William Outhwaite

Social theory at the end of the century

2000

global library

Abstract

The term 'social theory' is increasingly used in course descriptions, publishers' catalogues, journal rubrics and so forth. We probably need a very broad term of this kind to refer to the growing body of work which does not fall squarely within the boundaries of sociology or the other social sciences, nor of philosophy or any other single academic discipline. In reviewing the state of social theory towards the end of the twentieth century, we can see that, despite the massive changes in social and cultural forms in most parts of the world since the 1890s, and more particularly in the past thirty years, a number of the themes stressed by observers of modern societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the decades in whiich sociology came of age as a discipline), continue to be relevant today, and perhaps more obviously relevant than they were at the time. One fin de siècle may conceal another.

The term 'social theory' is increasingly used in course descriptions, publishers' catalogues, journal rubrics and so forth. I'm sure I'm not uniquely privileged in this respect, but now every mail seems to bring an invitation to participate in a new venture, notably the Journal of European Social Theory, of which I shall be a founding board member, or to edit a reader or to comment on proposals for another. There will soon be enough straws in the wind to build a substantial haystack, or perhaps even to develop a Centre for Social and Political Theory...

One reason for all the prominence of the term social theory these days, I think, is that we need a very broad term of this kind to refer to work which does not fall squarely within the boundaries of sociology or the other social sciences, or of philosophy or any other single academic discipline. It would clearly be imperialistic to hijack not just the Marxist tradition, but also such thinkers as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre or the historian of ideas, Michel Foucault, into the camp of sociological theory. At the same time, any systematic account of contemporary sociology which did not address the contributions of such thinkers as these would be seriously incomplete.

A number of sociologists, as well as people whose intellectual roots are in philosophy or cultural studies, have therefore tended to describe their work using a broad term such as social theory. Whatever their various motives for this choice, the more important point to make is that the rise of social theory reflects the fact that both our conceptions of sociology (and, to varying degrees, the other social sciences) and our ideas about the nature of scientific theory as a whole have changed in important ways over the course of the 20th century.

It's hardly surprising that substantial changes should have taken place in the course of such a long period. What is surprising, however, is that we seem to have experienced something of a circular movement, in which the middle decades of the twentieth century, from the late thirties to the late sixties or early seventies, appear as a bit of a detour. What is normally called classical sociology includes the grand nineteenth-century figures Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx, sometimes also Auguste Comte (who invented the name sociology) and Alexis de Tocqueville and centres around the work of a small number of approximate contemporaries writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto and Georg Simmel. These latter thinkers, even when, like Durkheim, they were desperately concerned to establish sociology as an independent academic discipline, were also active in adjacent disciplines such as philosophy. Their conception of sociology, in other words, was an inclusive one. This idea is perhaps best expressed by Simmel in his image of sociology as a second-order science which incorporates the more specialised contributions of history and other social sciences. This is an image which has persisted to the present, where sociologists are often seen as intellectual magpies, snatching fragments from economics, legal theory, linguistics, history or wherever and, to change the metaphor, mixing them up into a heady and sometimes dangerous cocktail.

The other point to make about the classical writers is that they thought of their theorising as, in large par at least, a means of responding to current social problems and crises and explaining concrete social processes such as suicide, the division of labour, the emergence of capitalism or other processes of social modernisation. What happens to these theories in retrospect is that they are of interest to subsequent generations not so much for their substantive claims as for their status as paradigms or exemplars which show us how we might wish, ourselves, to theorise about social phenomena. Only specialists, for example, are passionately concerned with assessing just how great was the contribution of ascetic protestant Christianity to the changes in values which helped to make early capitalism possible, but Weber's ideas about the way in which one might explain such processes remain one of the cornerstones of modern social theory - as do his more speculative reflections on the nature of modern subjectivities.

Historians of social thought often rightly criticise the selective and teleological pseudo-history which often pervades accounts of classical social theory. Such accounts tend to portray Max Weber, for example, as part of a trinitarian system of oppositions with the ghost of Karl Marx on the one hand and with the work of his contemporary Emile Durkheim on the other. In fact, of course, although the first of these relationships was indeed very important for Weber (he once said that the seriousness of a modern scholar could be measured by his relation to Marx and Nietzsche), he was not particularly interested in Durkheim, and was also drawing from and criticising a huge range of contemporaries who are nowadays mostly known only from the mentions of them in Weber's texts. Social theorists' accounts of the 'classics' are inevitably selective and partial. To put it another way: they fit the model of interpretation proposed in Hans-Georg Gadamer's existentialist hermeneutics, in which we are concerned with the practical meaning of earlier texts for us today, rather than the more traditional ideal of merely understanding the text in its own terms and its own historical context.

The question, then becomes whether the crises and challenges of late nineteenth and early twentieth century modernity to which these classical thinkers were responding, and those responses themselves, are still relevant to our present fin de siecle. I think it can be shown that they are. More contentiously, and this is the aspect which I shall emphasise here, I think it can be shown that their intellectual strategies and methodologies, in a broad sense of this term, as well as many of their substantive concerns, are still relevant to us today.

The borderline between 'classical' and 'modern' social theory is of course historically relative and shifting. The 'classical' theorists did not appear like Chianti bottles with 'classico' labels freshly attached to them, and the retrospective attachment of the classical label stretches further into the twentieth century as we approach its end. The American sociologist Talcott Parsons, who died in 1979, is however a pivotal figure in more than this historically relative sense. Parsons' first major work, The Structure of Social Action, published in 1937, was the embodiment of a particular conception of the history of sociological theory which was fairly dominant in the middle years of the twentieth century. In Parsons' version, the classics (his holy trinity is composed of Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto) can be seen to converge into a general theory of social action which Parsons spelled out here and in his subsequent works. This theory could be systematised according to some at least of the prescriptions of mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy of science and was in principle open, Parsons, thought, to empirical testing and confirmation.

On this model, then, Parsons was the midwife of modern sociology as well as its leading exponent. Even sociologists who did not accept Parsons' own theory tended, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, to accept something like his historical conception, also stressing, for example, the advances in empirical research techniques or the massive expansion in the numbers of people working in the social sciences in the post-world war two period. Whatever the future might hold for sociology and the other social sciences, it seemed that they had definitely come of age. Marx, Weber, Durkheim and the other founding fathers were, as the B movie gangsters say, 'history'.

This triumphalist vision was called into question in the late 1960s. First, the revival of social conflicts in many of the advanced capitalist countries encouraged a revival of Marxist social theory. This had hitherto been marginalised in the 'free world' with the beginning of the Cold War and perverted, in the socialist countries, into the official state doctrines of Marxism-Leninism and 'scientific communism'. Marxism came back in a variety of forms, ranging from dogmatic orthodoxy to various neomarxisms. Other classical social theorists benefited from a resurgence of interest in the history of social thought. This was marked in the English-speaking countries by Anthony Giddens' influential Capitalism and Modern Social Theory , published in 1971, with its very detailed discussion of Marx, Weber and Durkheim (Durkheim was himself the subject of a superb study, published in 1973, by my former tutor Steven Lukes.) This, then, is roughly where I came in, jumping on to a newly moving bandwagon, when I first started teaching at Sussex.

Alongside the revival of interest in the classics, contemporary sociological theory, too, became more ambitious and speculative in the 1970s, with a shift of hegemony from the US to Europe and an explosion of interest in Althusserian marxism, Frankfurt School critical theory, British Wittgensteinian philosophy, French structuralism and the work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and others. What has been called The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, in an edited volume in 1985 which documented this shift, meant that 'the classics' seemed less like remote ancestors and more like older contemporaries.

Generally, then, the time-perspective of sociology changed. Its substantive concerns once again became a little more historical, in a partial reversal of what the great historical sociologist Norbert Elias had attacked in 1983, a few years before his death, as 'The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present' - in other words their excessive concentration on contemporary social phenomena. Sociology's sense of its own past also shifted. Giddens had attacked, in an influential article in 1972, what he called the 'myth of the great divide' which had been set between the more or less unformed or chaotic pre-history of sociology and the subject in its modern 'scientific' form. This conception, he argued, involved both a lack of sensitivity to the work of the classical sociological thinkers and an undue degree of confidence in the scientific credentials of 'our' social thought. Others came to share this more nuanced account of the continuities and discontinuities in social theory. Substantively, sociology shifted its theoretical focus from 'industrialism' or 'industrial society' to 'capitalism' or 'late capitalism' (Spätkapitalismus), and then to a broader focus on 'modernity', in which it addressed dimensions of power (including state power in its international dimension) and culture, which had previously been somewhat marginal to its concerns.

This partial return to earlier traditions in social theory can of course be evaluated in very different ways. Many sociologists and other social scientists would see it as at best a diversion from, and at worst a threat to the pursuit of genuinely scientific knowledge of society which would be disciplined, systematic, verifiable and cumulative. Divergent evaluations of this kind reflect not just different conceptions of the proper role of sociology and the other social sciences but differing conceptions of the way in which we can come to know social phenomena and even of their very nature.

Having mentioned the 'myth of the great divide' I should now like to describe and deride (I wonder why I chose that particular verb...) a similar myth arising out of 'post-modern' social theory, which I call The Myth of Modernist Method. Among the many diverse strands of post-modernist thinking is the notion that there is something like a 'modernist' model of theory and metatheory in the social sciences which is objectivistic, dogmatic, and generally over-ambitious.

It is of course in architecture that the debates between modernism and postmodernism have achieved whatever precision they have done, and the parallel between modernist architecture and modernist theory seems at first sight an attractive one. Just as (some) modernist buildings ignore, or even efface, their surroundings and their predecessors, so, it can be argued, modernist social science sweeps aside the inarticulate musings of common-sense knowledge and the muted self-reflection of social actors in the name of positive science. Durkheim is perhaps the main defendant here, with his sharp distinction between common-sense and sociology and his bold claims that social facts should be treated as things and that one can distinguish between normal and pathological states of societies. In Durkheim's notorious conclusion to the Rules of Sociological Method (sic), 'the time has come for sociology to take on the esoteric character which is appropriate to any science'.

Postmodernists in social theory differ, of course, in their periodisations of modernity and modernism. Some write off all hitherto existing philosophy and social theory as modernist and wait on or, more boldly, present a new postmodern(ist) alternative, while others identify what Zygmunt Bauman has called 'intimations of postmodernity' in more or less any moment of scepticism or self-doubt in the history of European and export-European thought. The latter position, I suggest, is better history, but it yields only a vacuous teleological tautology that all is modernist but the exceptions, and that these are all embryos, foetuses or neonatal forms of actually existing postmodernism. The more interesting, though in my view historically false, and indeed somewhat incredible claim is that all is modernism without exceptions.

The most natural place at which to begin to examine this claim is with a position that one might called 'truistic sociological modernism'. Hardly anyone disputes the temporal overlap between social theory and modernity, whether they focus on the 17th, 18th or middle/late 19th centuries. More speculatively, and I shall return to this theme later, it can be argued that the very idea of theorising about society (as opposed to, say, 'the world', the natural order, or the state or polity), is modern by definition, in that it is inextricably bound up with the form of life which we call modernity. This form of life developed in Europe and North America around the 18th century and was exported from there, more or less systematically, to the rest of the world. In other words, social theory in something like a modern sense involves thinking of human societies as more than just aspects of a natural and/or divinely sanctioned order, and also not just as human contrivances, such as political constitutions, which can be modified more or less at will as a result of human decisions. And this modern conception of society in turn presupposes that we live in, or can appeal to, a society characterised by modern conceptions of individualism and citizenship. This, I think, is largely true. Few people would doubt, either, that Max Weber's social theory, for example, was primarily about modernity and its difference from other forms of society; nor that Weber, for all his gloomy reflections on the bureaucratisation of modern social relations, on the whole identifies himself with modernity as a form of life.

Social theory has also of course been 'modern' in its orientation in the sense that it has often identified itself with the natural sciences in the form they took in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards. Like these sciences, the emergent sciences of society aspired to furnish objective knowledge of social relations; they wanted, in other words, to be what came later to be social sciences. I shall not quarrel either with the details of this claim, though it is worth noting that it skews our attention very much towards Saint-Simon, Comte, Marx and Durkheim (and to some extent Max Weber) rather than, say, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Tocqueville or (for most of the time) Simmel. The dominant traditions in social theory have indeed been methodologically oriented to the other sciences, whether or not they ultimately aimed to differentiate themselves from them in, for example, the methodological dualism of verstehende sociology.

But perhaps more significant than all this is the way in which social theorists (or perhaps we should begin to call them social scientists) dealt with the issue of the status of the knowledge they generated. This is whre I take issue with the myth of modernist method. Where postmodernists tend to see an uncritical affirmation of objectivistic approaches to the detached 'scientific' analysis of modernity, even a novice in the history of social thought rapidly notices significant differences between the classical theorists. Aside from anything else, the founding fathers mostly had an acute sense of the paradoxes and ambiguities of modernity - more so perhaps than more recent theorists who have tended to adopt one-sided and simplistic accounts (positive in the case of modernisation theory, negative for the postmodernists). Durkheim's sociology and politics, for example, must be understood against the anxieties which led to 'solidarism' and in turn to the development of social policy in France. A similar degree of contemporary engagement can be shown for Max Weber, Tönnies, Sombart and Michels .

The same goes for these thinkers' epistemological perspectives. 'Modernist' science is standardly alleged to combine three simplistic conceptions: a detached subject of knowledge, a reduced and delimited object of knowledge and an associeted knowledge process. To put it crudely, the claim is that we know who we are, we know what we're doing when we do science, we know what we're talking about and things are just the way we say they are. The philosopher Richard Rorty (1979) has skilfully ridiculed the idea of philosophy as 'the mirror of nature', and postmodernists have extended this image to the activities of social scientists. It is difficult however to see how one could impute such a hubristic conception to, say, Max Weber, in whose methodological essays almost every sentence bulges with qualifications, reservations and doubts, and whose enigmatic metatheoretical reflections have been elaborated in all kinds of directions in subsequent work. For every Durkheim, in other words, there is a Weber, tortured, hesitant, qualifying his claims at every turn.

The positivist tradition is of course a more legitimate target for the postmodern critique, though even here it is worth recalling Comte's insistence that sociology would be the last science to go positive. Even in Durkheim's work, the modernist brutalism of the Rules of Sociological Method fits oddly with much in his more speculative and tentative substantive works such as the Elementary Forms of Religious Life. And even in the mid-twentieth century, the heyday of a (very diffuse) logical empiricist influence in the philosophy of social science, the most significant sociological contributions hardly fitted this image of science - as textbooks of the period in the philosophy of social science frequently lament.

It is important to remember also how far sociology in particular has always been a relatively free domain of methodological tolerance. Sociology was never really made into a paradigm-dominated normal science in Thomas Kuhn's sense, except perhaps in Eastern Europe, where it was also normalised in the more sinister sense which the term acquired in Czechoslovakia after 1968. As I suggested earlier, the thirty-year period in the middle of the twentieth century may come to be seen as no less exceptional in the philosophy of social science and social theory than it was in the history of world capitalism. What the economic historian Jean Fourastié called the trente glorieuses, the 30 golden years from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, were also the golden years of scientistic programmes for sociology. Little of this now remains except at the grass roots of certain varieties of empirical research, despite endless irrigation by funding bodies more impressed by clearly circumscribed projects than with the conceptual developments in the various social science disciplines. To put it more positively, most sociologists are all too aware of the plurality of possible theoretical frameworks, methods and evaluative conclusions surrounding any research project. Our conception of theory is now again a much more traditional one, in which it is seen as an organising framework of sensitising concepts rather than as something susceptible of what Adorno used to call 'drastic' verification. Postmodern critics of social science can accept all this, often seeing it as a precocious recognition by sociologists of the coming of postmodernism. But to do this is to impose a particular myth of rupture on a situation which is more properly seen in a longer time perspective.

One way of making all this a little more concrete is to focus on the concept of reflexivity. A reflexive orientation has been variously identified as intrinsic to modernity, intrinsic to (or at least only fully exemplified in) postmodernity, or as marking a difference within modernity between between its original forms and those characterised as 'high', 'advanced', or 'late'. Here, a distinction is often drawn between the relatively unreflective and confident modernism of the rising bourgeoisie and a more recent development in which an awareness, often drawn from popular psychology and sociology, of the institutional and cultural conditions of our actions becomes itself a central precondition for action. The notion of reflexive modernity is I think a useful one in marking a qualitative shift in ways of thinking and acting in the past 30 years or so in many parts of the world. What Jürgen Habermas calls a communicative orientation, which both relies on and reinforces a reflective orientation to social life, is now more strongly entrenched in modern societies and has in part displaced more authoritarian patterns of speech and action.

This is something which has perhaps not been fully internalised by postmodernists in the social sciences. There is a measure of agreement that we now inhabit a world of this kind, in which individuals are increasingly thrown onto their own resources to define their own social relations. What needs I think to be stressed, however, and is often overlooked in simple contrasts between the modern and the postmodern, is that the reflexivity of modernity was built into it from the beginning. It was described as such by Max Weber and others at the turn of the century, notably in Weber's concept of rationalisation. There has been a tendency to stress the promethean and world-making aspect of this process, but the 'moderns' captured in Max Weber's concept of ascetic protestantism or in the Rumanian-French sociologist Lucien Goldmann's much later analysis of Jansenism, were also racked with anxieties and self-doubt which, for theological reasons, they could not acknowledge. This negative or tragic consciousness of modernity eventually developed, in Romanticism, into aesthetic and often ironical forms, and the tension between these two aspects of modernity continues. In other words, pace Bauman, modernity is pervaded by ambivalence, in particular an ambivalence between (over-) confidence in its transformative projects and an agonising critical reflection on whether or not they are really practicable and beneficial. We are certainly uncertain, conscious that we live in a risk society of increasingly man-made (and I mostly do mean man-made) risks. But this sort of uncertainty was by no means absent from earlier phases of modernity.

At the back of my critique of the myth of modernist method is of course a critique of the notion of postmodernity itself. It's a little late in the evening, and a little late also in the history of the discusssion of postmodernity, to embark on a full-blown version of this, so let me instead briefly sketch out a an alternative view. It is that what we are confronting at the end of the twentieth century are essentially further modulations of modernity, confronting, perhaps, a second crisis, that of the welfare-state work society of advanced industrial civilisation which was itself in part a response to the late 19th and early 20th century crisis of the liberal polity. We are now faced, as for instance Claus Offe, Alain Touraine and Peter Wagner have argued in various ways, with the fragmentation of many of these structures and their associated identities.

I have argued elsewhere for a significant convergence in the philosophy of social science around a realist philosophy of science and a conception of social science oriented to critical hermeneutics. We need, I think, a realist philosophy of science (including social science) in order to sustain the notion of a social world which exists in relative independence of the specific descriptions which we may give of it. This is not only a pragmatic presupposition which gives meaning to scientific activity and disagreement; it is also a necessary condition of our own existence, which we cannot seriously doubt, as human beings extending over time and space. We need, secondly, to take on board the insights of the hermeneutic tradition if we are to give an adequate account of the complexities of our access to social reality and our pre-scientific understandings of it. And we need a critical hermeneutics because, as Habermas and others have rightly insisted, meanings and the understanding of meanings cannot be dissociated from relations of power and domination and the attempt to transcend them.

In such a conception, which draws on and combines the strengths of positions which have often been seen as irreconcilably opposed to one another, many of the long-standing oppositions in social theory between holism and individualism, structure and agency, materialism and idealism can be seen not as fundamental metatheoretical choices to be made once and for all at the beginning of inquiry but as posing issues to be argued out in detail, in relation to specific social situations located in time and space. Some social structures, for example, though of course conceptually mediated, may be relatively impervious to redefinitions by individual actors, while others may appear to be largely made up of actors' individual or collective interpretations and interventions. Individualist explanations of governmental decisions may compete with, but may also complement, more structural and long-term explanations. Here, metatheory and the more abstract forms of theory appear as outline frameworks to be filled with substantive content. The most promising path for social theory is between the two extremes of old-fashoned philosophical legislation, the solemn establishment of so-ccalled foundations, and a purely opportunistic pragmatism of performativity. And this is something which was already clear to the founding fathers of the social sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The past 25 years have seen, then, a parallel and convergent process in both the philosophy of social science and the social sciences themselves, in which the somewhat simplified scientistic conceptions which were prevalent in the middle decades of the twentieth century have been replaced by conceptions which, though no doubt more sophisticated, are yet at the same time closer in many ways to those which we find in the early decades of the twentieth century. Max Weber would, I think, have felt more at home, though probably no less irritated, in many recent debates in English-language philosophy of social science than in, say, 1953, the year of his brother Alfred's death. In the remaining minutes of this lecture I shall offer some thoughts about where we may be heading in the coming century.

The social sciences worldwide (and they have become inceasingly global in their orientation and dissemination) are marked by tendencies towards both unification and division. I have emphasised the trends towards the flexible cooperation between philosophy and the social sciences and between individual social science disciplines, so far as these still remain distinct. The revival of the classics and the seminal influence of a number of social theorists across a wide range of disciplines has been an important unifying force, as has the rise of social theory itself. Running against this trend, however, are pressures towards specialisation and the division of labour familiar from the example of the natural sciences, and similarly reinforced by funding opportunities and by disciplinary structures petrified along the largely obsolete divisions between academic departments. It is not just that that ambitious social scientists may prefer to be large fish in small ponds, presiding over a strictly limited area of inquiry; they will tend to find it easier to obtain funds, for themselves and hence for their institutions, for clearly circumscribed projects. The relation to the past remains ambivalent: many social scientists, not just empiricist researchers but even sophisticated and original theorists such as Niklas Luhmann, deplore the frequent reference back to the classics of social theory and to traditional problematics. What C.Wright Mills denounced in the Parsonian era as the coexistence of grand theory and abstracted empiricism remains an equally possible future for the social sciences in the twenty-first century.

The strength of social theory lies elsewhere, I think: in the sensitive attempt, as Hegel put it, to capture its time [broadly conceived of course] in thought. Although social theory, and particularly sociological theory, were generally slow, for example, to address issues of race and gender and of international conflict or the environment, they have responded relatively promptly to the theoretical and practical challenges posed by ethnic minority, feminist, peace and environmentalist movements in the last third of the century, just as the social theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century responded to the crises of liberalism and the rise of socialist and communist movements. Often the issues are the same, but the frame of reference radically reversed. Many of us, for example, are concerned again, as our predecessors were at the last turn of the century, with issues of ethnic or 'racial' conflict or with nationalism, but few, thank God, would now describe themselves as scientific racists or nationalists.

This suggests a more general conclusion. To paraphrase a remark by the German philosopher Fichte, what kind of social sciences we choose to have depends primarily on what sort of societies we are. Societies which want, and which want their universities to want, social science departments whose output and social utility are as quantifiable as that of departments of applied science will derive less benefit, I suspect, than those which allow social theory to develop in relative freedom from institutional constraints and free to address what it, rather than its paymasters, identifies as important issues for investigation. A major threat to this approach lies in the attempts to revive and enforce conceptions of specialised academic professionalism and performance in a half-baked extension of a science policy which was developed in relation to 'big science' and is of dubious application in the domain of the humanities and the social sciences.

I have argued, then, that the thinkers who have been retrospectively canonised as the classical social theorists of the last turn of the century were not just asking the right questions, but were asking them in roughly the right sort of way. Such conservatism (with of course a small c) requires justification of a kind which I have only been able to provide indirectly here. Let me summarise my claim in three theses.

First, to borrow an older formulation, no Newton for the social sciences. There has not yet been one, and the long sequence of unsuccessful candidates makes one think that there probably won't be one. It is not so much sour grapes as prudence born of experience which suggests we should stop looking out for one.

Second, we don't need one anyway, since we already know a good deal about the social world by being members of it. We're not beginning our ascent from sea level (which is what makes mountain climbing in Skye, for example, even more strenuous than it would anyway be). We can build on the tacit knowledge we already possess as more or less competent members of society. The most helpful theories in the social sciences are those which do this explicitly, rather than repudiating this initial understanding or knowledgeability at the outset and then smuggling it in later.

Finally, it is worth reflecting on the way in which some of the principal themes of social theory often become truer as time goes on than when they were first formulated. The Protestant ethic of self-surveillance, for example, surely comes into its own in the era of psychotherapy, management theory, performance appraisal and so forth, as do Marxist theories of fetishism and reification in the age of electronic money and intellectual property in cyberspace. Less dramatically, the theories of post-industrialism and technocracy, including critiques like E.P. Thompson's of the technocratic and commercial debauching of universities, which looked rather over-stated in the late 1970s, have again taken on a new bite. What is genuinely new, though again substantially anticipated by Marx, is the theme of globalisation. This we must now take to include not just economic and inter-state processes, but also the globalisation of culture. The second major theme is the dream, and in part the reality, of democratisation - the democratisation, in a broad sense which includes in particular the exposure to the need for discursive justification, of social relations of all kinds. As Giddens and others have argued, these processes of democratisation may give rise in turn to new fundamentalisms - not just of religion but also of gender, nation, 'race' and so forth. I shall not attempt to make predictions about the coming forms of modernity, but I do want to claim that only a social theory which recognises its own continuities and traditions has a chance to understand these changes.

Clark, T.N. 1973 Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dennis, Norman 1991: The Rise of Historical Sociology. Cambridge: Polity.

Elias, Norbert 1983 (1987): "The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present", Theory, Culture and Society, 4, 2-3, June 1987, pp.223-47.

Giddens, Anthony 1971 Capitalism and Modern Social Theory Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Giddens, Anthony 1972 'Four Myths in the History of Social Thought', Economy and Society, 1: 357ff. Reprinted in Giddens, Studies in Social and Political Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1977)

Kuhn, Thomas 1962 (1970): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lyotard, Jean-François 1979 (1984) La condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit. The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press.

Outhwaite, William 1987: New Philosophies of Social Science. London: Macmillan.
Parsons, Talcott 1937: The Structure of Social Action

Skinner, Quentin ed. 1985: The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences. Cambridge: C.U.P.