3

General Theory in the Postpositivist Mode:

The 'Epistemalogical Dilemma' and the Search far Present Reason

In the postwar period, generaJ socioJogical theory has been associatcd wltb the search for nomothetic knowledge. It has becn viewed, by lts proponents and critics alike, as the crowning glory of the positive science of society. As the positlVist convictlOn has weakened, the attractiveness oi pnrsuing general theories in social science has waned; indeed, the very viability of the peojee! has come to be seriousJy questioned. If sl1bjective frameworks ínevitably medIate scientinc observations, it is reasóned, then efforts at generalization from these observations must themselves have a partícularist component. Once the pristine universal status of theory has been undermined in this way, it has seemed only logical to many that socIal science should not . just acknowledge the personal but embrace it. Increasing[y, there have been calls for social science to give up ItS one-dimensional quest for cogmtive truth; social scicnce as praxis or moral inquíry (Haan et al. I983; WardeIl and Turner I986)J or as a hermcneutics cf the concrete (íbid.; Gíbbons 1987; RabíI10w and SuHivan I979} have been offered as alternatives.

On such intellectual grounds, and for historical and polítical [easons as weIl, nan-empil'ical discourse in thc social sciences has become more relativist than ever before. Sorne intellectuals have embraced this relatÍvism enthusiasticalIy; others have adopted ít in a spirit of resignatíon, believing that no other alternative to posítivísm can be defended. My point in thls essay is that this simpliste choice between scientistlC theory and antitheoretieal relativism represents not only a false dichotomy but a dangerous One. '

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1 wiH caH the preseIftation of these alternatives the 'epistemolog.ical dilemma/ for it presents the fate of general theory as dependent upon an epístemologicat choice aJone. Either knowJedge oí the world is un­reJated to the social position and intellectual interests of the knower, in which case general theory and universal knowJedge are viabJe) or knowledge is affected by its relatJOn to rhe knower, in which case rc1ativistic and particularistic knowledge can be the only resulto This is a true diJemma because it presents a choice bcrween two equally unpalatable alternatives. 1 argue that neither pole of this dilemma should be accepted. The alternative to posítivist theory 15 not resigned rclativism; the alternative to re1ativism is not positlV.ist theory. Theoretical knowledge can neve! be anything other than the socially rooted efforts of historical agents. But this sócial character doea not negate the possibi[ity for developing either generalized categoríes or mcreasingly disciplined, impersonal, and critical modes oi evaluatian (eL WiU I98S).

To acknowledge rdativlsm is not necessarily to lffiply that actors impose on Jenowledge persónal and ldiosyncratic lmprints. Actors can be bound - by thclr societies and themselves to standards that are rooted within, and after a manner are reflections broader and more· inclusive social mstitutions and groups. They may aJso be bound by traditions' that have a distinctively rabonal, impersonal bent. One mri'sr¡ dlffcrentiate, then, within the category 'reJativist.' Evaluative criteria, whtle contextually eelatlvc, can be both more universalistic and less so. The search far truth can be fuscd with the search for other kmds of knowledge - with rhe search for beauty and moral purity - or it can be separated from them and controHed in specialized and more impersonal ways. It is possible, in other words, to defend the search for universal truth, and the possibiJity of gaining valuable approximations to it, m a manner that does not reflect positívist creduJity.

In the course of this essay 1 seele to overcome the epistemological dilemma in a variety 01 ways. [n the sectlOn immediately following 1 present the argument that unÍversalistic standards of evaluation, and impersonal conceptual constructs, are products of rniHennia-long development in human civíhzation. Bccause the effolt to gain distance from objects outside 01 the self - to separa te the knower from the known - did not begm with the positivísm of the seventeenth-century scientdic lcvoJution, rhe quest for universalisrn cannot be evaluated on the grounds of a simple obj~ction to philosophical positivism as such. In the CQurse of this discussion 1 introduce the counterpoint to univelsalization that, 10 dlfferent Ís the criticaJ objeet through-out much of this essay. I suggest rhe demand fm a turning away

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from universalism has been intrinsic to cultural history and, in the sectlOn following, that this dialectic can be seen throughout the modern history oí social thought.

After these considerations, my focus become5 narrower and more detailed. 1 show how the epistemological dilernma was repro­duced with consequences in the postwar debate between scientism and theoreticism on the one hand and neo-romantic contextualism on the other. After discussing the deepening skepticísm about theory and <truth1 which has marked a range of intellectual movements over the last two decades, 1 develop a detailed criticism of Richard Rorty's brief for antifoundational relativism. Only after these critical and hermeneutie discussions are completecl do 1 ofier, in the concludíng section oi this essay, a relatively systematic defense oE the possibility fOI theorizing withill a postpositivist frame.

The Dialectic of Universal and Concrete in Cultural History

Social science theory is one important manifestatíon of the search for unIveisalism, for faÍr and principled standards of evaluatíon, that has been one oi the principal ambitions of civilizational development. The contemporary debate between general theory and its critics can be seen, therefore, as eme version of the conflict between the universal and the concrete that has marked cultural history itself.

To advocate the necessity for general theory is to uphold the possibility of universal thought. Universalism rests upon the capacity for actoIs to decenter themselves, to understand that the world does not revolve around them, that they are not its creators, that they can study 'ie in a relatively impersonal way. As writes in his Important argument about the paradoxical pursuit of objective knowledge,

The aim DI such understanding ís to go beyond the distincrion between appearance and rea.Jity by meluding the existence of appearances in an elaborated reality. But this expandéd reality, like physical reality, is center­fess. Though the subjeetive features of our own minds are at the center of our worId, we must try to concelve oi them as Just one manifestation oI the mental in a world that is not given especially to the human pOlnt of view.

{1986: 18, origmal italles)l

:' Yet, paradoxically, this decentered world is at the same time a world view, and the human view of it a human creation. When this ageney

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is forgotten, universalism becomes an obJectification that seems not just to decenter human beíngs but tú deny them. Objectivity is viewed not as wodd mastery but as alienation:The consequence 18 the return to the concrete.

The process of decentering actors from their wodd is the process upon which the clalms of civilizatían resto The earlier the human society, the more its members centeredness. The world is whole, it is our world, it ls in its subjective immediacy. Actors live in the dreaming, in circular narrative time, in myth, conventions, para bIes, stones.2 As Weber fust demonstrated, and as many others have substantiated as societies become larger and more complex, becornes more fragmented. Reality i5 posited more as that exists out5ide the actor, that lS removed from irnmediate and the concrete. As ir becomes more universal, time flattens out; reflection and self-conscIOusly constructed mapfi, and hypotheses talee their place alongside myths as orgamzed orientations for social action.3

With the great monotheistic religíons - particularly with Judalsm and Christíanity but a180 with Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confu-cianism, this i5 as a higher truth that not onl}: stands completely outside subjectively experienccd time and place but that actually creates them. This reahty, expressed as God, is so universal rhat in it could not even be personalized through a name, so abstract it eould not be worshiped through any concrete form. 4 The sarne kmd of decentering and objectifying process occurred in aneient Greece I96S; Voegelin I957), where nature assumed the status of an impersonal force, challenging the panttleo,n of personal divinities. For both secular and religious saeiety, the universal forces that decenter men and women are at the same time sources for the exercise of their reason. If it is men and women who have created the universal, then they must~ aft~r all, have the capacity to understand it.

For the Greeks~ the connectlon between impersonal nature and the exercÍse of reason is easy to seco It is perhaps more difficult in the case of re1igion. It is easier when we understand that the will and motives oE the impersonal religious force are also conceived by believers as forms of reason. God's reasons are presented to believers not only' thro,-:-gh the deep order of the natural and social worlds but through divine laws. As radieally decente red beings, men and wom~n strive to emulare the abstract model 01 divinity in order to understand its order and submit to its laws. For the aneient Jews,to submit to this universal personalization was to gain salvation. Salvation ean

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be called religious 'truth,' for it IS based on rather than on immediate experience. For the onesel! before ünpersonal nature gained acceSS to truth more secular and obviously rationa1 way.

This interplay between expanding religiolls abstractíon and secular universalism continued to develop in the modern wodd. Deperson-. alization brings individuatíon, not simply dominatíon.5 It was the great world religions that gave birth to the very conception oE auto bio graphy.6 Cosmic abstraction brings metaphysical dualism; such dualism i8 the leey to the experience oE the separated 'self: even while the v:r0rld i8 íncreasingly experienced as objective and as ratIOnal and rationalized - actors can an intimate connection to the objective forces from which they have become estranged. Insofar as this experience can be sustained, there exists what 1 will caH present rcason.

The experience of present reason Í8 difficult to maintain. In the course of its progress, impersonal reason i8 continual1y negated by the demand for the concrete. As soon as the existence of the universal Ís posited, it is denied. This negation ís because depersonali­zation IS experienced as having caused reason to be absent. Actors experience the fear of obliteratíon from the forces that they have themselves created, from the isolated and demanding self, from the impersonally organized socíety, from an omnipotent God, from the rationally reorganize4 forces DE nature.

This is not a deception, but rather another form of truth. The dialectic of present and absent reason forms the malO topie of Hege!'s Phenomenology. Insofar as human beings posit reason as outside of themselves, they create the eonditions for the alienation of reason from its human origins. Religion becomes an orthodoxy in which the faithfuI lose touch with their own spiritual Jife. Philosophy becomes a dogma that is casuistic, obfuscatory, elitist, and mere1y abstracto When decentered re aso n becomes objectified in colossal weapons oí death that obliterate human beings, the alienation of reason assumes more than a metaphysical form (see chapter 2., aboye). Because reason appears to be absent from the objects created by rati?nal. hurr:an beings, people deny its very existence. In response to thIs ahenatIOn of reason, truth is sought within, not without, in the concrete rather than the abstraet. Reason is abandoned for experience, rationality for the irrational. This countermovement i8 expressed by cabbalistic ·movements in Judaism, by Gnosticism in Christianity, by antinomi­anism in Puritanism, and by sophistry, skepticisrn, and idealism in philosophy.

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Universal and Concrete in Social Thought

In the realm of thought this diaIectic has been conceptualized as the relatíon of the knower to the known. The scientific revolutlOfl of the early rnodern period decentered the human being, the lcnower,

. in a partic111arly dramatic way. Social thought followed in its wake¡ as thinkers from Hobbes to the French philosophers strove to find rhe social physics corresponding to Newton's heavenly ones. These decentering movements of thol1ght were experienced as liberating but also as forms oí alienatlon, Rornanticism created a countermovernent that continues to Ínform reactions against universalism roday. Fichte,

and the earIy Marx were not the only thínkers who believed that seU and world division were onJy necessary steps on the way to a of unity.7 Romantic literary and theoretical protests objectification were also ErmIy rooted in English thought, as M.H. Abrams (I97I) has shown in his discussions of W ordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake.

it was Britísh thinkers who produced polítical economy and utilitarian sOCÍal science and Germans who created rhe intellectual'countermovement whose caH for the rec:emtefllng of knower within the known has become increasingly influential in recent times. While 1 will suggest fater that Dilthey, at did not intend to give up on scientific generalizatíon, his program for Geisteswissenschaft clearly emphasizes intuitíon and experience over reason and abstraction. It places activities governed by lmpel'SOI!1aJ laws including much oE polítical, economic, and l".\..'JI-"Ji.ll ..... ~U.

outside the bounds of interpretive social thought. When Nietzsche condemned abstract reason as the lnvention oÍ

monotheism and the Greeks, he was nor wrong; however, in his feverish effort to get behind (and beyond). reason to the sensate and concrete, to embrace particularism at any cost, he pushed Romanticism into a radically destructive fonn. When it takes less nihilístic forms, its anti-epistemological message is much the same. When he rejected Husserl's transcendental phenornen(J!ogy for existentiaJism, H.eldegg(~r was insisting on the disaster of depersona1ization. Following Husserl led only to understanding how impersonality is rationally constructed, not to the demand foc its abolition. Heidegger wanted philosophy to be more personal and diIect, an ontology of 'being there' (Dasein).

Following Heidegger and Hegel, Sartre called for a radical reeenter­ing of existence and questioned the very reality of the depeIsonalized world. In his early work he described what was outside the .individual as nothingness; in his later work he called it the concrete inert. Both

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are conceptions of the world in which abstractions have no meaning, in which it is impossible to experience the world outside of rhe seU in a real and satisfymg way. In this critica! respeet, the later Wittgenstein is no different. Words do not refer to things outside of consciousness but to other words. When we speak of the world as red we speak not of redness as such, oE the world out there, but rather we refer to a linguistic concept whose referent we accept because conventíon relates the word to other concepts with similar objects. Chained within the subjecti~e though not private world of our language games, we do not have any access to the impersonal world itself.

It is not my intention in this essay to deny the intellectual signifi.­canee, much less the moral importance, of this Romantic and idealistic movement in modern thought and culture. There is a pathology inherent in the uníversalism that civilizarion llpholds, and it is precisely that reason itse1f is often experienced as absent. To 'treat' this pathology, rational actors must be reminded that they are the creato~s of the world vú::w that allows them to comprehend nature, self, and society in a universalistic and impersonal way. Romanticism Ín its various forms has been the teacher of this lesson, for every generatíon forrunate enough to experíence 1tS tutelage.

1 do wish to maintain, however, that in important respects the world outside of the self can, in fact, be comprehended. Human create the world view that allows them to conceive of this world, but they do not create this world as such, Nor do they Ínvent the society whose regularities thlS allows them to see, regularitres which, .if not Jawful in the same sense as physicallaws, exhibit powerful and consistent patterning. The countermovement against impersonal rationality allows us not to forget that it is we who are seeing this society and world; it is not seeing Ítself through uso This is the achieve­ment of Romantic social thought in its modern guise. Yet, we can decenter ollrselves from this personal process of objective knowing in turn. Insofar as we do so, we can understand and explain what this process of constructing rational perceptíon, mvolves. Trus under­standing, however, does not threaten the universality of perceptlOn. To the contrary, it can become another, equally universalistic theory - a theory of knowledge and perception - in its own right.

Scientism and Theoreticism in the Postwar Period

These bread considerations are central to the problem of general theory and its crities. One can argue about what exactly 'theory' is, whether

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it is a model, a set of interlinked propositions that produces testable hypotheses, a frame of reference, a set of classífications, a conceptual acherne. One cannot argue, however, with the notion that, no matter how defined, theory implies an abstraction from the concrete. The more general the theory the greater its interpretive and explanatory r:each' - the more general the abstraction. Theory is the quintessence of the decentering procesa that distinguishes the modern world.

The universalism oi general theocy cannot be justified if this universalism is understood, and expenenced) as a decentering that demands the alienation oí reason. General theory is not somethmg that simply reflects the objectíve out there. Posítivism and empirici¡:;m reduce theory in just this way, viewing it merely as the studied reflec­líon of the natural world. For trus reason, their justjfications for theory have been particularly vulnerable in the contemporary period, for in this recent period the agentic contribution to our perception of the objective world has become increasingly well understood. In the present context, general theory can be justified only in a postpositivíst wa y, as the case for present reason.

Positivism and empiricism talee their warrant for universal theoriz-­ing from the role it seems to play in the sciences of nature. 1 say 'seem$ to play: for in the practice of natural science the exercise of reason is camouflaged in a particularly effective way. In its natural science form, the practice of general theory has at least in its normal science mode, a process oE absent reason. Scientists experience themselves as mirrormg nature. 8 The:ir own exercise in rationality the manner in which ir is this rationality itself which has al10wed perceptual access to a world which mathematics and scientific method can rnode! - i8 forgotten. For many decades absent reason al80 characterized the philosophy of natural science. Effacement, abnegation, objectivity, transparency - when these terms describe the re1atíon of scientists to nature rheir agentic construction of th~ natural world is ignored. Theories are he1d to be proven or falsified by exposing their human­made tenets to the force of non-human empirica! facts.

This perspectlve on natural science practice) articulated philoso­phicalIy by logical positivism, carried forcefully into the heyday of positive social science in the decades that followed the Second World War. The unified science movement, a position articulated by Neurath­but shared by virtually the entire social scientific community, suggested no significant difference between natural and social science. The ITIc:reaSlng technÍcal efficiency of statisticaJ methods made it a ppear that access to the social equivalent oE llnadorned nature would soon be approximated. With these methods, social scientists would not have

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to construct generalizations on the basls oftheir Int'p'l"lr1rp,tTIl'P

mteIlectual power} and wIt; on the basis símply of to the ironclad experimental codes of science, F.'-"'L'-'L" ... L .... a'L"'~.'" emerge out of the data themselves.

This vision of absent reason can be found even in the work of sophisticated theorists like Talcott Parsons. While Parsons appr(~c1;ate:d Weber's search tor a universalistic version of the Geisteswis~en-schaften, presenting a subtle and powerful of it in his first major work (Parsons I937: 579-639), he his own theorjzing on the mode! of Newtonian mechanics. He was not troubled by the possíbility, which he rumself that general theory placed the constructions of the knower onto the percep-tion of the known. To the contrary, Parsons confidently presented his action theory as a powerfuJ reflection of 'the ' even if a reflection that had been mediated in an analytic, a way.9 This utopian rationalism was not the product of Parsons's funetionalism. Writing at the high point of French cornmunist ascendancy in the early I96os, Louis Althusser (I969) confidently separated his own version of Marxist social science theory froID mere ideology. Post­war semiotics agreed to the idea that truth was accessible without the intervention of subjective frames. In 'Myth Today,' RolandBarthes (I9 59) iHustrated how social structural pressures distorted merely denotative analogies into redolent rnyths, without giving any thought to the question of how. his own thought could have escaped the same mythic fate. 10

Contextualism as- the Neo-romantic Alternative

It is not surprising that in the eourse oí the 19608 there emerged in reaetion against such absent reason an extraordinary neo-romantic

. critique. Optimism about the objectively progressive course of the postwar world had begun to fade; renewed racial, ethnic, and class conflicts and the emergence of newly strengthened pimordial attach­ments ~ade the unthinking eommitment to universal and social and intelle~tual structures more difficult. When they protested against 'meaningless abstraetion' in their newly expanded universities, colIege students were experiencing the absence of reason in the very heart of intellectual life; they vlewed the university not as the expression oí human creativity and imagination but as an objectified machine. They indicted science for its reifieation in weapons oí war.

The classical embodiments of rational social theory also were

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challenged in an antinomian way. the reconstruction ofWeber by parsons and Bendix as the embodiment oE rational sobriety, Mitzman (1970) claimed that pathos, and eros formed the revealing underside to Weber's rationalizing theme. Against Rieff's (I96I) moralist Freud and Jones's (1963) scieti!ific orre, Norman O. Brown (I966) created a Freud oE play and joy, while Russel Jacoby (1975) indicted American revisionists for ignoring the critical and erotic Freud that Marcuse (I 954) had earlier unearthed. Gar.finkel (I967) becaine dissatÍsfied with Husserl's eplstemological stance, fear­ing that it too easily endorsed the existence of impersonal forms; inspired by HeIdegger and Wittgenstein, he pushed' ethnomethodoiügy into a more radically antinormative mode, away from the belief in, and the hope for, consensual normative constraints as they were embodied in theorizing of a Parsonian form Alexander 1987= l57-8o}.

By the end oE the an antitheoretical orientation had' begun to emerge throughout Wester~ intellectuallife. ll I wiH caH this broad movement contextualismo in what became an extraordinarily influential with functionalist theory, CJifford Geertz (1973a [I964]) attacked the notion that cognÍtÍve truth was relevant to the study of ideology, Parsons for an interpretive and relativist approach that the close link between political action and the rhetorical creation of meaning. Thomas Kuhn (I970 [I962J) rebelled absent reason in natural science in an equally constructivist and contextualist way. While not denying the possi­bility of doing natural he identified the decentered scientist as a kind of 'normal science' ¡diot while describing creative and revolutionary science in a subjective and recente red way. Also begin­ning to get serÍous atten1Íon was the work oE Peter Winch (I958), which in questioning the very possibility of a social scÍence went further than either Geertz Of Kuhn. Following Wittgenstein, Winch argued that social scjentists were imprisoned by linguistic-conceptual worlds that made it impossible to create even reJative1y independent knowledge about the actions and intentions oí those outside one~s cultural group.

The Deepening Skepticism about Theory and 'Truth'

With the exception of Winch, these eady contextualist reactions did not reject the possibility oE uruversalism oc the value of general theory. They had not, in other words, become fuUy confined by the epistemological dilernrna. Those who followed them did, and were.

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In the 1970S and 1980s the neo-romantic reactíon deepened·. What are taken to be the epistemological implications of contextualism - conventionalism and skepticism have been explicitly formulated; in many quarters, theory has given way to the investigatíon of the concrete. Arguing from the mere existence of context, socIal scientists and philosophers have conduded that universalistlc modes of argu­ment are impossible. The faci1e and ultimately false dichotomy between positivism and relativism has thus inserted itseIf as a principal rubríc in contemporary debate. The possibility that the context within which we operate is ¡tself the very tradinon of objective reason has been ignored.

This movement from the acknowledgment of Context to the embrace oI relativism and the abandonment oE theory is nowhere more cIear than in the in.teHectual odyssey oí Clifford Geertz. In his essays on ideology and religlon} Geertz had emphasized interprerive over scientific reason in arder to avoid the sociologieal reductionism so prevalent in the social sciences of that day. Ideology and religion could be viewed as cultural systems only if their relation to social actors was evaluated by sorne criterion other than scientific truth. Ideological and religious actors, in other words, shollld not be mistaken for scientific ones. By the time he coHected these earlier essays in his enormously influential Interpretation of Cultures, however, Geertz was arguing that scientific theorlzíng shoul~ not be the goal of analysts rhemselves. Not universalistic theory but 'thick description' oi concrete behavior should be the goal of the human studies (Geertz I973b).

The essays that appeared subsequent to thlS pubhcation contain intriguing interpretations of cultural life, but they manifest virtualIy none of the theoretical ambitions, 01' the conceptual precision, oE Geertz's earlier work. When he introduced his second collection of essays, Local Knowledge, published one decade after the first, Geertz (I983; 3-6) averred that In this latter set of essays he had, indeed, simply taken to their logical conclusion the implications of the first: 'In anthropology, too, it so turns out, he who says A must say B, and 1 have spent much oI my time since [that n.rst collection] trying to say it.' Employing the logic of the epistemological ditemma, Geertz identifies the social scientiflc search for theoretical generalization with the pretensions oí the natural sciences. Citing the 'growing recognition that [this] established approach ... was not producing the triumphs oí prediction, control, and testa bi lit y that had for so long been promised,' he condemns such efforts at 'laws-and-causes social physics' as reflecting 'a technological conception of those [human] sciences.' One must choose eirher positivism or particularistic relativism: Geertz

GENERAL THEORY IN THE l'OSTPOSITIVIST MODE IOI

_ is condemning nor simply empiricist social science but any attempt to theonze about society as such. 'Calls for "a general theory" of just about anything SOCIal,' he asserts, 'sound increasingly hollow.' General, theory 'has never seemed further away, harder to imagine, or less certain[y desirable than it does right now.'

Once posítivist and theoretical social science have been rejected, the only alternative Geertz can foresee is a return to the concrete. Social analysis musr 'turn from trying to explain social phenomena by weaving them into grand textures of cause and eHect to trying to explain them by placing them in local frames of awareness.) Ethnography, nO,t generalizing social science, is the discipline best suited to tbis partícularist tasle. 'To an ethnographer, sorting through rhe machinery oI distant ideas, the shapes of knowledge are always ineluctably local, indivisible from their instruments and their encasements. One may veil this fact with ecumenical rhetoric or bluf ir with strenuous theory, but one cannot really malee it go away.' Geertz concIudes by warning his readers that, white his approach is a hermeneutic one, 'one will no! find very much in the way oí "the theory and methodology of interpretationJ> ... in what foUows.' Nor surprisingly, Geertz believes that 'there are enough general principles in the world already.~ He does, not wish to see hermeneutics (reified into a parascience.' What the essays in Loca.l Knowledge oHer instead oI theorizing are (actual inter­pretations of something.' In this relativizing tasIe, Geertz aligns himself with 'the views of such philosophers as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, or Ricoeur, such crities as Burke, FIye, jameson, or Fish, and such all-purpose subversives as Foucault, Habermas, Barthes, or Kuhn.' These are, of eourse, precisely the figures - Ha bermas excepted -I have earlier identified as central to the contextual reaction against universalist thought (ef. Friedman 19 87).

_ It is revealing, in this regard, that late! deyeIopments in Thomas Kuhn's intellectual career manifest the epistemological dilemma in strikingly sImilar ways as those in Geertz's. Despite his quite legitimate protests that he had not intended to produce an irrationalíst theory, Kuhn's revísion of his paradigm concept (1970) made it impossible to ídentify it with theoretical presuppositions of a universal hent (see Alexander 1982b). Neophytes learn to exercise their scientific skills not by understandíng intellectual frameworks but by mimicking' the plots of specific problem solutions, which Kuhn calls cexemplars! Scientific results are controlled not, in the first instance, by universal­istic theories Or impersonal methods but by a 'disciplinary matrix,' which Kuhn is careful to define not as a set of ideas but as a social network of situated human relations. In his subsequent monographic

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work Kuhn (1978) seemed to have given up on efforts at theoreticaI clarification ·altogether. Eschewing even the claim ro exemplífy his theory of scientific revolution, he returned to detailed historical description of a specific scientific case.

Equally revealing of the increasingly radical implications of contextualism is the poststructural movement beyond semiotics and structuralism. Since Saussure set forth semiotic philosophy in his general theory of linguistics, its key stipulation has been the arbitrary reJation oi sign and referent: there can be found no 'rational reason,' no force or correspondence in the outside world, tor the particular that actors have chosen to represent their wodd. As 1 briefly indicated in my discussion oE early elaborations of the semiotic position , exempted from this oE objective reference semioticians themselves. It should not surprising, perhaps, that the founder oi the American tradition of semiotics, Charles was coofident that experience eventually aligned scientific symboIs with objective truth. What is striking, however, is that the same. assurance oi universalism marked the French semiotic school. Saussure showed no anxiety about his ability to linguistic systems in a realistic way. Lévi-Strauss tnumphantly described his structuralist interpretations as exemplifying the science of

Contemporary inheritors of this semiotic and structuralist tradition were dlsappointed with the fate oE what they conceived to be truth and reason in the 1960s. In addition to their expenence of absent reason, they had well-justified coneerns with the epistemological naivety oE their theoretical predecessors. In accord with the logic of the epistemological dilemma, poststructuralists moved ro extend the arbitrary relativism of the semioric field to the semioticians themselves. Acknowledging the arbitrary reference oE 'reality: they felt compelled ro rejcct out of hand the very concept of an objectively differentiated world exer­cising an independent influence 00 the knower. Experience replaces reason, reJativism and the embrace of hypercontextualism displace the search for uníversalistic trurh. Emancipation is a logical impossibility, domination a condition that cannot logically be overcome.

Baudrillard's (1983) concept oE the simulacrllm represents the reductio ad absurdum oE the poststructuralist position, the inevitable conclusion of an insistence not only on the referential arbitrariness but also on the particularism of symbohc codeso Where the early Barthes saw myth as the corruption of reaJistic reference at the hands oE objective social power, Baudrillard sees the play of signifier and sígnified as a closed cireuit into wruch the reality oi social needs can never intrude. The contrast between Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu can be 1

.1 ¡ 1

1

GENERAL THEORY IN THE POSTPOSITIVIST MODE IDJ

seen in mueh the same way. Lévi-Strauss's overweening ratíonalism led him to cut symbolic thought short before the entry of the modern world. The bricoleur was replaced by the scientist. With Bourdieu, we ean see, once again, how a latter-day follower oE structuralism responds to the earlier faith in objectivity with cynical disappomt­ment. Denying the very possibility oí reference to critical uoiversalism, the perceptual structurcs of bourgeois and proletarian actors alike are fo! Bourdieu (I984) mere particularistic reflections, primitive codes from which there is no escape.

Derrida and Foucault suppJy the deep justificanoo for such post­structural argumento Whereas Bourdleu seems blithe1y to exempt himself from his own re1ativizing strictures, Derrida (198r) has insisted that the knower is simply a literate bncoleur. Reality, in turn, can be nothmg other than a text, a symbolic constructíon that lS itself related to other texts - not to history or social structure - in arbitrary ways. texts cannot themselves be accepted as representations, even of arbitrarUy signified referents. Composed not just of presenccs but of texts do not exist as complete wholes.

To this reconstruction of the epistemological dilemma in its most nihilistic form, Foucault adds a hisrory and sociology. Against the possibility oi contemporary universalism, he makes a double critique.'

there is his substantive historical demonstration of absent reason. The rationalization oE modern society, as manifest particularly in the thought and activity oE the scientifically trained professions, is a fraud (e.g. Foucault 1977, 1978). ProEessionals actuaHy engage in the manipulation of reason; their ministratlOns are forms of surveíllance} their goal technical control. Enlightenment universaJism amounts to the particularism of powerj it results in the of subjectivity, not in the exercise of present reason.

Foucault's second critique i8 an analytical one. In his later work he insists on the virtually complete identity o'f knowledge, or discourse, with power. In doing so, the very possibility DE decentered eX!)erJLenICe is denied. The subject, Foucault is fond oE repeating, is completely constituted by discourse. In this way, discourse becomes both the basís for power and merely its manifestation in another formo Because truth is relative to discourse, it is impossible to appeal to universalizing standards against worldly power: 'Truth Ísn't outside power, or Iack- ' ing in power .... Each society has ilS regime of truth, íts "general politics" of truth: that is, the types oE discourse which it accepts and makes function as true' (Foucault I98o: 13I). To set about rational1y to evaluate the logical conslstency, theoretical implications, or explana­tory value oE a given diseourse is obviously a waste oE time.

I04 FIN DE sri:.CLE SOCIAL THEORY

The simple and dangerous dichotorny is firmly seto The only alter­native to the faHacy of absent reason, to positivism, is a thoroughly relativist sociology of knowledge, an archeology of the historical conditions of discoUIse.12

The Apotheosis of Antitheoretical Relativism: The Philosophy of Richard Rorty and Its Postmodern Reprise

Nietzsche based his own of morals on his contempt for advocates of a belief in and the ascetic ideaL In their place, he 'entruones taste ... as the sole organ oE knowledge beyond Truth and Falsity, beyond Good and l as Habermas puts it in hi5 briHiant exploratíon of the underside of critical thcory. Richard Rorty, while on his own account a good 'postmodern bourgeois liberal' (1985a), reluctantly embraces this Nietzschean frame. He does so because, Jike he experiences the history of Western ratiocination not as the radically imperfect expression of present [eason but as the alienatíon of subjectivity from itself. When Rorty describes rhe scientific revolution, it is rhe pathology oE absent reason oE which he writes.

This is reality conceived as somehow represented by representations which are not mere1y ours .but its own, as h 100ks to itself, as it would describe itself íf it could .... This fantasy of discovering, and somehow knowing that one has discovered, Nature's Own Vocabulary seemed to becorne more concrete when Galileo and Newton formulated a comprehenslve set of predictively useful universal generalizations, written in suitably 'coId,' 'inhuman,' mathematical terms.

(I9B2a: 194, italics added)

Thís perception of absent reason leads Rorty to embrace the dichotomy between scientism and relativismo 'The urge to teH stories of progress, maturation and synthesis might be overcome,' he writes (I9 86: 48, itaJics added), 'ii we once took seríously the notion that we only know the wodd and ourselves under a description.} Rorty is caught on the horns of the epistemological dilemma. rf we acknowI­edge context, he believes, there is no possibility of evaluating the worth of various perspectives in a universalistic way.

If we once couId feel the full force of the claim that OUI present discursive practices were given nelther by God, nor by intuition of essence nor by the cunning oE reason, but only by chance, then we would have a culture

GENERAL THEORY IN THE POSTPOSITIVIST MODE IOS

WhlCh Iacked not only a theory of knowledge, not only a sense DE progress, but any soucce of what Nietzsche called 'metaphysical comfort.'

(ibid.: italles added)

T o embrace fulIy such relativism, indeed, one must avoid not only progressive theories but theorizing as such. {A Nietzschean must llOt

want any substitute for theories; Rortyexplains (ibid.). To theorize i8 to impJy the possibility of at least partly circumventing the particu­larÍsm oí contexto This is impossible, for a Nietzschean 'views the very idea of "theory" as tainted with the notion that there is something there to be contemplated, to be accurately represented in thou,ght.' The possibility of accurate representation is what Rorty wants to avoid. He succeeds remarkably weIl.

Rorty sees the history of philosophy as directed to 'the relatíon between universals andparticulars' (I979= I49}.13 Because Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature is an argumeñt against the possible existence oI the concrete, it 1S necessarily an argument ~gainst the history of philosophy as well. The problem began long ago, with the Greeks. Plato's and Aristotle's 8earch for universal categories and lffioel:so:nal lcnowledge did not marle the beginning of human emancipation an anthropomorphically disrorted world; this search, rather, produced another kind of equally magical and distorted myth. metaphor of knowing general truths by internalizing Rorty suggests 42), became 'the intel1ectual's substitute for the peasant' s belieI in life among the shades.'

One of the peculiarities of Rorty's book is that this key proposition - that universal properties do not exist - is talcen more as the basis upon which to draw other conclusions than as a point that needs to be demonstrated in and of itself. Rorty demonstrates that, after 2,500

years, philosophers still have not agreed about what such universals are, or about how they can be proved. He also discusses recent discoveries in the postpositivist philosophy and history oI science and points to the skeptical condusions oí such contextualist phiJosophers as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and, more questionably.l Dewey. Finally, Rorty argues that the split between mind and body cannot exi,st. He introduces a long parable about the visit to earth of Antipodeans, a mythical people from the other side of the galaxy whose vast knowl­edge of micro-neurology has demonstrated exactly how thoughts are produced by electrícal impulse and physicallaws. 'Now thatthey have taught us micro-neurology,' Rorty (p. 8I) has his backward frÍends on earth suggest, 'cannot we 5ee that talk of mental states was merely a place~holder for talk of neurons?' Because we have bodíes, in other

Io6 FIN DE SFECLE SOCIAL THEORY

words, there is no need for the concept of mind or for the theories they produce. 'To suggest that the mind is the brain,' Rorty msists, 'is to suggest that we secrete theorems and symphonies as Que spleen secretes dark humors' (pp. 43-4). Rorty's parable is amusing but ultirnately terrifying in its antirationalist implications.

It might be argued that Rorty's farlure to justify his assumption that universals do not exist places the intellectual edifice he is constructing on rather flimsy foundations. We will see that Rorty himself would offer to thlS fundamental objection rhe most skeptical of replies. Because universals do not exist, an effort te construct intellectual foundations is a hopdess enterprise trom the start. At an,y rate,. it is the implication that Rorty draws from this assumption against universals that makes his work interesting. _

Because there are no universals, we can talle in good faith ooly about experience, not abstraet normsi we can refer only 'to common sense and cornmon practice for details about what counts as justification' (p. 151). The real problem, aS Rorty sees it, is 'not to abjure such hypostatized universals but to explain why anyone had taleen thern seriously' (pp. 68-9). He laments (p. 38) the passing oE the traditional world - 'there would not have been thought to be a problem about the nature of reason had our race confined itself to pointing out particular states of aHairs - warning of cliEfs and rain, celebrating individual births and deaths.' Unfortunately, for 'no particular reason,' sorne philosophers - but not many normal human beings - got ir" into their heads that 'knowledge oE universals' held the leey to person­hood and freedoffi. With the entrance of the Greeles, the slide down the slippery slope began. Among philosophers at least, it has come to the point that 'to suggest that there are no universals ... is to endanger our uniqueness' (p. 43).

The conclusion Rorty draws from the nonexistence of universals i5 that foundational arguments - general theoretical anes, in the language of social science - are impossible to malee. It lS revealing that, despite his cxplicit condemnation oI epistemology as such, tuis antifoundational argument is made precisely in epistemological terms. Philosophers who espouse universals have justified their importance by describing them as objective entities. Against this, Rorty insists over and over again that it is impossible to have 'pre-linguistic awareness' (p. I8I). His -(epistemological) point is that there 15 'no transcendental stand­point of our present set of representations from which we can lnspect the relation between these representations and theie object' (p. 293). He concludes that the "'epistemological" quest for a way of refuting the skeptic and underwriting our claim to be talking about nonfictions

GENERAL THEORY IN THE POSTPOSITIVIST MODE

[isJ hopeless.' The epistemological claim is hopeless because it is empiricist. It reflects the absence of reason. Rorty points to the- coercive implications that flow from this loss. Such phIlosophers, he writes, belIeve that 'knowing a proposition to be true is to be identified with being caused to do something by an object' (p. 157). According 1'0 this view 'the object Wh1Ch the proposition is about imposes the proposition's truth' (original italics).

Rorty's claim is that philosophers seeking objectivity see rhemselves as reflectors, or mirrors, of reality; hence, they set out ro establish the 'foundations of knowledge.' Foundational arguments are universals that establish the grounds foe truth in what are conceived of as objec­tively rational ways, 'truths which are certain because of their causes rather than because of the arguments given for them' (p. 159). Because they move 'beyond argument to compulsion from the object known,' foundational arguments are inhuman; they daim that 'anyone gripped by the object in the required way will be unable to doubt or to see an alternative' (italics added). Foundationalism, Rorty inslsts, i5 'the end-product of an original wish to substitute confrontation (or conversation as the determinant of oue belief' (p. I63).

Rorty is right to dernand that [eason be present, and he is also right that this can be achieved only if a herrneneutic rather than mechanistic stan-ce i5 achieved.

lf the study of science's search for truth about the physicaluoiverse 18 viewed hermeneutically it will be viewed as the activity of spirit - the faculty which makes - rather than as the application of the mirroIing faculties, those which fínd what natme has already made.

(p. 344, original italics)

Rorty 1S wrong, however, to rhink that this can be accomplished only by abandoning the search for universals as such. The problem lies with his conviction that every argument against skcpticism and for univer­salism is an 'epistemological quest; that it i5 based upon reflecrion theory and the absence of reason. Phrlosophers who sede truthful foundations may perceive themselves as mirroring eeality, but the interest and power of theu arguments do not stand DI faH on whether thi5 claim can itself be true. These philosophers can be seen, rath~r, as rational agents who create frarneworks within which to interpret a worId whose objectivity and impersonality they take on faith. To the degree that they succeed, they falsify Rorty's epistemological syllogism, his claim that the proposition 'there is no neutral ground on which to stand' fol1ows logically frorn the notion 'there is no such thing as pre-linguistic awareness' (p. I8I).

Io8 FIN DE SIECLE SOCIAL THEORY

Rorty says that when foundationalists malee their arguments they are playing the language game of 'philosophy-as-epistemology.' But surely he is himself playing the same game from the other side of the neto Rorty characterizes Eoundationalism as the demand for 'sorne transcendental standpoint outside our present set of representations from which we can inspect the relations between those representations and their objects' (p. 293)' He believes that to deny the transparency of reality is to deny the interest and importance of universalistic ambition. Because he is caught within the epistemological dilemma, he cannot differentiate the levels and complexity of present reaSOn in an appropriate way. Acknowledging representational subjectivity does not mean abandoning the possibility oE differentiating our representa­rions from objects in the outside world. The possibility for so comparing 'objective' and 'subjective' is produced by the development of human culture itself, which can be seen as progress because it has allowed an increasingly decentered construction of nature and sociallife. Reason can be exercised in a present way.

Because Rorty cannot conceptualize thIs fine-grained alternative to positivist credulity, he can only recommend that we return to the concrete. Rather than evaluating lmowledge, he recornmends, we should explore its social origins. Rather than eriticizing society in light of universalist norms, we should criticize universahst norms in light of their social base. Because 'justification is a matter of social practice' (p. I86), we must explain 'rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter by the former' (p. I47)' Rorty's recommendation that philosophy be abandoned lor intellectual and cultural history - 'the division 01 labor between the historian and philosopher no longer made sense' (p. 272) - is only the logical, Wittgensteinian conclusion. Beeause 'the way people talle can "create objects,'" it follows that 'when we want to know how we know about such objects as these, we do and should tUfn not to the epistemologist but to the intellectual historian' (I986: 42).

The histonan can make the shjft from the oId scheme to the new intelligible, and make one see why one would have been led from the one to the other if one had been an intellectual of that day. There is nothing the philosopher can add to what the historian has already done to show that trus intelligible and plausible course is a 'cationa!' ane.

It is an either/or choice, ironically dictated by Rorty's location within the epistemological straitjacket from which he is trying to escape. This logic is particularly cIear in his attack on anything other than a

GENERAL THEORY IN TI-IE POSTPOSlTIVIST MODE I09

historical approach tE) science. If a nonhistorical, objectivistic reference for scientific concepts is impossible, then the dfort to evalllate the truth of this concept must be abandoned. 'We have the following dilemma: either the theory of reference is caBed upon to underwrite the success of contemporary SClence, or else it is simply a decision about how to write the history of science (rather than the provision of a "philo­sophical foundation" Eor such historiography)' (pp. 287-8). 'Once we understand (as historians of knowledge do) when and why various be1iefs have been adopted or discarded,' Rorty (p. 178) insists, there is simply nothing 'called "the re1ation of knowledge to reality" left over to be understood.'

Once the problem of the relation of thought to reality i5 abandoned (d. Rorty 1982b: 15), there is nothrng much left for philosophers in the traditional sense, or foc theorists in general, to do. Having given up on the traditlonal conception of truth-telling.l Rorty suggests, the philosopher should become an 'informed dilettante,' the 'poly­pragmatic' who can spread a littIe understandmg by providing what are destined to be personal transl~tions between discourscs whose re1ative truth can never be compared (p. 317). In this way, philosophy can become an 'edifying' profession, even a 'poetie' one (p. 360}, which follows from the belief that 'our culture should become one in which die demand for constraint and confrontation is no longer Ielt' (p. 315). Compromise is possible because no principled positions are at stake - 'edifying philosophers have to decry the very notion of having a view, while avoiding having a view about having views' (p. 37I). Once the trappings of rationality are avoided - things like 'inquiry' and notions liIce an 'exchange of views' - a return to intimacy, love, and real community will resulto 'One way to see edify­ing philosophy as the love of wisdom is to see it as the attempt to prevent conversation from degenerating if,Lto inq uiry, into an exehange oI Vlews. Edifying philosophers can never end philosophy, but they he1p prevent it from attaining the secure path of a science.'14

This aestheticized and antitheocetical vision, which believes itself incapable of distinguishing between telling stories and telling the truth, provides an analytic-philosophical rationale for the poststructuralist theory 1 described aboye (see Rorty 1985b). This conneetion surfaces most clearly in the postrnodernism of Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard. Lyotard contends that the age oE -the great 'metanarratives' is past; the beliefs that such a bstractions as science, education, democracYl and revoJu­tion would provide emancipation are rnyths that are no longer believed. Whereas modernism is deflned as the search after such abstract will­o'-the-wisps, postmodernism marks a return to the concrete. In place

IIO FIN DE SIECLE SOCIAL THEORY

oE abstracting and transcendence, there is 'heterogeneity' and 'local determinism' (Lyotard I984: xxiv). Rather than metanarratlves which through abstraction promote the mythical ideal of rational self~ reflection, there remain only local narratives, from within whlch recourse to an extra-discursive principIe is impossible.

Lyotard, too, is caught by the epistemological dilemma. Arguing from Hege1's relativizing of rational scientific thought in the Phenomenology, he moves from the simple existence oE context to the impossibility of knowing as such.

The speculatlve apparatus maintains an ambiguous relation to knowledge. It shows that knowledge is only worthy oí that name up to the extent that it reduplicates itself ('bfts itselí up,' hebt sich auf; is sublated) by citing its own statements in a second-Ievel discourse . ; . that functions to legitima te them. This is as much as to say that ... denotative discourse beanng on a certain reinent (a living organism, a chemical property, a physical phenomenon, etc.) does not reaHy lcnow what it thinlcs it Icnows. Posltlve science is not a form of knowledge.

(ibid.: 38)

Lyotard draws a sharp distinction between science - defined in its positivist mode as the knowledge that 'does not really know what it thinks it knows' - and narrative, or centered lcnowledge. The positivist scientist dismisses narratives because, confidently assessing validity, he 'concludes that they are never subject to argumentation or prooE' (ibid.: 27). With the end oE metanarratives, this demahd for abstract legitimation has ceased. 'Because narrative knowledge does not give priority to the question of its own legitimation, [it] certifies itself in the pragmatics oE its own transmission without having recourse to argumentation and proof.' What is ldt for the postmodern theorist to do? 'AH we can do,' Lyotard concludes, 'is gaze in wonderment at the diversity of discoursive species' (ibid.: 26). At this juncture, Huyssen's lament about 'the list of "no longer possibles'" (I986: 288) seems very much to the point.

The Postpositivist Case for Theory

When Rorty puts hermeneutics forward as the-alternative to theory and foundationalism, he emphasizes that he is not suggesting it as a 'successor subject' to 611 the vacancy left by íound:itionalist philo­sophy. Indeed, 'hermeneutics is an expression oí hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology [e.g. foundationalism] will

GENERAL THEORY IN THE POSTPOSITIVIST MODE LIT

not be fil1ed' (I979: 3IS). According to Rorty, in other words, hermeneutics is not a more sensitlve or interpretIve approach to ufl1versalism or rational understandingj it is the very opposite, the type case of an immersion in the sensuous concrete. With hermeneutics, Rorty believes, 'the demand foc constraint and confrontation is no langer Eelt.' This understanding oE hermeneutics, however, lilce Rorty's understanding of science, is distorted by the epistemological dilemma that confines his thought. We have seen how this condition malees it impossible to defend objectivity in even a conditional way, to defend the search foe universal grounds and the posslbility that sorne approxi­mation of them can be achieved. It is the ambition oE this final sect10n to suggest, this time in a positive rather than in a critical form, how such a search can proceed and how this possibility of proximate universality can be understood.

1 will introduce this discussion by examining a recent development within hermeneutical social theory itself (d. Ingram I9 8 5). The possi­bility that hermeneutical understanding may not, after" aH, be the anmhesis oí reason has recently been recognized by even sorne oI the most severe critics of 'mainstream' social science. Shifts can be traced, for example, in the critical and hermeneutic philosophy of Richar~ Bernstein, which exemplify this recognition in the most vivid way. The central ambition of Bernstein's earJier worlc, which culminated in The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, pubJished in I978, was to question the very possibility of a social science (see AJexander I98I). Attaclcing confidence in explanatory theorizing as proEoundly misplaced, Bernstein issued a call Eor practical theory and contextual interpretation. In Beyond Objectivism and Re/ativism (I983l., however, Bernstein's ambition is now very diHerent. He wants to demonstrate that hermeneutics is an:tithetical neither to social science nor to the search for universals.

In his earlier worlc, Bernstein presents kuhn's incornmensurability thesis in a sympathetic way, urging his readers to agree that 'the differ­ences among competing paradigms are as radical as Kuhn suggests' and that 'there is no set of standards for proving the superiority of one paradigm over another' (I978: 87). He goes bn to praise the nove1ty oE Kuhn's description oE paradigm change as a conversion experience depending upon techniques of persuasion, an antirationalist position" that surely confused the psychology oE science with the normative structure within which scientific interaction proceeds. In his lat.er work, however, Bernstein treats Kuhn's notion oE incornmensurabihty in a dramatically different way. He insists not only that the concept must be carefully distinguished hom 'incompatibility' and 'incomparability,'

II2 FIN DE SIECLE SOCIAL THEORY

but that the claim that Kuhn himself conflates these terms 'i8 not only mistaken brit perverse' (I983: 82). Not only does Kuhn make these distinctions, buthe does so, Bernstein wouldnow have us be1ieve, in order to demonstrate the manner in which 'rationaI debate and argumenta­tion between proponents of rival paradigms' 1S possible (ibid.: 85).

Whatever its merits as interpretation, these revisions demonstrate the new movement to defend rationality that characterizes Bernstein's recent work. 15 His intention is to escape the epistemological dilemma.

whenever he eontrasts rationality and contextualism, he quali­nes his characterÍzation 01 the former in a manner that points to a new, third termo While apparently paraphr~sjng Kuhn and Feyerabend on the decision-makjng process by which one scientific statement is judged to be more 'Iogical and rational' than another, Bernstein writes that it is not 'free-floating standards oE rationality detached (rom actual htstorical practices to which we can appeaP (ibid.: 67, italics added). In such judgments, he continues~ 'we are not appealing to permanent, atemporal standards of rationality,' to 'a permanent set of ahistorical standards of rationalíty' (ibid., ¡tafies added). Mer" making these careful qualifications, Bernstein impatiently rejects what he ca lIs a 'false dichotomy' 'either perrnanent standards of rationality (objectivism) or arbitrary acceptance of one set of standards or practiees over against its rival (relativism)' (ibid.: 68).

Bern8tein now introduces the rnissing third term - 'reasons embedded in ... social practices.: Rather than free-floating, reason is a practice imbedded in scie"nce; when scientists argue about truth, they refer not to sorne supra-social reality but to this imbedded reason to 'the best possible scientin.c reasons that can be given.' To suggest that it is institutionalized, however, does not suggest that science i8 irrationaL To the contrary, 'a scÍentist is always ander the obligation to give a ratlonal account of what is right and wrong in the theory that 18 being displaced and to cxplain how his or her theory can account for what i8 "true" in the precedmg theory.' By this point, it ls cIear that Bernstein's target is not positivism but skepticism. Indeed, he ends up by defending the possibility of social science theory against hermeneutics it8elf. 'However much one reeognizes the importance of the hermeneutical dímension of the social sciences,' he warns, tone must also forthrightly confront those aspects of these disciplines that" seek to develop th.eoretical and causal explanations oI social phenomena' (ibid.: I60). Bernstein even chides Gadamer, the heroic figure of his book, for what he talees to be the latter's hermeneutic rejection of scientific method, insisting that 'method is more like hermeneutic understanding than Gadamer frequently acknowledgcs' (ibíd.: I69).

GENERAL THEORY IN THE POSTPOSITIVIST MODE "Ir 3

The. third term that Bernstein inserts mto the debate overo science is the notlOn of present reason1 the alternative to the eplstemological dilernma WhICh 1 have explored in a of ways aboye. My argu­ment has been that, even while.rationality is acknowledged to be an agentie accomphshment) objeetivity can also be seen as an eminently worthy goaL To aehieve grounded rationality, social actors promote a decentered understanding of the social and natural world, establísh norms and frameworks that sanction personalization and that reward' not only the ability to see the world as 'out there' but the wi1lingness to 'subordinate' one's personal desires to that world's exploration~

It is time now to establish sorne general critecia for just how such a hermeneutically rooted version of universality can be established.

Whilc present rCason establishes the framework for understanding this world, it does not create this world ltself. As Frederick Will (I985: I3I) puts it in his modified brief for realism, action is 'affected by, controlled by, or more exactly, constituted in part by deterrnmams external to, mdependent oi, the Índividuals engaged in them.' For this reason, correspondence between framework and reality must ultimately be conceived oi aS the enterion governing every validity claim. Obviously, I am not proposing hefe a reahst program, Since the world, In the brute pre-Kantian sense, cannot be seen as such, cotrespondence can be nothing other than the relationship between 'reason-created' conceptual structures and reasonable 'obser­varional statements' about the world. Whether this differentiation can be conndentIy made i8, the first crÍterÍon of whether universality, and sorne conditional conception oE objeetivity, can be achieved.

Has this crÍterion been met in contemporary natural and social science? The answer must certainly be yeso It has been one of the dearest achievements of Western and more recently modern intellectuallife to create a world of observational statements which most practitioners at any given point in the development oi their disciplines recognize as having an impersonal status. Scheffler (I976: 39) expresses this perspective in the foHowing: 'We simply have a false dichotomy in the notion that observation mma be cither apure confrontation with an undifferentiated given, OI else so conceptually contaminated that it must render circular any observational test of a hypothesis.' The fact that Rorty (I979: 276n.) himself approvingly quotes this very passage" to declare his own departure froro idea1ism indicates the extent oí con­sensus on rhis criteríon. In social science, oI eourse, there is a smaller body of agreed-upon observational statements than in natural science. Agreement about observations, however, is different from acknowI­edging that they exist in an impersonal realm which i8 conceived as

I { ( f ( <. {

FIN DE SIECLE SOCIAL THEORY

separa te from theoretical claims. This latter conception, even in social science, commands near unanimous consent. It lS ínscribed in, and sustamed by, practical prohibitions agamst contaminating empírica! data and by support for the experimental method broadly understood; whereby it is agreed that empirical variations can be compared with an experimenter's personal expectations. Observational tests oi precon­ceptions - whether explicitly oc implicitly 'experimentally controlled) - are omnipresent in the practice of virtually every social scientist.

Whether impersonal worlds are aclenowledged to exist- IS the first crÍterion for universality. Whether practitíoners feel themselves bound to these frameworks points to the second. Insofar as sClentists do not agree about the nature of their worlds either about observations or about the differentiated rules that interpret, document~ model, and explain thero - they wiU be unable to consider one another~s daims as reasonable. Not only wiU they appear, instead, as paeticularistic and personal arguments, but they will in part be so. The more individuals share conceptions of their impersonal worlds~ by contrast, the more indivIdual practice can be subject to extra-personal control, the more it submits itself to universal crÍteria of evaluation. The more shared ground, the more neutral this ground not only seems but is in fact. The ground ls not neutral in the sense oI absent reason, but in the sense of a historical practice rhat neither party feels it can either own or control.16

The possibility of reaching consensus, then~ is-the second criterion of sClentific objectivity. It was Merton's insight into the intrins1c connection between impersonality and consensus (1973 [1942]) that led him to identify universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism in bis classic definition of the scientific ethos haH a century ago. If Merton ignored the process by which interpretation allows the construction of reality, he clearly understood that the socially generated framework fOI this construction has to assume an impersonal form if the consensus and objectivity that are such di.stinctive characterisrics of modern science are to be achieved. 17 In Théoretical Logic in Sociology 1 paid much more careful attenrion than Merton had to the interpretive process of reality construction. The criteria fo! evaluatmg these constructíons, however, remained for me a central concern. With the notiOlis of consensus and universality, 1 am telescoping the criteria for 'postpositivist objectivity' 1 offered in that earlier work (Alexander I982a: 113-26).

In what remains of this discussion, 1 want to suggest that social science succeeds in developing the conditions for consensus, and therefore meets this second criterion oI objectivity, more oIten than

" , , -/ jl

GENERAL THEORY IN THE 1'0STPOSITlVIST MODE II5

íts relativíst. critics realize. Ultimately, 1 wiU argue that ir does so because of the existence of 'theoríes/ multilayered impersonal worlds that create the conditrons of agreement. Wlthin theoríes, social scien­tists share broad traditions and research programs; moreover, in the cantext of contemporary social science, even competing theories crosscut one another in lmportant ways. 1 will begin, however, by pursuing the notion that chese impersonal worlds are not theories but lifeworlds. 1 will show that, contraey to the radIcal relativísm implied by the epistemological dilemma, hermeneutical philosophy is premised on the notion that these lifeworlds are not only impersonal but that they typically assume a universal and consensual formo

Since Dilthey defined the Geisteswissenschaften, hermeneutics has taleen as given the existence oI an impersonal natural world. For Dilthey natural science did not seem to involve the exercise of reason. By contrast, he was extremely sensítive to the subjectivity oE the social world and to the ímpact of this subJectivity on the methods of the human studies. 'Though experience presents liS w.ith the reality of lile in its many ramificatrons,' he writes (I976 [1910]: 186), 'we anly seem to know one particular thing, name1y our own life.' Since Dilthey posits a 'direct reJationship between life and the human studies,' the, subjective personalism he places at the center of rife makes relativism a critica! Íssue fOI the human sciences. As he puts it, there is 'a confliet between the tendencies of life and the goal of science' (ibid.: I83).

Because hlstorians, economists~ teachers of law and students of rehgion are involved in life they want to influence it. They subject bistorical personages, rnass movements and tl'ends to their judgment~ which is conditioned by their individuality, the nation to which they belong and the age in whlch they live. Even when they thinl< they are being objective they are determined by I:heir horizon, for every analysis of the concepts of a former generation reveals constituents in them wruch derive fn;¡m the presuppositions of that generatlon.

(ibid.)

It is not well understood that, while Dilthey begins with a powerful insight inta the ineVItable personalization of data and methods in the human studies, he does flot thinle that methodological depersonaliza­don or shared and binding universal understandings are imp·ossible .. He immediately follows the statement quoted aboye, for example, by insisting: 'Yet every science implies a daim to validity,' and he wishes to apply these goaIs to the relativistíc human. sCiences themselves: (If there are to be strictly scientific human stutlies they must aim more consciously and critically at validity' (ibid.). At least in the latter part

FIN DE SrECLE SOCIAL THEORY

of his career, took as his task to demonstrate how the very personalization of human lIfe made depersonalization and binding norms one of its central features.

Dilthey believed that it was precisely the ineluctable centra lit y oI experience that made the supersession of particuJarism a continu~us human project. Because experience is personal, mutual understandmg becomes problematic and henee of ultimate importance. Precisely because we are primarily experiencing the world, we are always trying to understand others and not only ourselves. This leads us to strive for common knowledge and to construct categories. Thus, Dilthey can insist in what would otherwise seem an enigma tic passage, that 'und~rstanding a10ne smmounts the limitation of the individual experience.' It does so beeause 'extendmg over several people, mental creations, and communities, it widens the horizon of the individuallife and, in the human studies, opens up the path which leads from the common to the general' (ibid.). Because human understandíngs 'possess an independent existence and development of their own; indIvidual actors are bound by uníversals} by 'judgments of value, rules of conduet) definitions of goals and of what is good' (ibid.: I79). Not only does the universal 'objective mind' but, Dilthey insists, it is accessible to hermeneutic understanding. In their role of social and cultural analysts, individuaIs exerCIse the sarne sure sense of understanding as when they are lay participants. 'Beeause we are at horne everyw.here in this historical and understood world,' Dilthey writes, 'we understand the sense and meaning of it a11' (ibid.: I9 I ). It is the eXÍE!tence of - contextually universalistic under­standings - that allows Dilthey to argue for the possibility that, even within hermeneutics, validity claims can have an objective reference.

What persons have in eommon is the starting-pomt lar all the relations between the panicular and the general in the human studies. A basic experience of what men have 10 common permeates the whole conception ot the mind-construeted world. . This 1S the presupposition for under­standing ... ' The degree of methodological uncertainty achieved by understanding depends on the development of the general truths on which the understandmg of this relationship 1s based. '

(ibid.: r87)

This same confidence that subj~ctivity and contextuality aetually create shared and binding norrns cornmensurability in the science studies phrase - rather than detraet from them is at the heart of Gadamer's existential hermeneuties, which owes much more to Dilthey than Gadamer seems inelined to admito Universal, depersonalized norms

GENERAL THEORY IN l'HE POSTPOSITlVIST MODE

are possible - in life as well as in method - because on the leve! of social life there is openness and cornmunity between individuals, who relate to one another more in the mode oí '1 and thou' than '1 and it.'

In human relations the 1mportant th1ng ÍS, as we have seen, to experience the 'Thou' truly as a 'Thou,' i.e., not to ovedook his claim and to listen to what he has to say to uso To this end, openness is necessary .... Anyone who listens is fundamental1y open. Without this kind of openness to one another there js no genuine human relationship. Belonging together always al50 means being able to listen to one another.

(Gadamer 1975: 32 5)

Because individuaIs are open to each other, they have a chance el mutual understanding. This act of understanding means acknowledg­ing the decenteredness of human reality and aceepting some at least oí its impersonal elaims: 'Openness to the other, then, ineludes the acknowledgement that 1 must accept sorne things that are against myself, even thóugh there is no one eIse who asks this of me.' (¡bid.)

This is where tradition enters in, but for Gadamer it is not the source of the unexamined, henee arbitrary, reference that the contextual reaetíon to positivism suggests. Where these recent contextualists seerñ

, almost e~ger to embrace skeptieal implications - with the implication, for example, that the project of justifying democracy is impossible - for Gadamer this was hardly the case. Half a century after Dilthey and one German Reich Gadamer is far more sensitive than the founder· oI hermeneutie phdosophy to the possible arbitrarÍness of binding norms. Dilthey demonstrates that there is commensur­ability and assumes that this provides the context for sustaining critieal evaluation. Gadamer demonstrates m detaiJ how it is that shared bonds become standards for the exercise oE critical reason. He argues that eornmon norms are accepted as binding -l. henee beco me 'traditional' - not simply because actors wish to be understood but because they recognize their validity daims. Aetors are open to tradition in the same way that they are open to other persons, and with often the same results: '1 must allow the validity of the claim made by tradition, not in the sense of simply adcnowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me' (Gadamer I975:. 324). lfl decide it has something to say, it is because 1 recognize that traditions can 'be a source of truth/ that there are 'justified prejudices productive of knowledge' (ibid.: 247).

The oE persons is based ultimately, not on the subjection and abdicatíon oi reason, but on recognitíon and knowledge - knowledge,

II8 FIN DE SIECLE SOCIAL THEORY

namely, that the oeher is superior tú oneself m Judgment and insight and that for this reason his judgment takes precedence .... Authority cannot actualIy be bestowed, but ... must be acquired, if someone is to lay dalm to it. Ít rests on recognition and henee on an act of reason itseH.

(ibld.: 248)

In these passages, the language of hermcneutics echoes with the sounds of the Enlightenment. Authority is a 'daim' that makes implicit 'validity demands.' Authority lS recognized if these claims - in 'an act of freedom and reason' - can 'be seen, in principIe, to be true' (ibid.: 248-9). Even the preservation oE tradition is 'act oí reason, though an inconspicuous one'. Indeed, 'preservation is as much a freely-chosen aetion as revolution and renewal' (ibid.: 250).

There eould be no more relevant argument against rhe epistemo­logical dilernma than this. Gadarner's hermeneutics has been talcen - not just by Rorty but by most of the contextualists 1 have discussed - as the of the concrete and against the abstraet and universal. Yet Gadamer himself argues that this cannot be the case. 'It seems to me,' he writes, 'that there is no such unconditional antithesis between tradition and reason' (ibid.). The rcason that is exercised vis-a-vís tradition in everyday lite is exercised by the inter­preter of society as well. Universalism and objectívity are intrinsic to the exercise Di the modern human sClenceSi they mark its coming of age. 'At rhe beginning,of aH historical hermeneutics,' Gadamer insists, 'the abstraet antithesis between tradition and historical research, between history and knowledge, must be discarded' (ibid.: 25 ¡). Interpretive understandíng isnot simply personal and empathic; it necessarily involves an impersonal reference that allows a critical and universalistic response.

This placing of ourseIves ís uot the empathy of one individual for another, nor 15 it the applícation to another person of our own critena, but it always involves the attainment oí a higher universality that overcomes, ñot only our own particularity, but a1so that of rhe other ... We have continually to test all our prejudices.

In light of this forcefully expressed seIf-understanding of hermeneu­tícs, it seems clear that the disrance Habermas has traveled with his theory of communieative action is not so great as he (1977) and others have represented. The notíon oi immanent validity c1aims is already there in Dilthey; it beeame explicit in the notion of understanding and interpretive method developed by Gadamer.

GENERAL THEORY IN THE POSTPOSITIVIST MODE

What Habermas has done to hermeneutie philosophy is important nonetheless. He that ir has overemphasized the IikeJihood of fully mutual consensual understi:mding of rhe spontaneous exercise of rational controL Actors are imbedded in socIal arrange­ments that systematrcally distort cornrnunÍcation in ways of whieh they eannot be fuHy aware. On these grounds, Habermas argues that rational understandIng must also be exercised, and often 15, in a more self-conscÍous and less spontaneous way than through the exercise oí understanding alone. This leads Habermas from hermeneutics as such - even when it is ríghtly understood - to a historieaHy grounded advocacy of social science theory. In pursuit of theory, Habermas rephrases Gadamer's approach to traditional rationa1íty in a manner that emphasizes its impersonahty. Because 'reflexivity and objectivity are fundamental traits of Ianguage,' he writes, hermeneutics lS aetually suggesting that 'pre-understanding can be thematized! Through self­refleetion, 'interpretive schemes ... are formulated in everyday language ... whieh both enable and pre-judge the making oi experiences.' Self­refleerion, thematization, and interpretive schematization are interpretive praetices that wiU at sorne point be applied to themselves: 'The rational reconstructíon of a system oi linguistic rules ... is undertaken wIth the aim of explaining linguistic competence' 177-9).

Rationally reconstructed Imguistic rules are one form of general knowledge they are theories of In making this transition from the objeetivity of commonsense communication to thematization of the rules for commulllcative understanding, we have moved from hermeneutics to social SClence. We can see that this has not been a Ieap but a logical step. The movement toward uníversalism is ,inherent in con textual interpretation itse1f, for actors rnake efforts to understand their own understanding in. increasingly general ways. The univer­salistic result of each interpretlve effort might be conceived of as a deposit of rationality. rE these deposits are 'taleen up by future efforts, they may become raüonal traditions; eventually, upon further· recon­struction, they may become abstraet theories.

Theories are couched at various levels of generality. For this reason, 'theories' present themselves in a variety of forms (Alexander I9 82a), as arguments about prcsuppositional logic, as schematic interactive models, ideologicaJ prescriptions, methodological predictions, causal hypotheses. These theories do not reflect absent reason; they do not exist 'out there' and ¡m pose themselves on credulous human beings. They do reHect thoughtful efforts, sometimes generations and centurjes long, to understand and deve10p approximations oE the society that surrounds human life. It is not only moral or aesthetic edification

I2.0 FIN DE SlECLE SOCIAL THEORY

that prompts this effort but the desire for objective understanding itself.

Indeed, it ís a simple thing to demonstrate that moral and aesthetic arguments - so often taken by contextualists as the very paradigms of anti-universalist, grounded discourse - have themselves aimed at developing general theories and have been guided by earher theoriz­ing in turno One could iUustrate this with even the most vulgar and popular of the arts. When French New Wave film critics developed theír director-centered evaluative standards in the postwar era, they advanced what they called the 'auteur theory' and relied on André Bazin's (I967) ontologicaJ theories about cinema in turno In the film criticism that followed, auteur theory was treated as a generalization and guided the practice and interpretation oí film-making for decades (see, e.g., Sarris I968), despite the efforts oI critics like Pauline Kae1 to refute it by offering falsifying data. In more sophisticated aesthetic domains, the generalizing references and the objective force oi what is taken to be 'trne argument' are much more explicito When William Empson (I93S) helped to launch 'New Criticism' in Seven Types of Ambiguity, he did not reIy simply on textual intuition but on Freud's theories about ambívalence, and the claims he made for che universal validity of his new theory appeared to be sustained for several decadcs thereafter. When Harold Bloom (1973) made his influential nposte in The Anxiety of Influence, he rested his case upon other Freudian tenets and a more historical theory of knowledge produc­tion, but he aimed atO producing a conceptual scheme that was just as generalizing and ambitious.

For moral argument, of course, it ig that much easier to demonstrate the significance oE general theory. Does John Rawls {I97I} forsake propositions, modeIs, and abstract conceptions simply because his concern in A Theory of Justice is practical and prescriptive? It eouId be argued, of course, that the theorctical abstraetion of RawIs's argument is produced by his mistaken sense of the transcendental - in current moral philosophical language, 'externalist' - nature of his project. Yet while he has subsequently acknowledged (McMurrin I987) the historically specific moral underpinnings of his project, his central propositions look much the same. Michael Walzer (I983) has offered the most foreeful hermeneutieal alternative to Rawls. Despite the groundedness oEWalzer's moral reasoning, however, Spheres ofJustice presents an attempt to build a systematic, empirically documented, and highly general moral theory (d. Warnke).

Neither aestheüc nor 'practica!' theory can or actually wishes to avoid strenuous references to validity claims; nor can they or wish they

. GENE.RAL THEORY IN THE POSTPOSITIVIST MODE L2I

to avoid the effort to substantiate these claims by building arguments of the most generalized sort. In giving such reasons and making such arguments) they reflect thel! deep entrenchment within a depersonalized and decentered world. Thís universalistic mode is abandoned, mdeed, only when there is a change in genre. Here we have the famous <imitative fallacy; that form should resemble substance. When the analysis of morality becomes an exercise in moral jeremiad, or when the argument foe erotic and aesthetic freedom becomes an exemplification oE poetic pIayfulness, moral or aesthetic argument may be edifying or satisfying but it certainly will not ha ve the same daim to be tru'e. 18

While the centra lit y of general theorizing can be demonstrated even in such paradigmatically interpretive works, such theoretical reference does not create a comforting sense oi objectivity. 'Theories' may create, or erystallize, !:he impersonal worlds that are the necessary conditions fo! agreement, but within the social and humanistic sciences, at least, fully satisfying agreement rarely oecurs. The dIsciplines oI the human sciences are organized theoretically around broad and competing traditions and empirically around competing research programs (Alexander and Colomy 1995 b). These traditions and programs originate in the charismatic reason of figures who at sorne later point have been accorded dassicaI status (Alexander I989b). In periods of fission; the existence of such deavages otten leads to skepticism and discour­agement. This, indeed, has been one of the principal reasons for the deepening movement toward contextualism of the present day.

Two responses can be made. The first follows directly from the argument thus faro These tradltions and programs are not just sources of disagreement but powerful means of intertwining impersonal theoretical controls with disciplinary practice. While there is dissensus between programs and traditions, there is relative agreement within them. 'It is for this reason that, within the parameters oE a school, practitioners can sometimes reach remarkable levels of mutual theoretical understanding and conceptual, even empirical, preclsion. The objec­tivity 01 such practices is conditional but not ephemeral. Dominant and mature researeh programs often create entirely new realms oi observational statements; they a180 set standards of explanatory scope and internal coherence that competing programs must meet. In the competition between such programs and traditions is found whatever ' progress the human sciences can provide (d. Alexander and Colomy 1995a ).

The second response to the prospect of continual disagreement is to suggest that these groups are neither as internally coherent nor as externally hermetic as the model of theoreticaJ cleavage suggests.

I22 FIN DE SrECLE SOCIAL THEORY

Kuhn exaggerated the incommensurabIllty of paradigms beca use he viewed scienrific orientations as expressive totalities, emphasizing the consistency between the different components of sCÍence. Yet the components of sCÍence - the different kinds and levels of theory -are relatively autonomous (Alexander 1982a); even within a single theorÍst's own work, let alone a particular school, commitmenrs at different levels oE rhe scientific continuum do not tightly cohere. While this variability reduces the possibílíty of objective controls over practices within a school, it Íncreases the likelihood that there will be universal and shared references between schools.

In the history of natural scientific thought (Alexander I982a: 2SffL scientists of similar metapnysical orientatÍons have often diverged radically over issues on the more empirically oriented side of the scientific continuum, such as proper rnodels or correct proposítions. On the other hand, scientists have agreed about empirical observa­tlOns while disagreeing fundamentalfy about general presuppositional issues. If such crosscutring commitments, or 'weak ties,' OCCUf even within the relatively controlled settings of the physical sciences, they are that rnuch more frequent in the sociaL In both the natural and social sciences, moreover, powerful cross-cleavage agreements emanate from the methodologlcallevel, where common commitments to rationalist notions of evidence and logic can usually be found. These and other historicaHy grounded yet deeply -institutÍonalized agreements which range from intellectual ambitions to tapie selec­tion procedures - form the shared discíplinary matrices (Toulmin I972) within which theorencal traditions and research programs must find their place. In hls slashmg attack on Louis Althusser's contention that empirical historical research can be reduced ta mere ideoJogical particularities, R.P. Thompson demonstrates the controllíng power of these broader disciplinary universals. 'Ris comments/ Thompson writes about Althusser, 'display throughout no acquaintance with, nor understanding of, historical procedures; that is, procedures which make a "history" a dzscipline and not a babble of alternatmg ideo-10gicaI assertions: procedures which pro vide foc their own relevant discourse [abour] proof' (I978: 205-6, original italics)Y'

These final considerations bring us back, fittingly, to the question of 'foundatÍons.' To engage jn foundationalism is to put forward general theoretical arguments, to create criteria for truthfulness that are so universally compeIling that they produce agreement about validity daims between practltioners in a field. Rorty, we have seen} rejects foundational argument on the grounds because theory cannot mirror reality in an epistemological sense, there lS no possibility of

"í

GENERAL THEÓRY IN THE POSTPOSITIVIST MODE

perrnanently uncontested truth. 'But surely this rnisses the point. It is precisely the perspectiva! qua lit y of social science that makes its own versíon of foundationalism, its more oc less continuous strain of

theorizing, so necessary and often so compelling. It Ís natural science that does not exhibit foundationalism, tor the very reason that its access to external truth has become increasingly secure. Com­mensurability and realism delegitimate foundationalism, not inerease its plauslbility. In natural science, attentíon can plausibly be focused on the 'empirical side of the continuum. In social by contrast, practitioners cannot so easily accept 'the evidence oí their senses.'

Discourse becomes as important a disciplinary activity as expla­natíon. Discourse is and foundational. It aims at thematizing the standards of validity that are irnmanent in the very Eractice of social sCÍence. Responding to the lade oE disciplinary confidence in empírical mirroring, theoretical discoufse aims to gain provisional acceptance on the basis of universal argumento It is, therefore, the very impossibility of establishing permanent foundations that makes foundationalism in the social sciences so critica1. This is the postposi­tivist case for general theory. It is also the case for present reason.

Notes

I. For a dev:elop~ental perspective on the concept of decentering, see Piaget (I972). For the hlstoncal frarnmg DI socÍctal generalization and depersonalizatlon and ,heir reJation to human freedom) see the evolutionary theory ofParsons (I966, I973) <lnd Bellah {I970}. whkh canies through on certain key themes in Weber and Durkheim and i8 pllshed further and Eormalized by Habermas (e.g. I984).

2. For Weber's Ilnderstandmg oE civihzatíon and dllalism, 8ee particlllarly Parsons's (I.963) classic Introductíon to Weber's Sociology of Religion. For clvilizatlon as an.evolving, increasingJy abstraet and ascetic construct) 8ce Elias (1.975 [I939]). For Abonglnal consciousness as a fused and interpenctrated 'dreaming,' see Bellah (1970). For the mterpenetration of levels in primitive thought, see Lévi-Strauss (1967).

. 3, ~ stress :orgamzed social action' because the suhjectiveJ phenomenological dllTICnSiOn remaInS central to the constructIOn 01 action and arder in modero societies jU8t as, in earlier and more simple societies, actors had to sllstain a stIOng sense oE th~ obje~tivity of .the ,,:,orld outsi~e ~h~m .. Indeed, to demonstrate this necessary inter­relatlOn Ol obJectlVlty llnd subJectlVlty 18 the very point of phenomenological [heory. Such a dernonstration IS also ane oE the main ambitíons of Wittgenstein, at once the rnost inHuentiaJ relativlst in rnodern thought and ane oE the most forcefu I critics DE the norion of priva te langllage (e.g. Wittgenstein I968: para. 272). Neither tor Husserl nor for Wittgenstein is there the philosophical posstbdity oE seeing the world out there as . it, real,ly is. To re~ognize this possibility social thcory and philosophy must develop a hlstoncal conce~tLOn of the human capacity for perception, one which emphasizes its cultural and SOCial orgamzation. ' ,

4. This i8 ane aE the principal themes oE Weber's comparative religion. S. Thrs theme is deve1aped in Alexander (1989a).

. 6. Far this hypothesis and sorne fascinating hlstoncal documentatloo, see Georg Mlsch (I973 [I90 7])·

FIN DE SIÉCLE SOCIAL THEORY

7. Far thIs argument, see Hegel's Phenomenology af Mind and Marx's Early PhiJosophical Manuscripts. For a broad and important discussion of Romantic Idealism as a countermovement, 8ee Charles Taylor (r975).

B. 1 use Rorty's (1979) phrase ironieally, to emphaslze tha[ ít is the practitioners, not the phílosophers of science, who are compelled to understand objeetivity in a mirroúng, subject-Iess stanee.

9. For thís position, see particutarly Parsons (I954) and Parsons and ShIls (r9SI). In his earlier work, Parsons (1937) developed the concept Di analytie realism, which recognized the agentic contnbutlon of the scientist but mSlsted (in a Kantian fashion) that the world could be mmored nonetheless. Rather then transcendrng the dichotomy, however, this concept finesses it. A more Hegelian, tess Kantian conceptíon is nceded.

10. Mter all, if the pressure oi a particular historical conjunctuce leads a popular audience to attach a new connotatlVely social 'signined' to wnat had initiany been merely a denotated referent, why should Barthes's envÍronment not affect him in th.e same way? Can he real1y distance himseli from the history that myrhologlzes other sem~­otic patterns in an obJective way? Is he not merely reading in his own antibourgeOIs senriment? Barthes's implicit response (:r 959: 156-9) i ... that he is the 'scientific' studcnt of myth. It 15 this unthought-out, impliclt scientism of early semíotics rhat detonated later poststructural considerations.

IL It was not visible at rhat tIme, however, because of the continmng mfluence oi critical theory, which inSlSted on the reality, iI not the deslrabílity, of rhe externa l. wodd.

I2. For a powerful critique of the polítical and epistemological implicat10ns of Foucault's work, which takes it as the archetype oE an antihumanism, .'lee Taylor (1<;)86).

r3. Unless otherwisc indIcated, all following page references are to Rorty (1979). 14. It ís probably not faír, then, for ComeH West {1985: 267} to cal! Rorty's philo­

sophy 'a form oi ethnocentric posthumanism.' Not falr, at least, in the sense that ~or~y's aim is to create the basls for universal COmmulllty and lave. However, Rorty's rejectlOn oí universalisrn and embrace of the concrete make it impossibte for hlm to respond in principIe to West's charge that 'fer Rorty .. we are ~orth AtI~ntíc ethnocentrists 10

solidarity with a civilization (or set oí contemporary tnbal pr3ctaces) - and posslbly a dccayrng and declining one'- which has no philosophical defense' (¡bid.) ..

I5. Nor is Bernstein atone in thIS shifting emphasls. As the contextuahst movement has gained acceptance, the fuI! ramincations Di its relatívism are beginmng to lead to reconsiderations in different quarters oi the social sClences. Cf. the lmportant critique of deconstruct!ve hlstory in Gossman (1989). .

:1.6. Thls connection betwecn the possibility for conditional obJectivity ami the ab,lity far those engaged in a knowledge practice to sustain agreement about the frameworks for knowing is emphaslzed by Goldstein (I976), in a work on historiography that is highly pertinent to the present argumento

17. In the drive to personalize anrl re!ativize science, this dimensio~ oI Merton's c~n­[ribution has been almost completely neglected, as, of course, has vIftually the ennre Íssuc oI scientific universalrsm as such. It i3 an illcredible paradox that in an age when scientlfic technology has put the entire human world at Íatal nsk the phi!osophy, hls­tory, and socÍology 01 science have focused increasingly 00 relativistic idiography. Surely sorne attentlon must be paid to the opposlte question: How has impersonal knowledge succeeded in 50 sl1ccessfutly exploring the objective worId that it has learned tú mimic It through humanly constructed machines? Cf. Boudon (forthcoming: XI): 'In spitc of the "po5t-modermst" reflection o~ science, science appears as ever. growing, and its quick progress is eVldence. So the dommant sryle oI the r~flectlon on. sClex:c~ see.ms .to have nmhing to do with science.' Also rdcvant is Boudon s observatlOn (Ihld., Italles added) that the 'ultra-empiricism' of contemporary science srudies whjch are almost exclusively erhnographic make the objective dimension 01 natural sciemific practlce difficuLr to understand: 'Is real what can be observed hic et nunc? ... The fact that most scientists believe (and are enntled to believe) that discussions can in principIe be conduded on an objective hasis cannot so easily be obserued.'

GENERAL THEORY IN TIlE POSTPOSITIVIST MODE ns

r8. Com~are, in thls lartee regard, Marcuse's Eros and Civilization {19H} with Brown's Love's Body (I966). . .

19. In his essay on historíography, Gossman (1989: 49-50, 57) slmJlarly emp~aSlz~s the critica I role of tite emergence of the disciplinary, professlonaL orgamzatlOn In

promoting the rational dimension oi histoIÍcal debate.

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