Introduction

Myth-Busting

Many students before they begin a social theory course feel a sense of gloom descending upon them. The thought of taking a theory class can fill you with trepidation. Thoughts that might be going through your head can include:

The answer to these questions is: no.

Social theory can be difficult to understand – at least at first. A lot of it is not immediately comprehensible. Theory will be tedious – if you are absolutely convinced it will be tedious. It is sometimes not immediately obvious how it relates to other courses. It can seem to stand in isolation from the ‘real world’. It can seem like eavesdropping on a conversation involving people that you don't know, can't understand and therefore don't like. It can seem to lack relevance to your life.

But social theory, if read in the right way, has many important pluses.

Let's draw a distinction: between ideas and the words they are expressed in. The people who write social theory often express themselves in what, for newcomers, seem like difficult ways. Learning about theory is like learning a new language. You are going to have to put in some effort to work out what is going on initially.

But even if the language is difficult to grasp at first, remember this: the ideas that are being expressed are actually not that difficult. They are about human societies – and you already know a lot about these, even if you don't fully realize it, because you live in one (or several). Social theories are in many ways just worked-up versions of what we all know anyway, if often in semi-conscious ways. In many ways, social theory is an exercise in telling you what you know already – but it tells you in ways that make your knowledge both deeper and more precise than before.

When they write, social theory authors are not being obscure deliberately (or mostly they are not). They have to write in a kind of code that other social theorists can understand. If they didn't, they would constantly have to be explaining everything – and that would take up a vast amount of time and energy. To understand social theory, you have to ‘crack’ the code (or number of codes) it is written in. Once you have cracked the codes, you will understand what social theorists are talking about. This will take time, but most people find it is not that difficult to do.

This book gives you a sense of major social theories and theorists. Each of these uses a distinctive type of code. This book is going to help you understand each of them – both what they are saying and how they are saying it. You will see the main ideas and concepts of each type (or ‘paradigm’) of theory, how they fit together, and how they both differ from and also overlap with the ideas and concepts of other sorts of theory. You will see what their significance is: for social theory, for people in the ‘real world’, and, crucially, for you. As you read the book there should be regular flashes of recognition, when you think ‘so that's what they are saying!’

Social theory can reveal things to you. Sometimes you will discover things that you were not at all aware of. Sometimes reading the work of a particular theorist will mean you will never look at the world in the same way again. Sometimes theory will point to things that you sort of knew about or were dimly aware of. Because it draws upon and talks about many things you already know in some way, social theory is already part of you.

Reading social theory is ultimately not a chore. It is worth persevering with, even if it is an uphill struggle at first, as it is almost inevitably going to be. Once you develop the capacity to understand what social theorists are saying, there can be a really productive, even exciting, meeting of minds, between yours and theirs. When social theory is really doing its job well, it opens up the reader's mental horizons, making them see themselves in new ways. Your understanding is deepened of who you are and how the world works. Once you have got to the stage where you can see the general thrust of any specific theory, you will be able to apply it to yourself and see the world around you in novel ways.

Additionally, the more you understand social theory, the more you will understand why you like or dislike certain parts and types of it, why you find some theories appealing and others dull or unconvincing. You will be able to use what you have learned to think about the social (and not just purely ‘individual’) reasons for the particular relationships you have to particular sorts of social theory. The social reasons why you relate to social theory in the specific ways you happen to do – liking some aspects, disliking others – are only fully discernible once you have grasped social theory's ways of finding and explaining those very reasons themselves. This is what is meant by the ‘reflexive’ powers and capacities of social theory – its ability to help you understand yourself better, including your own relationships to social theory.

How to Read the Book

If social theory is new to you, it will initially seem rather alien. But as you go along the path created by reading this book, it will seem more and more familiar, and you will start to feel comfortable with it. You will begin to see recurrent themes and ideas turning up over and over again. The book has been divided up into different chapters, each covering a major ‘school of thought’ or ‘paradigm’ in social theory. In each chapter we have presented the ideas of particular theorists who have a lot in common with each other, often writing explicitly in light of each other's ideas, engaged in a dialogue of like-minded thinkers.

But although we have arranged the book into chapters dealing with different paradigms, there is also a great deal of overlap between them. Different thinkers and schools of thought often borrow, take up or criticize the same sorts of ideas and themes. The paradigms are not self-enclosed and isolated from each other. They should each be seen as often quite loose sets of ideas that often have a lot more in common with other paradigms than it may at first seem.

Social theory is a patchwork of ideas of earlier thinkers being borrowed by later thinkers, and then being transformed for new purposes. Sometimes the debts to earlier thinkers are clear, sometimes they are more hidden. That is why we start the book with a depiction of the ideas of the so-called ‘classical theorists’, those who lived and wrote in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In many ways what is called ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’ social theory involves playing around with and transforming the ideas of the classical social theorists. Some new elements that are purely twentieth century in origin – notably the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein – get added into the mix as time goes on. But theory nowadays is still a response to, and involves diverse uses and transformations of, the ideas first created in the nineteenth century by the classical authors, such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel.

These classical thinkers also had their sources from which they took inspiration. At the heart of much social theory are the concepts of the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel. Their work had a huge influence on the classical social theorists. You cannot really understand ‘classical social theory’ unless you understand the basic aspects of Kant's and Hegel's thinking. Classical theory is in many ways a set of variations on themes set out by Kant and Hegel. And ‘modern’ social theory – theory written from about the 1930s until today – is largely a set of variations on those variations. Therefore you cannot really understand ‘modern’ social theory unless you understand its ‘classical’ ancestors, and you can't really understand the latter without a basic knowledge of what Kant and Hegel were talking about. So it is a good idea, however you otherwise use the book, if you read Chapter 1 first, because it contains the seeds of so much that comes later.

Recurring Themes

Almost all social theories have to deal with three key themes. In each chapter we will lay out what the main schools of thought have said about these themes. They are:

Knowledge

Every type of social theory makes claims about what it understands as the ‘real world’. Thus the first key theme that any theory must involve is to do with ‘knowledge’. In social theory, knowledge has two central dimensions. The first is what philosophers refer to as ‘ontology’. The ontology of a particular theory involves its central assumptions about what is ‘real’ and therefore what should be the focus of study. Ontological claims that a particular theory makes involve the assumptions it holds about what the ‘real world’ is like, what is in it and what makes it up. For example, one ‘ontological’...