Anthony Giddens. Studies in social and political theory. New York: Basic Books, 1977. 416 pp. $15.00(Reviewed by Werner J. Cahnman)
- Book ID
- 101356901
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1981
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 335 KB
- Volume
- 17
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The author of this book, who has been described as "the doyen'of younger British sociologists," is a brilliant writer. He offers a startling variety of insights into contemporary sociological theory. But the collected studies which he offers in the present volume are chiefly critical in approach and somewhat diffuse in character. They are loosely conjoined and do not offer the reader a coherent view or a cogent conclusion.
As critical surveys, the two chapters on positivism and functionalism hold out great promise. Positivism is traced from Auguste Comte's notion of a logical relation between the sciences to Durkheim's postulate of a "natural" and "autonomous" science, on the one hand, and from the stability principle of the Vienna circle, as initiated by Ernst Mach, Rudolf Carnap, and Otto Neurath, to more recent philosophical and sociological formulations, on the other. Karl Popper, although he wishes to distance himself from extreme positions of logical positivism, essentially belongs to the same school of thought. Giddens maintains that these derivations are important because logical positivism has permeated sociological thinking in America in the post-World War I1 period, by way of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the writings of Ernest Nagel, Hans Zetterberg, Hempel, and Oppenheim. Behaviorism, operationalism, and the assumption that a precise formal language, including quantification, are common to all "sciences" were effectively propagated by Lundberg, Ogburn, Stouffer, Paul Lazarsfeld, and their disciples and followers. Whoever strayed from the straight path was not considered a "scientist" and hence not a sociologist. It was hardly realized that a "uniform logical structure" of the world, which science was to discover, was neither a model nor a factual finding, but a dogmatic postulate.
While positivism, in denouncing authentic investigation as unscientific, failed to come to grips with reality, functionalism, although at times considered identical with sociology, provided only a confused and confusing approach. Giddens attempts to hew a path through the thickets of interlocking terms, such as structure, function, system, structural prerequisites, strains in and consequences of systems, system contradiction, functional incompatibility, the question as to whether and how functional and causal analyses are converging or whether the concepts of structure and action are complementary or contradictory. In the end, however, nothing but critical analysis is achieved. Obviously, what seemed clear to anthropologists Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski becomes unmanageable if applied to larger societies and complex civilizations. In view of these multiple bewilderments, Robert K. Merton's attempt to come to grips with the contradictions of functionalism appears superior. With the concept of manifest and latent function and of dysfunction, crucial questions are indeed raised. With the concept of latent function, Merton moves near to Marx and Freud, as do in a different way Max Horkheimer and Jiirgen Habermas. Yet, nobody has come up with a convincing approach by which to pinpoint latency. A step further, the concept of dysfunction shakes the entire edifice of functionalism because, as Alvin Boskoff and I have pointed out in Sociology and History (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1964), one cannot discern function from dysfunction until after the event.