Contemporary Social Theory

Society and social theory
Another way of thinking about Natalie’s life and current circumstance is by
looking in a little more detail at what social theorists have had to say about
the concept of ‘society’. Social theory, as we will see, is a very sweeping and
diverse attempt to engage with major social problems, and for that reason
alone any hard-and-fast generalizations about it should be treated with
caution. But it is possible to identify three widely held positions, deriving
from classical social theory, on what it actually feels like to live in the modern
world.
The first position seeking to make sense of what it feels like to live in
society is that of Karl Marx. According to Marx as well as authors influenced
by Marxism, social bonds are determined to their roots by structured
inequalities, or class conflict. In this portrait, society is fundamentally split,
torn and divided. The modern world after Marx is 
schizoid
to its roots. This
is a world that is continuously dynamic at the level of productive industrial
forces, and endlessly restless in its search for profits. Yet if capitalism
unleashes human creative powers and fosters material growth for some in
society, it condemns the bulk of humanity to a degraded, wretched life. ‘More
than any other mode of production,’ writes Marx (see Cohen 1978: 25),
‘capitalism squanders human lives, or living labour, and not only flesh and
blood, but also nerve and brain.’ Capitalism, simply, generates the brutaliza-
tion of society through its ongoing revolution of economic life. These
internal dynamics of the capitalist system produce, in turn, the most tragic
social contradictions – namely, the polarization of rich and poor. It is for
this reason, said Marx, that we have to free ourselves from capitalism by
restoring to society the realization of human powers through communism.
For Marx, the anticipated communist society was one in which the active
shaping of history involved a more stable, ordered, free and equal world.
The second position on the texture of modern society is that of Max
Weber. According to this portrait, modern society imprisons us in the ‘iron
cage’ of bureaucratic rationality. Writing at the turn of the nineteenth century,
Weber was as much preoccupied with the threats to humanity presented by
modern industrial society as was Marx, but he addressed these threats
differently. His focus was more internal than external, concentrating on how
individual attitudes come to be shaped by the drab, passionless world of
bureaucratic routine. The portrait of modern society he bequeaths to social
theory is that of a 
bureaucratic machine
– where people may retain some
semblance of authenticity (a kind of pseudo-individualism), but are in fact
trapped in the ‘steel-hard’ cage of a rigid rationality. This portrait of society
has been tremendously influential – for example, literary works such as
George Orwell’s 
1984
implicitly reference the Weberian model of society as
fixed, static and rationalized. 
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The third position on the texture of modern society is that of Emile
Durkheim, according to which social cohesion falls on hard times as a result
of the rise of individualism. Perhaps more clearly than either Marx or Weber,
Durkheim saw the significance of morality in modern social development.
There must be a moral bond for society to exist at all according to Durkheim,
and it is from that angle that the moral framework may be considered to be
at the root of both individualism and social relations. In 
Elementary Forms
of the Religious Life
(1912), Durkheim invoked the term 
conscience collective
to show that whenever we think, we think collectively. Less about religion
than about the question of morality, Durkheim’s 
Elementary Forms
sought
to demonstrate that social theory cannot explore the terrain of morality if
women and men are abstracted from their concrete social surroundings.
To study morality after Durkheim means grasping it as intricately interwoven
with the fine gradations and subtle nuances of our shared social experiences.
In the end, the world is known through the social categories of our shared
lives. The dilemma in our own time of intensive individualism, according
to Durkheim’s standpoint, is how to struggle to retain contact with the
common aspects of social life.
There is, however, a problem. History has not exactly been kind to 
any of these versions of society. The world in which Natalie finds herself
today does not really reflect, or simply correspond to, any of the classical
portraits of society. Rather than being socially integrated through the impact
of shared moral values as described by Durkheim, contemporary societies
seem to operate as much through a lack of consensus among social agents
as through any implicit shared moral norms. So, too, societies today are
not becoming more and more bureaucratic, or predictably ordered, in the
fashion Weber anticipated. Finally, as the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989
and associated death of Marxism as a political project indicate, class conflict
is most certainly not the principal motor of history. It is true that we 
now live in a global electronic economy, to which the ideas of Marx, Weber
and Durkheim still have relevance. But it is a very different world from that
anticipated in classical social theory, one that neither reduces to a single
overriding dynamic of social explanation nor one subject to rational pre-
diction and scientific control.
As it happens, Natalie has a powerful sense of the breadth and speed
of social change currently sweeping the globe. She believes, for example, that
no single force – neither governments nor corporations – is in control of
the global economy. She thinks the idea that the nation-state can manage
capitalism has been exposed as fatally flawed. Consequently, she is con-
cerned that the welfare state – an institution she has grown to admire while
living in the UK, but which was virtually unknown to her while growing up
in America – will not be able to meet the demands placed upon it by citizens,
especially the growing numbers of elderly people. But there are other
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anxieties too, perhaps deeper ones, that Natalie has about the future of
society. She feels that the entire globe is in a ‘state of emergency’. There are
tremendous new risks. Terrorism, and particularly the threat of high
technology nuclear terror, convinces Natalie that the world in which she grew
up is gone, and gone for good. Other high risks of today’s world that she
mentions include global warming and environmental destruction. And yet
she still identifies other social trends more promising for her future, and
the future of the next generation. She describes her life today as a constantly
shifting terrain of exciting experiences. As she moves between cities and
countries, her professional and personal lives bring her into regular contact
with people who think differently, and live quite different lives, from her. She
embraces this social complexity, and welcomes moves towards increased
cultural diversity and cosmopolitan living.
Natalie’s instinctive sense that the world in which she lives is changing
fast mirrors contemporary intellectual assessments of the human condition
in the current age. What the ‘deep drivers’ of society are, and whether they
are in point of fact new, are the focus of intense controversy in social theory.
I discuss many of the most significant assessments of society – of the
complex ways in which we now live – throughout this book. Some of these
social theories, as we will see, seek to develop the structural method
proposed by classical thinkers such as Marx, Weber and Durkheim, but apply
it to novel areas of social enquiry. That is to say, the classical insight that
social structures – such as the economy or bureaucracy – operate in ways
invisible to the naked eye has been extended by various contemporary
analysts of society to encompass, among others, the linguistic field, the
unconscious, sexuality, the body, new technologies and virtual networks.
Other social theorists reject classical perspectives on the grounds that they
are ill-equipped to comprehend the novel global circumstances in which we
now find ourselves. In this viewpoint, industrialism and market capitalism
are dying, if not dead, and a new world has been born. Various social theories
have been proclaimed to challenge classical orthodoxies in this respect,
ranging from post-industrialism and post-structuralism to post-feminism
and postmodernity.
New times demand fresh thinking. Tracing the rise of contemporary
social theory from the 1920s to the present day, this book explores how path-
breaking theoretical and sociological concerns have brought topics such as
selfhood, power, domination, sexuality and gender to the fore of intellectual
and public political debate over recent years. In reviewing developments in
social theory, my aim is to introduce readers to some of the most challenging
perspectives, and surprising innovations, on the multidimensional aspects
of contemporary social processes. Social theorists from a wide variety of
perspectives agree – even if they agree on little else – that we live in new
worlds of social and cultural organization. To capture the spirit of these new
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times, a vast array of terms and terminology has been developed. What must
urgently be engaged with according to Theodor Adorno are the institutional
transformations associated with ‘the totally administered society’, whereas
for Herbert Marcuse the core of our social pathologies stems from ‘surplus
repression’. Jürgen Habermas speaks by contrast of ‘systematically distorted
communication’ warping contemporary societies, and Axel Honneth widens
this focus on communication to encompass problems of recognition and
disrespect. If communication and culture brook large in some recent
analyses, then structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructive theories
focus attention on the relation between language and social realties in
startling new ways. The French semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure’s procla-
mation that we must analyse ‘the life of signs in society’ has served to
establish signifiers, sexualities and simulations as legitimate objects of study
in contemporary social theory. The pioneering works of Roland Barthes,
Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida on the
intricate entwinement of signs and society call attention to the fundamental
importance of languages, discourses and codes in everyday life.
Some of the new social theories, by contrast, seek to anchor their pre-
occupations in less cultural and more institutional concerns. Anthony
Giddens speaks of the current age as one of ‘reflexive modernization’. Ulrich
Beck writes of ‘risk society’. Zygmunt Bauman of ‘liquid modernity’. Manual
Castells of ‘the network society’. Fredric Jameson of ‘late capitalism’. All of
these social theories, in very different ways, attempt to account for changes
in social conditions and institutional life associated with modernity. They
represent powerful approaches to thinking about the rise of new information
technologies and the current world economy, among others, in these early
years of the twenty-first century. Then there are other, perhaps more familiar
attempts to theorize what is truly new today. The term ‘globalization’ has
been social theory’s most famed recent reply to the complexities of people’s
lives today. The adventures of the concept of globalization range all the way
from the emergence of transnational financial economies to global satellite
communications. Again, social theorists have invented new terms to cap-
ture, and indeed define, our new global times: to mention just a few that
we will review in this book, ‘global transformations’ (David Held), ‘border-
less world’ (Kenichi Ohmae) and ‘glocalization’ (Roland Robertson). 
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