Chapter1: Introduction: Sociological Theory

CONCLUSION

Dahrendorf's critique ofTalcott Parsons's functional approach was, for its time,a classic. Coser's more functional approach, borrowing from Simmel, has had a less enduring impact. But both Coser's and Dahrendorf's work indicated that theorizing in sociology was about to change. In particular, Dahrendorf's critique signaled the beginning of the end to the dominance of functional theorizing, and it ushered in a new era of conflict theorizing. For a time, virtually all theorizing seemed to call itself a "conflict" approach, and indeed, conflict theory in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to become almost as hegemonic as functionalism had been in the 1950s and 1960s. All this overemphasis on conflict eventually receded, but from this exuberance about rediscovering that the social world is filled with conflict, several important streams of theorizing emerged. We will focus primarily on wends inspired by Marx and Weber, whose work sill] informs all theorizing in sociology In the area of conflict sociology, this influence is even more dramatic.

Chapter11: Critical Theory

Early Critical Theory

CRITICAL STRAINS IN MARX'S THOUGHT

WEBER'S PESSIMISM:

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

THE CULTURAL TURN IN CRITICAL THEORY

CONCLUSION

Jurgen Habermas’s Critical Theory:

THE CRITIQUE OF SCIENCE

LEGITIMATION CRISES IN SOCIETY

THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION

The Reconceptualization of Action and Rationality

The Lifeworld and System Processes of Society

Evolutionary Dynamics and Societal Crises

CONCLUSION

Early Critical Theory

Virtually all early sociologists were influenced by a broad intellectual movement, often termed "The Enlightenment," which grew out of both the Renaissance, later, the Age of Science in the seventeenth century, The Enlightenment still inspires thinkers, in at least two respects. First, the social universe has often been seen as "progressing," moving from one stage of development to another. To be sure, theorists have disagreed about the stages, and many have had doubts about the notion of "progress," but it would be hard to deny that sociologists see directional movement of society or world systems as a central theme. A second legacy from The Enlightenment has been the belief that science can be used to further social progress. As with the idea of progress, this faith in science has not been universal, but even those who have doubted that science is the key to social progress still tend to believe that analysis of the human condition and its pathologies can be used for human betterment.

These two points of emphasis from The Enlightenment were part of a more general effort to come to terms with what is often termed "modernity" or the transformations associated with the rise of commerce and industrial capitalism from the debris of the old feudal order. Indeed, the central problem for all early sociologists was to understand the dramatic transformations of the social order being caused by the expansion of commerce and markets, the industrialization of production, the urbanization of labor, the decline of cohesive and local communities, the rise of the bureaucratic state, the decreasing salience of sacred symbols as a result of expanding secular law and science, the conflicts among new social classes, and many other disruptive transformations. These were changes that early theorists sought to comprehend. Some were pessimistic and worried about what was occurring; others were optimistic about the new modern age; still others believed that things would get better after the current turmoil subsided. But no one who was considered a serious social thinker could ignore "modernity."

Critical theorizing in all its forms enters this old debate about modernity from a number of different directions. As the name implies, most theorists in this "critical" tradition view industrial capitalism in negative terms, and some have even posited a new stage of history, "postmodernity," which is similarly viewed in a negative light. Almost all critical theorists disparage the optimism of The Enlightenment, seeing the use of science for constructing a better society as naive, as pursuit of an illusion, or even as harmful. For most, science is part of a broader culture of commerce and capitalism, which, critical theorists believe, are the cause of the problems in the modern or postmodern era, rather than part of their solution. Yet, ironically, these very same critics often appear to be figures of The Enlightenment because they address the very same problems of the earlier Enlightenment-inspired theorists, because they use analysis and reason to pronounce the problems of the modern or postmodern era. And because they often propose solutions to the ills of the current era even as they drown their pronouncements in pessimism. True, most critical theorists maintain a hearty disdain for science and the implicit Enlightenment projects of theories examined in earlier chapters, but they have not escaped the mood, tone, and problematic issues of The Enlightenment.

CRITICAL STRAINS IN MARX'S THOUGHT

In 1846, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels completed The German Ideology, which was initially turned down by the publisher} Much of this work is an attack on the "Young Hegelians," who were advocates of the German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1831), and is of little interest today, Yet this attack contained certain basic ideas that have served as the impetus behind "critical theory," or the view that social theory must be critical of oppressive arrangements and propose emancipatory alternatives. This theme exists, of coupe, in all of Marx's work, but the key elements of contemporary critical theory are most evident in this first statement.

Marx criticized the Young Hegelians severely because he had once been

one of them and was now making an irrevocable break. Marx saw the Hegelians as hopeless idealists, in the philosophical sense. That is, they saw the world as~ reflective of ideas, with the dynamics of social life revolving around consciousness and other cognitive processes by which "ideal essences" work their magic on humans. Marx~ saw this emphasis on the "reality of ideas" as nothing more than a conservative ideology that supports people's oppression by the material forces of their existence. His alternative was "to stand Hegel on his head," but in this early work there is still an emphasis on the relation between consciousness and self-reflection, on the one hand, and social reality, on the other. This dualism became central to contemporary critical theory

Actually, Marx's "standing of Hegel on his head" has been reversed by some contemporary theorists who, in essence, have put Hegel back on his feet Indeed, for many who commented on the condition of modernity or post-modernity near the close of the twentieth century, the world has been transformed into a sea of symbols that have lost anchorage in material conditions and that have, as a result, changed the very nature of society from one driven by control of the means of material production to one dominated by signs and texts symbolizing little but themselves. For critical theorists schooled in the Marian tradition, even those who call themselves postmodernists, such arguments go too far, hut there can be little doubt that Marx's dismissal of Hegel and the Young Hegelians was not the final word on the place of ideas, symbols, and signs in societal evolution.

Marx was a modernist, not a postmodernist; so he want a different direction than the Young Hegelians. Marx believed humans are unique by virtue of their conscious awareness of themselves and their situation; they are capable of self-reflection and, hence, assessment of their positions in society Such consciousness arises from people's daily existence and is not a realm of ideas that is somehow independent of the material world, as much German philosophy argued or as later versions of postmodernism implied. According to Marx, people produce their ideas and conceptions of the world because of social structures in which they are born, raised, and bye.

The essence of people's lives is the process of production, because, for Marx, human "life involves, before anything else, eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing, and many other material things” To meet these contingencies of life, production is necessary, but, as production satisfies one set of needs, new needs arise and encourage alterations in the ways that productive activity is organized. The elaboration of productive activity creates a division of labor, which, in the end, is alienating because it increasingly deprives humans of their capacity to control their productive activities. Moreover, as people work, they are exploited in ways that generate private property and capital for those who enslave them. Thus, as people work as alienated cogs in the division of labor, they produce that which enslaves them: private property and profits for those who control the modes and means of production. Marx provided a more detailed discussion of the evolution of productive forces to this capitalist stage, and like any Enlightenment thinker, he argued that this capitalist stage would lead to a new era of human organization.

Marx believed that the capacity to use language, to think, and to analyze their conditions would enable humans to alter their environment. People do not merely have to react to their material conditions in some mechanical way; they can also use their capacities for thought and reflection to construct new material conditions and corresponding social relations. Indeed, the coupe of history involved such processes as people actively restructured the material conditions of their existence. The goal of sociaI theory, Marx implicitly argued, is to use humans' unique facility to expose those oppressive social relations and to propose alternatives, Marx's entire career was devoted to this goal, and this emancipatory aspect of Marx's thought forms the foundation for critical theory, even in some of its postmodern manifestations.

Marx used the somewhat ambiguous term "praxis" to describe this blending of theory and action. The basic notion is that action to change social conditions generates increased knowledge that can then be used to mount more effective change-producing action. Thus, the interplay between action and theoretical understanding can eventually lead individuals to a better social life. Although those with power can impose their ideologies on subordinates and, thereby, distort the latter's perceptions of their true interests, Marx had typical Enlightenment-inspired faith that subordinates possessed the capacity for praxis and that they would eventually use their capacities for agency to change the nature of modernity.

Today, contemporary critical theorists appear somewhat divided on the question of whether analysis of modernity and postmoderdity can be used to improve the human condition. As we will see shortly, many confronted Max Weber's pessimism about the ever tightening "cage" of rational-legal authority and state domination. Others sustained the emancipatory faith of Marx's belief in praxis.

Still others emphasized an inherent force articulated in Marx's analysis of capitalism--the capacity of money-driven markets to "commodify" all things, symbols, and ideals as a basis for a renewed pessimism about the human condition. To commodify means that symbols, signs, objects, cultures, relationships, and virtually anything can be turned into a marketable thing, to be bought and sold for a price stated in monetary terms. Hence, as capitalists seek profits, they buy and sell not just the material objects necessary for human survival, but they produce and sell symbols and signs that, as commodities, lose their power to provide meaning to human life. Coupled with information technologies that Marx could never have visualized, as well as markets for services and cultural symbols that Marx did not fully anticipate, the social world is now dominated by the production and distribution of signs, symbols, texts, and other cultural commodities. This transformation has changed the very nature of humans capacities to understand and respond to their conditions.

WEBER'S PESSIMISM:

THE BASIC DILEMMA FOR EARLY CRITICAL THEORISTS

Max Weber was concerned with the historical transition to modern capitalist societies, and his description and explanation of this transition represent a devastating critique of Marx's optimism about revolutionary movements toward a new utopian society~ Weber's analysis is complex, and the historical detail that he presented to document his case is impressive, but his argument is captured by the concept of rationalization.5 Weber argued that the rationality that defines modern societies is "means/ends rationality" and, hence, involves a search for the most efficient means to achieve a defined end. The process of rationalization, Weber felt, involves the ever-increasing penetration of means/ends rationality into more spheres of life, thereby destroying older traditions. As bureaucracies expand in the economic and governmental sphere, and as markets allow individuals to pursue their personal ends rationally, the traditional moral fabric is broken. Weber agreed with Georg Simmel that this rationalization of life brings individuals a new freedom from domination by religious dogmatism, community, class, and other traditional forces, but in their place it creates a new kind of domination by impersonal economic forces, such as markets and corporate bureaucracies, and by the vast administrative apparatus of the ever-expanding state. Human options were, in Weber's view, becoming ever more constrained by the "iron cage" of rational and legal authority Unlike Marx, Weber did not see such a situation as rife with revolutionary potential; rather, he saw the social world as increasingly administered by impersonal bureaucratic forces.

This pessimistic view seemed, by the early 1930s, to be a far more reasonable assessment of modernity than was Marx's utopian dream. Indeed, the communist revolution in Russia had degenerated into Stalinism and bureaucratic totalitarianism by the Communist Party; in the West, particularly the United States, workers seemed ever more willing to sell themselves in markets and work in large scale organizations; and political fascism in Germany and Italy was creating large authoritarian bureaucracies. How, then, was the first generation of critical theorists to reconcile Weber's more accurate assessment of empirical trends with Marx's optimistic and emancipatory vision? This became the central question of early critical theory.