Abstract
With this book Charles Turner offers an ambitious take on why classic sociological theory should be at the top of the agenda. The main reason is the threat of fragmentation: The proliferation of subdisciplines has made sociology a portfolio of ‘theory of’, rather than a collective quest for constant honing of the discipline’s basic intellectual procedures. Sociological theorists like Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, for example, created, through their style, an intellectual distance to the substantive problems necessary to understand sociology as a science. According to Turner, classical works like theirs provide ‘much of the grammar without which we would be unable to speak sociologically’. This book is an attempt to rectify this situation.
Investigating Social Theory includes, in addition to Weber and Durkheim, a discussion of the work of Talcott Parsons, Theodor W. Adorno, Georg Simmel and Nobert Elias, as well as more recent sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and Pierre Bourdieu, but also Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Harold Bloom, Ernest Gellner and others who do not belong to the standard sociological catalogue. Turner argues that since we no longer read the original sociological theorists, we tend to miss the analytical rigour of their statements about particular social problems. Although being a heavy read at times, the book offers plenty of interesting explanations for why this is so – without doing the biographical routine. Instead of portraying sociologists and their theories name by name, concept by concept, Turner has structured the book as a set of overlapping and sometimes contrasting ideas such as: ‘description’, ‘categories', ‘metaphors', ‘diagrams'. This opens up for looking at many sociologists in new ways.
For instance, in the chapter on descriptions, Turner underlines the often neglected difference between formal and substantive theory. The former is ‘designed to provide direction and coherence to a discipline’ while the latter ‘directs our attention to substantive matters' like class, power and inequality. Examples of this rift are vast throughout the book, for instance in the sociology of Georg Simmel. Turner conducts a deliberation of Simmel’s divide between general sociology (putting things in their social context) and formal sociology (overall social forms) that portray him as a more reliable and ambitious sociological theorist than is usually the case. Simmel’s formal sociology is not well known and often hidden in his fascinating eclecticism. Quoting one of Simmel’s essays from The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Turner shows how Simmel – in one paragraph – uses examples of group behaviour from both the ancient Greek world, fifteenth-century Northern Europe, and nineteenth-century England. These examples are interesting in themselves, but according to Turner, they also help make a formal point about how groups may show certain characteristics only above or below a certain size.
Furthermore, because formal and substantive theory have grown apart, partly as a result of the increasing specialization that emphasizes the latter coupled with the decrease of interest in ‘grand theories' and positivist critique, sociology has failed to produce contemporary classics to compare with its founding figures. Turner’s exceptions are Pierre Bourdieu and to some extent Baumann, but he does not consider other theoretical thinkers mentioned in the book, such as Ulrich Beck and John Urry, as sociological theorists in the same way as for example Durkheim or Weber. While Durkheim dealt with issues associated with conceptualizing the social for the purposes of a science of society, Beck focuses on the problems that confront people trying to make sense of their lives in the modern world. It should be noted, though, that Turner does not argue that formal theory is superior to substantive theory by default, or that concepts are better than mere explanation; they are just different modes of thought. Turner in fact shows that when Anthony Giddens (‘a talented theorist’) used diagrams to illustrate his theory on structuration, the message was severely obscured.
Turner’s book invokes a discussion of the boundaries of sociology. As he states early, it is not accidental that key figures in the book are referred to as sociological theorists and not social theorists. They are chosen by a set of criteria that resembles the concept of a canon. He even adds his own criteria for identifying works that should be included among sociology’s classics: it presents ‘in an exemplary manner one of the important and enduring problems which sociology faces in its battle to make sense of and conceptualize the social’. Still, he rejects the idea of a sociological canon because there are no sociological dogmas, as implied in the religious use of the word ‘canon’. This is somehow paradoxical. Selecting individual works as classics is part of legitimizing their authority as essential reading, and that is in many ways the same as describing a canon of important work. Moreover, if it is possible to identify sociological classics without making it similar to a canon, his book should have included a more global perspective on sociological theory. If global society is the frame of analysis one could even claim that some of the most energetic reinterpretations of the ‘founding fathers' are found in sociological hotbeds outside the so-called Big Four of the United States, Britain, Germany and France.
That said, Turner does a good job in revitalizing the classics. Their achievement was not so much in the detail as in the ability to envision the grand picture. Illustrated by Weber’s Economy and Society as well as by Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics, Turner demonstrates that the capacity to abstract social forms from the content of social life – without turning them into airy models that are then imposed upon reality – is what constitutes classic sociological theory. As a result, although no synthesis is being offered, we get an original introduction on how to conceptualize the social.