Sociological Theory Since The War, by Jeffrey Alexander
The best cure for a false dichotomy is the synthesis of opposites
Jeffrey C. Alexander wrote:
LECTURE 1
What is Theory?
… By presuppositions, I refer to the most general assumptions that every sociologist makes—what he "presupposes"— when he encounters reality. It seems obvious, I hope, that the first thing a student of social life presupposes is the nature of action . When you are thinking about what action is like, you usually think about whether it is rational or not. The "problem of action," then, is whether we assume actors are rational or nonrational. Now I do not mean to imply here the commonsense equation of rational with good and smart, and nonrational with bad and stupid. I do not mean, in other words, that nonrational action is "irrational." In social theory, rather, this dichotomy refers to whether people are selfish (rational) or idealistic (nonrational), whether they are normative and moral (nonrational) in their approach to the world or purely instrumental (rational), whether they act in terms of maximizing efficiency (rationally) or whether they are governed by emotions and unconscious desires (nonrationally). All these dichotomies relate to the vital question of the internal versus external reference of action. Rationalistic approaches to action portray the actor as taking his bearings from forces outside of himself, whereas nonrational approaches imply that action is motivated from within. By calling this choice presuppositional, I am suggesting that every social theory and every empirical work takes an a priori position on this problem of action. Each does not, however, necessarily have to choose one side to the exclusion of the other. Action may be portrayed, though it usually is not, as having both rational and nonrational elements.
Yet to answer the central question about action is not enough. A second major issue needs to be presupposed. I will call this the "problem of order." Sociologists are sociologists because they believe there are patterns to society, that there are structures separate from the individuals who compose it. Yet while all sociologists believe this, they often disagree sharply about how such an order is actually produced. I will call this an argument between individualistic and collectivist approaches to order. If thinkers presuppose a collectivist position, they see social patterns as existing prior to any specific individual act, as, in a sense, the product of history. Social order confronts the newborn individual as an established fact that is "outside" of him. Now, if they are writing about adults, collectivists may well acknowledge that social order exists as much inside the individual as without… The issue here, however, is that whether it is conceptualized as inside or outside an actor, social order from the collectivist perspective is not seen as the product of purely this-instant, this-moment considerations. Any individual act, according to collectivist theory, is pushed in the direction of preexisting structure, although this direction remains only a probability for those collectivists who acknowledge that action has an element of freedom. Thus, for collectivist theory , it is the economy that determines the direction of individual economic actors, not entrepreneurs who create the economy; it is the religious system that determines the behavior of an individual believer, rather than the church which springs from faith; it is the party organizations that produce politicians, not politicians who make parties.
Individualistic theorists often acknowledge that there do appear to be such extra-individual structures in society, and they certainly recognize that there are intelligible patterns. But they insist, all the same, that these patterns are the result of individual negotiation, that they are the upshot of individual choice. They believe not simply that structures are "carried" by individuals but that they are actually produced by actors in the concrete, ongoing processes of individual interaction . For them, it is not only that individuals have an element of freedom but that they can alter the fundaments of social order at every successive point in historical time. Individuals, in this view, do not carry order inside of them. Rather, they follow or rebel against social order—even their own values—according to their individual desires.
I do not regard the problems of action and order as “optional." l believe that every theory takes some position on both. But I will go even further than this. I want to argue that the logical permutations among presuppositions form the fundamental traditions of sociology. There have been rational-individualistic theories and rational-collectivist theories. Theories have been normative-individualistic and normative-collectivist. There have also been some attempts in the history of social thought—too few and far between—to transcend these dichotomies in a multidimensional way.
These presuppositional issues are of much more than academic concern. Whatever position theorists take, fundamental values are at stake . The study of society revolves around the questions of freedom and order, and every theory is pulled between these poles. This is , I think , a peculiarly Western dilemma, or better yet, a peculiarly modern one. As modern men and women , we believe that individuals have free will—in religious terms, that every human being has an inviolable soul—and because of this, we believe, each person has the capacity to act in a responsible way . Such cultural beliefs have been, to one degree or another, institutionalized in every Western society. The individual has been set apart as a special unit . There have been elaborate legal efforts to protect him or her from the group, from the state , and from other, culturally "coercive" organs like the church.
Sociological theorists have usually taken these developments quite seriously, and like other citizens of Western society have tried to protect this individual freedom. Indeed, sociology emerged as a discipline from this very differentiation of the individual in society, for it was the independence of the individual , the growth of his powers to think freely about society, which allowed society itself to be conceived of as an independent object of study. It is the
independence of the individual that makes "order" problematic, and it is this problematising of order that makes sociology possible. At the same time, sociologists acknowledge that there are patterns even in this modern order and that the everyday life of individuals has a deeply structured quality. This is just what makes the values of "freedom" and "individuality" so precious. It is this tension between freedom and order that provides the intellectual and moral rationale for sociology : sociology explores the nature of social order in large part because it is concerned about its implications for individual freedom.
Individualistic theories are attractive and powerful because they preserve individual freedom in an overt, explicit, and complete way. Their a priori postulates assume the integrity of the rational or moral individual, taking for granted that the actor is free of his situation defined either as material coercion or moral influence. Yet the freedom of the individualistic position, in my view, is achieved at great theoretical cost. It gives an unrealistic and artificial voluntarism to the actor in society. In this sense individualistic theory does freedom no real service. It ignores the real threats that social structure often poses to freedom and, by the same token, the great sustenance to freedom that social structures can provide. It seems to me that the moral design of individualistic theory encourages the illusion that individuals have no need for others or for society as a whole.
Collectivist theory, on the other hand, acknowledges that social controls exist, and by doing so it can subject these controls to explicit analysis. In this sense collectivist thought represents a great gain over individualistic thought , both morally and theoretically. The question, of course, is whether this gain can be achieved only at an unacceptable price . What does such collectivist theorizing lose? How is the collective force it postulates related to the individual will, to voluntarism, and to self-control? Before we try to answer this decisive question, we must be clear about a vital fact: assumptions about order do not entail any particular assumptions about action. Because of this indeterminacy, there are very different kinds of collectivist theory.
The way I see it, the crucial and decisive question of whether collective theory is worth the cost hinges on whether it presupposes instrumental or moral action. Many collectivist theories assume that actions are motivated by a narrow, merely technically efficient form of rationality . When this happens, collective structures are portrayed as if they were external to individuals in a physical sense. These seemingly external-material structures, like political or economic systems, are said to control actors from without , whether they like it or not. They do so by arranging punitive sanctions and positive rewards for an actor who is reduced to a calculator of pleasure and pain. Because this actor is assumed to respond objectively to outside influences, "motives" are eliminated as a theoretical concern . Subjectivity drops out of collectivist analysis when it takes a rationalist form, for it is then assumed that the actor's response can be predicted from the analysis of his external environment. This environment, not the nature or extent of the actor's personal involvement with it, is considered determinate . I am arguing, then , that rational-collectivist theories explain order only by sacrificing the subject, by eliminating the very notion of the self. In classical sociology, reductionistic forms of Marxist theory presents the most formidable example of this development , but it also pervades the sociology of Weber and Utilitarian theory as well.
If, by contrast , collectivist theory allows that action may be nonrational, it perceives actors as guided by ideals and emotion. Ideals and emotion are located within rather than without . It is true, of course, that this internal realm of subjectivity is initially structured by encounters with "external" objects—with parents, teachers, siblings, and books, with all the varied sorts of cultural carriers and object attachments encountered by young "social initiates." Yet according to nonrational collective theory, in the process of socialization such extra-individual structures become internal to the self. Only if this process of internalization is acknowledged can subjectivity and motivation become fundamental topics for social theory , for if internalization is accepted it is obvious that some vital relationship exists between the "inside" and the "outside" of any act. Individual volition becomes part of social order , and real social life involves negotiation not between the asocial individual and his world but between the social self and the social world . Such thinking leads to what Talcott Parsons called a voluntaristic approach to order, though, I should warn you, this is not voluntarism in an individualistic sense . To the contrary, voluntarism might be said to be exemplified by theories which see individuals as socialized by cultural systems.
The dangers that such theorizing encounters are quite the opposite from those encountered by collectivist theories of a more rationalistic sort. Moralistic and idealist theories often underestimate the ever present tension between individual volition and collective order. There is a strong tendency to assume an innate complementarity between the social self and that selfs world—in religious terms , between the individual soul and the will of God, in political terms between individual and collective will.
I hope that this brief discussion of the strengths and the weaknesses of instrumental and moral forms of collectivist theory gives you some idea of how important a synthesis between them might be. While each has its achievements, each by itself tends toward a dangerous one-dimensionality which overlooks vital aspects of the human condition. I would argue on both moral and scientific grounds that theory should interweave the internal and external elements of collective control. I will not even try to tell you at this point what such a multidimensional theory might look like. My goal for these lectures is to outline one . I will do so through a critical reconstruction of sociological theory since World War II.
Presuppositions about action and order are the "tracks" along which sociology runs. Whether theorists or not, sociologists make presuppositional decisions and they must live with the consequences. What these presuppositions are, and what their consequences have been, will be my point of departure throughout this course.
[end of book]
LECTURE 20
Sociological Theory Today
In a series of earlier efforts I went back to the classics and tried to develop the basis for a new, more synthetic kind of collectivist theory. In later essays I took up more directly the micro macro link, arguing, for example, that the "individualist" traditions of both phenomenology and interactionism contain significant collectivist strains and that these can be integrated with the subjective dimensions of the collectivist tradition .
[MGH: The Macro-Micro was an interesting book. Thanks to Amazon’s computer memory — see the picture above — I know now I purchased it 22 years ago.]
Most recently I have tried to work out a more systematic account of the relation between contingency and idea l and material structures. Though I have worked much more closely with the Parsonian tradition than the other theorists I have mentioned, my interest in overcoming the antagonism of the previous period, while not in any way negating its accomplishments, is, I believe quite similar to theirs.
My goal in these lectures has been to develop an argument for what Hegel would have called this "concrete negation" of postwar theorizing in both a systematic and historical way . I have done so, of course , through a process of interpretation. As you learned from the lectures on hermeneutics, however, to conduct an interpretation you must step into the hermeneutical circle first, that is, you must first have some interpretive standard in mind. The standard I developed in my first lectures was a frankly ecumenical one, derived from the spirit, and in part from the letter, of Parsons' earlier work. Multidimensionality, I believe, is the only position which can explain the social world in a thorough , consistent, and satisfying way. It is also, I have tried to demonstrate, the only perspective from which the full variety of competing sociological theories can be fairly interpreted without shunting one or another of their partial interests aside. In theoretical interpretation, the prior commitment which draws the hermeneutical circle is a theory itself. If my interpretations have been good ones, however, I have justified my initial theory in (relatively) more empirical and inductive ways. Though I started with a general and abstract multidimensional position , I have tried to specify the particular elements of a multidimensional theory through my interpretations of postwar work. [END]
[MGH: I would, in addition, favour individualist-collectivist synthesis and rational-nonrational synthesis. I fully support a multi-causal mixed-motives presuppositional thought process, travelling on multiple “tracks” simultaneously. False dichotomies can be false consciousness, misleading the members of the sociology profession about the commonsensical real world. But even the claim to synthesis is often revealed to be partisan. And, from every new synthesis there is born a new dichotomy. Dichotomies, after all, were the “tracks” along which post-war sociology ran. Perhaps it is due to this revelatory disappointment that sociology post-1990 altogether gave up theory.]
The Source:
Jeffrey C. Alexander, Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War II, Columbia University Press 1987
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.