Blackwood Project 2001. Geoff Boucher
Anthony Giddens is the leading contemporary English-language social theorist and one of the major theoretical architects of the “Third Way” programme for the modernisation of European social democracy. In Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), Giddens launched his project by claiming that “social theory stands in need of radical revision” (CMST, vii). The major axes of this revision were to be a break with the dualisms characteristic of social theory (especially structure and agency) and the turn to a fully modern concept of society. Classical social theory (Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel) conceived the social as an organic totality with relatively simple functional differentiation, whereas contemporary social formations are characterised by complex functional differentiation and cannot be described as organic totalities or functional unities.
Throughout the 1970s, Giddens critically appropriated the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel, and then turned to an investigation of the major contemporary thinkers in social theory, including Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Herbert Marcuse. On the basis of this survey and critical appropriation of the central concepts in social theory, Giddens began the construction of his alternative, the theory of structuration. In The Constitution of Society (1984), Giddens’ major statement of structuration theory, he outlines a theoretical and methodological alternative to the persistent dualisms of social theory, centred on the tension between the individual and society. Giddens therefore rejects not only both methodological individualism and methodological collectivism, but also any dialectical reconciliations or mediations of the two perspectives, claiming the development of a new and alternative position. Giddens then applied the conceptual apparatus developed in the preliminary surveys and the central theoretical statements to modernity (The Consequences of Modernity, 1990), the nation state (The Nation State and Violence, 1985) and the globalisation of capital (On the Edge, 2000). This considerable body of social theory has recently been turned towards explicit political engagement in the project of the renewal of social democracy. In Beyond Left and Right (1994), The Third Way (1998) and The Third Way and Its Critics (2000), Giddens has elaborated the political consequences of his methodological stance and positions in social theory.
Because of its shifting nature (Giddens produces approximately a book a year and a myriad articles), strategy of critically appropriating and transforming the conceptual vocabulary of opponents, and deepening engagement with empirical research and political action, Giddens is often criticised for “eclecticism” and inconsistency. This style of criticism is singularly unproductive in dealing with the theoretical developments of Giddens’ sociology. As Hegel reminded us some time ago, great intellectual figures are never wrong, only subject to the limitations and partiality of the age, and Giddens is nothing if not a central thinker in contemporary social theory. Therefore, it seems far more productive to initially interpret Giddens’ work as a diacritical totality of concepts and positions - an internally related system of different positions and concepts whose meaning emerges through the relational positions that the various terms occupy in the whole theoretical arsenal - rather than as a loose set of analytically distinct propositions, each of which might be analysed in isolation. It is also reasonable to assume that, in mapping a rapidly changing society through a series of approximations and revisions, later theorisations stand as corrections to earlier ones, rather than as contradictions of them. The meaning of this interpretive strategy can be readily seen from an example. On the surface, little or nothing divides the proposition “society is matter in motion” from the claim that “the social is a text”.
This may seem outrageous, but a moment’s reflection will reveal that if the “social text” position in actual fact used a set of new names which played exactly the same role as fundamental positions in the “social materialist” theory, then we would in fact have a theoretical duplication under two different brand-names. This is not such an unlikely thing as might first seem the case: consider the research into Hegel conducted by Marxists during the twentieth century, the main result of which was to disclose that actually very little separates Hegelian philosophy from Marxism methodologically speaking, and even the substantive propositions turned out on detailed inspection to be much closer than the superficial dismissal of Hegel’s idealism might have lead socialists to believe at the end of the nineteenth century. The critical difference, therefore, between the “social text” position and the “social materialist” theory will be how the theories map social phenomenon (what they regard as most important, the extent of coverage and the presence or absence of blindspots). This cannot be revealed in a term-by-term comparison, nor by taking individual propositions from the “social text” position and assessing them from the standpoint of the other theory, the “social materialist” theory. It can only come out on the basis of a global comparison of the two theories across the entire range of social phenomena over which they claim explanatory coverage. Only on the basis of this global interpretive strategy can we identify concepts that stand in contradiction to the rest of the theoretical field (inconsistencies), or that remain unsupported by the theoretical totality (eclecticism).
This strategy of viewing Giddens’ work as an ongoing totalisation is also valuable in terms of situating his theory in relation to the rest of the social theoretical field. While it is incorrect to suppose that Marxism was the sole theoretical antagonist in Giddens’ development, both Western Marxism and structural Marxism are crucially important for the development of Giddens’ work as a whole. Giddens’ “contemporary critique of historical materialism” ranges across three volumes and two decades: A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (1981) rejects what Giddens views as the determinism and functionalism of Marxism, whilst retaining the importance of class conflict as vital to the understanding of modern society; The Nation State and Violence (1985) develops an alternative to the Marxist theory of the state, and; Beyond Left and Right - the Future of Radical Politics (1994) elaborates the political consequences of this position. With the decline of the socialist tradition and the emergence of postmodern social theory, Giddens has increasingly defined his position against two new interlocutors: the modernism of Jürgen Habermas and the postmodernism of Michel Foucault.
While Giddens fundamentally challenged the 1970s orthodoxy, reinstating Marx, Weber and Durkheim as central thinkers of modern society, he is also highly critical of their conceptual universes. Classical (nineteenth century) social theory is located in the context of the transformation of pre-modern societies by the processes of modernity. All identify an emancipatory dynamic in modernity, while criticising the problematic or partial character of this liberation through the categories of alienation (Marx), the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality (Weber) and anomie (Durkheim).
Criticising historical materialism, Giddens engages with both the Marxian texts and major twentieth century interpretations (Lukács, Marcuse, Althusser, Habermas, G. A. Cohen). In Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), Giddens investigates the continuities between the young and the mature Marx, so as to reconstruct a coherent account of historical materialism. Giddens accepts that capitalism is a class society and that class conflict is a central axis of modern social dynamics, but he rejects the proposition that class struggle is the motor of history, in capitalist or pre-capitalist societies. For Giddens, the emphasis on economic production as the source of both social progress and social conflict is the main problem with Marxism. Marx’s “Promethean” theory of the expansion of the productive forces as unproblematically tied to social progress is criticised, as is the one-dimensional theory of labour as the mediation between humanity and nature. Marx, according to Giddens, has no theory of environmental degradation as the result of industrialisation. [1] Marxism reduces labour and industry to instrumental concepts, ignoring the dimension of symbolic interaction in production and the autonomous logic of industrialisation, with the result that the Marxian account of culture is lop-sided and reductive.
Weber’s social theory proposed that the rise of instrumental rationality - as exemplified in bureaucracy but also in the increasing division of labour in the factory system - rather than class struggle was the key to modern society. The emergence of capitalism and democracy progressively disenchants and rationalises everyday life, which loses its magical and mysterious qualities in the face of science and instrumental reason. From the Protestant ethic to the dominance of modern bureaucracy and the prestige of the natural sciences, rationality is the critical factor in the transformation of spontaneity into managed behaviour. Weber argues that the complexity of modern society - the intertwinement of an increasing diversity of rational systems and social environments - ultimately exceeds the capacity of social science to map the social. This extends to culture also, where sociology is powerless to resolve questions of values and beliefs. Consequently, social theory is the servant of a pluralist politics, incapable of completely mastering society and merely a tool at the disposal of a multiplicity of interests and programmes. Yet for all Weber’s insights into the importance of politics, the theory of rationalisation cannot grasp the moral dimension of social cohesion and the centrality of bourgeois individuality and liberal democracy as emancipatory as well as manipulated.
For Durkheim, the complete dispersion of society into a myriad independent sub-systems is prevented by social solidarity arising from sacred, shared beliefs - that is, a core framework of “absolute truth” beyond any scientific rationality. Society is conceptualised as a quasi-natural organism whose various systems represent organic functions essential for social equilibrium - that is, for stable social reproduction. Social reproduction happens because people consent to follow social rules which are linked to absolute beliefs. These absolute beliefs are revitalised and sanctified through social rituals: in modern organic solidarity, these ritual ceremonies are anchored in the division of labour and the formalities of various professional and occupational groups. Organic solidarity only springs from democratic and rational participation in the formation of their social groups. Without the bonds of solidarity and the meaningfulness of ritual, individuals lapse into the state of “anomie,” a rootless condition of nihilistic rejection or egotistic aggression characteristic of those denied access to the moral benefits of social life. Durkheim’s moral sociology is an important supplement to Weber’s theory of rationalisation, but the Durkheimian theory of politics is inadequate: he cannot - according to Giddens - analyse social conflict and the genesis of political power. [2]
Giddens argues that Weber’s theory begins to grasp the radical break between modernity (from approximately the 17th century onwards in Europe) and pre-modern society and that Durkheim tries to differentiate between modern and traditional societies. While Durkheim is a “functionalist” - social roles are functional for the reproduction of the society and the society can therefore be conceptualised as a quasi-natural organism - his theory is a defence of moral individualism. The automatic solidarity of traditional societies is impossible in modernity, which is characterised by individual autonomy and reflexive moral choices. [3] This is crucial for Giddens, who interprets Durkheim and Weber as developing new concepts of liberal individualism in opposition to a socialist movement whose positions reproduced Engels’ Anti-Duhring. Nevertheless, proposes Giddens, Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is not an idealist refutation of Marxian social theory — since Weber agrees with the centrality of material forces and social classes - so much as a supplement to it which modifies its political direction. Likewise, Durkheimian functionalism is not hostile to social change so much as preoccupied with the difference between tradition and modernity.
Indeed, the contingencies of the historical transformations occurring in England, France and Germany account for many of the differences between Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Marxism in inflected by its development in England during the industrial revolution. Weberian social theory develops in the context of Bismarkian Germany, with consequent emphasis on the decisive role of politics in social evolution. Durkheimian sociology is a theory of the Third Republic in France and therefore tied to the special relation between social integration and the ritualised invocation of the French Revolution peculiar to nineteenth century French republicanism. Yet none of these theories is thereby rendered false - rather, their characteristic emphases are contextualised and their blind-spots thereby explained. All three present a theory of the transition to modernity, but each one is incomplete and no grand synthesis is possible. [4] Instead, their insights have to be incorporated into a new synthesis, namely, the theory of structuration.
Giddens argues that social theory must incorporate reflexivity into its conceptual apparatus. The sociologist is not a scientific observer standing apart from the society and observing it “objectively”. Nor are they a “participant observer” interpreting the subjective responses of social agents from within these agents own self-understanding. Rather, the sociologist is a combination of both, a combination that moves beyond the subjective/objective polarity, towards what Giddens calls his “new rules of sociological method”. The reason for this shift “beyond” the subjective/objective dualism is straightforward: social agents in modernity employ expert systems, like sociology, in their everyday life, and therefore the relation between the social theorist and social agents should be conceived as a dialogue, where the actions and beliefs of agents influence and are influenced by the sociologist, who is also, from another perspective, an agent themselves.
This means a shift beyond the qualitative/quantitative (scientific/interpretive) methodological split, which Giddens views as a legacy of positivism. For the nineteenth century positivism of Comte, society could be regarded as a natural fact and treated with the methods of the natural sciences. In the twentieth century, positivism has meant the position that no statement is meaningful that cannot be experimentally verified, or, more broadly, that theoretical propositions are scientifically valid only when they can be (ultimately) empirically falsified (Popper). The hallmark of the maturity of social theory in the nineteenth century was therefore its ability to reduce social phenomena to mathematical formalisations - especially through the use of the emerging discipline of statistical methods - and to state the general laws governing all of social life. In reaction against this, nineteenth century hermeneutics proposed a rigid split between the natural sciences and the interpretive disciplines of the humanities, including sociology. Durkheim, for instance, advocated the approach of the positive sciences, supplemented where necessary with a sensitive interpretive social theory. Weber, by contrast, concentrated on the interpretation of social action through reconstruction of the intentions of the actors, supplemented where necessary with detailed economic and demographic data. Weber argued that the construction of “ideal types” - sociological generalisations or distillations into archetypes that might never be actually encountered in the pure form in reality - was a methodological necessity because social complexity tended to exceed the limits of sociological data collection. Marx, as is well known, argued that economic phenomena betrayed regularities that could be mapped “with the precision of the natural sciences,” but employed a sophisticated political hermeneutic to recover the significance of political events and ideological formulations, based on the disjunction between material interests and the consciousness of agents.
What all these figures concede to scientific positivism is the notion that facts exist aside from the theories for which they are facts. The classical positivist example is the observation statement, “the needle on the dial is pointing to the number six”. Now surely, the positivist argues, whether the theory in question is Newtonian physics, Einsteinian relativity or quack astrology, all observers agree on this observation statement - to say that they don’t drives you into the la-la land of subjective idealism and relativism, and ultimately to solipsism. Therefore there is always a basis for comparison of theories, since any genuinely scientific theory can be translated into a set of actual or possible observation statements and predictions of this kind. For Popper, the propositions of a theory that cannot be so translated are all metaphysics, to be consigned to the proverbial flames. Debates in the 1960s revealed that this was impossibly narrow and would lead to the conclusion that most of the propositions in the foundational theories of modern physics - at the time of their emergence and even today - are “metaphysics”. Therefore, in the work of later, “post-positivist” philosophers of science, such as Imré Lakatos, an attempt is made to divide theories into a set of “metaphysical core hypotheses” (such as, “the production of material life precedes and conditions the intellectual and social life processes in general”), and a periphery of observation statements and falsifiable hypotheses. Pseudo-sciences have no falsifiable propositions whatsoever. Competing scientific research programmes - scientifically valid but metaphysically distinct scientific theories - can be characterised as progressive or degenerating according to the balance between adjusting core hypotheses to account for the failure of peripheral propositions, and the expansion of the periphery so as to include new phenomena, on the basis of successful experiments. Despite the sophistication of Lakatos’ position, it is “post-positivist” rather than post-positivist, because Lakatos clings to the belief that there exist observation statements valid for all observers: an objective and independent world of “facts”.
Continuing the analysis of natural science before turning to social theory, research into the history of science since the 1970s (and not just by philosophers of science with a radical constructivist, “truth is just a social convention, an effect of power, and nothing to do with the Real,” axe to grind) demonstrates that this realm of objective facts does not exist. It is not that two observers cannot manage to decide whether the needle points to six - of course they can. But if the experiments are testing genuinely different scientific theories - theories separated by a “paradigm shift” for instance - then the experimental apparatus, the units of measure and the theoretical construction of which phenomena are significant and which represent “noise” or calibration problems are completely different. There is all the difference in the world between six electron volts and six units of quantum spin, despite the agreement of the observers on the numerical quantities in question. The question of whether the phenomena described overlap and are translatable between frameworks (that is, whether every observation in the theory of electro-magnetism can be explained as a local phenomenon within quantum electro-dynamics) cannot be solved with reference to observation statements alone - and this brings us back to my initial argument about regarding theories as diacritical totalities.
From here, it is easy to draw relativist conclusions, and this is precisely what Giddens does. [5] Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s relativist theory of scientific “paradigm shifts” between incommensurable theoretical universes, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Giddens argues that “there is no way of justifying commitment to scientific rationality rather than, say, to Zande sorcery, apart from premises and values which science itself presupposes, and indeed has drawn from historically in its evolution within Western culture”. [6] Likewise, the falsification of theories is not straightforward, for “what counts as a falsifying observation depends in some way on upon the theoretical system or paradigm within which the description of what is observed is couched”. Furthermore, theories have different means to incorporate instances of falsification without necessarily discarding the “core metaphysical hypotheses”. [7] It follows, for Giddens, that while empirical research is crucial to social theory, this mainly serves to substantiate, modify and extend the propositions of the social theory, rather than to lend it the weight of being a final “science of society”. Instead, Giddens advocates a pragmatic and hermeneutic social theory, which combines Wittgenstein’s theory of language pragmatics - the analysis of “what has to be done” in a social context through the application (and transformation) of social rules [8] — with an interpretive analysis of the reflexivity of social agents.
Giddens is therefore close to the cultural anthropology of the social theory known as “ethnomethodology”. This school concentrates on what Giddens calls the “practical consciousness” of agents in everyday life - the habitual actions and discourses of routine and confident performance. In this practical consciousness, agents formulate their self-identity and social roles through a social “language” that includes linguistic performances, commonly-understood gestures and actions, and the mobilisation of a tacit consensus regarding “normal” behaviour. This practical consciousness is therefore available for inspection, since it is externalised through the discourse of everyday actions, speech-acts and habits. This discourse of everyday life mobilises reflexive knowledge at the pre-conscious level: for instance, the performance of the majority of routine work tasks in the advanced industrialised world presupposes a high level of secondary school education, sedimented into work routines in the form of the easy comprehension of instructions, tasks, processes and communicative requirements. Indeed, the performance of everyday tasks normally presupposes that the agent grasps the situation as a rule-governed “language game” with a range of possible moves and potential outcomes.
5 To avoid the relativist conclusions requires closer examination of the assumption that identical observation statements disclose radically different "universes" of facts. This is the lynchpin of contemporary relativism in the philosophy of science and the humanities (just replace "observation statement" with "signifier"), and it is false. The example given will serve here for demonstration: the electro-magnetic and the quantum observers are not looking at the same instrument. The relativist position simply assumes that identical observation statements can be explained in radically incommensurable ways (hence there is no rational difference between science and pseudo-science) - but this is only an assumption. It is not necessary to abandon the insight into the theoretical construction of observed facts to propose, with the Critical Realist school, that significant regions of a theoretical paradigm can be translated into the observation language of another paradigm and comparison of the relative efficacy of the theories conducted. Moreover, there are significant operative and investigative differences between science and pseudo-science. While these are not completely separate from social tasks and the historically determined characteristics of Western rationality, they are not reducible to these factors, either.