Second Edition
polity
Copyright © David Inglis and Christopher Thorpe 2019
The right of David Inglis and Christopher Thorpe to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition first published in 2012 by Polity Press
This second edition first published in 2019 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0639-2 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0640-8 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Inglis, David, author. | Thorpe, Christopher, author.
Title: An invitation to social theory / David Inglis, Christopher Thorpe.
Description: Second edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001628 (print) | LCCN 2018003794 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509506439 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509506392 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509506408 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences–Philosophy.
Classification: LCC H61 (ebook) | LCC H61 .I5326 2018 (print) | DDC 330.1–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001628
Typeset in 11.25 on 13 pt Monotype Dante by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Many students before they begin a social theory course feel a sense of gloom descending upon them. The thought of taking a theory class can fill you with trepidation. Thoughts that might be going through your head can include:
Isn't theory impossible to understand?
Isn't theory boring?
Isn't theory completely unrelated to the rest of my studies?
Is theory not for me?
The answer to these questions is: no.
Social theory can be difficult to understand – at least at first. A lot of it is not immediately comprehensible. Theory will be tedious – if you are absolutely convinced it will be tedious. It is sometimes not immediately obvious how it relates to other courses. It can seem to stand in isolation from the ‘real world’. It can seem like eavesdropping on a conversation involving people that you don't know, can't understand and therefore don't like. It can seem to lack relevance to your life.
But social theory, if read in the right way, has many important pluses.
Let's draw a distinction: between ideas and the words they are expressed in. The people who write social theory often express themselves in what, for newcomers, seem like difficult ways. Learning about theory is like learning a new language. You are going to have to put in some effort to work out what is going on initially.
But even if the language is difficult to grasp at first, remember this: the ideas that are being expressed are actually not that difficult. They are about human societies – and you already know a lot about these, even if you don't fully realize it, because you live in one (or several). Social theories are in many ways just worked-up versions of what we all know anyway, if often in semi-conscious ways. In many ways, social theory is an exercise in telling you what you know already – but it tells you in ways that make your knowledge both deeper and more precise than before.
When they write, social theory authors are not being obscure deliberately (or mostly they are not). They have to write in a kind of code that other social theorists can understand. If they didn't, they would constantly have to be explaining everything – and that would take up a vast amount of time and energy. To understand social theory, you have to ‘crack’ the code (or number of codes) it is written in. Once you have cracked the codes, you will understand what social theorists are talking about. This will take time, but most people find it is not that difficult to do.
This book gives you a sense of major social theories and theorists. Each of these uses a distinctive type of code. This book is going to help you understand each of them – both what they are saying and how they are saying it. You will see the main ideas and concepts of each type (or ‘paradigm’) of theory, how they fit together, and how they both differ from and also overlap with the ideas and concepts of other sorts of theory. You will see what their significance is: for social theory, for people in the ‘real world’, and, crucially, for you. As you read the book there should be regular flashes of recognition, when you think ‘so that's what they are saying!’
Social theory can reveal things to you. Sometimes you will discover things that you were not at all aware of. Sometimes reading the work of a particular theorist will mean you will never look at the world in the same way again. Sometimes theory will point to things that you sort of knew about or were dimly aware of. Because it draws upon and talks about many things you already know in some way, social theory is already part of you.
Reading social theory is ultimately not a chore. It is worth persevering with, even if it is an uphill struggle at first, as it is almost inevitably going to be. Once you develop the capacity to understand what social theorists are saying, there can be a really productive, even exciting, meeting of minds, between yours and theirs. When social theory is really doing its job well, it opens up the reader's mental horizons, making them see themselves in new ways. Your understanding is deepened of who you are and how the world works. Once you have got to the stage where you can see the general thrust of any specific theory, you will be able to apply it to yourself and see the world around you in novel ways.
Additionally, the more you understand social theory, the more you will understand why you like or dislike certain parts and types of it, why you find some theories appealing and others dull or unconvincing. You will be able to use what you have learned to think about the social (and not just purely ‘individual’) reasons for the particular relationships you have to particular sorts of social theory. The social reasons why you relate to social theory in the specific ways you happen to do – liking some aspects, disliking others – are only fully discernible once you have grasped social theory's ways of finding and explaining those very reasons themselves. This is what is meant by the ‘reflexive’ powers and capacities of social theory – its ability to help you understand yourself better, including your own relationships to social theory.
If social theory is new to you, it will initially seem rather alien. But as you go along the path created by reading this book, it will seem more and more familiar, and you will start to feel comfortable with it. You will begin to see recurrent themes and ideas turning up over and over again. The book has been divided up into different chapters, each covering a major ‘school of thought’ or ‘paradigm’ in social theory. In each chapter we have presented the ideas of particular theorists who have a lot in common with each other, often writing explicitly in light of each other's ideas, engaged in a dialogue of like-minded thinkers.
But although we have arranged the book into chapters dealing with different paradigms, there is also a great deal of overlap between them. Different thinkers and schools of thought often borrow, take up or criticize the same sorts of ideas and themes. The paradigms are not self-enclosed and isolated from each other. They should each be seen as often quite loose sets of ideas that often have a lot more in common with other paradigms than it may at first seem.
Social theory is a patchwork of ideas of earlier thinkers being borrowed by later thinkers, and then being transformed for new purposes. Sometimes the debts to earlier thinkers are clear, sometimes they are more hidden. That is why we start the book with a depiction of the ideas of the so-called ‘classical theorists’, those who lived and wrote in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In many ways what is called ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ social theory involves playing around with and transforming the ideas of the classical social theorists. Some new elements that are purely twentieth century in origin – notably the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein – get added into the mix as time goes on. But theory nowadays is still a response to, and involves diverse uses and transformations of, the ideas first created in the nineteenth century by the classical authors, such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel.
These classical thinkers also had their sources from which they took inspiration. At the heart of much social theory are the concepts of the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel. Their work had a huge influence on the classical social theorists. You cannot really understand ‘classical social theory’ unless you understand the basic aspects of Kant's and Hegel's thinking. Classical theory is in many ways a set of variations on themes set out by Kant and Hegel. And ‘modern’ social theory – theory written from about the 1930s until today – is largely a set of variations on those variations. Therefore you cannot really understand ‘modern’ social theory unless you understand its ‘classical’ ancestors, and you can't really understand the latter without a basic knowledge of what Kant and Hegel were talking about. So it is a good idea, however you otherwise use the book, if you read Chapter 1 first, because it contains the seeds of so much that comes later.
Almost all social theories have to deal with three key themes. In each chapter we will lay out what the main schools of thought have said about these themes. They are:
Every type of social theory makes claims about what it understands as the ‘real world’. Thus the first key theme that any theory must involve is to do with ‘knowledge’. In social theory, knowledge has two central dimensions. The first is what philosophers refer to as ‘ontology’. The ontology of a particular theory involves its central assumptions about what is ‘real’ and therefore what should be the focus of study. Ontological claims that a particular theory makes involve the assumptions it holds about what the ‘real world’ is like, what is in it and what makes it up. For example, one ‘ontological’ position – which we can roughly call social ‘structuralism’ – claims that the primary elements of the human social world are ‘social structures’. These are ‘real’ and have a strong influence on how individual persons think and act. So structuralism presents ‘structures’ as the basic and most fundamental aspects of human social life. Examples here would include functionalism (Chapter 2) and some kinds of Marxism (Chapters 1, 3 and 9). By contrast, the ontological position we can call ‘individualism’ claims that the ‘real’ things in human life are individual people. From this viewpoint, social structures either do not exist, or are merely the products of individuals acting and interacting in particular ways.
The second central dimension of knowledge for each social theory is the ‘epistemological’ dimension. This involves how the theory intends to study what it thinks of as the ‘real world’. A particular division between different types of social theory involves what they want to model their ‘epistemology’ on. For some paradigms (e.g. phenomenology Symbolic Interactionism and streams within feminism – see Chapters 4, 5 and 11), social theory, and the social science that it guides, should be modelled on the techniques to be found in humanities disciplines, like literary criticism. The means by which we should understand social life is by ‘interpreting’ the meanings to be found in the heads of individuals as they go about acting and interacting with each other. A related but rather different viewpoint is to be found in Rational Choice and Exchange theories (see Chapter 6).
An alternative epistemological position is that of ‘positivism’, which holds that social theory and the social sciences should be modelled on the natural sciences, which are said to search for general ‘laws’ (e.g. the laws of thermodynamics), and which collect ‘facts’ that are uncontestable if collected properly, these facts often being found in statistics. Both ‘interpretivism’ and ‘positivism’ are explained more in Chapter 1.
The epistemology of a theory is intimately connected to its ontology, the one leading to the other and vice versa. For example, the epistemology of positivism is based on a particular ontology – the claim that there are facts ‘out there’ to be captured, and that they exist ‘outside’ of any particular person's consciousness. The epistemology of interpretivism involves a very different ontology – that the most important thing in the world is the meanings to be found in people's heads, which are shaped by particular cultural systems or forms. The heart of any theory is what it says about its own ontology and epistemology. This fundamentally underpins any theory's views of what the world is like and how it is to be studied.
The second key theme that most social theories deal with has to do with their views on the relative importance of ‘social structure’ or individuals' ‘actions’ in their analysis of how the social world works. More recent social theory often replaces the term ‘action’ with ‘agency’. This relates to the ontological issues just mentioned, as to whether structures or individuals are the most important aspects of human social existence.
It should be noted, however, that some theories assume there is a fundamental, ontological distinction between ‘structures’ and ‘actions’, while others reject this divide, trying to create a terminology which goes beyond thinking in terms of a stark divide between the two. These issues will be seen particularly acutely in Chapter 7, where we encounter ‘process sociology’, and Chapter 10, where we examine structurationist thinking, both of which reject the division between structure and action, society and individual. All we have to note at the moment is that some theories put more emphasis on the power of individuals to shape their own lives, while others put far more emphasis on the capacity of social structures to influence what people do.
Some positions, like Actor-Network Theory (Chapter 12), reject the division between structure and agency and try to think about the make-up of social worlds in radically different terms. Not all forms of social theory explicitly formulate ‘structure’ and ‘action’ as their focus of concern – these tend to be theories that come from sources most distant from the discipline of sociology, certain brands of structuralism being the obvious case in point, as they are more centrally derived from the discipline of linguistics (see Chapters 8 and 9). These theories are much more centrally concerned with thinking about the nature of ‘subjectivity’ (the ways in which a person's mind is shaped by social and cultural factors) and ‘identity’ (the ways in which a person thinks about themselves and their place in the world). Some more sociologically oriented theories deal explicitly with these matters too, so we will highlight all instances of thinking about subjectivity and identity where these arise.
The third key theme that social theories deal with concerns what they say about contemporary society, how it developed, what it is made up of, how it operates and how it is changing. Social theory generally uses the term ‘modernity’ to describe what it is centrally about. This term was in large part invented and elaborated by the classical theorists. It is generally taken to refer to the kind of society which arose from about the sixteenth century onwards in Western Europe, which replaced the previous type of social organization (medieval ‘feudalism’) in that part of the world, and which then spread, in all sorts of complicated and uneven ways, to other parts of the world over the next several centuries. The various classical theorists produced ideas about modernity that in some ways shared similar assumptions and in other ways were quite different from each other, especially in terms of how enthusiastic or not they were about the new kind of society they saw as having relatively recently arisen (see Chapter 1). Theorists ever since then have drawn upon these classical ideas in a diverse range of ways, altering them in the process.
Since the 1970s, there has been a widespread sense among many social theorists, reflecting perceptions in wider society, that the version of modernity we have today is in important ways different – perhaps exceptionally different – from the version of modernity the classical theorists tried to understand. A major part of social theory over the last forty years or so has involved trying to determine what this ‘new modernity’ looks like and what it should be called. Terms that have been coined in this regard include post-modernity (Chapter 9), late modernity (Chapter 10), risk society, the network society and globalized modernity (Chapter 13). All these terms reflect the broader epistemological and ontological commitments of the people who have created them, as well as their senses of what structure, action, agency, subjectivity and identity look like in the present day.
Now let's begin …