Berkeley Book List: Social Theory
False Necessity, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Verso, 2002 (rev. ed., orig. 1987) The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001 The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills, Oxford University Press, 1959 Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, Carolyn Steedman, Rutgers University Press, 1987 Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics, Luc Boltanski, (tr. Graham Burchell), Cambridge University Press, 1999 (orig. 1993) Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih (tr. Denys Johnson-Davies), Michael Kesend, 1989 (orig. 1969) |
Social theory emerged to explain the tumultuous transformations that made modern life: the expansion and intensification of industrialization, the massive growth of the state and its bureaucracy, rapid rural exodus and concomitant urbanization, the disenchantment of the world and the spread of the democratic ideal, and the rise at once of collective identities and sovereign individualism. The classic works of Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and others take off from the insight — usually attributed to Giambattista Vico — that society is made and imagined, rather than reflecting the divine will or the natural law. Thus, social theory seeks simultaneously to be explanatory and emancipatory. That is, it carries on the longstanding faith that understanding (and explaining) social life will help forge a better future.
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Writing in moments of massive change, modern social theorists could not help but shatter the illusion of order and stability in social life. Yet seduced by the temptation of scientificity, many social scientists search for natural and necessary laws (or constraints) of social life. Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s False Necessity disavows facile claims of naturalness and necessity and offers the insight that society is made and imagined to its logical conclusion. In passionate prose, Unger demonstrates again and again that what theorists and people have regarded as immutable institutions and constraints are in fact ephemeral and plastic. The reproduction of the status quo thereby reflects more the failure of imagination and action rather than the entrenched structures of social life.
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The presumption of change — its ubiquity and inevitability — is also a major theme of pragmatism, the U.S.-born philosophy that arose after the Civil War. Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club is an intellectual history that vividly recreates the lives and thoughts of principal pragmatic thinkers, from the well-known William James to the virtually vanished Chauncy Wright. In spite of its heft, it is one of the few books of intellectual history that I can say that I wish were longer. There’s no better place to begin to make sense of pragmatism, the cultural and intellectual life of the postbellum United States, and the possibility of social theory.
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The fusion of European social theory and U.S. pragmatism found its most forceful articulation in the work of C. Wright Mills, whose The Sociological Imagination is at once an introductory sociology textbook and an advanced theory primer. It tries to recoup the place of imagination in social theory (and social science in general) and the potential relevance of social theory in informing our political practice. Avoiding the pitfalls of grand theorizing (form without substance) and abstracted empiricism (substance without form), Mills urges us to explore the intersection of biography, social structure, and history. For him, social theory is not only about society "out there," but is also a way to make sense of ourselves. The possibility of democracy and good life depends in part on the promise of self-enlightenment.
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Mills’s call for the sociological imagination finds an echo in the feminist injunction that politics is personal. A particularly searching reflection is Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman. She responds to the social theories that she learned from her (male) teachers and reflects on her mother’s life. Steedman’s narrative questions whether our intellectual constructs can adequately make sense of concrete lives, or of the matters of our hearts. If imagination is a critical but repressed faculty in the project of social theory, so too are self-reflections, emotions, and meanings. Though written in plain prose, "Landscape for a Good Woman" somehow soars to the level of lyricism that one might expect from poetry.
But what of social problems far removed from our lives? Here let me recommend Luc Boltanski’s Distant Suffering. We are awash with images and stories of suffering: indeed, they saturate our media. How do we make sense of and react to the vision of starvation or the narrative of social evil? Having convinced ourselves to say "never again" to genocide, have we not remained impassive, bearing ineffectual witness to a series of horrendous mass murders in the last decade? Boltanski trenchantly analyzes political passivity in the age of mass media.
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Finally, a work outside the realm of social theory: Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. I cannot say that this is my favorite novel; perhaps it is not even a great novel. However, it is an illuminating narrative of an intellectual caught between two ways of life, two modes of thought. For myself, self-consciously languishing in the intellectual periphery for much of my early life — far, far away from the world that seemed so significant, so meaningful to me — Salih’s novel resonates in a way similar to that searing account of intellectual exclusion, Thomas Hardy’s "Jude the Obscure." But the novel offers more. As smug self-reckonings of tradition and modernity proliferate — whether by fundamentalists of east, west, north, or south — we should become aware that these conflicts reside within individual souls and minds.
Social theory is a continuation of the classical philosophical question about the meaning of life: how should we live? Social theory that is worth its salt must not only make sense of our social world and personal lives, but also help us to meet the demands of the day. As a moral science, it strives to become a contemporary guide for the perplexed, that is, for all of us trying to make sense of the confusing, changing world and to anticipate and shape the unpredictable future. And this challenging task depends on the indivisible promise of knowledge, hope, and love. As far away from science as it may seem, both theory and life would be meaningless without it.
About John Lie
John Lie (pronounced "Lee") was born in South
Korea, grew up in Japan and in Hawaii, and attended Harvard University
where he received A.B. magna cum laude, A.M., and Ph.D. Currently
he is professor of sociology at the University of
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