In the previous chapters I dealt with the type of relativism which denies that modernity entails features which, under globalized conditions, are transcultural rather than Western-specific. In this chapter I deal with a related issue: I critically assess attempts to overcome the relativism that communitarian theories often entail by the adoption of an anti-relativistic strategy different from my own. In order to make my arguments as clear and concrete as possible, I focus on a single work – Amitai Etzioni's The New Golden Rule (1996).

There are two standard critiques of communitarian theories: (i) that these theories always have authoritarian connotations, with their emphasis on the importance of communal values and order undermining individual freedoms; and (ii) that their focus on the context-bound nature of communal values results in the relativistic idea that, since every community has its own values, there is no supra-communal or extra-communal way of assessing conflicting views of the ‘good’ life.

The golden rule perspective

Communitarianism, as expounded by Etzioni (1996), attempts to overcome both the authoritarian and the relativistic critique. He responds to both with his notion of a ‘golden rule’ – the idea that when advocating or promoting ‘community’ in the modern world, one should strive to achieve a balance between order and individual autonomy. It is imbalance between these two cardinal virtues that creates difficulties: emphasis on order at the expense of autonomy leads to authoritarianism, while emphasis on autonomy at the expense of order leads to anarchy.

Introduction

In the previous two chapters I critically examined some of the strong and weak points of Parsons' functionalist-evolutionist theory and its relevance in understanding democratizing tendencies in the modern world. In the following two chapters I examine some of the writings of two theorists, Alexander and Joas, who, although taking Parsons' work seriously, try to restructure it in an attempt to resolve some of its more problematic aspects.

If Parsons is the father of sociological theory, Jeffrey Alexander in the United States and Anthony Giddens in Britain are his main heirs presumptive. Like Parsons, they both try to create a set of concepts to help raise interesting sociological questions and investigate the social world in a non-empiricist, theoretically rigorous manner.

Giddens' theorizing is quite as ‘grand’ as Parsons'. His aim, at least in his more theoretically orientated work (1984), is to provide a fully worked-out post-Parsonian armoury of concepts, with the help of which we can conceptualize sociologically major dimensions of social life (such as power or trust), compare different types of social systems, and establish logically coherent linkages between different levels of analysis and different ways of viewing the social.

Alexander's theorizing, without being any less significant, is less ‘grand’ in two senses. For one thing, he tries to retain, in more or less restructured form, some major components of the Parsonian edifice, and for another he offers us, on a more modest scale, a set of ‘tactical’ concepts that attempt to bring Parsonian functionalism and the various theoretical reactions to, or critiques of, Parsons that developed from the 1960s onwards closer together.

In dealing with the issues of rights and citizenship in modern societies, Parsons was very much influenced by T. H. Marshall's account of the successive development of civil, political and social rights in the United Kingdom. Given this, it is appropriate briefly to examine Marshall's contribution – before considering how Parsons integrated it into his broader, more theoretical framework.

T. H. Marshall: civil, political and social rights

With his elegant prose, which systematically eschewed sociological-theoretical jargon, Marshall (1964) based his analysis of citizenship on a rather non-deterministic theory of social differentiation. According to him, citizenship, as a movement for the spread of rights ‘downwards’, began in the seventeenth century together with the development of capitalism and the marked emergence of national consciousness.

But in the seventeenth century ‘rights were blended because institutions were amalgamated’ (1964: 72). It is in the eighteenth century that institutions became less ‘amalgamated’ (in evolutionist terminology, more differentiated), and a process of ‘unblending’ of rights can be discerned, with each category of rights (civil, political, social) beginning to acquire its own logic and dynamic trajectory. The civil aspects of citizenship developed first. Civil rights related to property, free speech, free association and other ‘individual freedoms’ gradually destroyed the feudal principles of social stratification, and durably established the principle of equality under the law. It was therefore in the legal sphere and, more specifically, in the institutional arena of the courts of justice, that we see the first thrust from ‘subjects’ to ‘citizens’, from a situation where different laws and juridical principles applied to different classes, to a situation where all were equal before the major legal codes of the national community.

Introduction

Alexander has tried to restructure Parsonian theory by reworking the theory of culture and by exploring the connections between culture and action in novel ways. Hans Joas, on the other hand, in his influential The Creativity of Action (1996), tries to go beyond Parsons by putting at the centre of his analysis not the normative but the creative, not the actor but interaction.

According to Joas, Parsons' early work, particularly his The Structure of Social Action (1937), set the foundations for all subsequent sociological attempts to construct a general theory of action. For Joas, however, these foundations are rather inadequate. They have directed the attention of social theorists to the utilitarian–normative or rational–non-rational distinction, which leads to a very restrictive conceptual framework. This framework rules out the idea that what is most distinctive about human action is neither rationality nor normativeness but creativity, which underlies and goes beyond the notions of the rational and the normative.

Parsons' critique of utilitarianism and his persistent attempt to show the normative basis of social order (which is to say, his one-sided concern with the rational–normative dialectic) prevented him from taking into consideration various philosophical theories of action that grapple with the issue of creativity. It also prevented him from seeing what the theorists on whom he focused (Pareto, Marshall, Durkheim, Weber and, to a lesser extent, Tönnies and Simmel) had to say about the creative, inventive aspects of action.

The distinction between social integration and system integration has been a useful tool in the empirical investigation of social transformation. The various attempts to change or transcend this well-known dichotomy relate it to some key debates in sociological theory, such as the status of functionalist explanations, the links between subjectivist and objectivist sociologies, the issue of essentialist accounts of social phenomena, etc. In the present chapter I focus on how Habermas and Giddens have tried to restructure Lockwood's distinction, and argue that their attempts have not been very successful and that it is more useful to retain Lockwood's original formulation (with some modifications).

Lockwood

For Lockwood (1964), the distinction between social integration and system integration sensitizes the student to two different ways of viewing social wholes; in turn, these two different perspectives lead to different mechanisms accounting for social order or disorder. Social integration refers to ‘the orderly or conflictual relationships between the actors’, whereas system integration focuses on the compatible or incompatible/contradictory relationships between ‘the parts of the social system’ (1964: 244).

Looking at a social whole from the point of view of actors and their relationships leads to investigating the problem of social order/disorder in terms of social co-operation/conflict. These are the result of the actors – on the basis of how they conceive the social world – developing strategies for defending or promoting what they consider to be their interests. On the level of system integration, the focus shifts from an agency to a systemic perspective.

Introduction

The development of the social sciences in general and of sociology in particular is inextricably linked with the emergence and consolidation of the nation-state in nineteenth-century Europe. The nation-state and the more general modern social organization it entails have two basic dimensions that distinguish it from all pre-modern social formations:

1. (i) the decline of segmental localism and the massive mobilization/inclusion of the population in the national centre. This ‘bringing in’ process entails the concentration of the means of not only economic but also political, social and cultural production at the top; as well as the shifting of attachments and orientations from the traditional, non-differentiated community to what Anderson (1991) has called the ‘imaginary community’ of the nation-state;

2. (ii) the top to bottom differentiation of the societal whole into distinct institutional spheres, each portraying its own logic, values and historical dynamic. This differentiation, unlike that of complex, pre-modern social formations, is not confined to the top but reaches the social base or periphery as well.

Classical sociologists have tried to understand the social realities resulting from the British Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution by focusing holistically on the above two major features of modernity. Spencer (1972) and Durkheim (1964), for instance, explored differentiation as a major feature of the evolutionary process leading to the emergence of modern societies.

Introduction

It must be pointed at the very start that the terms used to define the debate between social constructionists and critical realists are often misleading. They seem to imply that the differences between the two sides have to do with whether such phenomena as social structures are real or mere fictions in the minds of social scientists. In fact, the actual debate is concerned less with the ‘reality’ of structures than with how real social structures are constructed and what exactly they do, what kind of impact they have on social stability and change.

If we take, for instance, the exchange of views between Rom Harré and Bob Carter in a symposium published in the European Journal of Social Theory, it is not only the critical realist Carter who believes in the real existence of structures; Harré also states emphatically that social structures, although discursively constructed, are the real products of acting agents. They both, therefore, start by accepting, ontologically speaking, the real existence of structures. They differ, however, on the way in which real structures impact on social action and interaction.

For Carter (following Bhaskar, 1978, 1989; Archer, 2000), social structures have ‘causal powers’, whereas for Harré only human agents have such powers. Social structures can in themselves cause nothing:

Having discussed the type of action–structure and micro–macro linkages that are presupposed in a non-essentialist, open-ended, holistic conceptual framework in the two previous chapters, it remains to examine what presuppositions are necessary for examining the linkages between institutional spheres (economic, political, social and cultural) in a way that avoids aprioristic, not empirically founded positions about the dominance of one sphere over the others.

Economism

As pointed out in previous chapters, the strongest argument that can be made for Marx's holistic framework is that it avoids the conflation of objectivist and subjectivist approaches seen in Giddens' and Bourdieu's writings; it also avoids the imbalance between systemic and action approaches seen in Parsonian and Althusserian functionalism at one extreme, and in interpretative micro-sociological approaches at the other. Viewed as a whole, Marx's work achieves a remarkable balance and successfully combines systemic-institutional and actor-oriented perspectives. It views social development in terms of both systemic contradictions of institutional parts (system integration/disintegration) and actors' struggles (social integration/disintegration). It is important to repeat once more that Marx not only accepts methodological dualism (i.e. the necessity, in Habermas' terms, of both an internalist and an externalist perspective), but changes from one to the other without any conceptual acrobatics – since the key concept of technology (the forces of production) plays a crucial role in moving in a theoretically coherent manner from systemic contradictions to actors' struggles.

In this and the following chapters (14–16) I take an intermediate, ‘bridging’ position between conventional, holistically oriented macro-sociological theories and postmodern approaches which reject all holistic theories and conceptual frameworks as always entailing essentialist connotations. It is worth emphasizing once more that the notion of holism in this and the following chapters is not used in a way which entails the ‘methodological individualism versus collectivism’ debate; nor does it raise the ontological issues of the emergence and the reality of causal powers of social structures (as in chapter 7). Rather than focusing on philosophical issues, it simply raises the methodological question of whether or not it is possible to study social wholes (such as formal organizations, communities, nation-states and global formations) in a non-essentialist and, at the same time, non-fragmentary, overall manner.

Postmodern, anti-foundationalist discourses have developed two major criticisms of holistic theories. If a distinction is made between substantive theories and conceptual frameworks, the first critique stresses the over-ambitious and often deterministic character of the former, whereas the second critique points to the essentialist connotations of the latter.

‘Grand narratives’: context-sensitive and insensitive

In this case the postmodern attack concentrates on positivistically oriented theories aimed at producing generalizations or ‘laws’ that are supposed to be universally valid in all social situations regardless of time or space. The critics point out that such transhistorical, transcultural generalizations, whether they focus on the structure of kinship, the dynamics of revolutionary movements or the nature of religious phenomena, are wrong and, in addition, their pseudo-scientific pretensions lead (as in the case of ‘scientific’ Marxism) to all sorts of authoritarian practices (Lyotard, 1974).

There have been fundamental changes in the past three decades, both on the level of social theory, and on the level of the social realities that this theory tries to describe and explain. Concerning the former we have witnessed a post-positivist/anti-foundationalist as well as a linguistic/cultural turn. With regard to the latter, the abrupt opening of world markets (particularly financial ones) in combination with the new information technologies has led to a type of neoliberal globalization within which nation-states have had to change profoundly both their internal structures and their external strategies in their attempts to thrive or even just survive in a new, highly competitive world order.

For some social theorists the above changes have been so radical that the term ‘modern’ should be replaced by the term ‘postmodern’ – both on the level of second-order theoretical discourses, and on the more practical one of first-order laypersons' discursive and non-discursive practices. Hence the talk about postmodern theory and postmodern society: a social order within which the belief systems and the collective certainties of early modernity have evaporated – this state of affairs leading to constant references to the ‘death of the subject’, the ‘end of history’, the ‘dissolution of metaphysics’, the ‘implosion of the social’, the ‘eclipse of the political’, etc.

Against this hyperbolic tendency to exaggerate partial trends to the point of showing them as totally dominant, other theorists (including myself) consider that the term late-modern rather than postmodern is a more appropriate characterization of present-day society and theory.

As I have argued in chapter 1, the dominance of Parsonian functionalism in the field of sociological theory during the early postwar period gave way to extreme fragmentation when Parsons' grand synthesis was challenged by a variety of competing paradigms (symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, phenomenological sociology, non-Marxist conflict theory, structuralism/post-structuralism, etc.). This proliferation of approaches led to compartmentalization, with each theoretical tradition claiming the monopoly of truth and busily building impregnable barriers (methodological, epistemological and ontological) to inter-paradigmatic, open-ended communication.

The 1980s and 1990s brought a reaction to the ‘war of paradigms’ with attempts from various quarters to overcome the fragmentation of the previous two decades. This reaction took two main forms. On the one hand, post-structuralism presupposed the radical dissolution of boundaries not only between social-science paradigms but also between social-science disciplines and sub-disciplines (economics, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, etc.), or even between the social sciences and philosophy, literature, linguistics, etc. This extreme form of theoretical dedifferentiation led to a situation where complex social phenomena were reductively explained in terms of signs, texts, ‘desire’, etc. (Mouzelis, 1995b: 41–68).

A more constructive reaction to fragmentation and compartmentalization was the endeavour to transcend the boundaries between existing paradigms. For instance, Giddens' structuration theory (1984) is supposed to provide a ‘transcending’ conceptual framework which draws elements from what he calls interpretative sociologies, structural sociologies and structuralist ones.

Goldthorpe's article ‘The uses of history in sociology’ (1991) raises very interesting problems on the status and future prospects of what Goldthorpe has pejoratively labelled ‘grand’ historical sociology – as this has been developed during the last three decades by historically oriented sociologists like Barrington Moore, Michael Mann, Theda Skocpol, John Hall and others. As I consider the rapid growth of this branch of sociology one of the most fruitful and promising developments in the discipline; and as my own work on the long-term historical developments of some Balkan and Latin American polities (Mouzelis, 1986) has been very much influenced by Moore's work, I would like to make a few brief points in its defence.

The conflation of history and sociology

To begin with, I agree with Goldthorpe on the necessity of maintaining the distinction between history and sociology as two disciplines which, although closely interrelated, portray different logics and methodologies. From this point of view, I am against Abrams's (1982) well-known position as well as the more general postmodern tendency to ignore or demolish all boundaries between social-science disciplines and sub-disciplines. In fact, I think that Goldthorpe's criteria for distinguishing sociological from historical analysis (the monothetic/ideographic distinction and the types of empirical evidence that the two disciplines use) are useful for establishing differences of emphasis between history and sociology.