Traditions and Concepts

Abstract

It is often said, quite rightly, that theory is an extension of ordinary communication about social and political issues (Harrington, 2005), that everyone theorizes, that we all map our world by way of concepts, generalizations, abstractions. It’s also true, I think, that, as Ernesto Laclau (1990) notes, we only think out of traditions, that the structures of knowledge already in place — academic disciplines, ideological configurations, larger cultural currents, religious worldviews — crucially shape our ideas and practices: we never start from scratch. In this chapter, I want to deal with some of these already-in-place concepts and traditions, for the most part setting the scene by running with the convenient fiction of sociology’s three founding thinkers — Marx, Durkheim, and Weber — and, subsequently, focussing on the central political sociological question of power.