Classical theory: Introductory notes

Periodically I will be posting short summaries of some of the main points covered in class on a given day. These notes may or may not bear any resemblance to what is actually said or done in class. I will not be posting general lecture notes on a regular basis, as these are telegraphic notes to myself which would probably be of very limited use to anybody else. --EDG

A lot of people approach the prospect of a theory course with some reservations! Old, boring, technical, difficult, not based on facts … if by the end of the term some of you come to see how exciting theory is, I will feel like I have achieved my purpose.

A baseline definition: theory has two purposes (see textbook, p. 3): 1) to explain and predict phenomena, and 2) to produce hypotheses that can be tested. Maybe that does not sound very exciting by itself! But the interesting stuff in any text is sometimes not apparent at first glance. What I think is interesting here is what is hiding behind a proposition when we are talking about societies. It means:

• Social facts can be treated like other facts, and it is possible and worthwhile to develop explanations for them.
• However different societies or parts of societies may be from one another, they can be compared, across space and time. They are not mysterious.
• Even if it is not possible to know what will happen in the future, people who know enough about the past and present can try to recognize patterns and suggest predictions.
• Maybe most of all, facts do not speak for themselves, but have meaning only in a context: where they appear and how they are organized. Different suggestions about what the context is (Goffman called this “the definition of the situation”) will give different weights and different values to different facts.

What a lot of this amounts to is a claim that social facts can be treated the way physical science approaches physical facts, or biological science approaches biological facts. Now, a lot of people find this claim objectionable – after all, people are not the same as cells, rocks or vectors. Besides this, there are objections about claiming to achieve a level of certainty that cannot possibly be achieved, and also objections that the level of knowledge that natural or physical scientists have cannot be reproduced by “the science of society” because such things as experiments would also be impossible or so grossly unethical that it would be hard to conceive of such a thing.

Well, fair enough. Let’s say that “social science,” as we like to call it, might be a flattering image but cannot and probably should not be achieved as a fact. There are some contours of science that are simply not available to us. But maybe we need to conceive of science in a different way – not the pursuit of certainty and mastery, but the pursuit of understanding. The term that is used in German is broader than the one used in English: Wissenschaft might be broken down as “making knowledge,” and in usage it refers to the organized pursuit of understanding. This could be the kind of science we are after – somewhere in between precise measurement or manipulation on the one hand, and guesswork or the blind application of ideological principles on the other.

What this might do is allow us a way of approaching the “big questions” so that we can suggest answers.

• (one big question: why were so many people in the 19th century wrong in thinking that as modernity advanced, religion would disappear?)
• (another big question: how will societies around the world change when oil becomes a scarce and expensive commodity?)
• (another question: how will the distribution of political power in the US change as the racial and ethnic composition of the population changes?)

The material we will be reading this term comes from a specific place and period: Europe from the middle of the 19th to the early 20th century. This is conventionally thought of as "classical " theory’s “moment”: an age of revolution(s). Let's try to put this into context.

The first original theoretical idea any human came up with was probably: “that’s the way it is.” It was the principal explanation for most social facts during most of human history. Since “the way it is” seemed to last so long and be so unlikely to change (and since the alternative was often complete breakdown or disorder!), asking why “it” was the way it was seemed beside the point. For those who insisted on questioning, there were always religious principles (theoretical proposition: the system of power in which humans are subject to other humans is a logical extension of the system of power in which all humans are subject to divine forces) to rely upon.

One of the reasons this began to break down was because of changes in intellectual life. Science began to develop to the point that things that seemed to be mysterious began to appear to have rational explanations. Philosophy developed to the point that it challenged the authority of religion as a source of truth, and became capable of proposing alternatives.

But talking about changes in intellectual life explains only so much. It is not always possible to account for ideas solely in terms of other ideas. At some point that comes to look less like sociological explanation and more like fantasy. These intellectual developments – changes in the ideas that people had available to them – did not happen in a vacuum but happened because there were changes in the way people lived.

The period is often called the age of revolutions: political; industrial; communication and travel; secular; urban.

What can we say about these revolutions? They produced tremendous hope (everything can be changed and made right) and they also produced tremendous fear (everything that we know is slipping away). In many cases, they meant that the world was fundamentally transformed over the course of the lifetime of an ordinary individual. Marx described this in the sentence: “all that is solid melts into air.”

This is one possible definition of what makes modern society different from traditional society: traditional society, for all its limitations, offered people certainty and security; modern society produced uncertainty and permanent anxiety. That would be a fairly pessimistic definition. It would imply that people experiencing this are looking for answers to the question of what happened to them, what are the new rules, and what it all means.

It would also be possible to offer another definition: traditional society, in all its seeming permanence, imposed limitations on people and seemed stagnant. Modern society seemed to offer the hope that through knowledge and reason, everything could be understood, human arrangements could be made rational and beneficial, problems could be solved.

One of the fundamental insights to come out of the rise of reason as the deciding factor in knowledge is that what people thought for many years was inevitable, the result of divine will or nature, was really the result of the kinds of arrangements that developed between people – and that these arrangements can and do change. That is to say, people began to realize that there seemed to exist something independent and powerful called society. They hoped that this could be understood using the same principles that science was beginning to use to understand everything else. The first person to use the word sociology was a philosopher, Auguste Comte, who proposed that if the rules according to which arrangements worked could be understood, then it would be possible to understand how they change and it would also be possible to understand how to intervene in order to change them for the better. But sociology was not the first term he used: the first time out, he called this new science he proposed social physics. The term was rejected, probably for good reason. But it remains useful because it implies that there is some kind of motion in question. Comte argued that social physics had two subfields: social statics (why social arrangements tend to be stable and to successfully reproduce themselves) and social dynamics (why social arrangements change or die out and new ones develop). Nearly nobody reads or cites Comte anymore or uses these terms, but let me suggest that they can be useful to keep in mind as a source of questions when you look at the works of the theorists we are reading: what are their answers to the question of social statics and to the question of social dynamics?

Another general question that might be posed is this: if people and societies change, is there anything that can be thought of as permanent? Odd as it may sound, religion has always offered some sort of answer to this question. It postulated that the moral and spiritual life of humans predates and outlives the material constraints under which they live every day. There are probably two ways to try to answer this question without relying on religion. The biological answer would involve looking backward and talking about origins and materials: what humans are made of, what they desire, what impulses and instincts they have. This leads to considering humans as individuals who live outside of history. At least one version of the sociological answer would involve looking forward and talking about what humans can hope for in the future based on what we know so far.

A point about the transformation from traditional to modern society: although this move is usually thought of in terms of progress, it did not benefit everybody or delight everybody. One of the central questions of sociological theory is what are the problems of modern life? Often the answer is posed in terms of a postulate about human nature – humans need something that modern life is not providing. Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber offered very different answers to this question, which we will be exploring in detail over the semester.