"Charles Taylor", in Profiles in Contemporary Social Theory (original) (raw)

Book Chapter: The Emergence of Postmodern Theory in Sociology.

Insofar as sociology is the discipline associated with inquiry into social relations and conditions -seeking to understand the 'logic' of society based on interpretive generalisations drawn from empirical observations -it is explicitly a product and, therefore, a project of 'modernisation'. That is, sociology arose as a way to understand society in tandem with the historical processes that arose in Western Europe and spread east and south into Asia and Africa and on to the Americas and Oceania from around the seventeenth century onwards . Modernisation as such implies a transformation of social conditions, away from the primacy of agricultural production located in the countryside and villages, often centred on a large place of worship such as a cathedral or temple or centre of power such as a castle or fort, and towards the primacy of non-agricultural production concentrated in relatively large towns and cities, often centred on markets for goods and services or sites for distributing these, such as a factory or stock exchange. Modernisation also implies a transformation of social relations, away from the primacy of inter-personal bonds of kinship or fealty and linked to historical interdependencies that draw upon a cosmological, that is, more or less religious, order that stretches back over time and establishes hierarchical relations between humans and between humans and the natural environment ). Modernisation ushers in a shift towards the prevalence of relatively abstract social relations based around mediating 'tokens' such as paper money or legal rules .

Contemporary Sociological Theory Graduate Seminar Syllabus

Meeting Time: W 1:30-4:20pm "One always begins to grapple with and analyse difficult political situations using one's experiences and understandings. But one draws upon theories to break into experience, to open up to investigation the problematic nature that such political institutions present to us in order to better understand what is going on and how to respond. Cultural studies emerged at just such a moment, but there are always other such moments, confronting people with a major historical shift, a change in the tempo and texture of society, the emergence of a new set of relations. And it is that which is problematic and which defines the theoretical and political problematic as well. It is in the face of such real problematics that old theories prove themselves inadequate. Then new theories have to be generated in order to take one further towards that point which we all affirm as if it already existed but which in fact is the point towards which we hope we are travelling: the unity of theory and practice."-Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History SEMINAR DESCRIPTION What is social theory? How can theory help us make sense of a complex world, craft new and transgressive solidarities, and engage in collective political action? In this seminar, we will read the works of prominent twentieth and twenty-first century social theorists carefully and generously, while also acknowledging their limits. We will discuss the ways in which theory can help us demystify, defamiliarize, and historicize categories that we often take for granted-including race, gender, identity, capitalism, labor, and power. We will consider how the writings of different theorists were shaped by their own historical and geographical contexts, as well as the extent to which their insights can subsequently be "stretched" (Fanon, 1961) to other settings. Building on the foundations of SOCY 201, in this class we will delve into questions about objectivity, the nature of power, culture and cultural politics, and the workings of social transformation. We will consider what happens when we locate the axes of gender, sexuality, and race at the center of the global story of capitalist modernity.

Synthesis and fragmentation in social theory: a progressive solution

Sociological Theory, 1994

Postmodern claims for the lack of general coherence in social life and therefore in social research are merely a version of recurrent attempts to accept incoherence as adequate in explanations. Incoherence, however, is less sharply distinguishedfrom the synthetic and generalizing theories that it is held to have replaced than its proponents and critics suppose. Generalizing approaches, in fact, were built around contradictions that contributed to their instability and facilitated postmodern fragmentation. In this paper we demonstrate the central contradictions in social theory, showing their common occurrence in apparently opposed positions. Both postmodernism and what it seeks to replace are features of a conservative and unproductive social science. We trace the contradictory continuities through major modern schools of social theory in order to clear the ground for a progressive social science which accepts contradictions as problems that must be solved creatively in the practice of social research. Recent commentaries on the state of sociological theory view the current situation as one of crisis. Alexander (1988b, p. 77) writes that the promise of the 1960s and the 1970s gave way a decade later to fragmentation and despair, whereby theories seemed "enervated" and "debilitated." This is no isolated judgment; a sense of crisis is a pervasive feature of current theoretical discussion. Sociological theories appear to have exhausted their potential for insight and development. Seidman believes that "sociological theory has gone astray. .. unconnected to current research programs, divorced from current social movements and political struggles, and either ignorant of major political and moral public debates or unable to address them in ways that are compelling or even understandable by nontheorists" (1992, p. 47). The transformation of the sociological conscience collective from optimism to despair and fatigue has been rapid. Through the 1960s and 1970s, social theorists from different traditions believed in general theory as ultimately resourceful and progressive. Yet those days of hope are not so distant from the current postmodern perception that a general, integrated theory is impossible in practice and even perhaps offensive in principle, as is often supposed. We had different and opposed hopes, each making general claims. There was no single general theory-only competing claims to generality. The patent failure of all these general claims, according to postmodern theorists, led to the denial of generality (see Seidman 1992), but others see new opportunities for a new, all-encompassing synthesis. Alexander writes that "where even 10 years ago the air was filled with demands for radical and one-sided theoretical programs, in the contemporary period one can only hear urgent calls for theorizing of an entirely different sort. Throughout the centers of Western sociology-in Britain and France, in Germany and the United States-synthetic