Social theory: an anti-individualist story

Abstract

Prospective readers of this impressive work should not let its subtitle fool them. Its “twenty introductory lectures” are not for the uninitiated. This is an introduction, rather, for the relatively advanced student—and not only the student—who already knows enough sociology, philosophy of science, and (European) history, including the history of ideas, to benefit from the subtleties and sophistication of its analyses and attempt at synthesis. It is at once a work of pedagogy and of scholarship. It also has an agenda, arguing for a particular vision of social theorizing and thus against others. It is, moreover, concerned only with contemporary theory post-1945, referring only tangentially to classical works. As a pedagogical instrument, it is not a textbook in the conventional sense. As Jeff Manza and his co-authors have recently shown, 1 most sociology textbooks are constructed in strikingly formulaic ways, almost invariably reproducing identical long-superseded classifications. They show how, in the United States, these textbooks combine to congeal the teaching of sociology throughout the lower reaches of higher education under the market-driven pressures of editors and publishers responding to their remarkably uniform perception of the demands of aging and hard-pressed lecturers operating far from their discipline’s current thinking and research. By contrast, Joas and Knobl offer a distinctive, if controversial, vision of the scope of what they call “social” theory and of what it is to theorize. They also do so in an interesting and innovative way, in the form of a narrative with an overall unity and employing distinctive, and contestable, principles of selection. They seek to avoid, as they explain from the start, viewing social theory in “its purely empirical, explanatory dimension”: they promise instead to focus on “an overarching conception incorporating political and cultural dimensions.” The promise Theor Soc (2013) 42:653–657 DOI 10.1007/s11186-013-9207-y