Living Theory

As someone who has been teaching theory courses for 35 years, I had a visceral reaction to Alan Sica’s editorial, “A Million Words of ‘Theory’,” (Contemporary Sociology, July 2013). For him, the gold standard of the theory text is the two-volume 1961 edition of Theories of Society—a “monumental” compilation by Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Kasper Naegele and Jesse Pitts with 169 excerpts from 87 theorists, amounting to, Alan notes, 1.4 million words plus 29 pages of bibliography. Next to this, he laments, subsequent compilations of the classics of social theory look slight: Ritzer’s history of social theory weighs in at 367,000 words, Charles Lemert’s anthology at 444,000 while Sica’s own textbook comes in at a mighty 663,000 words and 144 authors, but still less than half the gold standard.

Why is a great Weber scholar like Alan Sica counting words to measure theory? I have always found Alan’s knowledge of social theory staggering and inspiring, but I confess that it also induces in me a deep sense of inadequacy. If all this knowledge, or even a small proportion of it, is what it takes to be a social theorist or to teach social theory, then I’m dead in the water before I begin. I don’t command a full understanding of even a tiny fraction of these theorists. And if I’m intimidated, what about those students for whom these textbooks are designed?

As I explain in more detail below, in my approach to teaching theory, less is more. By engaging students with a limited selection of key texts, they learn much more than in the survey approach represented by these textbooks. I use the word “survey” advisedly both in the general and technical sense. Each excerpt included in these texts is treated as a data point from the population of possible social theories. They are then organized into categories, labeled and classified. As in a social survey, there is a double decontextualization: the excerpts are severed from their historical context as well as from the context of the editorial process that selects some and omits others. So too, there is a double disconnection: the excerpts are separated from one another as if they were independent entities, obscuring the ways in which they are in dialogue with one another, but they are also separated from other potential excerpts from the same theorist.

Alan Sica’s Social Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Present is a case in point. In his short introduction he laments “the harsh financial forces that rule publishing today” that forced him to cut the length of the manuscript in half and the number of theorists from 185 to 144, so that whole populations (in particular women and theorists from the Africa, Latin America and Asia) had to be excluded. Nowadays the costs of publishing, especially reprint fees, make a “book like Parsons’ huge Theory of Society out of the question.” In addition, Alan avers, by eclipsing what little consensus there was, the canon wars have now made the editor’s job even more difficult. He reels off lists of theorists that deserve recognition, but were denied inclusion on the grounds of space, and apologizes to each and all for subjecting them to the editor’s ax. Surprisingly, that’s all we hear from Alan—the rest of the book places his chosen excerpts in chronological order without context or connection. This is the theory survey par excellence.

I have never had the chance to observe Alan Sica in a classroom, but I’ve seen my colleagues—devotees of the survey approach—assign graduate students hundreds of pages of Hegel, Marx, Weber and Durkheim each week. The subtext is: this is what you must know—learn it, regurgitate it, don’t question it. Similarly, in a textbook-based undergraduate course, the teacher wields the textbook over the students, expecting them to absorb one theorist after another, all too often in an incoherent and disconnected manner. The students are taught to survey the mountain range from below, rather than attempting to climb one or more mountains and see things from their summits.

Perhaps it’s good to get a glimpse of the mountain range. But it can only be a glimpse, for few can read and absorb such a vast terrain. So it easily becomes an excuse for the teacher not to engage the class, or more problematically, for the teacher to rule over the class, to deliver himself (or, less likely, herself) beyond contestation, favoring those who come with the cultural capital in an absurd game of make believe. You pretend to teach, we pretend to learn. Introduction to theory thus becomes a disciplinary tool, and all too often for first semester graduate students, a hazing ritual in which the instructor becomes a high-priest putting them in touch with the Gods. Quickly, they learn the rules of the game so well that they are not even aware that they are playing it. No wonder that today some colleagues object to classical theory tout court as a pile of dead wood, confined to the past, a distraction from serious scientific engagement, from the real problems of the day.

But if this textbook-based survey approach is flawed, what is the alternative? One possibility is the interpretive approach to social theory which is designed to bring the theory and the theorist into relation with one another and to the world in which they live, in a dynamic three-way relation. Charles Camic’s approach to theory is the prototype and Bourdieu’s field theory can help. This interpretive approach to the history of ideas, if it is to be more than placing theory and theorist in their life and times, requires a sophisticated theory of knowledge. It replaces the survey approach with a focus on a single theorist whose theory is constituted at the intersection of biography and history.

Another interpretive approach focuses on a selection of excerpts from the great thinkers of the past derived from the editor’s own distinctive theoretical vision, which is then promoted through its projection into the past. That’s what Parsons tried to do, by selecting pieces constructed as stepping stones to his own theory. Here excerpts are connected to one another in a teleological manner, culminating in this case in the architectonics of structural functionalism. By clarifying the criteria of excerpt selection, at least, this has the virtue of being open to critique.

These two interpretive approaches break from the survey in two contradictory directions: the first underlines the singularity of theory as a product of a specific time and place, even of a specific author, while the second strips the historical context away and instead presents the history of theory as a long staircase ascending into the present. As a teaching strategy, however, they may leave students just as bewildered as in the simple survey approach. Here too students are expected to be passive receptacles of the packaged knowledge congealed in the text book.

In my own teaching I have attempted to develop a third approach, what I call the ethnographic approach to social theory. It replaces the search for a universe of theories that are connected by an inner destiny with a focus on the connections within theories as well as connections among theories, although without any superimposed teleology. The development of this dual connectedness opens up a new relation of students to theory, which is no longer external to them. Like ethnographers, students are not simply observers but participant observers, they learn that they are theorists themselves. They learn to live in theory so that theory begins to take root in them, occupying their lives, shaping their imagination. This may sound preposterous, so let me explain.

In opposition to the survey, the ethnographic approach focuses on a series of carefully chosen extracts from the original texts of each theorist, extracts that students can manageably study in the allotted time—from a few paragraphs to 10 or so pages per class depending on their difficulty. These extracts are like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle that are slowly assembled in the course of a dialogue between teacher and taught. Like the ethnographer’s field notes they are read and re-read as they are put into relation with successive extracts (from the same theorist). Each extract is interpreted in the light of what came before and is re-interpreted in the light of what comes after. Slowly but surely, piece by piece, we create a vision of the whole.

Once the theoretical architecture is built, it is subjected to systematic critique, by searching out both internal contradictions and external anomalies—the latter often leading back to the former. External anomalies derive not so much from historical analysis, but from the lived experiences of the students themselves. Great theories harbor great contradictions that feed their continued discussion and relevance. The point, however, is not only to underline the limitations of a given theory, but also to seek to resolve those contradictions by reconstructing the theory on its own terms, that is, on the basis of its own assumptions rather than by adding arbitrary postulates. The idea is to refute the refutation. Students gradually master this technique of reconstructive critique through their own practice.

Critique of one theorist provides the basis for advancing to the next. The anomalies and contradictions can be addressed either within the theorist’s original set of assumptions, thereby building a theoretical tradition, or by changing those assumptions and starting a new theoretical tradition. In either case, as with ethnography, the past is never eclipsed but becomes part of the present, as previous theories are embodied in successor theories.

The entire process is organized on the basis of student participation, which has its own rules, especially important with student enrollments of 200 or more. All dialogue in class is initially limited to the text at hand, which students are required to bring to class. But later, at certain points other theorists (but only those who have been assigned in the course) and the personal experiences of students may be invoked. The class begins with my writing out the set of questions students should take to the next readings, followed by a summary of where I think we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. We then launch into a collective discussion structured by the questions from the previous class, always in reference to the text in hand. Thus, the classes are conducted Socratic-style through an expanding discussion of specific quotations from the text, often represented visually in the form of an accumulating diagram on the board. This allows everyone to participate without unduly advantaging those who claim to have prior knowledge of theory. This is education for all, not just those well-endowed with cultural capital. And, in principle, any student can contest what the instructor says, which they invariably do. Indeed, they discover flaws in my arguments, offer alternative interpretations of texts, and in the second semester they often have been on the ropes as I vainly try to defend each theorist in turn.

Apart from the classroom discussion, there are also discussion sections, 20 students in size, led and organized by brilliant, devoted and above all creative teaching assistants who have collaborated with me in developing this approach to theory. Along with one-page reading memos due every week, each semester we assign a “theory in action” paper (no more than a thousand words) that requires students to choose current events or their own experiences to illustrate a theorist of their choice. In addition mid-term and final exams consist of three short 750-word take-home papers (once again less is more) that assume the form of an exegesis of a given theorist, a comparison of theorists, or an application of theory to real live situations as defined by an article from a newspaper or magazine.

The course culminates in a 20-minute oral examination with their teaching assistant in which each student has to reconstruct the entire course as a conversation among the theorists, again in answer to a specific question given ahead of time. They are encouraged to include images, pictures, drawings, in what essentially is a poster presentation. The posters they produce amply demonstrate to what extent the various theorists have become part of them, whether theorists have become different mindsets that they will take with them into their future lives.

This is the approach I’ve struggled to develop over the years in lieu of the survey approach, but consistent with the ethnographic disposition I didn’t start from scratch. Especially, in the beginning, I too had to rely on surveyors and interpreters such as Raymond Aron, Anthony Giddens and, indeed, Talcott Parsons. They helped me choose my theorists and the themes that would make them comparable. Among other things they helped me discover the key ideas that are central to all social theory, what Robert Nisbet calls “unit-ideas” such as: “community,” “authority,” “status,” “the sacred,” and “alienation.” More abstractly one could also include “social conflict,” “social change” or “social order.” In my courses I have experimented with various such ideas, but none have worked as well as “the division of labor,” which is not only an issue of great concern to many social theorists but also an idea that students can grasp from within their own lives. It’s all around them—in their families, their workplaces, their classrooms, their dormitories. Focusing on this theme leads to a set of questions posed in relation to each theorist we study: What is the division of labor? What are its origins, its conditions of existence, it tendencies, its consequences, and its future? This provides a framework for choosing both the theorists and the extracts that become the basis of the unfolding conversations.

In my two semester course, required for Berkeley sociology majors, I start with Smith and interrogate his assumptions, leading on the one hand to Marxism and on the other hand to sociology and beyond. The first semester shows how the Marxism is a living tradition that develops successively from Marx and Engels to Lenin, Gramsci and Fanon, each theorist working off anomalies and contradictions in previous theorists as well as engaging specific historical challenges. You might call this an internal dialogue of theory reconstruction as opposed to an external dialogue of critique that takes place in the second semester where Durkheim faces off against Marx, Weber against Lenin, Foucault against Gramsci, and Beauvoir against Fanon. This critical dialogue does not lead to the conquest of one theorist over the other but the clarification of what makes them great social theorists, viz. their assumptions about human beings that allows them to conceive of society, their vision of history that allows them to project an alternative future, their explanation of social reproduction that allows them to understand social change, and their innovative methodology that allows them to put their theory to work in empirical studies. Their distinction, along with their limitations, creates the foundation for alternative living traditions.

To end with feminist theory—and we read Mackinnon and Collins after Beauvoir to catch a glimpse of the feminist tradition—is not so much to follow a chronology nor only to develop a critique of classical theory for sidelining gender, but to bring theory home, forcing students to reflect on their own lives and their own location in the division of labor. From there we turn the theory of the division of labor back on itself, calling attention to the social location of the theorists we studied and to think of social theory, in part, as a product of location. It compels students to think about the relation of the theorist to the subjects they theorize, and, thus, of themselves to the world they inhabit. As the conclusion to the course, feminism is the most vivid expression of the significance of social theory, namely to question the entrenched common sense we develop as participants in the world, to underline the presence of theory not only in disembodied texts but also in our own embodied lives. In denaturalizing our lives and challenging common sense, social theory shows that the world need not be the way it is and explores what it would mean to inhabit a better world. In their different ways that is what motivates and inspires Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, and Beauvoir, and it is what defines every enduring sociological theory, infusing energy and meaning into the substantive fields of sociology. In the age of the internet, of distance learning and of MOOCs it is especially important to uphold the idea of living theory: living with theory, living in theory and even living for theory.