A Beginner′s Guide to Social Theory

Shaun Best

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781446223536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

`This book is accessible, as a beginner?s guide should be, but without an over-simplification of the arguments. It should prove an immensely durable text for generations of students to come? - John Hughes, Lancaster University

At last, a book that makes social theory for undergraduates a pleasure to teach and study. The book offers a comprehensive overview of social theory from classical sociology to the present day. Students are guided through the work of Durkheim, Marx and Weber, functionalism, action perspectives, feminism, postmodernism and contemporary thinkers like Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, J[um]urgen Habermas, Frederic Jameson, Judith Butler, Gilles Deluze, Manuel Castells, Luce Irigary, Naomi Woolf and Camille Paglia. The book presents clear accounts of these contributions and employs an extensive range of activities that encourage the reader to evaluate the work of given theorists and approaches.

The book is:

- Comprehensive

- Student-friendly

- Accurate

- Unpatronising

It offers lecturers and students an ideal study resource for undergraduate modules in social theory.

Chapter contents

Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)

Talcott Parsons: The Functionalist Approach

Neil Smelser: Social Paralysis and Social Change

Niklas Luhmann: ‘Autopoietic Systems Theory’

Summary

1	Functionalist Perspectives: Theorising Systems and Structures

By the end of this chapter you should have:

a critical awareness of the contribution of Emile Durkheim to modern social theory;

an awareness of the way in which Durkheim’s contribution to social theory is treated in textbooks;

a familiarity with the work of Ferdinand Tönnies;

a critical understanding of the work of Talcott Parsons, Neil Smelser and Alex Inkeles;

a critical understanding of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory.

Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)

Durkheim introduced a number of ideas and arguments that are still of importance to social theorists today. Durkheim argued that we should treat social facts as things. In other words that we should study the factors that influence social behaviour as if they were concrete objects and external to the individual.

Like all sociologists, Durkheim was interested in the question ‘How is society possible?’ One of the central themes of his work was to identify the relationship between the individual personality and the wider society. For Durkheim, human consciousness without categories of thought is ‘fragmentary’ – a constant flow of representations which have no relationship to each other. Moreover, Durkheim was no stranger to uncertainty, his sociology was written against the background of Nietzsche’s philosophy; the Franco-Prussian War; the Industrial Revolution, with its urbanisation, social movements, etc., and the First World War. But Durkheim believed that classification does exist and that it extends to all areas of social life. It forms the basis of pre-cognition, and as such allows us to organise our ideas. Categories exercise constraint upon us so that the world appears to be arranged according to a set of rigid principles, which allow us to read acts and signs.

Activity: Durkheim

Look at Durkheim’s book The Rules of the Sociological Method and read the first chapter: ‘What is a social fact?’ Then read the following passage and say if you agree with it. Give three reasons for your answer.

Durkheim is very good at explaining the common ways of behaving within a society. However, his understanding of the human agent – what it means to be a person – is very limited. Durkheim assumes that individual people are pushed about by forces outside of their control. That ways of behaving are determined by forces outside of the individual’s command so that people are powerless and have limited choice in terms of ways of behaving, what to do and how to do it. For Durkheim, the individual human agent is a ‘cultural dope’, doing what it is told, following the rules, with question.

All sociology textbooks assume that Durkheim’s argument on classification is Kantian in nature. However, adopting a distinctly anti-Kantian stance was one of the positions that Durkheim took in an effort to distance sociology from philosophy. For Durkheim, an empirical analysis of morality is always necessary. In contrast, for Kant all moral concepts are a priori, in that what we perceive depends upon our subjective apparatus, which is given and not dependent upon our experiences. Any objective principle which we find compelling Kant termed an imperative. There are two forms of imperative for Kant:

the hypothetical imperative – you must do X if you wish to achieve end Y;

the categorical imperative – which states that a certain type of action is objectively necessary without any regard to an end.

As Russell explains: ‘Kant holds that the mind orders the raw material of sensation, but never thinks it necessary to say why it orders it as it does and not otherwise’ (Russell, 1946: 687). In Durkheim’s analysis, however: ‘There is no rule, no social prescription that is recognized or gains its sanction from Kant’s moral imperative or from the law of utility as formulated by Bentham, Mill, or Spencer’ (Durkheim, 1973: 25).

Our faculties such as definition, deduction and induction form part of the mechanism we use to ‘construct, project, and localize in space our representations of the tangible world’ (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963: 3). We have no reason to suppose that the human mind contains within it a framework for classification. No such framework was given by nature: these mechanisms had to be formed from a combination of elements drawn from a range of sources. In addition, people have to be educated in the nature of the categories, and how to use them: ‘humanity in the beginning lacks the most indispensable conditions for a classificatory function’ (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963: 7).

Any system of classification, Durkheim argues, is ‘extra-logical’. There is no given or preconceived logic for classification. Classification is hierarchical and involves looking for arrangements between categories, but this is not a spontaneous process based upon abstract reasoning, it is the product of a human process. The reasons why we developed such a system of classification may have been forgotten, but the categories remain and new ideas are assimilated into existing categories. However, it is perfectly legitimate to ask why we have classified the world in this way. As Durkheim made clear: ‘We have no justification for supposing that our mind bears within it at birth, completely formed, the prototype of this elementary framework of all classification’ (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963: 8).

Ideas are organised on a model which is contained within the conscience collective. What is the ‘conscience collective’? For Durkheim, whenever individuals interact with each other they make expectations of each others’ behaviour. These expectations come together to form a ‘normative order’ which is over and above the individual. Once the conscience collective is established, it exercises a constraint upon people, which can inhibit future change within or between the categories. Hence, Durkheim argues that there is a close link ‘between the social system and this logical system’ (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963: 41). However, the system of classification can change. In Primitive Classification, Durkheim and Mauss give the example of the decline of ‘totemism’ on the islands of the Torres Straits.

Durkheim is often presented as a naive precursor of a caricature of Parsonian Functionalism found in sociology textbooks. This view ignores the ontological status of Durkheim’s key ideas. He was primarily interested in social facts, which are not ‘absolute’ facts and have a very different ontological status rooted in the practical ideas and perceptions of human agents.

As we have seen, for Durkheim, classification is simply about the concepts that we use to describe the relations between things. Everything is labelled and given a place within an integrated system: ‘such classifications are thus intended, above all, to connect ideas, to unify knowledge’ (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963: 81). The classes and the relationship between the classes are social in origin. Concepts are collective representations, they are ideas about the shared ways of doing things in practice. The relationship between the idea and the activity is like the relationship between the rules of a game of football and the activity of playing a game. The rules were clearly made by people, and people can change them if they so wish. However, in order to avoid an extreme relativist position, Durkheim argued that the collective representation was a social fact which exercised a constraint upon people. It is important to note that the external constraint of the social fact is totally dependent upon the internal constraint of the human agent upon itself. We both possess agency and are aware of this shared perception. We can then choose to behave in the way that others do in similar circumstances – classifying this as the ‘right’ way. Or we can choose to behave in some other fashion. Excessive individualism, as the root of egoistic suicide, would not be possible otherwise. For Durkheim, if a person becomes separated from the influence of the ‘conscience collective’ and is no longer subject to its moral constraint they are much more likel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Theoretical Self
• 1 Functionalist Perspectives: Theorising Systems and Structures
• 2 Marxism: Theorising Capitalism – Debates and Developments
• 3 The Action Perspectives: Theorising Social Action and Self
• 4 Feminist Approaches: Theorising Patriarchy and Oppression
• 5 Anthony Giddens: Theorising Agency and Structure
• 6 Postmodernism: Theorising Fragmentation and Uncertainty
• Index