Social Theory and the Changing World

Abstract

Classical sociological theory is usually viewed as an account of the changing world in the long 19th century. It theorizes the great transformation from the agrarian, feudal to the industrial, capitalist mode of production (Marx), from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft (Tonnies), from traditional to rational social action (Weber). Like the late medieval theory of transition from nomadic pastoralism to urbanization or civilization by Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), all but one of these theories are structural, and consider social change without direct reference to conscious human intention and motivation. The one exception is Max Weber, who formulated his theory with reference to the (conscious) purpose and meaning of social action, and included consideration of the epochal social change set in motion by the transcendent vision and objectives of the world religions. In a provocatively revealing recent statement, Stephen Turner (2004) considers social theory an autonomous and self-sufficient academic field with its own internal conversation based on a series of commentaries on classical texts. The marriage of social theory and empirical sociology, which was to be consummated in an ever closer approximation to theoretical closure with the accumulation of empirical findings, is, in his view, the result of ‘the great instauration of 1945’. It lasted abnormally long because of the unprecedented expansion of universities and the academic market from 1945 to 1970. But with the retirement of the generation of social scientists produced in this period, ‘the mutual irrelevance of empirical sociology and social theory’ is increasingly evident. Turner (2004: 159) admits, however, that social theory ‘scrutinizes its concepts and considers the world in the light of the problems of applying its concepts in new settings’. My argument, by contrast, is that the lodestars – value-ideas – that guide such conceptual reinterpretation and theorizing also set the