Social theory
Social theory refers to the use of abstract and often complex theoretical frameworks to explain and analyze social patterns and large-scale social structures.
Though many commentators consider social theory a branch of sociology, it functions inherently in an interdisciplinary manner, as it uses ideas from and contributes to a plethora of disciplines such as anthropology, economics, theology, history, and many others.
Social theory attempts to answer the question 'what is?', not 'what should be?'. One should therefore not confuse it with philosophy or with belief.
Social theory in relation to hard science
Social theory has always had an uneasy, love/hate relationship to the more classic academic disciplines, especially sociology. Many of its key thinkers were neither sociologists nor ever held a university position.
Unlike disciplines within the “objective“ natural sciences — such as physics or chemistry — social theorists are less likely to use the scientific method and other fact-based methods to prove a point. Instead, they tackle very large-scale social trends and structures using hypotheses that cannot be easily proved, except by the history and time, which is often the basis of criticism from opponents of social theories. Extremely critical theorists, such as deconstructionists or postmodernists, may argue that any type of research or method is inherently flawed. Many times, however, social theory is defined as such because the social reality it describes is so overarching as to be improvable. The social theories of modernity or anarchy might be two examples of this.
However, social theories still play a major part in the sciences of sociology, anthropology, economics, and others. Objective science-based research often begins with a hypothesis formed from a social theory. Likewise, science-based research can often provide support for social theories or spawn new ones.
Statistical research grounded in the scientific method, for instance, that finds a severe income disparity between women and men performing the same occupation can complement the underlying premise of the complex social theories of feminism or patriarchy.
In general, and in particular among adherents to pure sociology, social theory has an appeal because it takes the focus away from the individual (which is how most humans look at the world) and focuses it on the society itself and the social forces which control our lives. This sociological insight (often termed the sociological imagination) has appealed to students and others dissatisfied with the status quo because it looks beyond the assumption that societal structures and patterns are purely random.
Critical debate between mainstream sociologists and social theorists
In a sense, "social theory" is either a reversion-to or continuation of this subterranean mainstream because it revives abstract speculation, narrative, and normative assumptions and normative results.
Essential to the enterprise of "social theory" as practiced by Theodor Adorno and others is a methodological challenge to the hegemony of a scientific method. Sharing its core commitment to truth the social theorist points to the radical difference in phenomena between the subject matter of physics and that of sociology.
In sociology, the "objects" of study regard themselves as equal "subjects" with the researcher and for this reason must be gamed, carefully, by the researcher to get objective answers and also to avoid the ethical issues raised in the Milgram experiment, where the people whose authoritarianism was being investigated were persuaded to inflict what they thought was severe pain on others.
The social theorist is suspicious of "objectivity" not as a lifestyle choice but because his social theory, self-applied in a responsible way (vaguely reminiscent of mathematics) generates the notion that people deal in social constructs by default. He doesn't reject confirmation and denial by the facts, only adds the need for a theoretical venture that typically takes into account self-interested behavior that in turn results from oppressive conditions.
Of course, "mainstream" sociology has developed a continual body of minor theory to avoid false results, such as the double-blind experiment. But it still must act as part of the social phenomena it would describe while the physicist doesn't have to enter a black hole in order to fully describe a black hole.
In fact, in terms of the general Western and non-Western history of social theory, which usually appears in philosophy and religion with a strong normative streak, "scientific" sociology is the exception rather than the rule, and it derives from Daniel Bell's work on the end of ideology. The deep presumption of "scientific" sociology turns out to be economic, and a desire for market operations, which raises the question whether they are even fair, far less the question whether the respondent hopes for anything better.
World-wide, both economists and sociologists including Amartya Sen start from a questioning as to the justice of markets and the relation between the developed and underdeveloped world to come to quite different conclusions than often supported by the American mainstream, such as "a rising tide lifts all boats" and models showing economic progress at the hidden expense of human rights.
"Scientific" sociology avoids extreme views in its purest form. But, the social theorist might reply, scientific sociology then meets the market and turns into political pollstering in which it is gamed, using hidden computer models, to give predetermined answers after all.
Of course, the "mainstream" sociologist would as a "pure", academic practitioner disclaim any association with pollstering and spinmeistering; but this places, in play, the question whether in a subject belonging to what Immanuel Kant would call practical reasoning even bifurcates into the pure and the applied in the first place.
Again, this relates to the very different situations of physics and mathematics versus sociology. Albert Einstein and the physicists had to cross a very bright line between pure and applied physics to build the Bomb, but because sociology takes place inside its phenomena, any social research can at any time, it seems, have a political implication.
One of the most recent theorists in America was C. Wright Mills, who in White Collar: The American Middle Classes and The Power Elite, assumed and narrated social divisions in an America still thought to be roughly egalitarian. Basing his work both on statistics and narration, Mills seems to have noticed early on how America was changing from a country of "self made men" to people who depended on far more powerful combinations for their existence and who for this reason looked to others for their "cues": another member of this group of "theorists" was David Reisman, who originated the phrase, and book, The Lonely Crowd, to describe the resulting phenomena.
The way in which a social theorist like Mills is "confirmed", or refuted, occurs over several years. Mills seems to have been confirmed because certainly today, "white collar" and other Americans are in fact far more dependent on large employers. But his confirmation involves acceptance of a complex view of contemporary society which other people simply do not share.
It is true that "social theory" is very different from "sociology" insofar as the sociologist looks for neat, predetermined problems to which she can apply equally neat methodologies, while the theorist gets rather flustered by the brute fact of human suffering.
But as Pierre Bourdieu shows in 'The Weight of the World', social theory can be very empirical, in fact far more than spreadsheets, as long as we believe that there are "True Stories" to be told, and that listening is a profoundly empirical act. In The Weight of the World, Bourdieu as a theorist goes beyond polls which show that native French people dislike Arabs to find that their dislike contains envy of the communitarian structures of Arabs by French people isolated in housing projects, whose children live far away. Dislike/envy complicates the software but nonetheless exists if we believe the narrative.
But for the "mainstream" scientific sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu becomes a sort of high-class Studs Terkel, listening to "Tales of Woe" with a tape recorder that remain anecdotal. The totalized fact may, in fact, be Panglossian, and (as Voltaire's professor "proved") this may be "the best of all possible worlds".
History
Pre-classical social theorists
Prior to 19th century, social theory took largely narrative and normative traits. Expressed in story form, it both assumed ethical principles and recommended moral acts. Thus one can regard religious figures as the earliest social theorists. Saint Augustine (354 - 430) and St. Thomas Aquinas (circa 1225 - 1274) concerned themselves exclusively with a just society. St. Augustine describes late Ancient Roman society but through a lens of hatred and contempt for what he saw as false Gods, and in reaction theorized The City of God. Similarly, in China, Master Kong (otherwise known as Confucius) (551 - 479 B.C.E.) envisaged a just society that went beyond his contemporary society of the Warring States. Later on, also in China, Mozi (circa 470 - circa 390 B.C.E.) recommended a more pragmatic sociology, but ethical at base.
Classical social theory
The first “modern” social theories (known as classical theories) that begin to resemble the analytic social theory of today developed almost simultaneously with the birth of the science of sociology. Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857), known as the 'father of sociology', laid the groundwork for one of the first social theories - social evolutionism. In the 19th century three great classical theories of social and historical change emerged: the social evolutionism theory (of which Social Darwinism forms a part), the social cycle theory and the Marxist historical materialism theory.
Another early modern theorist, Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903), coined the term "survival of the fittest" (and incidentally recommended avoidance of governmental action on behalf of the poor (socialism) as a positive act). Vilfredo Pareto (1848 - 1923) and Pitirim A. Sorokin argued that 'history goes in cycles', and presented the social cycle theory to illustrate their point. Ferdinand Tönnies (1855 - 1936) made community and society (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, 1887) the special topics of the new science of "sociology", both of them based on different modes of will of social actors. Emile Durkheim postulated a number of major theories regarding anomie and functionalism. Max Weber theorized on bureaucracy, religion, and authority. Karl Marx theorized on the class struggle and social progress towards communism and laid the groundwork for the theory that became known as Marxism. Marxism became more than a theory, of course, carrying deep implications over the course of 20th century history (including the Russian Revolution of 1917).
Most of the 19th century pioneers of social theory and sociology, like Saint-Simon, Comte, Marx, John Stuart Mill or Spencer, never held university posts. Most people regarded them as philosophers, because much of the their thinking was interdisciplinary and "outside the box" of the existing disciplines of their time (eg:, philology, law, and history).
Many of the classical theories had one common factor: they all agreed that the history of humanity is pursuing a certain fixed path. They differed on where that path would lead: social progress, technological progress, decline or even fall, etc. Social cycle theorists were much more skeptical of the Western achievements and technological progress, however, arguing that progress is but an illusion in of the ups and downs of the historical cycles. The classical approach has been criticized by many modern sociologists and theorists, among them Karl Popper, Robert Nisber, Charles Tilly and Immanuel Wallerstein.
Modern social theory
Although the majority of 19th-century social theories now class as obsolete, they have spawned new, modern social theories. Some modern social theories represent some advanced version of the classical theories, like Multilineal theories of evolution (neoevolutionism, sociobiology, theory of modernization, theory of post-industrial society) and various strains of Neo-Marxism.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by a more or less arbitrary division of topics, the social theory became most closely related to academic sociology while other subjects such as anthropology, philosophy, and social work branched out into their own disciplines. Such subjects as "philosophy of history" withered, and their subject matter became part of social theory as taught in sociology.
Attempts to recapture a space for discussion free of disciplines began in earnest in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research provides the most successful example. The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago followed in the 1940s. In the 1970s, programs in Social and Political Thought were established at Sussex and York. Others followed, with various different emphases and structures, such as Social Theory and History (University of California, Davis). Cultural Studies programs, notably that of Birmingham University, extended the concerns of social theory into the domain of culture and thus anthropology. A chair and undergraduate program in social theory was established at the University of Melbourne and a number of universities now specialize in social theory (UC-Santa Cruz is one example). Finally social theory seems to be gaining more acceptance as a classical academic discipline.
In modern times, generally speaking, social theory began to stress free will, individual choice, subjective reasoning, and the importance of unpredictable events in place of the classic determinism – thus social theory become much more complex. Rational Choice Theory and Symbolic Interaction Theory furnish two examples. Most modern sociologists deem there are no great unifying 'laws of history', but rather smaller, more specific, and more complex laws that govern society.
Post-modern social theory
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