Constructing Epochs: The Argumentative Structures of Sociological Epochalisms

Introduction

Asked about the distinctive features of modern society, many social scientists will answer by outlining some sort of macro-level diagnosis of the present. Popular examples widely noticed beyond the narrow scope of academic sociology are, for example, Daniel Bell’s ‘post-industrial society’ (1973), Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ (1986), Manuel Castells’ ‘network society’ (2009[1996]), Lash and Urry’s ‘economies of signs and space’ (1994), or Richard Sennett’s ‘the culture of the new capitalism’ (2006). What primarily characterizes such descriptions of contemporary society is that the present is understood in terms of radical social change. In this vein, a great deal of social scientists tend to describe the present as the dawn of a new epoch in human history, in one way or another marking a profound break with hitherto existing social structures of modern societies.

The epistemological status of such descriptions is controversial in the social sciences. A very common approach, especially in methodology-driven empirical research, is to take such descriptions for granted and to refer to them sporadically and ceremonially. This is done primarily to give empirical work a theoretical ‘gloss’ and to associate it symbolically with leading intellectual fashions (on this strategy see, e.g., Inglis, 2014: 104, 112). A more critical and often tried approach is to evaluate the empirical significance of descriptions of presently occurring radical social change. Such studies ask if, for instance, the changing employment structure or the predominant use of certain technologies in a given society is a reason for calling it ‘post-industrial’ (e.g. Kumar, 1978).

In recent years, however, there has emerged yet another way of critically dealing with claims of radical social change in contemporary societies. Here, the question was not primarily if and to what extent such claims hold from an empirical perspective, but rather if descriptions that portray the present state of society as a transformation of epochal dimensions form a distinct genre of social scientific reasoning. The discussions about the distinctive features of this genre started in the mid-1990s, with major contributions coming mostly (though not exclusively) from German-speaking theoretical sociology (Bogner, 2012; Kieserling, 2004; Kneer et al., 1997; Lichtblau, 1995; Lohmann, 1994; Lucke, 2000; Nassehi, 2001; Peters, 2008; Pongs, 2000; Reese-Schäfer, 1996; Schimank, 2000).

Two interchangeable terms were used here to designate the genre: Zeitdiagnostik or Gegenwartsdiagnostik, both roughly meaning diagnoses of the present. With a short time-lag and without much reference to the German discourse, the discussion also emerged in English-speaking sociology, where the preferred term for designating the genre was epochalism ¹ (Du Gay, 2003; Savage, 2009) and, very recently, presentism (Inglis, 2014). Despite these ‘multiple discoveries’, both the Continental and Anglo-American traditions of sociology prefer to take a decidedly critical approach in dealing with the genre from a comparative perspective. By assuming a structured narrative order of epochalisms, this sort of critique would argue that, against its self-perception, epochalist social science does not passively ‘uncover’ or ‘detect’ new epochs, but actually uses a definable set of argumentative and textual tools to actively construct the rise of new epochs in present society.

Notwithstanding the steadily intensifying interest in critically comparing the argumentative structures of epochalisms, this research field is still extraordinarily small and barely goes beyond the studies quoted above. Also, most studies in the field use a somewhat anecdotal and sketchy approach in analyzing the distinctive features of epochalisms. Some definitions treat epochalisms as ‘theories of the present epoch in its totality’, or as approaches that use the ‘dynamics of a few parts of society as evidence for encompassing change’ (Schimank, 2000: 14) – not making clear how such definitions allow for distinguishing epochalisms from, for example, social theories in general. Also lacking analytical insight are definitions that rely on stylistic features like the ‘essayist style’ or the ‘theoretical abstinence’ of the genre (see Reese-Schäfer, 1996: 379 ff). More generally, critical accounts rarely focus on the history and the micro-structures of epochalist argumentation and blatantly criticize it by referring to some of its superficial commonalities, like the use of ‘postisms’ (e.g. ‘post-industrial society’) or the descriptions of ‘social crises’ (see Peters, 2008).

To fill these research gaps, I will present two approaches in dealing with epochalisms. First, drawing upon the history of ideas and classical sociology of knowledge, I will show that current epochalisms evolved out of changed concepts of temporality in early modernity. Second, and in accordance with the rising interest in micro-practices of social scientific knowledge production (Camic et al., 2011), I will describe how current epochalisms actively construct new epochs by relying on the argumentative device of retrospective realism. Throughout the article, my focus will be on sociological epochalisms, though, as I will show below, disciplinary boundaries are often hard to discern in this genre.

The Discovery of the Present: A Genealogy of Epochalisms

One of the most striking aspects of epochalisms is that, though they describe profound changes of contemporary societies in different terms, they co-exist simultaneously. If all of them were adequate descriptions of ongoing social change, modern societies would apparently at the same time turn into post-industrial, post-modern, post-capitalist, network-based, knowledge-based, globalized, or risk societies – just to name a few approaches. Already in the 1970s, critical voices, in a somewhat ironic tone, identified over 350 widely accepted descriptions of how modern society is right now changing its basic structures in dramatic ways (Marien, 1977). From a similar perspective, Lichtblau (1995) argued that if epochalist accounts were taken seriously, modern society would witness epochal disruptions at least on a yearly basis. This led critics to call for academic skepticism towards the genre due to the greatly over-generalized, alarmist and historically flawed arguments they associate with it (e.g. Savage, 2009: 219–221). Others, while being aware of the flaws of the genre, were eager to underline some positive functions that epochalisms can have for the social sciences – broad public attention being an often proposed one (e.g. Bogner, 2012; Kieserling, 2004; Osrecki, 2011, 2012).

The critical views on sociological epochalisms, as illuminating as they might be, usually pay relatively little attention to the history of the genre. Those who do (e.g. Inglis, 2014: 103 ff; Savage, 2009: 221 ff), trace current epochalisms to their ‘classical’ predecessors like Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. Here, a common reading is that present-day epochalisms have their roots in techniques of periodization of history typical for early sociology. From this perspective, sociology as a discipline is based on one central epochalism – the uniqueness of modernity. However, while the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology insisted on modernity being an unprecedented historical epoch, they built their diagnoses of the ‘here-and-now’ on wide-ranging historical analyses that led them to acknowledge both continuities and discontinuities between ‘modernity’ and ‘pre-modernity’ (Savage, 2009: 221). In contrast, concepts like ‘risk society’, ‘knowledge society’, ‘liquid modernity’, etc. only use reductive concepts of historical change that are led to overemphasize the unprecedented character of the present. In short, epochalisms are the simplifying and historically impoverished heirs of classical sociology (Inglis, 2014: 112).

Epochalisms are, however, much older than classical sociology, although their ‘pre-sociological’ roots have rarely been discussed. Broadly understood as a technique of periodization of history, they can be traced back to mythological concepts of epochs. Understood more narrowly as theories that treat the present as the beginning of a radically new epoch, epochalisms seem to be a genuinely Western concept that emerged in the late 16th and early 17th centuries because of changing intellectual concepts of temporality and time. This perspective was proposed by Reinhart Koselleck (2004), who, as an historian of ideas, described the changing concepts of temporality and historical semantics of time in European philosophy.

Koselleck’s main interest is in how European thinkers conceptualized the relationship between the past and the future, and how and why those concepts changed over time. In short, his argument is that until the late 16th century European notions of time differed considerably from how time is perceived today. One peculiar aspect of medieval concepts of time was that, for then-active philosophers and historians, past historical events were never strictly ‘over’. Instead, the metaphysical meaning of certain historical events had an immediate relevance for making sense of what was happening in the present-day world. This, for example, enabled painters to depict troops in historical battles or religious motifs in contemporary clothing (pp. 9 ff). The bottom line of such a temporal consciousness is best described as historia magistra vitae, history is life’s teacher (pp. 26 ff). In this concept, the present is mainly seen as a continuation or a recurrence of past historical events and eschatological principles.

In view of this ever-repeating history, the temporal distance between the past and the present is almost negligible. For Koselleck, the concept of the future in medieval Europe was, consequently, largely static and remained locked in a constant temporality marked by the expectation that ‘sub speciae aeternitatis nothing novel can emerge’ (p. 21). Even more radically, the future seemed to be set in stone by a permanent expectation of an imminent End of Days. This temporal consciousness was heavily shaken by perfectly unprecedented events that could not be interpreted by consulting history or biblical texts: the ‘discovery’ of America, the Reformation, the Copernican Revolution.

This is where Koselleck sees the origin of a gradually changing concept of temporality, which cannot be presented in detail here. Eventually, it was historically unmatched events that disrupted the medieval European cosmology and eschatology and, no later than after the French Revolution, forced philosophers and historians to operate with concepts of time that incorporated an unforeseeable and thus totally open future – totally open for human action. Koselleck describes this new intellectual concept as a ‘temporalization’ of time: the future becomes open for unpredictable events, while the past loses the burden of guiding the present. What is past is irretrievably past and the future is not set in stone – it is for mankind to build (pp. 43 ff). ²

These issues were taken up by Niklas Luhmann, who, in his sociological interpretation of changing semantics of time (e.g. Luhmann, 1976, 1980, 2004: 195 ff, 2005: 326 ff), drew upon some of Koselleck’s ideas. For the intellectual history of epochalisms, Luhmann’s main contribution is that, along with the ‘closing’ of the past and the ‘opening’ of the future, there also emerged the notion of an extremely short, punctualized present. While medieval European thinkers understood the term ‘present’ both in temporal and in spatial terms as the ‘undeniable duration of present things’, ³ the growing consciousness of an open future radically temporalized the concept. If already tomorrow even undeniable certainties could potentially become questionable, the idea of a spatially and temporarily stabilized present collapses. Confronted with an open future, the present ‘shrinks’ to a single point in time that separates the irrepeatable past from a risky future.

Luhmann describes several social consequences of this notion of temporality, while the single most important being that planning becomes necessary, mostly in the form of permanent strategic foresight. ⁴ This can happen in a hands-on fashion, as in investment plans, but also in form of speculations on how present society differs from the past. It is perhaps one of the most intriguing paradoxes of the changing concepts of temporality that it is exactly the shortness and fleetingness of the present that makes it interesting for philosophical interpretation. The present might only be a point in time, but it becomes an extremely important point: it now separates the old world from the possible and desired world. It is the now where humankind has to act in order to establish rationality, liberalism, communism, and so on. These were not only competing utopias, but also, if not primarily, competing concepts of what society should get rid of and where, in comparison with the past, society stands right now. From the late 18th and early 19th century onwards, not only the desired future, but also the present state of society becomes a philosophically contested issue (Folkers, 1987). Thus, the temporalization of time not only meant the discovery of an open future, but also the discovery of the present as an interesting, albeit very short, age.

In a nutshell, it is the simultaneous ‘opening’ of the future, the ‘closing’ of the past and the ‘shortening’ of the present that mark the beginning of modern epochalisms. Not much later than the mid-18th century, philosophers of history began to see their own present as the beginning of a new epoch – an epoch so radically new and so rapidly changing that its present moves from being conceptualized as ‘stable-for-the-time-being’ to a ‘moving target’ in need of philosophical interpretation. Therefore it is certainly not a coincidence that the terms zeitgeist, esprit du siècle, or esprit du temps gain momentum from the mid-18th century onwards, and were widely used starting with Voltaire and continuing to the German Idealists (e.g. Ritter, 1986: 458). Despite diverging visions of the current zeitgeist, the unprecedentedness of the present in comparison with the past, was, by the early 19th century, a well-established way of dealing with history (Bendix, 1967).

The Rise of Sociological Epochalism

The history of epochalism shows that thinking about the distinctiveness of the present is much older than sociology, and it has been argued that the very idea of sociology as a science of contemporary society is just a long-term effect of regarding modernity as a special kind of age or epoch (Outhwaite, 2006). Indeed, it was the main concern of most classical sociologists to juxtapose modernity with what they believed were pre-modern conditions. Marx’s description of the movement from feudalism to capitalism, Weber’s notion of the rise of instrumental rationality or Durkheim’s approach of contrasting pre-modern mechanic solidarity with modern organic solidarity, all carried strong epochalist assumptions (Inglis, 2014: 105ff; Sztompka, 1993).

At this stage, that is, in the mid- and late 19th century, it was thus not possible to clearly define the boundaries of the genre of sociological epochalism. First, the classical authors mentioned above were as much epochalists as they were evolutionary historians of the longue durée. The second reason why it was hard to distinguish epochalist argumentation from other sociological genres at this time was that the disciplinary boundaries of sociology were only just emerging. Without academic institutionalization, without specialized journals, without a canonical body of knowledge, without agreed-upon methodologies, and without a specialized audience, the epochalisms of the classical sociologists were in fact not sociological, but were what nowadays would be called intellectual discourse or social critique. At this time there still existed an intellectual continuum between the emerging social sciences, the well-established humanities and the belles lettres. Authors such as Oswald Spengler (1918), Arnold Toynbee (1935) or Henry Adams (1918) effectively articulated this fused interest in defining the zeitgeist of the present that was still hard to express in terms of disciplinary boundaries. Such boundaries were also blurring regarding the presumed public for epochalist claims, as most of the ‘classical’ authors tried to address broadly learned publics – historians, artists, publishers, philosophers, social reformers, political radicals, doctors, lawyers, priests, librarians, and so on.

This began to change gradually in the early 1900s with the institutionalization and professionalization of sociology, first in the USA (e.g. Janowitz, 1972; Shils, 1970). This development not only entailed specialized departments and journals, but also raised concerns about what was not part of the discipline. From a very early stage on, diverse visions emerged on where to actively draw the boundaries of the discipline (Evans, 2009). The most powerful approach was to conceptualize sociology as a formal science, thereby copying the self-conceptions of the very successful natural sciences (Kieserling, 2004: 28 ff). On the one hand, this meant the preference for controlled and reproducible methodology, primarily statistical (Turner and Turner, 1990). On the other hand, it also meant a strong preference for highly abstracted general theories, which were mostly concerned with basic principles of culture and social structure that were seen as universal, yet historically changing, institutions – for example, political power, social inequality, legal systems, economic exchange, family, education, intimacy, organizations, and so on. Fascinated by Darwinian biology, sociology imported from it the central idea of an unplanned and gradual social change. This process culminated in the late 1930s and early 1940s with the rise of structural functionalism (e.g. Parsons, 1951) as the leading approach in theoretical sociology. This theory was not only decidedly evolutionist and extremely abstract in its approach to social change, but its rise also meant the exclusion of broadly learned publics from sociological discussions. After this point, it became necessary to be a professional, university-trained sociologist to keep up with cutting-edge sociological research.

With the rise of Parsonian structural functionalism, even radical counter-concepts in theoretical sociology had to comply with its level of historical abstraction and academic tone (see Gouldner, 1970). ⁵ Even after structural functionalism lost its appeal as the leading sociological paradigm in the early 1970s, most general sociological theories kept relying on evolutionary models of social change. This is obviously the case with Luhmann’s (1997) theory of functional differentiation, but also with Habermas’s (1984) theory of communicative action, Bourdieu’s (1992) theory of social fields, and sociological theories of rational choice (e.g. Coleman, 1990). By trying to avoid the historically over-generalized and ideal-typical epochalisms of the ‘founding fathers’, general theorists rarely insisted on the distinctiveness of the present and when they did, they saw only tendencies – not least due to the extremely high level of methodological detail meanwhile demanded from historical research.

However, this academization, abstraction and historical timidity of general sociological theory did not abolish epochalist thinking in sociology, but underlined that the more that general theory is academic in aspiration, the less it allows for drawing clear lines between the present and the past. Thus, I would argue that the rise of sociological epochalisms starts only after, and as a reaction to, the abstraction and academization of general sociological theories. From now on, and very clearly from the 1950s onwards, the interests in the distinctiveness of the present and in general principles of societal evolution parted ways. Those who insisted on diagnosing the present state of society in terms of a radical break with existing social structures had to do so against the established sociological theories, especially against their way of dealing with history. In the following section it will be shown that the differences in dealing with the past in fact form the most important distinguishing features between sociological epochalisms and general theories.

Retrospective Realism

From the historical perspective outlined above, it was the abstraction, evolutionism and academization of general sociological theories that, by contrast, allowed for treating epochalisms as a distinct genre of sociological reasoning. However, this distinction is still not a well-established one in the sociological discourse. An indication of this is that being a sociological epochalist is still an external ascription almost exclusively used by those who critically deal with the genre and not by the producers themselves, who, aware of the largely negative connotations, would describe themselves as proper sociologists. Also, most sociologists, in one way or another, operate with models of discontinuous periodization of history and grant ‘modernity’ or ‘the present’ some kind of special status or their primary attention. Even decidedly evolutionist sociologists like Luhmann (1985) argued that social change, unlike in biology, has to be conceptualized as discontinuous as even small-scale innovations, such as the invention of writing or money, can have disproportionally large effects.

Therefore, the difference between general sociological theories and sociological epochalisms should not be conceptualized as if it is the latter that argued in terms of discontinuity, while the former were thoroughly evolutionist and cautious regarding historical data. While this might be a rule of thumb, a more precise description is that epochalisms argue that society is right now going through a change of epochal dimensions. This is a very specific claim, as periodizations of history do not necessarily imply that current social change is as extensive as, say, the move from hunter–gatherer societies to agrarian societies or from feudalism to capitalism.

The second important difference is that while it is widely acknowledged that social change has discontinuous paths, sociological epochalisms radicalize that idea by conceptualizing social change as a succession of incompatible structures. Again, this is not an inevitable consequence of periodizations of history since, to elaborate on the examples given above, the invention of writing did not replace spoken language, nor did money thoroughly abolish barter. The distinctive temporal narrative in epochalisms is, however, constructed exactly that way. ‘This style of thought contrasts the novelty of the emergent against what are held to be key features held to delineate the old, and thus renders the new visible through juxtaposition against the old’ (Savage, 2009: 218). In sociological epochalisms, the present is not only pictured in terms of discontinuity, but in terms of juxtaposition, incomparability and inversion of the past.

Retrospective realism is an argumentative strategy that facilitates the construction of such historical juxtapositions by (a) reducing the past to a backdrop of the present, and (b) presenting ideal-types as real types. With retrospective realism, the past is, first, reduced to a single type or a narrow set of types that are selected in a way that neatly forms the opposite of what is seen as the newly emerging societal epoch. Here, ‘the historical account gets subordinated to the account of the alleged condition we are currently in’ (Inglis, 2014: 6). The past is serving as a counterpoint to the present.

Usually, this is not done by collecting and juxtaposing historical and modern data, but by presenting sociological models as adequate descriptions of the past. Epochalisms that were heavily disputed by the time of their formulation (‘class society’, ‘industrial society’, ‘instrumental rationality’, ‘capitalist society’, ‘technocracy’, ‘functional differentiation’, etc.) are presented as valid, widely accepted and uncontroversial descriptions of the past from which the present now radically differs. This is why it seems useful to call this argumentative strategy retrospective realism: the descriptions of society by established authors, say Marx or Weber, are not juxtaposed with the present in terms of ideal types, but as actual movements from one type of society to another, happening just now. With this kind of argumentation, it becomes easy to seal off the past from the present and by reducing both the past and the present to a single type, continuities between them disappear. The past appears as, for instance, ‘industrial society’, the present is defined as its opposite, that is ‘post-industrial’.

One of the most intriguing examples of how retrospectively realist argumentation is unfolded in sociological epochalisms is David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd (1953). It was widely read by non-academic audiences, enabled the author to play the role of the public intellectual, described fundamental ongoing social change, and was nonetheless regarded as an important contribution to academic sociology. Furthermore, it was published at a time where the difference between epochalism and general theory became visible for the first time. Thus The Lonely Crowd probably is the clearest and also earliest case of a sociological epochalism in a narrow sense. Furthermore, it was chosen here because, due to its historical distance, it is a comparatively well-discussed approach. Until today it remains the discipline’s undisputed number one bestseller (Gans, 1997). The book’s popularity was so widespread that Riesman’s portrait appeared on a cover of Time magazine in the early 1950s (see Time, 1954). On the other hand, his well-written study also played a significant role for empirical research and theoretical elaborations, and thus characteristically stands for this hybrid genre (e.g. Berghorn and Steere, 1966; Centers, 1962; Greenstein, 1964; Lipset, 1961; Parsons and White, 1961). Although Riesman’s description of the present began to appear dated around the mid-1970s (Zussman, 2001), it can still be regarded as a blueprint for contemporary sociological epochalisms.

The most important characteristic of The Lonely Crowd is that it describes social change in terms of discontinuity, favoring a view which considers social transformation to be clearly marked by unprecedented breaks or thresholds. Riesman’s main argument is that, by means of early childhood socialization, each society produces a ‘social character’ that corresponds to its demographic growth potential. Societies with high death and high birth rates generate a social character that is dominated by tradition and obedience. Individuals are given a position within society according to their ancestral role set, which is hardly ever questioned. As populations grow, very diverse people are forced to live together under conditions of scarcity. Social control is no longer exerted externally by traditional roles, but is installed as an internal self-disciplining mechanism, or inner direction. Traditional forms of social control are replaced by generalized ideals that members of society strive for without being forced to do so. The humbly industrious puritan serves Riesman as an illustration of this social character, which is kept on course by a moral ‘gyroscope’. However, under conditions of affluence and low birth rates, this form of self-control is replaced by yet another type of social character, the so-called other-directedness. Especially among upper-middle classes in urban USA, inner-direction loses its significance and is replaced by a peer culture – people lose their commitment to internalized norms and act predominantly according to what they think their peers would value. Riesman then presents every-day evidence for this hypothesis in such diverse areas as education, business administration, intimate relationships, politics, mass media, cuisine, art and leisure.

According to Riesman, nuances between the historical phases and their corresponding social characters disappear. In other words, the three epochs described in Riesman’s typology are mutually exclusive – one sort of social character is bound to one historical phase only. The change from one historical phase to another appears to be an instant break. Actually, Riesman himself states that his intention was to describe both a society and its typical individuals with a ‘minimum of scaffolding’ (Riesman, 1953: 48), a minimum of cross-over types. Still, he is aware of the problem that it is an extremely generalizing argument to ascribe one character type to entire societies or to entire historical epochs. In fact, he directly responds to this criticism by admitting that all members of society are in a sense simultaneously inner-directed, other-directed, and traditional – depending on the situation they find themselves in. Social characters are thus ‘abstractions’ or ‘ideal types’, which may overlap (pp. 46 ff). But how does he solve this dilemma?

His answer is that diverse social characters can indeed appear in a given society simultaneously, but each phase has dominant and subordinate social characters. Unable to claim absolute exclusiveness, Riesman introduces a repairing device: diverse social characters cannot cohabit peacefully. His diagnosis thus becomes a conflict theory of social characters. The mutual exclusiveness of social characters is further fortified by ascribing one single character type to geographical regions. The dominant types are placed at the forefront of a given society. Other-directedness flourishes in coastal metropolitan areas, while traditional behavior survives only in rural parts of the country and is re-imported by immigrants (pp. 49 ff). The message is: although we still have diverse social characters, the foreseeable future belongs to those who are best adapted to a phase of population decline – the other-directed. Other types are reduced to ‘outcroppings of submerged types here and there’ (p. 49).

From an historical and anthropological point of view, critics claimed that there was no evidence for a correlation between social character type and demographic growth potential (Aydelotte, 1953; Heberle, 1956; Mead, 1951). This well-founded critique in a way misses the major weakness of Riesman’s epochalism, and that is, claiming to argue with ideal types, yet in fact being unable to allow the types to exist simultaneously. His ideal types turn into quasi-empirical claims of a succession of incompatible real types. What could have been a perfectly acceptable ideal-typization becomes retrospective realism: today mainly type x, yesterday mainly type y. This argument constructs a clear break between then and now but, by that means, Riesman is forced to diagnose a dramatic change that an ideal-typical model, for logical reasons, cannot account for. This is mainly because ideal types, at least in Max Weber’s widely used concept, are not empirical abstractions. They are meant to be analytical tools for highlighting the difference between the type and the empirical reality. Thus they never exist in reality, and Max Weber’s suggestion was even to construct ideal types in sharp contrast to observable facts (Weber, 1980[1922]: 10). The empirical adequacy of an ideal type thus cannot change over time.

Yet, this is exactly what Riesman tells us and, ironically, it is exactly his use of Max Weber’s concept of Protestant ethics, or what he calls the waning ‘inner-directedness’, that makes his argument retrospectively realist. This was the focal point of those critics who attacked Riesman for an over-simplified view of this concept. Berghorn and Steere’s (1966) content analysis of American education guidebooks, for example, could not find an increase of other-directed values over the last hundred or so years. More specifically, both inner- and other-direction values served as guidelines for education without a discernible historical tendency. Greenstein’s (1964) secondary examination of an old data set also shows that teenagers’ values towards politics were already ‘other-directed’ around 1890. It seems as if Riesman’s diagnosis of a rising epoch of other-directedness is based on a reification of inner-directedness which never was an historical reality. When describing inner-directedness, he pictures an ideal-type puritan, personified in Max Weber’s famous example of Christian, the main character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Weber, 2001[1904–1905]: 62 ff). Both are kept on course by internalized moral standards, both keep diaries, both adhere to diverse forms of strict self-discipline, and both rely on the same work ethics. The idle talk resented by the puritan today reappears in the inner-directed blue-collar worker’s contempt for human relations (Riesman, 1953: 135 ff). But while for Weber the ideal-typical puritan was an analytical abstraction, for Riesman it becomes an empirical description for how the average Americans used to play, eat, work, learn, and love until the 1940s, and how extremely different those Americans are from their present-day counterparts.

In Riesman’s case, restricting social change to dramatic novelties entails a reifying approach to existing sociological ideal-types. Where Weber introduced the morally over-steered puritan as an ideal type, Riesman treats him as a description of a past reality. Riesman can only deal with social change if it is factually new; the description of the past is left to other theories which are not treated with a skeptical distance. Ideal types are merely turned into actual or real types with diminishing empirical relevance as society moves towards the present. Highly contested theories are staged as adequate historical accounts. Weber used to be right – until now.

Riesman’s epochalism was the first in what was a long tradition of using retrospective realism to construct dramatic social change, by reifying controversial sociological models as adequate descriptions of the past. It can be found in Ulrich Beck’s (1986: 29 ff, 101 ff) descriptions of the ‘old industrial society’, ‘class society’ or ‘primary modernization’ that is juxtaposed with the upcoming ‘risk society’. An especially telling example can also be found in Richard Sennett’s (1998) juxtaposition of the newly flexible economy and a past allegedly marked by a puritan work ethic and stable work routines. Almost 60 years after its publication, the historically flawed confrontation of a puritan past with a ‘human-relations’-like present still has apparently not lost its appeal – both for sociologists and for broader publics Richard Sennett perpetually supplies with new insights on how society is dramatically changing right now.

Discussion: Some Functions of Sociological Epochalism

What can be learned from the argumentative structures of sociological epochalisms apart from their reductionist view of history? On the one hand, sociological epochalisms can be regarded as a legitimate strategy of raising public awareness for sociological debates. If it is acknowledged that in modern society public awareness for most issues is created by mass media, and if mass media are conceptualized as using a distinctive and autonomous way of communicating (e.g. Bourdieu, 1998; Luhmann, 2000), then scientists will have to adopt a mass-media style in presenting their insights to broad publics.

For social scientists this means commenting on issues that have the potential to create broad moral panics (Cohen, 1972) like crime, divorce rates or social inequality. More importantly, however, they must, in one way or another, comment on newsworthy events, that is, on events with a here-and-now appeal. In cases like 9/11, the 2011 UK riots, or the ongoing financial crisis, this is a relatively easy task. But when the culture and social structure of whole societies are the issues, newsworthiness is harder to construct. This task can be performed by sociological epochalisms. With their distinctive argumentative structure, they can portray the bulky issue of social macro-change as newsworthy. With retrospective realism, social change can be presented as an instant and presently ongoing upheaval, a silent revolution. Instead of guiding readers through centuries of incremental evolution, sociological epochalisms can provide the argument that social change is dramatic, that it is happening here and now, and that it is (however covertly) happening in one’s own backyard – thereby accommodating to what communication scientists call ‘news values’ (e.g. Galtung and Ruge, 1965), i.e. the kind of news mass media prefer to report on: discontinuity, negativity, local focus, conflict, and so on.

Instead of just criticizing their well-documented over-dramatizations and poor historical bases, it should be acknowledged that sociological epochalisms also have the function of raising public awareness for encompassing social change under conditions of autonomous mass media and high levels of specialization of the social sciences. This does not imply embracing epochalisms in actual research, but embracing them in communicating with lay publics. This can mean addressing broadly interested but otherwise specialized publics, say the readership of feature pages, political commentary, and, more recently, the socially critical blogosphere.

Now addressing lay publics can also mean addressing colleagues in the extremely differentiated field of academic sociology, where scientists only have a rudimentary knowledge of research beyond their narrow interests. The high level of specialization demanded from cutting-edge sociological research created a generation of sociologists who were mainly concerned with small-scale empirical research – while detailed historical debates are, if anything, ‘sequestered within the specialism of “historical sociology”’ (Inglis, 2014: 112). But while, from this perspective, epochalisms are a by-product of the lack of historical consciousness in modern sociology, they can also be regarded as comparably accessible descriptions of society at large that neither presuppose a deep understanding of general theories, nor of sociological methodologies. It is this intellectual inclusiveness that allows for, at least superficial, sociology-wide debates that transcend the painstakingly specialized and secluded discussions dominating the daily business of academic sociology. Epochalisms, if broadly appreciated, force academic sociologists to think outside the box.

Finally, sociological epochalisms have the function of alleviating paradigmatic dogmatisms. Here it should be highlighted that most social sciences, and sociology in particular, are multiparadigmatic disciplines. This not only means that within sociology there are multiple and basically incompatible ways of thinking about society, but also that there are currently no incentives to change one’s preferred paradigm in the course of an academic career. Thus, today’s sociology, without a leading paradigm, is institutionalized as a patchwork of different worldviews, where, for example, Marxists can always stay Marxists, Foucauldians can always stay Foucauldians, functionalists can always stay functionalists, and ethnomethodologists can always stay ethnomethodologists. There will always be a, however small, number of journals and departments where they do not have to explain themselves to the representatives of competing paradigms.

This institutionalized ‘groupthink’ leads to very little conceptual innovation in modern sociology (Abbott, 2001: 60 ff). Here, the retrospective realism of sociological epochalisms can be a conciliatory argument for tearing down these fortified walls between competing paradigms. By arguing that modern society is, for instance, turning into a ‘risk society’ and that, until very recently (basically until yesterday), it used to be a capitalist or a class society, it is possible to re-orient proponents of these paradigms without explicitly arguing against them. Ulrich Beck (1986), for example, argued that Marxism and Modernization Theory were indeed the appropriate approaches for understanding modern society, but, alas, only until recently. Riesman argued that Protestant ethics in Max Weber’s terms was the right concept for analyzing modern society, but, alas, only until recently. In both versions, dogmatists can save face by asserting that they were right until now, but that it is wiser to jump onto a new bandwagon from now on. A similar argument was proposed by Rojek and Turner (2000: 631 ff), who describe how the extremely successful rise of post-modernism was mainly due to its elegant way of providing disillusioned Marxists with a new theory that paid tribute to Marxist arguments as long as they applied to society how it used to be until now. In this way, sociological epochalisms, through the back-door, can create theoretical innovations in an otherwise extremely fractured and thus very conservative field like theoretical sociology.

However, in paying tribute to ‘old’ theories as long as they apply to ‘old’ societies, epochalisms themselves risk reinforcing conceptual conservatism. Where, by developing a new general theory, authors like Habermas (1987: 301 ff) would argue that, for example, Marxist, Weberian, and Parsonian theories were already flawed at the time of their first formulation, epochalisms, in relying on retrospective realism, tend to reify and uncritically adopt the claims of the ‘classics’ – at least for what they portray as ‘society until now’. Although a fair amount of critical potential is lost by using this narrative device, it nonetheless offers incentives to reconsider paradigmatic preferences and, thereby, stimulates conceptual innovations.

Conclusion

Epochalism is a genre with contested boundaries, as its interest in describing the unprecedentedness of the present is shared by large parts of the social sciences and sociology in particular. Thus critical approaches should concentrate in more detail on the micro-structures of epochalist argumentation, in order to come to a more precise picture of the genre, its history and intellectual position within the social sciences. The description of retrospectively realist argumentation is a step in this direction, though it only concerns the temporal narratives of epochalisms. The narrative construction of new societal epochs rests on several other argumentative devices that were not discussed in this article and that should be the focus of further research in this field. One example is the tendency to describe epochal transformations in terms of ‘silent revolutions’, i.e. to argue that the social transformations associated with a new epoch are far-reaching, yet largely invisible for the time being. Here, diverse arguments can be provided for how and why an epochal transformation can be invisible. Another example is the epochalist fondness for ‘pars-pro-toto’ arguments, like Riesman’s description of avant-garde milieus that, though just being parts of society, stand for larger transformations. An encompassing analysis of epochalist argumentations should, therefore, move beyond the temporal arguments discussed in this article and operate with a comparative perspective that covers, in a controlled fashion, larger numbers of epochalisms than could be discussed here.