self-contained whole, tolerating nothing that
and subsystems related to one another in complex modes
cannot be incorporated into a system, whether this be a
and processes of communication; see also Buckley (1967).
system of thought (such as the idealist philosophy of
See further pp. 283 5.
Hegel) or a system of political control (such as the
tacit knowledge term in the work of Anthony Giddens, totalitarian state) Alternatively, the term may be used
originally coined by the philosopher Michael Polanyr simply to denote anything that is a composite whole.
(brother of Karl Polanyi); also developed by linguistic
totem term meaning an obJect, species of animal
philosophers, referring to taken-for-granted background
or plant, or natural phenomenon symbol zing1
330 GLO ·c;ARY OF TERMS
a clan, family, or tribe, usually with ritual associations,

logically constant in the structure of the theory but Is
especially in the aboriginal societies of Australia and the
open to empirical variation
Americas, regarded by mile Durkheim as the most
elementary symbol of the moral solidarity of the socidl verstehen term in German meaning ·understanding',
group and the most primitive image of the sacred. See in the sense of empathy or 'Imag1ning oneself In the
further pp. 58, 200. other's shoes'; used by Max Weber to describe the
aims of his own 'interpretive sociology' (verstehende
transnational term to be distinguished from
Soz,ologie). Se1> further pp. 65, 111-12.
'international', referring not to relatively well-regulated
relat1onsh1ps between nation-states or between Vienna Circle term referring to the group of posit1v1st
institutions more or less directly answerable to their home philosophers dnd scientists active in Vienna in the
nation-states but to emergent, often unregulated 1920s 1930s who defended the unity of science on the
relationships, exchanges, and flows of mobile capital, model of the natural sciences. regarding sooal science as
people, commodities, information and ideas across reducible to more basic sciences such as biology, chemistry,
nation-state boundaries See further pp. 294 6. and physics, included Montz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto
Neurath. and more loosely the young Ludwig W>ttgenstein.
unified theory term referr ng primarily to the work of
Talcott Parsons, involving pursuit of a scheme of mutually voluntaristic term in the work of Talcott Parsons,
consistent concepts with a systematic structure. See denoting the idea that while human action 1s constrained
further pp. 92. by social structures and systems. it is voluntary, based on
universalism term meaning true for all, or relevant to all, free will. not predetermined like the parts of a piece of
affecting all, or valid In all situations. not limited or local machinery. See further pp. 93.
In signif,cance, not context-bound but context-
Western Marxism term denoting Marxism as t developed
transcendent, relevant to humankind as a whole, a term
;n the twentieth century In Europe and North America after
often associated with the claims of the European
the Russ,an Revolution. but not in the Soviet Union and
Enlightenment but one with a normative logical content
not In Eastern Europe after 1945. See further pp. 154-
that need not be reduced to this historical context. (In
5
social policy the term has a more specific meaning,
denoting the pnnc,ple that welfare services should be Whiggish term referring to belief ii steady linear
available to,all by right and according to need, not progress in science and politics, especially towards liberal
restricted by individual abilities to pay.) democracy, deriving from the supporters of the Liberal
Party In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bntain,
utilitarian term associated with the writings of
known as the Whigs.
Jeremy Bentham. referring to the doctrine in
nineteenth-century English thought holding that the world systemstheory term in the work of Immanuel
greatest good of society consists in the maximization Wallerstein. referring to analyses of global historical social
of utility by, and for, individuals. See further pp. 24-5. change in terms of exploitative relat1onsh1ps between
economically dominant regional ·centres· and relatively
variables term denoting any element in a theory that
undeveloped or disadvantaged regional ·peripheries' or
can have different empirical states; any element that Is not
'semi-peripheries' See further pp. 149-50
BIOGRAPHIES OF THEORISTS
The following list of biographical entries provides brief reference information for prominent theorists
discussed in this book, as well as for some relevant historical personalities. Entries include references
to a small selection of the major works of named figures.
Addams, Jane (1860--1935) US feminist social reformer

ancient Greek thought; critic of social engineering and
and pacifist, influenced the work of the Chicago School
champion of politcal enlightenment Author of The
of sociology.
Qr,gins of Totalltarianism (1951), The Human Condition
Adorno, Theodor W. (1903-69). Marxist theorist, (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
member ot the Frankfurt School, influenced by Hegel and Banality of Evil (1963), and On Revolution (1963) See
German idealist philosophy, theorist of modernism 1n further pp, 3, 9-10, 36.
avant-garde art and music, hostile critic of mass culture
Aristotle (384-322 sc). Greek philosopher, student of
and the 'culture industry'. Author of Negative Dialectics
Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great; the most
(1966) and Aesthetic Theory (1970); co-author of Dialectic
influential philosopher of the ancient world in Christian
of Enlightenment (1947), with Max Horkheimer. See and Muslim philosophy of the Middle Ages. Author of
further pp. 162-4, 180-1
works on logic, ethics, politics, poetics, rhetor,c, zoology,
Alexander, Jeffrey (b 1947) US theorist, advocate of and metaphysics.
neo-functonalist theory and the rehab litanon of the work Aron, Raymond (1905-83). French liberal social theorist in
of Talcott Parsons. Author of Theoretical Logic in SoCJology the trad;tion of Alexis de Tocqueville, influenced by Max
(1982-4) Cn 4 vols.). See further pp. 106-7. Weber and German sociology, cnt1c of Marxist thought,
antagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre, supporter of post-war
Althusser, Louis (1918-90). French structuralist Marxist
Western European social democracy. Author of Opium of
theorist, 1nfluent1al in the 1970s, committed to a mental
the Intellectuals (1955) and Main Currents in Sociological
hospital after killing his wife. Author of For Marx (1965)
Thought (1965).
and Reading Capital (1970). See further pp. 167-8, 184-5.
Austin, John (1911-60). British philosopher of language
Anderson, Perry (b. 1938) British Marxist historian of the
influenced by Wittgenstein, originator of speech-act
rise of cap:talism and the breakdown of feudal
theory with John Searle, inventor of the concept of
monarchies; leading editorial figure in the New Left
'performat1ves' influencing Habermas, Derrida,
Review. Author of Lineages of the Absolutist State
and others. Author of How to Do Things with
(1974) and Passages from Ant1quiry to Feudalism
Words (1962).
(1974). See further pp. 147-9.
Bacon, Francis (1561-1626). English seventeenth-century
Apel, Karl-Otto (b. 1922). German philosopher of
philosopher of empir cism and free ind1v1dual enquiry; not
language and social science; demonstrated convergences
to be confused with the Irish twentieth-century modernist
between analytical philosophy of language, pragmatism,
painter Francis Bacon (1909-92), Author of Novum
and German hermeneutics; a close associate of Jurgen
Organon (1620) and Essays (1625).
Habermas. Author of Towards a transformation of
Philosophy (1973). Barrett, Michele (b. 1949). British feminist theorist of
material culture, influenced by Marxism. Author of
Archer, Margaret S. (b. 1943). British theorist of structure Women'.s Oppression Today(1980) See further pp.
and agency, sociologist of education and culture, advocate 239,243.
of realism in social theory. Author of Culture and Agency
Barthes, Roland (1915-80) French literary theorist and
(1988) and Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenet,c
critic pioneer of structuralist semiotics in lterary and
Approach (1995). See further pp. 227-9.
cultural criticism, a founding influence in contemporary
Arendt, Hannah (1906-75). German liberal political cultural studies Author of Mythologies (1957), Elements
philosopher, Jewish emigre to the USA; influenced by of Semiology (1964), SIZ(1970), and The Pleasure of the
Text (1973). See further pp. 199
332 810GRAPHIES OF THEORISTS
Bataille, Georges (1897-1962). French writer and

Benhabib, Sey/a (b. 1950). Turkish-born US feminist
anthropologist, influenced by Durkheim, Nietzsche,
theorist, influenced by Habermas and the Frankfurt
Marxism, and the surreal1st poets; wrote about eroticism,
School. Author of Critique, Norm and Utopia (1986) and
community, exchange, transgression, the sacred, and the
Situating the Self (1992).
'interior life'. Author of Story of the Eye (1928), Inner
Experience (1943), and Eroticism (1962). Benjamin, Jessica. US feminist psychoanalytic theorist.
influenced by the 'object relations' theories of the
Baudrillard, Jean (b. 1929). French postmodern
psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott.
theorist of the media and consumer culture; influenced
Author of The Bonds of Love (1988) and Like Subjects,
by semiotics, Marxism, and Marshall McLuhan; theorist
Love Objects (1995). See further pp. 188-9.
of media simulation and the 'disappearance of the real'.
Author of The Consumer Society(1970), The Mirror Benjamin, Walter (1892-1939). German Jewish
of Production (1973), Symbolic Exchange and Death Marxist theorist of culture. literature, and the
(1976), and Simulacra and Simulation (1981) See further mass media; loosely associated with the Frankfurt
pp, 167, 253, 263-5. School; a close correspondent of Theodor Adorno;
committed suicide in 1939 while trying to cross the
Bauman, Zygmunt (b. 1925). Polish-British theorist of
French-Spanish border to escape pursuit by Nazi
postmoderrnty and 'postmodern ethics'; influenced by
officers. Author of The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Marxism, ex1stent1alism, and Norbert Elias. Author of
(1928), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the
Reproduction (1936), Theses on the Philosophy
Holocaust(l 989), Intimations of Postmodernity (1992),
of History (1939). and The Arcades Project(1925-39).
Postmodern Ethics (1993). and Liquid Modemity(2000).
See further pp. 162, 188-9.
See further pp. 266-9, 296-7.
Bentham, Jeremy (1748--1832). British eighteenth- and
Beauvoir, Simone de (1908-86) French feminist
nineteenth-century moral philosopher, founder of
existentialist philosopher and novelist, influenced by
utilitarianism. Author of A Fragment on Government
Marxism; key figure in second-wave feminism; elaborated
(1776) and Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
the idea of women as 'Other' to a universal subject who
Leg1slat1on (1789). See further pp. 24-5.
Is unmarked as man; wife of Jean-Paul Sartre. Author of
The Second Sex (1949) and Adieux. A Farewell to Sartre Berger, Peter L. (b. 1929). Austrian-born sociologist based
(1984). See further pp. 243. in the USA, influenced by Alfred Schutz and
phenomenology; theorist of the sociology of religion,
Beck, Ulrich (b. 1944). German sociologist, theorist of risk,
knowledge, and culture. Author of The Sacred Canopy
'reflexive modernization', and globalization. Author of
(1963), The Homeless Mind (1973), and Oesecularization
The Risk Society (1986); co-author of The Normal Chaos
of the World (1999); co-author of The Social Construction
of Love (1990) with Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim.
of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge
See further pp. 286-7, 302.
(1966) with Thomas Luckmann. See further pp. 121.
Becker, Howard (b 1928). US sociologist influenced Bhaskar, Roy (b. 1944). British philosopher of social
by symbolic interact1onism and the Chicago School, sC1ence, influenced by Marxism, originator of 'critical
best known for work on deviance, medicine, and realism·. Author of A RealJSt Theory of Science (1975),
cultural institutions from an ethnographic perspective. The Possibility of Naturalism (1979), and Scientific
Author of Boys m White (1961), Outsiders (1963). and Realism and Human Emanc,pation (1986).
Art Worlds (1982). See further pp. 116. See further pp. 127, 227-9.
Bell, Daniel (b. 1919). US theorist of post-industrial society

Bloch, Ernst (1885-1977). German Marxist theorist,
and consumer capitalism. Author of The End of Ideology
close to the Frankfurt School, influenced by Hegel and
(1962), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973),
German theology. Author of The Principle of Hope
and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976).
(1952-59). See further pp. 158,167.
Blumenberg, Hans (1920-96). German historical theorist
Bendix, Reinhard (1916-91). German-American historical
of literature, metaphor, and scientific change; influenced
sociologist. influenced by Max Weber. Author of Work
by phenomenology, hermeneutics, and theological
and Authority in lndustry(1956), Max Weber: An
thought; recognized for studies of myth, symbolism, and
Intellectual Portrait (1960), and Nation-Building and
secularization; notably defended the idea of the
Citizenship (1964). See further pp 142
'legitimacy of the modern age' against Karl Low1th's
Bl OGRAPHIES OF THEORISTS 333
conception of secularization as a process of ontological

Marxism, semiotics, and hermeneutics. Author of
'decline' and 'desolation'. Author of The Legitimacy
The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975). See
of the Modern Age (1996), Work on Myth (1979), and
further pp. 275-6.
Genesis of the Copernican World (1975).
Chodorow, Nancy (b. 1944). US feminist psychoanalytic
Blumer, Herbert (1900-87). US sociologist based at
theorist, critically adapted Freud's theory of the Oedipus
Chicago, inventor of the term symbolic interactionism 1n
complex from a feminist standpoint. Author of The
1937; synthesized George Herbert Mead's pragmatist
Reproduction of Mothering (1978). See further pp. 186-8
philosophy and social psychology with the sociology of
W. I. Thomas and others. Author of Symbolic Chomsky, Noam (b. 1928) US theorist of linguistics and
lnteractionism: Perspective and Method (1969). See critic of behaviourism; inventor of the concept of
further pp. 110, 115-16. 'linguistic competence' based on a theory of 'generative
grammar'; also an outspoken critic of US imperialism and
Bourdieu, Pierre (1931-2002). French sociologist,
champion of anti-capitalism. Author of Aspects of the
influenced by Max Weber, Marxism, and structuralism;
Theory of Syntax (1965), Language and Mind (1968),
theorist of domination and the cultural reproduction of
American Power and the New Mandatins (1969), and
social inequality. Author of Outline of a Theory of
Manufactunng Consent (1979).
Practice (1972), Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgment of Taste (1979), The Logic of Practice (1980). Cicourel, Aaron (b. 1928). US sociologist, co-founder
and The Weight of the World (1993). See further of ethnomethodology with Harold Garfinkel;
pp. 221-9. theorist of conversation analysis, medical
communication, decision-making, and child
Braudel, Fernand (1902-85). French historian of the
socialization. Author of Method and Measurement in
Anna/es school; studied global historical processes from
Sociology (1964)
the perspective of la tongue duree ('the long term').
Author of Capitalism and Material Life (1967). Cohen, G. A. (b. 1941). Canadian-born political
philosopher of egalitarianism, pioneer of
Brecht, Bertolt (1898--1956). German Marxist theorist, 'analytical Marxism', applied functionalist
poet, and playwright; sought to use theatre and the mass principles to Marx's conception of historical
media as organs of political consciousness-raising, materialism. Author of Karl Marx's Theory of
involving the audience as active participants. Author of History: A Defense (1978).
The Three Penny Opera (1929) and The Rise and Fall of See further pp. 186.
the City of Mahagonny (1930) (in collaboration with the
composer Kurt Weill), and numerous theatrical works. Coleman, James (1927-95). US sociologist of education
and theorist of rational choice, influenced by economic
Butler, Judith (b. 1956). US feminist theorist, theory, advocate of methodological individualism,
influenced by Foucault and post-structuralism. Author critic of Parsons. Author of Mathematical
of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Sociology (1964) and Foundations of Social
Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Theory (1991). See further pp. 104-5.
Discursive Limits of Sex (1993). See further pp. 243-5.
Comte, Auguste (1798-1857). French nineteenth-century
Calvin, John (1509-64). Swiss-French theologian, the social thinker, founder of the terms 'positivism' and
second most influential figure in the Protestant 'sociology', upheld a theory of evolutionary social
Reformation of early modern Europe after Martin Luther; a progress. Author of Cours de philosophie positive
central focus of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and (1830) and Systeme de politique positive (1851).
the Spirit of Capitalism. Author of Institutes of the See further pp. 2, 4, 27-8, 112.
Christian Religion (1536). See further pp. 68-9.
Confucius (K'ung Fu-tse) (551-479 BC). Ancient Chinese
Castells, Manuel (b. 1942). Spanish-American theorist philosopher who emphasized moral order, tradition,
of globalization, cities, information technology, and the virtue, and gentlemanly education among the Chinese
network society. Author of The Information Age: mandarins or officers of state. Author of The Analects of
Economy, Society and Culture (1996-2000) (in 3 vols). Confucius (compiled posthumously)
Cooley, Charles H. (1864-1929). US sociologist,
Castoriadis, Cornelius (1922-97). Greek-French theorist influenced the Chicago School, best known for his idea of
of social agency and the radical imagination; influenced the 'looking-glass self'. Author of Human Nature and
by Social Order (1902). See further pp 115.
334 riOGRAPHitS OF THEORiSTS
Oahrendorf, Ralf (b. 1929). German-oorn liberal

Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833-1911). German hermeneutic
sociologist based in Britain, influenced by Max Weber,
philosopher, influential in early twentieth-century German
critic of functionalism, advocate of conflict theory, theorist
sociology; critic of posit1v1sm and progenitor of historicism
of social class in a non-Marxist framework Author of
as a methodology for the human sciences. Author of
Class and Class Conflict (1959). See further pp. 100.
Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883). See further
Darwin, Charles (1809-82). English nineteenth-century pp 112
scientist, founder of the theory of evolution by natural
Douglas, Mary (b. 1921). British anthropologist, theorist
selection. Author of The Origin of Species (1859)
of cultural class,ficat1on systems, symbolic boundaries, and
and The Descent of Man (1872).
risk. Author of Purity and Danger (1966), Natural Symbols
Debord, Guy (1931-94). French Marxist theorist of (1970), Risk and Culture (1982), and How Institutions
consumerism and anti-capitalism; central figure in Think (1986) See further pp. 122.
the Situationist International, a group of radicals
Dreyfus, Alfred (1895-1935). French Jewish army officer,
prominent in the French 1968 movement. Author of
innocently accused of treason and imprisoned in 1893;
The Society of the Spectacle (1967).
released in 1899 after a pardon overturning a retrial which
Oeleuze, Gilles (1925-95). French theorist, influenced by returned a second false verdict of guilt. The case dvided
Marxism, Nietzsche, structuralism, and psychoanalysis; France between anti-Semitic Catholic forces and liberal
theorist of technology, cinema, the body,.and physical life; progressive forces. In 1898, the novelist l:mile Zola wrote
critic of phenomenology and of liberal humanistic a famous letter-'J'accuse'-defend1ng Dreyfus and
thought. Author of Diffr>rence and Repetition (1968) and accusing his accusers. Durkheim identified with the
Logic of Sense (1969); co-author with Felix Guattari of defenders of Dreyfus, the 'Dreyfusards'. Durkheim's
Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) essay 'lnd1v1dualism and the Intellectuals' addressed
See further pp. 191-3. the implications of the case for French democracy.
Derrida, Jacques (1930--2004). French theorist of Durkheim, tmile (1858-1917). French founder of the
deconstruction, associated with post-structuralism; discipline of sociology and founder of the journal L'Annee
influenced by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Saussure, and structural sociologique; uncle of Marcel Mauss. Author of The
linguistics; leading theorist of t xtual ambiguity, 'differance', Division of Labour (1893), The Rules of Sociological
and 'logocentrism'. Author of Of Grammatology(1967), Method (1895), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary
Writing and Difference (1968), Margins of Philosophy Forms of Religions Life (1912). See further pp. 51-60.
(1972), Speech and Phenomena (1973), and Spectres of
Eisenstadt, Shmuel (b. 1923). Israeli comparative historical
Marx(1992). See further pp. 202-6, 253-4
sociologist of civilizations; influenced in early work by
Descartes, Rene (1596--1650). French seventeenth functionalism; later work advocating a conception of
century rationalist philosopher, regarded as the founder of 'multiple modernities' influenced by Karl Jaspers's thesis
modern philosophy and modern geometry; proponent of of the 'axial age civilizations' Author of The Political
a dualistic theory of mind and body (also known as Systems of Empires (1963); editor of The Origins and
'Cartesian dualism') which has been the object of criticism Diversity of
in twentieth-century social thought. Author tif Discourse the Axial Age Civilisations (1986). See further pp. 136--7.
on Method (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy
Elias, Norbert (1893-1990). German Jewish sociologist,
(1641). See further pp. 20.
em1gre to Britain and the Netherlands, theorist of conflict,
Dewey, John (1859-1952). American pragmatist socialization, and the 'civilizing process'. Author of The
philosopher of education, democracy, religion, art, and Civilizing Process (1939), The Court Society(1969), and
civic well-being; defined all values with reference to The Germans (1989). See further pp. 141-4, 222.
'experience' conducive to reasonable conduct and
effective practice. Author of Democracy and Education Elster, Jon (b. 1940). Norwegian-born theorist of rational
choice; applied methodological individualist principles to
(1916), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), The Quest
the study of Marx and the philosophy of social science in
for Certainty (1929), and A Common Faith (1934).
general. Author of Ulysses and the Sirens (1979),
Making Sense of Marx (1985), and The Cement of
Society (1989).
Diderot, Denis (1713-84) French Enlightenment

Engels, Friedrich (1820-95). German-born inheritor of
philosopher; a sharp critic of European cultural beliefs,
industrial interests in Manchester; lifelong intellectual and
customs, and soci<1I conventions Director of the
financial supporter of Karl Marx; disseminated Marx's
French Encyclopedie (1745-72).
ideas after his death. Author of Anti-Duhring (1878), The
lllOGRAPHll:S OF THEOl!ISP 335
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884),

Franklin, Benjamin (1706-90) American statesman,
and The Condition of the Working-Class in England in
scientist, and inventor; ambassador to France; involved in
1844 (1887); co-author of The German Ideology (1846)
the drafting of the Declaration of Independence of 1776;
and The Communist Manifesto (1848) with Karl Marx;
Puritan moralist famous for the slogan 'time Is money',
also editor of vols. 2 and 3 of Capital by Marx.
a key case figure in Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and
Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536). Dutch Renaissance the Spirit of Capitalism.
social critic; leading humanist scholar of classical antiquity
Fraser, Nancy. US feminist theorist of social recognition
in northern Europe during the Protestant Reformation,
and the politics of identity, influenced by critical theory.
friend of Thomas More; published the first Greek edition
Author of Unruly Practices (1989) and Justice lnterruptus
of the New Testament ir, 1516. Author of In Praise
(1997); co-author of Redistnbution or Recognition?
of Folly (1509).
(2003) with Axel Honneth. See further pp. 242.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1902-73). British anthropologist;
Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939). Austrian Jewish psychiatrist
studied African tribes in southern Sudan, including
and founder of psychoanalysis, reviled by the Nazis. Author
witchcraft beliefs among the Azande tribe; influenced
of The Interpretation of Dreams (1902), Beyond the Pleasure
debates about rationality and relativism in anthropology
Principle (1920), The Future of an Illusion (1927), and
and the philosophy of social science, especially in the work
Civilization and its Discontents (1930). See further pp. 175-9.
of Peter Winch. Author of Witchcraft, Oracles and
Magic among theAzande (1937) and The Nuer(1940) Friedan, Betty (b. 1921). US feminist and social reformer;
See further pp. 126. regarded as the most influential figure in the early years of
the post-war American movement for women's rights;
Fanon, Frantz (1925-61). Algerian anti-colonial activist,
founder of the National Organization for Women in 1966.
theorist of racism and imperialism; influenced by Sartre's
existentialist Marxism; prominent in the Algerian war of Author of The Feminine Mystique (1963). See further
independence against France in the 1950s. Author of pp. 103,247
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Wretched of the Fromm, Erich (1900-80). German social psychologist,
Earth(1961). See further pp. 34,167. emigre to the USA. early brief associate of the Frankfurt
Ferguson, Adam (1723-1815). Scottish Enlightenment School; combined Freudian psychoanalysis with social
historical writer and philosopher, wrote on conflict and critique. Author of The Art of Loving (1956) and To Have
the division of labour in society. Author of An Essay on and To Be (1976). See further pp. 160, 180.
Civil Society (1767). Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1900-2002). German
Feuerbach, Ludwig (1804-72). German nineteenth hermeneutic philosopher, influenced by Martin Heidegger;
century philosopher, follower and critic of Hegel; argued defined hermeneutics as a practice of the interpretation of
that God is the projection of man and an expression of existence, history, and tradition founded in dialogue
human alienation, influencing Karl Marx's materialist between the past and the present; an early influence on
critique of religion and idealist metaphysics. Author of Jurgen Habermas. Author of Truth and Method (1960)
The Essence of Christianity (1841) and Basic Propositions See further pp. 125-7.
of the Philosophy of the Future (1843). Galbraith, John Kenneth (b. 1908). US economist,
Feyerabend, Paul (1924-94). Austrian philosopher of concerned with the fate of the public interest in capitalist
science, emigre to the USA; early advocate of positivism, economies. Author of The Affluent Saeler; (1958) and
later advocate of strong relativism or 'epistemological Economics and the Public Purpose (1973) See further
anarchism'; famous for the provocative slogan that in pp. 140-1.
science 'anything goes'. Author of Against Method
Garfinkel, Harold (b. 1917). US sociologist, founder of
(1975) See further pp. 123.
ethnomethodology, theorist of tacit rules in social
Foucault, Michel (1926-84). French theorist of power, communication and interaction. Author of Studies in
knowledge, science, history, discourse, subjectivity, and Ethnomethodology (1967). See further pp.110, 117-19.
sexuality, influenced by structuralism and Nietzsche.
Geertz, Clifford (b. 1923). US anthropologist, associated
Author of Madness and Civilization (1961), The Order
with a 'cultural turn' in social science modelled on the
of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), and reading of texts, best known for his concept of 'thick
The History of Sexuality (1976-84) (in 3 vols.). See further description'. Author of The Interpretation of Cultures
pp. 201-12. (1973) and Local Knowledge (1983). See further pp. 122.
336 BIOGRAPHIES OF THEORISTS
Gellner, Ernest (1925-95) Czech-born anthropologist

Bergson; theorist of collective memory and material
and philosopher of history based in Britain until 1993;
culture. Author of Population and Society (1938), The
commentator on Islam, nationalism, civil society,
Causes of Suicide (1930), Collective Memory (1950),
relativism, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. Author of
and The Psychology of Social Class (1955).
Relativism and the Social Sciences (1985), Plough, Sword
and Book (1988), Reason and Culture (1992), and Hall, Stuart (b. 1932). Jamaican-British theorist of
Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992). ethnicity, difference, and cultural marginality, influenced
by Marxism and post-structuralism; founder of the
Giddens, Anthony (b. 1939). British theorist, influenced
Birmingham school of cultural studies; pioneer of
by Durkheim and Max Weber, exponent of 'structuration
postcolonial theory and criticism. Author of Hard Road to
theory' based on synthesis of the concepts of structure
Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left
and agency; advocate in later work of a Third Way'
(1988); editor of Culture, Media, Language: Working
between state-directed soC1al democracy and free-market
economics. Author of The Class Structure of the Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79 (1980) and New
Advanced Societies (1973), The Constitution of Society Times (1989) with Martin Jacques. See further pp. 168-
70.
(1984), The Consequences of Modernity (1990),
Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), and The Third Way Haraway, Donna (b. 1944) US feminist theorist of
(1998). See further pp. 217-20. technoscience; formulated a 'Cyborg Manifesto'
questioning traditional distinctions between culture and
Goffman, Erving (1922-82). US sociologist, influenced by
nature, humans and animals, and 'man' and 'machine'.
symbolic interactionism; exponent of a 'aramaturgical"
Author of Primate Visions (1989), Simians, Cyborgs
perspective in social analysis and theorist of 'outsiders'
and and Women (1991), and The Companion Species
·total institutions'. Author of The Presentation of (2003).
Self in Everyday Life (1956), Asylums (1961), and Stigma
(1963).Seefurtherpp.110, 116-17. Harding, Sandra (b. 1935). US feminist philosopher of
science, exponent of feminist standpoint epistemology.
Gouldner, Alvin (1920-80). US sociologist, influenced by
Author of The Science Question in Feminism (1986)
functionalism in early work; later a stern critic of
functionalism as politically conservative. Author of and Whose Scrence, Whose Knowledge? (1991)
The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970) and Harre, Rom (b. 1927) New Zealand-born philosopher of
For Sociology(1973). See further pp. 102. science and social psychologist based in Britain and the
USA; theorist of realism in science, favouring an
Gramsci, Antonio (1891-1937) Italian Marxist theorist,
1nteract1onist approach 1n preference to naturalistic and
co-founder of the Italian Communist Party; imprisoned
by the fascist regime under Mussolini from 1926 until structuralist variants of realism. Author of Social Bemg
his death. Author of Selections from the Prison (1980); co-author with Paul Secord of The Explanation of
Notebooks (1926-37). See further pp. 6-7, 157-9. Social Behaviour (1972). See further pp. 126.
Hayek, Friedrich (1899-1992). Austrian-born economist,

Guattari. Felix (1930-92). French Marxist theorist,
influenced by psychoanalysis and structuralism. Co-author critic of socialism. advocate of free-market principles.
Author of The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The
with Gilles Deleuze of Anti-Oeoipus (1972) and A
Constitution of Liberty (1960) See further pp. 14G-1.
Thousand Plateaus (1980) See further pp. 192.
Hegel, Georg W. F. (1770-1831). German nineteenth
Habermas, Jurgen (b. 1929). German theorist of
century philosopher, the most systematic
communication, democracy, universal political values, and
the public sphere; second-generation associate of the representative of German idealist philosophy in the
Frankfurt School in the 1960s; early work influenced by early nineteenth century after Immanuel Kant; an early
Hegelian Marxism; later work from the late 1970s influence on Marx and influential in twentieth-century
onwards moved closer to liberal political philosophy, Western
pragmatism, and linguistic theory. Author of Structural Marxism; celebrated (among other reasons) for his
Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), conception of the 'dialectic of master and slave· in which
Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), The Theory the slave 1s said to triumph over the master insofar as the
of Communicative Action (1981), and Between Facts master depends on the slave for vital needs, a thesis
notably developed in the writing of the French
and Norms (1992). See further pp. 125-7, 164-5, 279-83.
phenomenological philosopher Alexandre Kojeve.
Halbwachs, Maurice (1877-1945). French sociologist, Author of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and
influenced by Durkheim and the philosopher Henri The Philosophy of Right (1821). See further pp. 6.
Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976). German existentialist

philosopher; developed Husserl's phenomenological
philosophy into a comprehensive analysis of Being and

exponent of a communicative theory of social justice
human existence; influenced post-war European
based on recognition for injured and excluded social
philosophy; regarded modern science and metaphysics as
parties. Author of The Struggle for Recognition (1992).
a derivative mode of understanding in relation to the
fundamental problems of existence; compromised by hooks, bell (b. 1952) (nee Gloria Watkins). US feminist
support for Hitler in the 1930s. Author of Being and theorist of race, racism, emancipation, and education,
Time (1927). See further pp. 126. influenced by the pedagogical theorist Paulo Friere.
Author of Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism
Held, David (b. 1951). British theorist of globalization,
(1981), Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
especially of the idea of 'global civil society' and
(1989), Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics
'cosmopolitan democracy' as normative possibilities.
Author of Democracy and the Global Order (1995) See
further pp. 306. Horkheimer, Max (1895-1973) German critical theorist;
became director of the Institute for Social Research at
Heller, Agnes (b. 1929). Hungarian-born theorist based in
Frankfurt in 1930; central founding figure of the Frankfurt
the USA, influenced by Gyorgy Lukacs, Marxism, and
School; returned to Frankfurt in 1949 after emigration to
phenomenology. Author of A Theory of History (1982)
the USA. Author of Traditional and Critical Theory
and Theory of Modernity (1999) See further pp. 276-8.
(1937); co-author of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)
Hirschman, Albert 0. (b. 1915). US economist and with Theodor Adorno. See further pp. 160-1, 163--4.
historian, theorist of industrial relations, social trust, and
Hume, David (1711-76). Scottish Enlightenment
economic development. Author of Exit, Voice and Loyalty
philosopher, sceptic, and empiricist; examined the nature
(1970) and The Passions and the Interests (1977). See of induction, causation, and personal identity. Author of
further pp. 26.
A Treatise of Human Nature (1740).
Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679). English seventeenth
Husserl, Edmund (1859-1938). German Jewish
century political philosopher; defender of the absolute
philosopher, founder of phenomenological philosophy;
sovereignty of the monarch; celebrated chiefly for his
influential in interpretive approaches to soC1al enquiry,
book Leviathan (1651), which argued that subjects must especially in the work of Alfred Schutz and Maurice
obey the sovereign to the extent that the sovereign Merleau-Ponty; progenitor of the concepts of
protects them from violent death at the hands of 'intersubjectivity', the 'lifeworld', and 'phenomenological
enemies. Insofar as individuals agree to obey a reduction'. Author of Logical Investigations (1901),
sovereign, they depart from what Hobbes called the Cartesian Meditations (1929), and The Crisis of the
'state of nature', marked by a 'war of all against all'
European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
where all individuals pursue conflicting egoistic desires. (1936). See further pp. 3, 113.
Hobbes wrote in the context of the English Civil War of
1640-60. James, William (1842-1910). American pragmatist
philosopher and psychologist; influenced early
Hobsbawm, Eric (b. 1917). British Marxist historian of twentieth-century European thinkers; brother of the
modern Europe since the French Revolution. Author of novelist Henry James. Author of The Principles of
The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital Psychology (1890), Varieties of Religious
(1975), The Age of Empire (1987), and The Age of
Experience (1902), and Pragmatism (1907).
Extremes (1994). See further pp. 26.
Jameson, Fredric (b. 1934). US Marxist cultural theorist;
Haggart, Richard {b, 1918). British historian of working influenced by the Frankfurt School and French literary
class culture, writer on education, influential in the first theory. Author of Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic
wave of British cultural studies. Author of The Uses of of Late Capitalism (1991). See further pp. 265-6.
Literacy (1957). See further pp.168-9.
Jaspers, Karl (1883-1969). German existentialist
Homans, George (1910-89). US sociologist, philosopher, influenced by Max Weber; propounded a
proponent of social behaviourism based on thesis of the ·axial age civilizations' of ancient Greece,
methodological individualism; critic of Talcott Parsons; Israel, Persia, China, and India between 800 and 200 BC,
exponent of exchange theory, with Peter Blau. Author of seen as key determining episodes in the course of world
The Human Group (1951) and Social Behaviour (1961). history. Author of The Ongin and Goal of History (1949).
Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826). Third president of the
Honneth, Axel (b. 1949). German critical theorist USA (1801-9), chief architect of the Declaration of
influenced by Habermas and the Frankfurt School;
Independence of 1776, and chief opponent of the

relativistic and anti-realist conceptions of science.
centralizing pol c1es of the Federalists ed by James
Author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Hamilton during the formation of the American
Constitution.
Lacan, Jacques (1901-81) French psychoanalyst;
Kant. Immanuel (1724-1804). Prussian Enlightenment
interpreted the work of Sigmund Freud in terms of
philosopher; the most inf1uential figure 1 modern
structural lingu sties; best known for his statement that
philosophy after Descartes; argued in opposition to
'the unconscious is ,tructured like a language'
eighteenth-century British empiricist philosophy that the
Author of tcrits (1966). See further pp. 181-3, 189-91.
possibility of knowledge of the world depends upon
certain 'transcendental' a pnori concepts and categories Latour. Bruno (b. 1947). French anthropologist and
that are supplied by the human mind and are not given in philosopher of science; theorist of scientific practice
experience. Author of The Critique of Pure Reason and legal reasoning in etrnographic terms, including
(1781), The Critique of Practical Reason (1788). and The non-human agency 1n relation to physical artefacts and
Critique of Judgment(1790). See further pp 22, 43, 112. instruments; associated with social construct1onism;
pioreer of actor-network theory (with Michel Callon)
Keynes. John Maynard (1883-1946) British economist; Author of The Pasteurization of France (1988), We
advocate of active government fiscal policy to achieve high
Have Never Been Modern (1991), and Pandora's Hope
levels of employment; influential in the foundation of
(1999); co-author of Laboratory Ute (1979) with Steve
welfare states after 1945 Author of The General Theory
Woolgar See further pp. 124.
of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).
Lefebvre, Henri (1901-91). French Marxist
Kohlberg, Lawrence (1927-87). US psychologist, phenomenological theorist. pioneer of spatial analysis 1n
influenced by Jean Piaget; theorist of cognitive relation to social deprivation and inequality, especially in
development and moral reasoning from a psychological
urban research. Author of The Critique of Everyday Life
perspective; influenced Habermas·s theory of
(1947) and The Production of Space (1974).
communicative action. Author of Essays on Moral
Development (1981) Levinas, Emmanuel (1905-95). French philosopher,
influenced by phenomenology, ex•stentialism, and
Kojeve. Alexandre (1902-68). French phenomenological Jewish theology; developed a moral philosophy
philosopher; humanistic interpreter of Hegel's 'dialectic emphasizing the dialog1cal relationship of the self to the
of master and slave·, later rnt1c1zed by the Frencn
'face of the Other' as a primordial fact of ex stence;
post structuralist theorists. Author of Introduction to influencing themes in debates about postmodernism
the Reading of Hegel (1947) that focus on unique non-generalizable ethical situations,
Korsch, Karl (1889--1961). German Marxist theorist. such as in the work of Zygmunt Bauman and
influenced by Hegelian dialectical thought Author of others. Author of Totality and lnfin,ty(1961) and
Marxism and Philosophy (1923) and Karl Marx (1938). Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1974).
See further pp. 157 Levi-Strauss, Claude (b. 1908). French anthropologist,
pioneer of structuralism in anthropology, following
Kracauer, S egfr ed (1889-1956). German cultural theorist.
Ferdinand oe Saussure's structura linguistics Author of
emigre to the USA; theorist of film and photography,
popular culture and the metropolis, influenced by S1mmel The Elementary Structures of Krnsh1p (1949), Tristes
and Marxism; close friend of Walter Benjamin and Tropiques (1955), Structural Anthropology (1958),
Theodor Adorno. Author of The Mass Ornament (1931}. The Savage Mind (1966), and Mythologies (1964--71}.
From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the See further pp. 200-202.
German Film (1947). and Theory of Film (1960), Lipset, Seymour Martin (b. 1922). US sociologist; studied
democracy and democratization 1n comparative historical
Kristeva, Julia (b. 1941). French-Bulgarian feminist
perspective Author of Political Man (1960) and The First
psychoanalytic theorist and literary critic, influenced by
New Nation (1963) See further pp. 138.
semiotics. Author of Revolution in Poetic Language
(1974) and Tales of Love (1983). See further pp. 189-91. Locke, John (1632- 704). Eng 1sh seventeenth-century
philosopher of Pmpincism; theorist of liberal democracy
Kuhn, Thomas (1922-96) US historian and philosopher
and the origins of private property; supporter of
of science; theorized the history of ,uence in terms of
religious toleration and separation of Church and
discontinuous 'paradigm shifts', casting doubt on linear
state; influential in eighteenth-century France and
progress ,n science; regarded as preparing the ground for
North America. Author of An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1690) and Two Treatises on

Lyotard, Jean-Fran ois (1924-98) French theorist of
Government (1690).
postmodernism; influenced by Marxism, psychoanalysis,
Lockwood, David (b. 1929). British sociologist, theorist and post-structuralism; defined postmodernity in terms of
of social inequality and critic of functionalism; the 'end of grand narratives' or 'scepticism toward
distinguished between 'social integration' and 'system meta-narratives·. Author of The Postmodern Condition
integration·. (1979) and The Differend (1983). See further
Author of Blackcoated Worker (1958) and Solidarity and pp.253-4, 256-8.
Schism (1992). See further pp. 102.
Machiavelli, Niccolo (1469-1527). Italian Renaissance
Lowenthal, Leo (1900-93). German Marxist theorist. political philosopher; adviser to the ruling Medici family of
member of the Frankfurt School, emigre to the USA; Florence; separated moral considerations from political
compiled studies of fascism, consumption, and the mass expediency; associated with the view that in politics 'the
media, including film and the sociology of literature, as end justifies the means'. Author of The Prince (1512).
well as anti-communist hysteria in the USA in the 1950s.
McLuhan, Marshall (1911-80). Canadian theorist of the
Author of Literature and the Image of Man (1957),
mass media, originator of the slogan 'the medium is the
Literature, Popular Culture and Society (1961), and False
message'; influential in postmodern media theory. Author
Prophets: Studies on Authoritarianism (repr. 1987) of Understanding Media (1964).
Lowith, Karl (1897-1973) German-born philosopher of Maine, Henry (1822--88). English Victorian lawyer and
history, emigre to the USA, influenced by German historian; described the passage from ancient to modern
philosophy and theology, especially by Martin society as a transition from status to contract; influential in
Heidegger; viewed the rise of the modern world in terms late nineteenth-century English and French sociology.
of a process of secularization and ontological Author of Ancient Law (1861).
subjectivization in which individuals lose a sense of
connectedness to a transcendent realm; notably Malinowski, Bronislaw (1884-1942). Polish-born
criticized by Hans Blumenberg in relation to the anthropologist based in Britain; pioneer of anthropological
question of the 'legitimacy of the modern age' Author of fieldwork in a functionalist framework; famously studied gift
exchange systems among inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands
From Hegel to Nietzsche
in north-western Melanesia. Author of Argonauts of the
(1941), Meaning in History(1949), and Max Weber and
Karl Marx (repr. 1982). Western Pacific (1922), The Sexual Life of Savages (1932),
and A Soentific Theory of Culture (1944). See further pp. 88.
Luckmann, Thomas (b. 1927). Austrian sociologist,
Mann, Michael (b. 1942) British-born historical
influenced by Alfred Schutz and phenomenological
sociologist; recognized for work on the history of social
philosophy; edited Schutz's later unfinished writings on
power. Author of The Sources of Social Power (1986,
'structures of the lifeworld'. Co-author of The Social
vol. i; 1993, vol. ii). See further pp. 148.
Construction of Reality (1966) with Peter Berger. See
further pp. 121 Mannheim, Karl (1893-1947). Hungarian-born theorist
based in Germany until 1933 before emigrating to Britain;
Luhmann, Niklas (1927-98). German theorist of social
influenced by phenomenology and German historicism;
systems, influenced by Talcott Parsons and cybernetic
founding theorist and methodologist of the sociology of
theory; critic of Habermas. Author of The Differentiation
knowledge and the sociology of culture. Author of
of Society (1970) and Social Systems (1984). See further
Conservatism (1925), Ideology and Utopia (1929), Essays
pp. 283-5.
on the Sociology of Knowledge (1952), and Essays on
Lukacs, Gyorgy (Georg) (1885-1971). Hungarian Marxist the Sociology of Culture (1956). See further pp. 120-1.
theorist influenced by Hegel, German philosophy,
Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979). German-born Marxist
Weber, and Simmel; became in later work a rather
theorist, emigre to the USA; member of the Frankfurt
dogmatic adherent of Soviet communism. Author of
School; influential in the American 1968 peace
Theory of the Novel (1910), History and Class
movement. Author of Reason and Revolution (1941),
Consciousness (1923), and The Destruction of Reason
Eros and Civilization (1955), and One-Dimensional Man
(1955). See further pp. 156--7.
(1964). See further pp. 166, 180-1.
Luther, Martin (1483-1 546). German sixteenth-century
Marshall, Alfred (1842-1924) English economist;
religious thinker; leader of the Protestant Reformation in synthesized classical political economy with the theory of
northern Germany; believed that salvation was to be
'marginal utility'. Author of The Principles of Economics
sought 'by faith alone', not by tribute to the Church or by
(1890).
outward deeds; translated the Bible into German in
1521-46.
Marshall, T. H. (Thomas Humphrey) (1883-1981). British

Author of The State in Capitalist Society(1969) and Class
theorist of social policy, welfare, and social citizenship.
Power and State Power (1983).
Author of Citizenship and Social Class (1949) and The
Right To Welfare (1981). See further pp. 138-9 Mill, John Stuart (1806-73) English Victorian empiricist
philosopher; classical theorist of liberalism in politics.
Marx, Karl (1818-83). German philosopher, resident in
Author of A System of Logic (1843) and On Liberty (1859)
Britain for most of his life; influenced principally by
German idealist philosophy, British economic theory, and
French Enlightenment political thought. Author of Mills, C. Wright (1916-62) US theorist of conflict, power,
Grundrisse (1858) and Capital, vol. i (1867); co-author class, stratification, and elites; critic of Talcott Parsons.
of The German Ideology (1846) and The Communist Author of White Col/ar(1951), The Power E/ite(1956), and
Manifesto (1848) with Friedrich Engels. See further The Sociological Imagination (1959). See further pp. 100.
pp. 41-9, 59-60.
Mitchell, Juliet (b. 1940). British socialist feminist.
Mauss, Marcel (1872-1950). French anthropologist and influenced by psychoanalysis. Author of Psychoanalysis
sociologist, nephew of !':mile Durkheim; editor of the and Feminism (1974). See further pp. 185
journal L'Annee sociologique; studied practices of gift
Montaigne, Michel de (1533-92). French Renaissance
exchange n primitive societies in terms of relations of
historical thinker and moral sceptic; critic of European
power, obligation, and reciprocity; influenced
prejudices. Author of Essays (c. 1571-92).
structuralist anthropology, including the work of Claude
Levi-Strauss. Author of The Gift (1925); co-author of Montesquieu, Baron de (1689-1755). French
Primitive Classification (1903) with !':mile Durkheim. Enlightenment political philosopher; influential in the
French and American revolutions; argued for separation
Mead, George Herbert (1863-1931). American pragmatist
between the powers of the legislature, the executive, and
philosopher and social psychologist; theorist of the self.
the judiciary. Author of The Spirit of the Laws (1748).
socialization, communication, language, and personal
agency; a major influence on the symbolic interactionists. Moore, Barrington (b. 1913). US comparative historical
Author of Mind, Self and Society (1934) and Philosophy sociologist; examined the power bases of modern states.
of the Act (1938). See further pp. 110, 114-15. Author of Social Ongins of Dictatorship and Democracy
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908-61). French
phenomenological philosopher, influenced by Edmund More, Thomas (1478-1535) English Renaissance social
Husserl and Martin Heidegger; defined human critic and statesman under Henry VIII, friend of Erasmus
subjectivity from the standpoint of the 'lived body' of the of Rotterdam. Author of Utopia (1516).
self as a sensory-motor agency of feelings, sensations,
Mosca, Gaetano (1858-1941). Italian theorist of
desires, and intentions that pre-structure the conscious
oligarchies and elites; close to the work of Pareto and
life of the mind, criticizing Cartesian dualism,
Michels. Author of The Ruling Class (1896) See further
emphasizing human finitude, praxis, and everyday life;
pp. 28 30.
defended a humanistic form of Marxism, with some
similarities to the existentialist Negri, Antonio (b. 1933) Italian Marxist theorist of Left
Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Author of The autonomy; theorist of globalization and anti-capitalism;
Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Humanism and exiled from Italy by the Italian government until 1998 on
Terror (1947), and Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) grounds of suspected involvement in Left terrorism in the
1970s. Co-author of Empire (2000) with Michael Hardt.
Merton, Robert (1910-2003). US theorist; examined the
sociology of deviance, organizations, knowledge, and
science in a functionalist framework; espoused theories of Neumann, Franz (1900-54) German legal theorist, early
the 'middle range' (mediating between grand theory and associate of the Frankfurt School; emigre to the USA;
non-theory) Author of Social Theory and Social defended democracy and the rule of 1mpart1al formal law
Structure (1949; 2nd edn. 1968) See further pp. 90-2. within a socialist framework, criticizing Carl Schmitt's
conservative attack on parliamentary democracy and the
Michels, Robert (1876-1936). Swiss-Italian theorist of
rise of fascism in Germany 1n the 1920s and 1930s.
oligarchies, elites, and political parties; student of Max
Author of Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of
Weber, close to the work of Mosca and Pareto. Author of
National Socialism (1942).
Political Parties (1911). See further pp. 28-30.
Neurath, Otto (1882-1945). Austrian philosopher and
Miliband, Ralph (1924-94) Belgian-born Marxist theorist
theorist of logical positivism; member of the Vienna Circle,
based in Britain; theorist of stratification and state power.
developed a system for the visual display of quantitative

'disembedding' of istor1cal cultural traditions. Author of
information known as the V,enna Method or lsotype.
The Great Transformation (1944). See further pp 000-0.
Author of Foundations of the Soc,al Sciences (1944)
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900) German nineteenth Popper, Karl (1902 94) Austrian liberal phi'osopher
century philosopher; forerunner of existentialism and of science based in Britain, linked to the Vienna Circle in
philosopher of nihilism; celebrated for his conception of early work, later became a critic of logical positivism,
the 'superman' (Obermensch) based on 'sovereign propounding a theory of 'fdlsificdtion' based on
personality', and for his doctrine of the 'death of God'. acceptance of scientific theories until shown to be false;
also a proponent of the concept of the 'open society'
Author of The Birth of Tragedy(1872), The Gay Science
based on liberal critique of Hegelian-Marxist philosophy
(1882), Thus SpokeZarathustra (1885) and Beyond
of history. Author of logic of Scientific Discovery (1935),
Good and Evil (1886) See further pp 254-5.
The Open SoC/ety and its Enemies (1945), and
Pareto, Vil/redo (1848-1923) lta'ian theorist of power, Conjectures and
elites, and economic advantage, forerunner of rational Refutations (1963).
cho'ce theory; close to the work of Mosca and Michels
Author of The Mind and Society (1916). See further Poulantzas, Nicos (1936-79). Greek-born Marxist theorist
pp. 28-30. based in France, influenced by Louis Althusser; theorist of
the state, social class, and stratification. Author of Political
Parsons, Talcott (1902-79). US theorist; the most Power and Social Classes ( 1968) and Classes in
systematic theorist of functionalism (also known as Contemporary Capitalism (1974).
'structural functionalism'); influenced by
Durkheim, Weber and evolutionary thought, introduced Proudhon, Pierre Joseph (1809-65). Nineteenth-century
European social theory to the USA in the 1930s. Author of French utopian socialist writer, famous for the slogan
The Structure of Social Action (1937), The Social 'property is theft'. Author of What is Property? (1840)
System (1951), TheSystemofModern
Radcliffe-Brown. Arthur (1881-1955) British
Societies (1971), The Evolution of Societies (1977), and
anthropologist, pioneer of functionalism in anthropology
Action Theory and the Human Condition (1978); co
Author of Andaman Islanders (1922) and Structure and
author of Toward a General Theory of Action (1951) with
Function 111 Pnm1tive Society (1952). See further
Edward Shils, and Economy and Society (1956) with Neil
pp. 88.
Smelser. See further pp. 92-9.
Rawls, John (1921-2002). US liberal political philosopher,
Peirce, Charles, S. (1839-1914). American nineteenth
the most influential American political philosopher of
century philosopher, mathematician, and logician; founder
the twentieth century; originator of a Kantian theory of
of pragmatism as a philosophical movement; also
justice evaluating the relative priority of liberty of
propounded a theory of semiotics. Author of Collected
individuals over equality of individuals. Author of
Papers (1n 8 vols.) (1865-1914).
A Theory of Justice (1971), Political liberalism (1993), and
The law of Peoples (1999).
Piaget, Jean (1896-1980). Swiss-French psychologist;
Rex, John (b. 1925). South Afr,can-born sociologist based
studied cognitive development in children, developed a
in Britain, critic of functionalism, proponent of conflict
theory of 'genetic structuralism'; influenced Habermas's
theory. Author of Key Problems of Soc,ological Theory
theory of communicative action Author of The Chtld's
(1961), Race Relations in Soc,ological Theory(1970), and
Conception of Physical Causality (1930), The Moral
Social Conflict (1981). See further pp. 100.
Judgement of the Child (1932), and Genetic
Epistemology (1968). Ricardo, David (1772-1823). English eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century economist; a wealthy stockbroker,
Plato (c. 427-347 BC). Ancient Greek philosopher, disciple
friend of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill (father of John
of the dissident sage Socrates (c. 470-399 sc); the single
Stuart Mill), criticized at length by Marx; analysed
most influential intellectual figure of Western antiquity;
distributions of goods between landowners, workers, and
notable for his conception of truth and Justice as
owners of capital, formulating an 'Iron Law of Wages'
absolute values 1n themselves, knowable only by
which stated that all attempts to improve the real income
trarscendence of everyday subiective opinion. Author of
of workers are futile and that wages necessarily tend
The Republic
toward near-subsistence level. Author of Principles of
(c. 360 ec).
Political Economy and Taxation (1817).
Polanyi, Karl (1886-1964). Austrian-born economic
Rickert, Heinrich (1863-1936). German Neo-Kantian
historian, emigrated to Britain and the USA; analysed the
philosopher; influenced Max Weber's views on the
rise of international capitalism in relation to processes of
methodology of the social sciences. Author of The Limits

philosopher; believer in progress through industry
of Concept Formation m the Natural Sciences (1902)
and science. Co-author of The Reorganisation of
Ric<J!ur, Paul (b 1913). French historical and literary European Society(1814) with Augustin Thierry.
theorist; influenced by hermeneutics, phenomenology,
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1950-80). French existentialist writer
semiotics, and psychoanalysis. Author of Freud and
and philosopher, influenced by Hegel, Marx, Edmund
Philosophy (1970), The Conflict of Interpretations (1974),
Husserl, and phenomenological philosophy; outspoken
and Time and Narrative (1983-90) (in 3 vols.).
public intellectual of post-war France. famously spoke of
Riesman, David (1909-2002). US sociologist, influenced man as 'condemned to freedom'. Author of Nausea
by Weber; studied character. alienation, and personality in (1938), Being and Nothingness (1943), and The Critique
relation to social structures 1n the USA. Author of The of D1alectical Reason (1960). See further pp. 166-7.
Lonely Crowd (1950). See further pp. 119.
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857-1913). Swiss-French
Ritzer. George (b. 1940). US theorist of globalization, linguist, pioneer of structural linguistics; defined linguistic
influenced by Weber's theory of rationalization. Author of meaning in terms of differential relations between signs.
The McDonald1zation of Society (1993). See further Author of Course in General Linguistics (1916). See
pp. 299. further pp. 197-200.
Robertson, Roland (b. 1942) British soc1olog1st; regarded Scheler, Max (1874-1928). German theorist, influenced
as one of the first writers to define 'globalization' as a by phenomenology, Nietzsche, and German historicism;
sociological concept; also inventor of the term influenced Karl Mannheim, Alfred Schutz,
·glocalization' Author of Globaltzation, Social Theory and and others in the development of the 'sociology of
Social Culture (1992) and Globalization and Modernity knowledge' as a field of investigation; elaborated a
(2002) See further pp. 304-5. conception of 'philosophical anthropology' emphasizing
the importance of feeling, emotion, desire, will, and
Rorty. Richard (b. 1931). US pragmatist philosopher, critic
compassion in human action and thought. Author of The
of .<\nglo-Amencan analytical philosophy, associated with
Nature of Sympathy(1912), Problems of a Sociology of
postmodernism; sophisticated defender of relativism in
Knowledge (1926), and Man's Place in Nature (1928).
cultural values, sceptical of universal claims to truth and
of indubitable foundations for knowledge; advocate of Schmitt, Carl (1888-1985). German conservative legal
'post-foundat1onalism' Author of Philosophy and the and political theorist. influential in international relat ons
Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony and theory; student of Max Weber; critic of democracy and
Solidarity (1989). bureaucracy, theorist of Realpolitik and of 'friend-enemy
relations'; argued that the essence of political
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-78). Swiss-French
sovereignty lay in the ability to 'decide in the emergency
Enlightenment philosopher; influential in the French
case' and to prevail over disorder; compromised by
Revolution; champion of republicanism and direct
support for the Nazis. Author of The Concept of the
democracy, believer in the natural goodness of man; critic
Political (1932) and Political Theology (1934).
of social and political corruption. Author of The Social
Contract (1762), tmile (1762), and Confessions (1782). Schumpeter, Joseph (1883-1950). Moravian-born
economist, emigre to the USA; influenced by Weber;
Ryle, Gilbert (1900-76). British analytical philosopher of
critic of both Marxism and classical economics. Author of
language, influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein; cntimed
Capitahsm, Sooa/ism and Democracy (1942) and History
Descartes's dualism of mind and body as suggesting a
of Economic Analysis (1963). See further pp. 139-40.
notion of 'the ghost in the machine'; distinguished
influentially between practical knowledge ('knowing Schutz, Alfred (1899-1959). Austrian phenomenological
how') and theoretical knowledge ('knowing-that'). Author philosopher, emigre to the USA; influenced by Weber,
of The Concept of Mind (1949) Edmund Husserl, and Henn Bergson, founder of
phenomenological sociology. Author The
Said, Edward (1935-2003). Palestinian-American cultural
Phenomenology of the Social World (1932), Collected
theorist and literary critic, influenced by Marxism,
Papers (1962-66) (in 3 vols.); co-author of Structures of
psychoanalysis, and Michel Foucault, pioneer of
the Lifeworld with Thomas luckmann (1973). See further
postcolonial theory. Author of Beginnings (1975) and
pp. 112-14, 121
Orienta/ism (1978). See further pp. 34.
Searle. John (b. 1932). US philosopher, pioneer of
Saint-Simon, Claude Henn de Rouvroy, Comte de
speech-act theory (with John Austin). Author of
(1760-1825). Nineteenth-century French utopian socialist
Speech Acts (1971) and The Construction of Social
Reality (1995).
BIOGRAPHIES OF THEORiSTS 343
Simmel, Georg (1858-1918). German philosopher; the

Taylor, Charles (b. 1931). Canadian political philosopher,
second most influential founding figure in German
influenced by Hegel, Gadamer, and hermeneutics thought;
sociology after Max Weber; examined relations of
theorist of ethical value, communitarianism, and the
interaction and exchange in terms of social 'forms'.
expressive self, emphasizing the historical s1tuatedness of
Author of The Philosophy of Money (1900) and Sociology
moral and political beliefs; critic of positivism,
utilitarianism, ethnocentrism, and abstract universalizing
Skinner, B. F. (1904-90). US psychologist; leading forms of liberal political philosophy such as those of Kant,
twentieth-century exponent of behaviourism as a scientific J. S. Mill, or John Rawls. Author of Hegel (1975), Human
methodology. Author of Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Agency and Language (1985), Philosophy and the Human
Freedom and Dignity (1971). Sciences (1985), Sources of the Self (1989),
Multiculturalism and the 'Politics of Recognition' (1992),
Skocpol, Theda. US historical sociologist; examined the
and Modern Social Imaginaries (2004)
social causes of revolutions. Author of States and Social
Revolutions(1979). See further pp. 146-7. Thomas. W. I. (1863-1947). US sociologist, member of
the Chicago School; recognized for his conception of the
Small, Albion (1854-1926). US sociologist based at
lay actor's 'definition of the situation'. Co-author of
Chicago; influenced by Georg Simmel; influential in urban
The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918) with
sociology. Author of Introduction to the Study of
Florian Znaniecki. See further pp. 115.
Society (1894).
Thompson, E. P. (1924-93). British Marxist historian,
Smelser, Nei! (b 1930). US theorist, influenced by Talcott
influential in British cultural studies,
Parsons; exponent of functionalism applied to historical
critic of Althusser. Author of The Making of the English
sociology. Author of Social Change and the Industrial
Working Class (1963) and The Poverty of Theory (1978)
Revolution (1959); co-author of Economy and Society
(1956) with Talcott Parsons. See further pp. 135-6.
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Smith, Adam (1723-90). Scottish Enlightenment
the rise of nation-states in Europe. Author of Coercion,
philosopher and economist; regarded as the founder of
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Smith, Dorothy (b. 1926). Canadian feminist theorist, Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805-59). French nineteenth
originator of feminist standpoint epistemology. Author of century liberal political thinker and commentator;
The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology celebrated for his conception of 'voluntary associations' as
(1987) and The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist sources of democratic solidarity. Author of Democracy in
Sociology of Knowledge (1990) America (1835) and The Old Regime and the Revolution
(1856). See further pp. 25-7, 134.
Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903). English Victorian social
philosopher, influenced by Charles Darwin, Auguste Tiinnies, Ferdinand (1855-1936). German founding
Comte, and evolutionary thought. Author of The figure in sociology, a contemporary of Weber and
Principles of Sociology (1882-98) (in 3 vols.). See further Simmel; famously distinguished between a disappearing
pp. 28. condition of Gemeinschaft ('community') and an
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feminist theorist, influenced by deconstruction; pioneer of 37.
postcolonial criticism; translator of Jacques Derrida's Of
Grammatology(1967). Author of In Other Worlds: Essays Touraine, Alain (b. 1925) French theorist of social action
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Vico, Giambattista (1668-1744) Italian Enlightenment
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Politics as a Vocation (1919), Science as a Vocation (1919),
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Voegelin, Eric (1901---85), Austrian-born theorist,
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hermeneutics, existentialism, and theological thought;
pp. 168-9.
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framework; especially concerned with the link between Ludwig Wittgenstein; stressed the distinctness of the
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of theodicy (involving explanation for the existence of the humanities.
evil), especially as formulated in the writings of the
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889-1951). Austrian philosopher
seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm van
of language resident in England; one of the most
Leibniz, who held that the real world is 'the best of all
significant philosophers of the twentieth century;
possible worlds'.
associated in early work with the Vienna Circle; moved
Wallerstein, Immanuel (b. 1930). US historical sociologist; from a defence of logical positivism to a more complex
exponent of world systems theory based on relations account in which 'language games' are seen as
between 'centres' and 'peripheries'. Author of The constructing 'forms of life', influencing many
Modern World-System (1974-89) (in 3 vols.). See developments in post-war interpretive social analysis.
further pp, 149-50, Author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and
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Watson, J.B. (1878-1958). US psychologist, founder of
behaviourism as a methodological principle in 1913, Ziiek, Slavoj (b. 1949). Slovenian Marxist psychoanalytic
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consumption, popular culture, xenophobia, film, and the
Weber, Max (1865-1920). German theorist, the founding
mass media. Author of The Sublime Object of Ideology
figure in German sociology; pioneer of 'interpretive
(1989), Tarrying with the Negative (1993), The Ticklish
sociology' based on verstehen ('understanding'), Author of
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Sociology, ed. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills. Analysis and Antitrust Implications: A Study in the
London: Routledge, 1948 (originally in German). Economics of Internal Organization. New York: Free
Press.
-- (1920e), 'Intermediate Reflections', repr.
in The Essential Weber: A Reader, ed. S. Wilson, E. (1991), The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life,
Whimster. London: Routledge, 2003 (originally the Control of Disorder, and Women, London:
in German). Virago.
- (1922a), Economy and Society, 3 vols. Berkeley: Wimmer, A., and Schiller, N. G. (2002),
University of California Press, 1978 (originally in 'Methodological Nationalism and Beyond',
German). Global Networks, 2/4: 301-34.
-- (1922b), 'Basic Sociological Terms', in Winch, P. (1958), The Idea ofa Social Science and its
Economy and Society, repr. Berkeley: University Relation to Philosophy, repr. London: Routledge,
of California Press, 1978 (originally in German). 1990.
-- (1922c), 'Class, Status, Party', repr. in From -- (1970), 'Understanding a Primitive Society',
Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. Gerth repr. in T. McCarthy and F. Dallmayr (eds.),
and Understanding and Social Inquiry. Notre Dame:
C. W. Mills. London: Routledge, 1948 (originally Notre Dame University Press.
in German).
Witz, A. (2000), 'Whose Body Matters?
- (1922d), 'The Types of Legitimate Feminist Sociology and the Corporeal Turn
Domination', in Economy and Society, repr. in Sociology and Feminism', Body and
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 Society, 6/2: l-24.
- (2001),'Georg Simmel and the Masculinity of
- (1922e), 'The Sociology of Charismatic Modernity', Journal of Classical Sociology, 1/3:
Authority', repr. in From Max Weber: Essays 353-70.
in Sociology, ed. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills.
364 REFERENCES
Wolff,J. (1990), 'The Invisible Flaneuse: Women

Wright, E.0. (1978), Class, Crisis and the State.
and the Literature of Modernity', in id., Feminine
London: Verso.
Sentences:Essays on Women and Culture.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Zizek, S. (1989), The Sublime Object of Ideology.
California Press. London: Verso.
- (2000), 'The Feminine in Modern Art:
Benjamin,Simmel and the Gender of - (2002), Welcome to the Desert of the Real!
Modernity', Theory, Culture and Society, Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates.
17/6:33-53. London: Verso.
■ INDEX
Upset, S. 138 Bataille, G.

A origins of postmodernism anthropologist 167
Absolutism 255 postmodernism 265-6 biography 332
feudal aristocracy 148-9 pragmatism 114-15 Baudelaire, C. 17
glossary 317 Smelser, N. 135-6 Baudrillard,J.
Action Anderson, P. biography :!32
Parsons, T. 93 biography 331 relation to Marxism 167
Weber, M. 75-6 Bntish Marxist historian 147-9 consumer society 263-5
Adorno, T. Anomie postmodernism 253
biography 331 Durkheim, E. 54-5 Bauman,Z.
Marxist theorist 162-4, 180-1 glossary 317 biography 332
Agency Anthropology ethics 266-7
Archer, M. 227-9 approach to knowledge 121-3 postmodernism 256, 266-9
Bhaskar, R. 227-9 influence of Durkheim 59 time-space compression 296-7
Bourdieu, P. 221-7 meaning 11 totalitarianism 36
conclusions 230-1 origins of functionalism 88-90 Heauvoir, de, S.
dual reality with structure relation to social theory 11-12 biography 332
216-17 structuralism 200-2 sex-gender distinction 243
Elias, N. 141-4 Archer, M. Beck, U.
gender 188-9 biography 331 biography :l:!2
Giddens, A. 217-20 structure and agency 227-9 globalization 302
glossary 317 Arendt, H. influence on Bauman 268
meaning and scope 215-16 biography 331 reflexive modernity 286-7
problems of individualism overlap of political and social Becker, H.
227-9 theory 9-10 biography 332
Touraine, A. 282 critique of science 3 Chicago School 116
Agriculture totalitarianism 36 Behaviourism
agrarian power 145 Aristotle glossary 317
community and society 30-1 philosopher 10 Watson and Skinner 115
Alexander,J. biography 331 Bell,D.
biography 331 Arts. see Culture biography 332
neo-functionalist 106-7 Asceticism consumer capitalism 257-8
Alienation 4 glossary 317 Bendix, R.
Althusser, L. Protestant ethic 70 biography 332
biography 331 Austin,). historical sociologist 142
structurali t Marxist biography 331 Benhabib, S. 332
theorist 167-8, 184-5 language philosopher 125 Benjamin,].
Ambivalence biography 332
postmodernism 266-9 psychoanalytic social theory
Simmel, G. 79-80 B 188 9

American theory Barrett, M. Benjamin, W.
approach to knowledge 122-3 biography 331 biography 332
Chicago School 115-9 Marxism and feminism 239, Frankfurt School 162
functionalism 243 psychoanalyticsocial theory
Merton, R. 90-2 Harthes, R. 188-9
objections and alternatives biography 331 Bentham,].
100-7 literary theorist 199 biography 332
overview 87-8 Base-superstructure foundations of utilitarianism
Parsons, T 92-9 glossary 317 24-5
liberalism 25-7 Marxist theory 155, 317 moral philosopher 24-5
366 IND EX
Berger, P.
Marshall, T.H. 138-9 Weber and Simmel 82-4
biography 332
relation to nineteenth-century feminist readings 235-8
sociologist 121
liberalism 26 key movements of eighteenth
Bhaskar, R.
Schumpeter,J. 139-40 and nineteenth centuries
biography 332
socio-economic modernity community and society 30-1
hermeneutics 127
23-4 liberalism 25-7
realism 227-9
Tilly, C. 145-6 political economy 24-5, 43-7
Binary
Weber, M. 67-9 positivism 27-8
glossary 317
Castells, M. socialism 24
Levi-Strauss, C. 201
biography 333 theories of elites 28-30
Bloch,E.
globalization theorist 296-7 utilitarianism 24-5
biography 332
Castoriadis, C. Cohen,G.H.
Marxist theorist 158, 167
biography 333 biography 333
Bloor, D. 124
social agency 275-6 structural and analytical
Blumer,H.
Chicago School Marxism 186
biography 333
Blumer, H. 110, 115-16 Coleman,J.
interactionism 110
Garfinkel, H. 117-19 biography 333
symbolic interactionism 115-16
Goffman, E. 116-17 rational actor approach 104-5
Body
interactionism 110 Colonialism
'absent presence' 236-7
Meade, G.H. 110, 114-15 see also Imperialism
'habitus' 222-4
symbolic interaction ism 115-16 deconstruction 205
Bourdieu, P.
Chodorow, N. Fanon, F. 34
biography 333
biography 333 feminist social theory 247-9
Giddens compared 217
feminist psychoanalytic theorist Said, E. 34
problems of individualism
186-8 Commodity fetishism
227-9
Cicourel, A. 344 glossary 318
reflexive sociology
Citizenship arxist term 46-7
cultural capital 224-7
Bendix, R. 142 Common sense
'habitus' 222-4
globalization 300-1 reorientation of sociology of
overview 221-2
Marshall, T.H. 138-9 knowledge 121
Bureaucracy 74
Civil society role in social theory 6-7
Butler,J.
Durkheim, E. 53-4 Communication
biography 333
Gramsci, A. 157-59 see also Language
feminist theorist 243-5
Marx, K. 48-9 communicative rationality
Civilizing process 279-80
Bauman, Z. 36 glossary 318
C
Elias, N. 32, 141-4 Habermas,J. 279-80
Calvin,].
Freud, S. 176-8 internet 304
biography 333
glossary 318 Luhmann, N. 283-5
Protestant ethic 68-9
historical social theory 141-4 mass media 264-5
Capitalism
Class Communism
Anderson, P. 147-9
cultural studies 168-72 see also Marxism; Western
Castoriadis, C. 275-6
Dahrendorf, R. 100 Marxism
critique by Marx
Elias, N. 141 fall of Soviet communism 171-2
expansion and self
feminist readings 241, 246-7 The Communist Manifesto 41, 48
destruction 47-8
glossary 318 Community and society 30-1
feudalism 44-5
Gramsci, A. 157 Comparative historical
labour theory of value 46-7
Hayek, F. 140 sociology. see Historical
overview 43-4
Marcuse, H. 165-66 social theory
use and exchange values
distinguished 45-6 Marshall, T.H. 138-9 Comte,A.
globalization 300 Marxism 44-5, 165-68 biography 333
Hayek, F. 140 Wallerstein, I. 149 conclusions 37
Weber,M 72 foundations of positivism 27-8
Heller, A. 278
Classical theory founder of term 'sociology' 2
Jameson, F. 265-6
conclusions idea of unified science 4
Lyotard,J-F. 261-2
Marx and Durkheim 59-60 influence on Durkheim 52
HJDH 367
interpretivism distinguished
Bloch, E. 158 Descartes, R.
112
Gramsci, A. 157-9 biography 334
theory of social evolution 27-
8 Lukacs, G. 156-7 cultural modernity 20
Conflict studies in Britain and Determinism
Eisenstadt, S. 137 USA 168-72 glossary 319
Heller, A. 276-8 Western modernity 20-1 problems with structure and
Simmel, G. 79 'Culture industry' agency 227-9
Conflict theorists Adorno and Horkheimer 160-1 globalization 300
glossary 318 Dialectic
Dahrendorf, R. 100
dualist approach 105 Cybernetics Adorno and Horkheimer 162-4
Lockwood, D. 102 glossary 318 glossary 319
Mills, C.W. 100 self-regulating systems 284 Marx 42
objections to Differentiation
functionalism 100-1 Durkheim, E. 53-4
re-evaluation 101-2 D globalization 307-8
Rex,J. 100 Dahrendorf, R. glossary 319
Constructivism biography 334 Luhmann, N. 283-5
conflict theorist 100 Parsons, T 97-9
deconstruction 203-6
social constructionism 123-5 Darwin,C. Smelser, N. 136
social studies of science 123-5 biography 334 structural differentiation
cultural modernity 21, 28 Eisenstadt, S. 137
Consumer society 263-5
de Beauvoir, S. Parsons, T 97-9
Contingency 266-9
Control. see Social control biography 332 Smelser, N. 136
Cooley, C.H. sex-gender distinction 243 Dilthey, W.
biography 333 de Saussure, F. biography 334
Chicago School 115 biography 342 interpretive social theory 112
Critical theory structural linguistics 197-200 Discursive practices
contemporary strands 164-5 de Tocqueville, A. Butler,J. 243-5
glossary 318 foundations of liberalism 25- 7 democracy 281-3
sociology 134 dispositive approach,
Habermas,J. 283
Debord, G. 209-12
hermeneutics 127
Horkheimer, M. 160-1 biography 334 epistemes 207-8
consumerism and Foucault, M. 207-12
Western Marxism
existentialism 166-7 anti-capitalism 167 glossary 319
Frankfurt School 160-5 Deconstruction Habermas,J. 281-3
Marcuse, H. 165-66
Derrida, J. 204-6 'Disembedding'
structuralism 167-8 glossary 319 glossary 319
logocentrism 203-4 Polanyi, K., 297-8
Culture
meaning 204-6 'Disenchantment with the
Baudrillard, J. 263-4
Deleuze,G. world' 76, 83
Bourdieu, P. 224-7
biography 334 Uivision of labour
Frankfurt School
technologytheorist 191-3 Durkheim, E. 53-4
Adorno, T. 162-4
Democracy glossary 319
Benjamin, W. 162
cosmopolitanism 297 Marxism 45-7
'culture industry' 160-1
Habermas,J. 281-3 Domination
Habermas,J. 164-5
Hayek, F. 140 feminist social theory 235,
Horkheimer, M. 162-4
Upset, S. 138 246-7
Freud, S. 178
political modernity 22 Gramsci, A. 157-9
functionalism 95-7
Schumpeter,J. 139-40 Weber, M. 72-5
globalization 304-5
Derrida,J. Douglas,M.
imperialism 306
Jameson, F. 266
deconstruction 204-6 anthropological approaches to
mass media 264-5
introduction of influential knowledge 122
overlap with social
concepts 202-3 Dualism
science 11
logocentrism 203-4 glossary 319
Simmel, G. 81-2
postmodernism 253-4 feminist readings 235
Western Marxism
368 INDEX
Durkheim, E.
Education Evans-Pritchard, E.E.
anomie 54-5
Bourdieu, P. 226 biography 334
approach to knowledge 122
Lipset,S. 138 anthropologist 126
biography 334
secularization 57-8 Evolution
conclusions 59-60
Eisenstadt, S. Darwin, C. 21, 28
difference of psychology
biography 334 social evolution
and social theory 10
comparative historical Comte,A. 27-8
feminist readings 236
sociologist 136-7 Durkheim, E. 10
globalization 294
Elias, N. religion 11-12
historical understanding 134
biography 334 Spencer, H. 28, 37, 53
ideas from Spencer 28
conflict and sociology 141-4, 222 Exchange value 45-6
interpretivism distinguished 111
Elites Existentialism
methodology 51-3
key movement of nineteenth glossary 320
moral individualism 56-7
century 28-30 Sartre,J-P. 166-7
origins of functionalism 88
Lipset,S. 138 Exploitation
reaction to Marxism 101
Mills,C.W. 100 extraction of value 46-7
religion 58-9
Emancipation glossary 320
secular education 57-8
critical theory 160-4
sexuality 245
glossary 319
solidarity and differentiation
Habermas,J. 164-5
53-4
Marx 48-9 Family
suicide 52
Empiricism feminist perspectives 235
Weber's approach to religion
glossary 320 nuclear families 99
distinguished 71
observational doctrine 112 socioeconomic modernity 19
Enlightenment Fanon,F.
critical theory biography 335
E
Adorn, T. 162-4 racism and imperialism 34,
Economic theory
Bloch, E. 158, 167 167
see also Globalization;
Industrialization; Habermas,J. 164-5 Fashion 78
Horkheimer, M. 160-1 Feminist social theory
Urbanization
agriculture eighteenth-century Europe 17 classical influences
feminist values 234, 250 contemporary theories 236-7
agrarian power 145
Foucault, M. 253 Durkheim, E. 236
community and society 30-1
community and society 30-1 glossary 320 Marxism 238-9
determinism Kant,!. 22 scope 234-5
problems in structure and Epistemes Simmel, G. 236
agency 227-9 glossary 320 socialization 236-7
globalization 300 knowledge 207-8 Weber, M. 235
Hirschmann, A. 26 Equality 28-30 conclusions 249-50
Marx critique of capitalism Ethics. see Morality criticisms of functionalism 103,
expansion and self Ethnocentrism 107
destruction 47-8 glossary 320 gender exclusion 246-7
feudalism 44-5 habits of thought 33 modernity 239-43
labour theory of value 46-7 Ethnomethodology postcolonial theory 247-9
overview 43-4 Garfinkel, H. 117-19 psychoanalysis
use and exchange values glossary 320 Benjamin,]. 188-9
distinguished 45-6 Eurocentrism Chodorow, N. 186-8
modernity 23-4 cultural thinking 32-3 importance 185-6
Polanyi, K. 26 glossary 320 Kristeva,J. 189-91
political economy 24-5, 43-7 Europe scope 233-4
Ricardo, D. 42 historical social theory sex-gender distinction 243-5
solidarity and differentiation Anderson, P. 147-9 sexual orientation 245-6
53-4 Mann,M. 148 Feudalism
Smith, A 24-5, 42, 134 nation-states weakened by Anderson, P. 147-9
Weber, M. 70-1 globalization 299 glossary 320
world systems theory 149-50 Marx critique of capitalism 44-5
INDEX 369
Feuerbach, L.
Functionalism exclusionary effects 246-7
biography 335
Alexander,). 106-7 feminist social theory
philosopher 42-3
conclusions 107-8 modernity 239-43
Feyerabend, P.
Eisenstadt, S. 137 sex-genderdistinction 243-5
biography 334
globalization 307-8 glossary 321
rise of social
glossary 320 Kristeva,J. 189-91
constructionism 123
influence on historical social sexual orientation 245-6
Forms. see under Sociology
theorists 135-6 Giddens,A.
Foucault, M.
influence on structuration agency 217-20
biography 335
theory 218 biography 336
'archaeological' approach
Merton, R. 90-2 Bourdieu compared 217
207-8
nuclear families 99 problems with determinism and
discipline 210
objections and alternatives individualism 227-9
discursive practices 201-12
conflicttheory 100-1 reflexivity and
'genealogical' approach 209-12
:'v!arxism 101-3 individualization 287-9
importance 206-7
neo-functionalism 105-7 structuration theory 217-20
knowledge 207-8
rational actor approaches structure 217
postmodern theorist 253-4
104-5 'Third Way' politics 217
power 210-11
origins in anthropology 88-90 time-space 'distanciation'
rise of constructivism 124
overview 87-8 296-7
Frankfurt School
Parsons, T view of functionalism 106
Adorno, T. 162-4
social integration 95-7 Globalization
Benjamin, W. 162
structural differentiation conclusions 310-11
'culture industrialization' 160-1
97-9 culture 304-5
glossary 320
systems of action 93-5 differentiation 307-8
Habermas,J. 164-5
unified general theory 92 'disembedding' 297-8
Horkheimer, M. 162-4
'voluntaristic theory of economic determinism 300
overview 160- I action' economic theory 301-2
psychoanalytic social theory 93 free markets 296
180-1 psychoanalytic social theory governance 298
Weber's influence 75 180-1 historical perspective 308-10
Fraser, N. Fundamentalism integration 307
biography 335 postmodern discontents 269 international law 300-1
Habermas and the public sphere renewed support 313 Marx critique of capitalism
242
47-8
Free markets
meaning and scope 292-4
globalization 296 G lime-space compression 296-7
Hayek, F. 140-1 Gadamer, H-G. transnationalism 294-6
Freud,S. biography 335 universalism and particularism
analysis of identity and self 176 hermeneutics 125-7 305-7
biography 335 Galbraith,J.K. weakened nation-states 298-9
civilization 176-8 biography 335 world systems theory 149-50
importance 175-6 free markets 140-1 'Glocalization'
links with Weber and Simmel Garfinkel, H. glossary 321
82-4 biography 335 Robertson, R. 304-5
Oedipus complex 176-8 ethnomethodology 117-19 Goffman, E.
problems of generalization 179 interactionism 110 biography 336
repression 176-8 Geertz, C. interactionism 110
Friedan, B. anthropologicalapproaches to 'presentation of self' 116-17
biography 335 knowledge 122 Gouldner, A.
criticisms of Parsons 103 biography 335 biography 336
gender and exclusion 247 Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft Marxist objections 102
Fromm,E. 30-1 Governance
biography 334 Gender glossary 321
Frankfurt School 160 see also Sexuality social regulation,
psychoanalysis 180 Benjamin,). 188-9 298
Chodorow, N. 186-8
370 INDEX
Gramsci,A. theorist 276-8

biography 336 Hermeneutics
hegemony 157-9 glossary 321 Idealism
role of common sense In social theories of understanding 65, critique by Marx 41-3
theory 6-7 125-7 glossary 322
Guattari, F. Hirschman, A. Parsons, T. 93
biography 336 biography 337 Weber, M. 65-6
Marxist theorist 192 industrial relations 26 Idealtypes
Historical social theory glossary 322
Anderson, P. 147-9 Weber, M. 65-6
R Bendix, R. 142 Identity
condusions 150-1 Durkheim, E. 57
Habermas,J.
biography 336 Eisenstadt, S. 136-7 Elias, N. 141-4
communicative action 279-80 Elias, N. 141-4 Freud, S. 176
critical theory 164-5, 283 Hayek, F. 140-1 glossary 322
discursive democracy 281-3 Upset, S. 138 'identity politics' 306
feminist social theory 242 Mann,M. 148 Ideology
language 125-7 Marshall, T.H. 138-9 Althusser, L. 167-8, 184-5
lifeworld and system 281 Marxism 41-3 Bell,D. 57-8
postmodernism 259 Moore, B. 145 capitalism
view of functionalism 106 recognizable modern form Anderson, P. 147-9
'habitus' 222-4 133-5 critique by Marx 43-8
Hall, S. Schumpeter,J. 139-40 globalization 300
biography 336 Heller, A. 278
scope 132-3
cultural studies in Britain and Skocpol, T. 146-7 Jameson, F. 265-6
USA 168-70 Smelser, N. 135-6 Lyotard,J-F. 261-2
Haraway,D. Tilly, C. 145-6 Marshall, T.H. 138-9
biography 336 Wallerstein, I. 149-50 socio-economic modernity
phallogocentrism 249 Hobbes, T. 23-4
Hardt, M. 167 biography 337 Weber, M. 67-9
Harre,R. comparisons with Freud 176 'end of ideology' 111-12, 278
biography 336 security 302 feminist social theory 239
language and hermeneutics 126 social order 94 foundations of liberalism 25-7
Hayek,F. Hobsbawm, E. glossary 322
biography 336 biography 337 Gramsci, A. 159
free markets 140-1 Marxist historian 26 Mannheim, K. 120
Hegel,G. Hoggart, R. Marxism
biography 336 biography 337 'base and structure' 155,317
influences cultural studies in Britain and comparisons with Freud 176
Lukacs 156 USA 168-9 conclusions 59-60
Marx 42-3 Homans,G. critique of idealism 41-3
Simmel 80 biography 337 critique of political liberalism
role of common sense in social 48-50
rational actor approach 104
theory 6 hooks, b. feminist readings 238-9
Heidegger, M. biography 337 globalization 294
biography 336 gender and exclusion 246 hermeneutics 111
language and hermeneutics 126 Hopkins, A. 309 historical understanding 134
Hegemony Horkheimer, M. influence on sociology of
glossary 321 biography 337 knowledge 120
Gramsci, A. 157-9 critical theory 160-1 psychoanalytic social theory
Hcld,D. Frankfurt School 163-4 180-1
biography 337 Humanities 11-12 socialism
globalization and universalism Hume,D. 337 Hayek, F. 140
306 Husserl, E. Schumpeter,J. 139-40
Heller,A. biography 337 Western Marxism
biography 337 phenomenology 3, 113 llloch,E. 158
INDEX 371
collapse of Soviet communism

Integration anthropological approaches
171
Durkheim, E. 53-4 121-3
conclusions 170
glossary 322 Berger, P. 121
Gramsci, A. 157-9
Lockwood, D. 102 conclu ions 128
Kersch, K. 157
Parsons, T. 97 education
Lukacs, G. 156-7
lnteraclionism Bourdieu, P. 226
overview 154-5
American pragmatism 114-5 secularization 57-8
scope and meaning 155
Chicago School Foucault, M. 207-8
Imagination
Becker, H. 116 Giddens, A. 219
Castoriadis, C. 275-6
Blumer, H. 115-16 Luckmann, T. 121
glossary 322
Strauss, A. 116 Lyotard,J-F.
Lacan,J. 181-3
conclusions 127-9 legitimation 261-2
Imperialism
ethnomethodology 117-19 scientific 260-1
culture 306
Garfinkel, E. 110 science 123-5
Eisenstadt, S. 136-7
glossary 323 sociology of knowledge
empires 134,309
Goffman, E. 116-17 Mannheim, K. 120-1
globalization 292-311
influence on structuration overview 119
Hardt, Mand Negri, A. 167
theory 218 Korsch, K.
Mann,M. 148
Mead, G.H. 110 biography 338
USA 269
meaning and scope 110 Marxist theorist 157
Individualism
International relations theory Kristeva,J.
Beck, U. 286-7
220 biography 338
Durkheim, E. 56-7
Internet 304 feminist psychoanalysis 189-91
Giddens, A. 287-9
Interpretivism Kuhn,T.
egoism 56-7, 119
conclusions 127-9 biography 338
glossary 322
hermlc'neutics 65, 125-7 rise of social construction ism
Marx, K. 42-3
influence on structuration 123-4
methodological individualism
theory 218
64-5
interest in knowledge 110-12
moral individualism 56-7 L
language 125-7
problems in structure and Labour
meaning and scope 110-10
agency 227-9 alienation 4
phenomenology 3, 112-14
self feminist social theory 236-7
rise of constructivism 123-5
deconstruction of the subject housework 247
Schutz, A. 112-14
205 Marx, K. 46-7
social theory 7-9
Elias, N. 141-4 sociology of knowledge 119-23 Protestant ethic 66-9
'presentation of self' 116-17 'verstehen, 111-12, 128 theory of value 46-7
psychoanalytic social theory women 234-5, 237-9, 246-7
Weber, M. 64-6
176-94 Lacan,J.
reflexivity 221-7 biography 338
Riesman, D. 119 psychoanalysis 181-3
Simmel, G. 80-1 semiotics 189-91
Jameson,F.
Tennies, F. 30-1, 37 structuralism 181-3
biography 337
Industrialization Language
Marxist cultural theorist 265-6
Bell, D. 257-8 deconstruction 203-4
'culture industry' 161-2 discursive practices
Heller, A. 278 Butler,]. 243-5
K
Lipset, S. 138 democracy 281-3
Kant, I.
post-industrial society 282 dispositive approach 209-12
biography 338
socio-economic modernity epistemes 207-8
critique 43
23-4 cultural modernity 22 Foucault, M. 207-12
Information society 262 Habermas,J. 281-3
neo-Kantism 112
Institutions Foucault, M. 208
Keynes,J.M.
Goffman, E. 110 Giddens, A. 219
biography 338
Heller, A. 276-8 welfarism 150, 262 Habermas,J. 279-80
Weber,M. 74 interpretivism 125-7
Knowledge
372 INDEX
Language (cont.)
Luther,M. distinguished 45-6
Lacan,J 183
biography 339 critique of idealism 41-3
Levi-Strauss, C. 201
Protestant ethic 68 critique of political liberalism
structuralism 197-200
Lyotard,J-F. emancipation 48-9
Winch, P. 125-7
biography 339 property and revolution
Wittgenstein, L. 125
capitalism 261-2 49-50
Lash, S. 260-2
general themes 256-8 Durkheim distinguished 56-8
Latour, B.
knowledge feminist readings 238-9
biography 338
scientific 260-1 globalization 294
rise of social constructionism
status 260 historical understanding 134
124
Marxism 167 influence on sociology of
Law
postmodernism 253-4 knowledge 120
globalization 300-2
psychoanalytic social theory interpretivism distinguished
Habermas,J. 281-3
192-3 111
political modernity 22
rise of constructivism 124-5 labourtheoryofvalue 46-7
Weber, M. 72-5
objections to functionalism
Legitimacy
101-3
glossary 323
M overlap of history and social
Lyotard,J-F. 260-2
Machiavelli, N. theory 11
Weber, M. 72-5
biography 339 psychoanalytic social theory
Levi-Strauss, C.
political philosopher, 180-1
biography 338
McClintock, A. 248-9 theory of social elites
influence of Durkheim 59
McDonaldization 299 29 Mass media 264-5
structuralism 200-2
Malinowski, B. Materialism 42
Liberalism
biography 339 Mead,G.H.
critique by Marx
functionalism in biography 340
emancipation 48-9
anthropology 88 American pragmatism 114-15
property and revolution
Mann,M. interactionism 110
49-50
biography 339 Media 264-5
neo-liberalism 150, 217, 262,
anthropologist 148 Merleau-Ponty, M.
288
Mannheim, K. biography 340
nineteenth-century movement
biography 339 critique of ideology 156
25-7
sociologyofknowledge 120-1 Merton, R.
Lifeworld
Marcuse,H. biography 340
glossary 323
Habermas,J. 281 biography 339 differentiation 307
Husserl, E. 113 Marxist theorist 166, 180-1 'middle-range' theories 90-2
Upset, S. Markets 102,310
biography 338 globalization 296 Methodology
sociologist 138 Hayek, F. 140-1 Durkheim, E. 51-3
Lockwood, D. Marshall, T.H. ethnomethodology 117-19
biography 339 biography 340 research 4-5
social and system integration social policy 138-9 Weber, M. 64-6
102 Marxism Michels,R.
Logocentrism see also Western Marxism biography 340
glossary 323 'alienation' 47 elites 28-30
Husserl, E. 203-4 biography 340 'Middle-range' theories
Luckmann, T. Castoriadis, C. 275-6 glossary 323
biography 339 comparisons with Freud 176 Merton, R. 90-2, 102, 310
sociologist 121 conclusions 59-60 Mitchell,J.
Luhmann,N. conflict theory 100 psychoanalysis and feminism
biography 339 critique of capitalism 185
social systems 283-5 expansion and self Mill,J.S.
Lukacs,G. destruction 47-8 biography 340
biography 339 feudalism 44-5 foundations of liberalism,
Marxist theorist 156-7 overview 43-4 25-7
use and exchange values rejection by Durkheim 53
INDEX 373
Mills,C.W.
Durkheim, E. 58-9 Freud, S. 176-8
biography 340
Marxism 171-2 Guattari, F. 192
conflict theorist 100
Mosca, G. Levi-Strauss, C. 202
Mitchell,].
biography 340 postmodernism 192
biography 340
elites 28-30 Orientalism
socialist feminist 185
Multiple modernities 33 glossary 325
Modernism
Said, E. 34
culture 17-20, 253-9, 274-5
glossary 323
N
Modernity p
Nation-states
see also Post modernism
historical social theory Paradigms
agrarian power 145
Bendix, R. 142 glossary 325
community and society 30-1
Moore, B. 145 scientific assumptions 123
conclusions 36-7, 289
Skocpol, T. 146-7 Pareto, V.
cultural modernity 20-1, 28
Tilly, C. 145-6 biography 341
'disenchantment with the
Marx critique of political elites 28-30
world' 76, 83
liberalism 42 Parsons, T
Enlightenment
Middle East 269 biography 341
eighteenth-century Europe
political modernity 21-2 differentiation 307
17
secular education 57-8 feminist criticisms 103
feminist values 234, 250
weakened by globalization Giddens compared 218
Foucault, M. 253
298-9 ideas from Spencer 28
Kant, I. 22
Negri,A. influence on historical social
Eurocentrism 32-3
biography 340 theorists 135-6
feminist social theory 239-43
Marxist theorist 167 Merton compared 90-2
Foucault, M. 208
Neo-functionalism 105-7 modernity and traditionalism
Habermas,J.
Neo-Kantism distinguished 18-19
communicative action
glossary 324 reformulation of ideas by
279-80
Rickert and Windleband 112 Garfinkel 117-18
critical theory 283 relation to Luhmann 284
Neo-liberalism
Heller, A. 278
economic policy 150,217,262, social integration 95-7
Luhmann, N. 283-5 stratification 18-19
288
meaning 17 structural differentiation 97-9
glossary 324
metropolis 82 systems of action 93-5
Networks 297-8
modernism 17-20, 253-9, unified general theory 92
Nietzsche, F.
274-5 'voluntaristic theory of action'
biography 341
multiple modernities 33 93
links with Weber and Simmel
origins 17-18 Particularism
82-4
political modernity 21-2 cultural beliefs 305-7
origins of postmodernism
rationalization 75-6 glossary 325
254-5
Simmel, G. 80-2 Parties 72
Norms
socio-economic modernity Patriarchy
Durkheim, E. 54-5
23-4 feminist readings 235
glossary 324
Touraine, A. 282 glossary 325
normative attitudes 7-9, 324
traditionalism distinguished Phallogocentrism
Parsons, T. 95-7
18-20 feminist readings 249
Western science 20-1 glossary 325
Money Phenomenology
0
gender 242 glossary 325
Objectivity
globalization 292 Husserl, E. 3 112-14
glossary 324
Marxism 46-7 Philosophy
approach to social enquiry 7-
Simmel, G.,80-1 American pragmatism 114-15
9 'Occidental rationalism' 75-6
wealth creation 263 empiricism 112
Oedipus complex
Moore, B. 340 existentialism 166-7
Benjamin,]. 188-9
Morality Greeks 10
Chodorow, N. 186-8
Bauman, Z. 266-9 idealism 65-6, 93
Deleuze, G. 191-2
374 INDEX
Philosophy (cont.)
Post-industrial society Practice
influence on Marx 42-3
Bell, D. 257-8 'praxis' 159
interpretivism distinguished
glossary 326 relation to theory 6-7, 315
112
Postmodernism Pragmatism
language 125
1980's 256-8 content and validity of
logocentrism 203-4
ambiguity of terms 258- concepts 114-15
metaphysics 202-6
9 Baudrillard,J. 253, 263- glossary 326
Nietzsche, N. 82-4, 254
5 Praxis philosophy 159
positivism 27-8
Bauman, Z. 266-9 'Presentation of self' 116-17
relation to social science 11
Castoriadis, C. 275-6 Private property 49-50
sociology of knowledge 119
conclusions 270,289 Protestant ethic
theory and practice 11-12,
evaluation and points of consumerism 266-9
314-5
criticism 274-5 Weber, M. 67-9
Polanyi, K.
glossary 326 Psychoanalytic social theory
biography 341
Habcrmas, J. conclusions 193-4
economic historian 26
communicative action Deleuze, G. 191-3
Political theory
279-80 feminist readings
agrarian power 145
defence of enlightenment Benjamin,]. 188-9
Arendt, H. 3, 9-10, 36
project 259,283 Chodorow, N. 186-8
Aristotle 10
Jameson, F. 265-6 importance 185-6
critique by Marx 48-50
Luhmann, N. 283-5 Kristeva,J. 189-91
globalization 300-1
Lyotard,J-F. Freud, S.
Habermas,). 281-3
capitalism 261-2 analysis of identity and self 176
liberalism 25-7
general themes 256-8 civilization 176-8
Upset, S. 138
knowledge 260 problems of generalization 179
Mill,J. 25-7
science 260-1 importance 175-6
modernity 21-2
origins 254-5 Lacan,J.
political sociology
poststructuralism compared problems with his approach
Elias, N. 141-4
254 183
Lipset,S. 138
psychoanalytic social theory structuralism 181-3
Tocqueville, de 134
191-3 Marxism and functionalism
Rawls,J. 281
scope 252-3 180-1
relation to social
theorists identified 253 Zizek, s. 184-5
science, 9-10
Poststructuralism Psychology
Weber,M.
conclusions 212-13 Durkheim's rejection 51
dominant social groups 72
Derrida,]. relation to social theory 10
domination and legitimacy
deconstruction 204-6 Public sphere
72-5
introduction of influential Fraser, N. 242
leadership 75-6
concepts 202-3 glossary 326
overview 71
logocentrism 203-4 Habermas,J. 164-5, 281-3
leadership 75-6
glossary 326
Popper, K.
postmodernism compared,
biography 341
254 Q
science philosopher 123
relation to structuralism 200-2, Queer theory
Positivism
212-13 glossary 326
Comte,A. 27-8
scope and meaning 196-7 sexuality 245-6, 326
empiricism 112
Power
glossary 325
Elias, N. 141-4
logical positivism 203-4 R
Foucault, M. 210-11
positive science 112, 325 Radcliffe-Brown, A.
functionalism 95-7
Postcolonialism biography 341
Mann,M. 148
deconstruction 205 functionalism in anthropology
Mills,C.W. 100
Fanon, F. 34, 166 88
Parsons, T. 95-7
feminist social theory 247-9 Rational choice theory
Weber,M.
glossary 325 actors and choice 104-5
domination and legitimacy
Said, E. 34 glossary 326
72-5
socia I groups 72
fNDEX 375
Rationalism
world religions and socio biography 342
actors and choice 104-5
economic change 70-1 speech-act theory 125
glossary 326
Representation Science
'occidental rationalism' 75-6
collective representations 59 Lyotard,J-F. 260
role in Western modernity 33-6
representative government 22 relationship to social theory
Weber, M. 75-6
Repression 3-4
Rationalization
Chodorow, N. 186-8 rise of constructivism 123-5
glossary 326
Freud, S. 176-8 Western modernity 20-1
postmodernism 254-5
Research Secularization
Weber, M. 75-6
methodology 4-5 education 57-8
Rawls,].
objectivity 8 glossary 327
biography 341
Revolution Protestant ethic and capitalism
political philosopher 281
1989 278 266-9
Realism
fall of Soviet communism, 171- Weber,M. 75
Archer, M. 227-9
2 historical social theory 146-7 Western modernity 21
Baudrillard's denial of the real
Marx, K. 49-50 Self
264-5
postmodemism 278 deconstruction 205
Bhaskar, R. 227 -9
Rex,J. Elias, N. 141-4
international relations 227-8,
biography 341 'presentation of self' 116-17
295
conflict theory 100 psychoanalytic social theory
glossary 326
Ricardo,D. 176-8
hermeneutics 127
biography 341 Semiotics
Reason
economist 42 glossary 327
challenges to Western Kristeva,J. 189-91
Riesman,D.
modernity 33-6
biography 342 meaning and scope 198-200
communicative rationality
sociologist 119 Sex-gender distinction
279-81
Risk societies feminist readings 243-5
ethnomethodology 117-19
Beck, U. 286-7 glossary 327
instrumental rationality 166
Luhmann, N. 285 Sexuality
political modernity 22 see also Gender
Ritzer, G.
Weber, M. 7S-6
biography 342 feminist social theory 236-7
Reflexivity
McDonaldization 299 Foucault, M. 211-12
Beck, U. 286-7
Robertson, R. glossary 327
Bourdieu, P. 221-7
biography 342 Oedipus complex
Giddens,A. 287-9 Freud, S. 176-8
globalization 304-5
glossary 327 Levi-Strauss, C. 202
Rule of law 281-3
'habitus' 222-4 postmodernism 192
meaning and scope 286 qucertheory, 245-6,326
overview 221-2
Regulation 298, 303-4
s repression
Said,E. Chodorow, N. 186-8
Relativism
biography 342 Freud, S. 176-8
glossary 327
cultural theorist 34 Simmel,G.
sociologyofknowledge 120
Sartre,J-P. ambivalence 79-80
Religion
cultural modernity 20-1
existentialism 166-7 feminist readings 236
Durkheim, E. 58-9
Saussure, de, F. interaction and exchange 77
fundamentalism 269 interpretivism distinguished
biography 342
Marx, K. 42
structural linguistics 197-200 111
relation of theology to social
Schumpeter, J. metropolis 82
theory 11-12 modernity 80-2
biography 342
secularisation 21, 57-8,
economist 139-40 money 76,80-1
75 origins of postmodern ism 255
Schutz,A.
totemism 58, 200 sociability 78-9
biography 342
Weber,M. Simulacra
impact 121
Protestant ethic and Baudrillard,J. 264-5
interpretivism 112-14
capitalism 67-9 Jameson, F. 266
Searle,}.
376 INDEX
Skocpol, T.
glossary 328 elites
biography 343
Parsons, T 97 key movement of
revolutions 146-7
Sovereignty nineteenth century 28-30
Smelser,N.
globalization 300-1 Upset, S. 138
biography 343
Hobbes, T. 94 Mills, C.W. 100
functionalist 135-6
nation states 22 gender 246-7
Smith,A.
Speech-act theory status
biography 343
glossary 328 Bourdieu, T. 222-4
historical thinker 134
hermeneutics 125 groups 72 328
influence on Marx 42
Spencer,H. Parsons, T. 72
political economy 24-5
biography 343 Weber, M. 72
Sociability 78-9
conclusions 37 Strauss, A.
Social control
development of positivism 28 biography 343
Foucault, M. 210
rejection by Durkheim 53 Chicago School 116
Parsons, T. 95- 7
Spivak,G. Structuralism
Social constructionism
biography 343 see also Poststructuralism
deconstruction 203-6
gender and postcolonial theory Althusser, L. 167-8, 184-5
glossary 328
248 Foucault, M.
social studies of science 123-5
State 'archaeological' approach
Social order 93-5
see also Nation-states 207-8
Social theory
Comte,A. 27-8 'genealogical' approach
interpretation of facts 7-
Durkheim, E. 55 209-12
9 meaning 1-3
Marx critique of political importance 206-7
methodology of research 4-5
liberalism 48-50 glossary 328
overlapping domains
Middle East 269 Lacan,J.
humanities 11-12
political modernity 22 problems with his approach
political theory 9-10
Soviet communism 171 183
psychology 10
Weber, M. 72-5 psychoanalysis 181-3
relationship to science 3-4
role of common sense 6-7 Status Levi-Strauss, C. 200-2
Socialism Bourdieu, T. 222-4 meaning and scope 196-7
glossary 328 Saussure, F. de 197-200
see also Marxism
fall of Soviet communism 171-2 groups 72, 328 semiotics 198
Parsons, T. 72 Western Marxism 167-8
Hayek, F. 140
Weber,M. 72 Structuration theory
Schumpeter,J. 139-40
'Third Way' politics 217 Strangers Giddens,A. 217-20
Simmel, G. 78 glossary 328
Western Marxism
Bloch, E. 158 Weber,M. 71 Structure
Korsch, K. 157 Stratification Archer, M. 227-9
Lukacs, G. 156 class Bhaskar, R. 227-9
Sociology cultural studies 168-72 Bourdieu, P.
Comte,A. 2 Dahrendorf, R. 100 Giddens compared 217
knowledge Elias, N. 141 reflexive sociology,
Mannheim, K. 120-1 feminist readings 241, 246-7 221-7
overview 119 glossary 318 conclusions 212-13, 230-1
reorientation towards Gramsci, A. 159 dual reality with agency,
common sense 121 Hayek, F. 140 216-17
Simmel's theory of forms Marcuse, H. 166 Giddens, A. 217-20
interaction and exchange 77 Marshall, T.H. 138-9 glossary 328
overview 76-7 Marxism 44-5, 166-7 meaning and scope 215-16
sociability 78-9 Wallerstein, I. 149 Parsons, T. 96
'social theory' and Weber,M 72 problems with determinism
'sociological theory', xx cultural capital 224-7 and individualism,
Solidarity education 228-30
Durkheim's theory 53-4 Bourdieu, P. 226 Symbolic interactionism,
functionalism 89 Upset, S. 138 115-16
secularization 57-8 see also lnteractionism
INDEX 377
Systems
Transnationalism globalization 294
Giddens, A. 218-20
glossary 330 'habitus' 222
Habermas,J. 281
well-regulated relationships influence as reaction
Parsons, T. 93-5
294-6 to Marxism 101
Lockwood, D. 102
Trust 56-7 influence on conflict theory
Luhmann, N. 283-5
100
Systems theory
historical understanding 134
glossary 328
u ideal types 65-6
Luhmann, N. 283-5
Understanding importance to social theory 67-8
interpretivism 111-12, 128 interpretivism distinguished
Weber,M. 65 111-12
T
Universalism links with Nietzsche and Freud
Taylor,C.
Enlightenment claims 305-7 82-4
biography 343
glossary 330 modernity and traditionalism
rational actor approach 105
Urbanization distinguished 19
Technology
Chicago School 112 origins ofpostmodernism 255
Heller, A. 278
Simmel, G. 82 overview 64-5
information society 262
socio-economic modernity political theory
internet 304
23-4 dominant social groups 72
technocracy 35
time-space compression 296-7 domination and legitimacy
time-space compression
Utilitarianism 72-5
296-7
glossary 330 overview 71
Terrorism 73,269,314
nineteenth-century movement rationalization 75-6
Theology 11-12 24-5 religion
Theory rejection by Durkheim 52-3 Protestant ethic and
conclusions 315
capitalism 67-9
meaning 1-3
world religions and
relation to practice 6-7
V socio-economic
'Third Way' politics 217
Values change 70-1
Thomas, W.I. interpretation of facts 7-9 Simmel distinguished 79
biography 343 Marx critique of capitalism status of the West 32-3
Chicago School 115 labour theory of value 46-7 support from Winch 125-6
Thompson, E.P. use and exchange values values 65-6
biography 343 verstehen 65
distinguished 45-6
cultural studies in Britain and use value 45-6 Western Marxism
USA 168-9 Althusser, L., 167-8, 184-5
Weber, M. 65-6
Tilly, C. 'Verstehen' Bloch, E. 158
biography 343 collapse of Soviet communism
glossary 330
nation-states 145-6 171
interpretivism 111-12
Tocqueville, de, A. Weber,M. 65 conclusions 172
foundations of liberalism 25-7 critical theory
Vico,G.
sociology 134 biography 343 existentialism 166-7
Tonnies, F. Enlightenment philosopher 6 Frankfurt School 160-5
biography 343 Marcuse, H. 166
community and society 30-1, structuralism 167-8
37
w in France 166-7
Totalitarianism 36 Wallerstein, I. glossary 330
Totcmism biography 344 Gramsci, A. 158-60
Durkheim, E. 58 globalization 294 influence on cultural studies
glossary 329 world systems theory 149-50 in Britain and USA
Levi-Strauss, C. 200 Weber,M. 168-72
Touraine, A. biography 344 in Italy 166-7
biography 343 bureaucracy 74 Korsch, K. 157
social action and collective capitalism 67-9 Lukacs, G. 156-7
agency 282 differentiation 307 overview 154-5
Traditionalism 18-20 feminist critics 235 scope and meaning 155
378 INDEX
Williams, R.
distinguished, 125-7
biography 344 z
Wittgenstein, I.
cultural studies in Britain and Zizek,S.
biography 344
USA 168-9
language and hermeneutics 125 biography 344
Winch,P.
World systems theory psychoanalytic social theory
biography 344 184-5
glossary 330
social and natural sciences relation to Lacan 182
Wallerstein, I. 149-50
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Modern Social Theory

Digitized by the Internet Archive

This book is the product of fourteen chapter contributions by prominent international

LIST OF BOXES xvi

1. Classical Social Theory, I:Contexts and Beginnings 16

2. Classical Social Theory, II:Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim 40

3. Classical Social Theory, Ill:Max Weber and Georg Simmel 63

4. Functionalism and its Critics 87

5. lnterpretivism and lnteractionism 110

6. Historical Social Theory 132

7. Western Marxism 154

8. Psychoanalytic Social Theory 175

9. Structuralism and Post-structuralism 196

10. Structure and Agency 215

11. Feminist Social Theory 233

12. Modernity and Postmodernity: Part I 252

13. Modernity and Postmodernity:Part II 273

14. Globalization 292

Conclusion: Social Theory for the Twenty-First Century

The meaning of 'theory'

1. Classical Social Theory, I: Contexts and Beginnings 16

2. Classical Social Theory, II: Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim 40

Karl Marx: historical materialism and the critique of idealist philosophy 41

QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 2 60

3. Classical Social Theory, Ill: Max Weber and Georg Simmel 63

Max Weber: the idea of interpretive sociology 64

4. Functionalism and its Critics 87

5. lnterpretivism and lnteractionism 110

The idea of interpretation: understanding from the inside 111

QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 5 129

6. Historical Social Theory 132

Historical thinking in social theory 133

Western Marxism and the critique of ideology 155

Sigmund Freud's legacy for sociology 176

French structuralist psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan and his school 179

QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 8 194

9. Structuralism and Post-structuralism 196

Ferdinand de Saussure and structural linguistics 197

QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 9 213

10. Structure and Agency 215

QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 10 231

11. Feminist Social Theory 233

QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 11 250

12. Modernity and Postmodernity: Part I 252

13. Modernity and Postmodernity: Part II 273

Discursive democracy and the rule of law 281

QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 13 289

14. Globalization 292

What is globalization?Towards a working definition 293

Conclusion: Social Theory for the Twenty-First Century 313

GLOSSARY OF TERMS 317

thus a wider term of reference It encompasses contexts of thought about society to

TOPICS DISCUSSED IN THIS INTRODUCTION

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 12

The meaning of 'theory'

Science and social science

Method and methodology in social research

To be 'methodical' is to be systematic in the pursuit of something. To apply a 'method' or

topic of study. Methodology thus refers to a theoretical principle or principles governing

Social theory and 'common sense'