CRITICAL THEORY
Read: Appelrouth & Edles 409; Mills 1-20; Appelrouth & Edles 719-752
Critical Theory – the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two quite different meanings with different origins and histories, one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism. This has led to the very literal use of 'critical theory' as an umbrella term to describe theoretical critique.
C. Wright Mills – There has long been debate over Mills' overall intellectual outlook. Mills is often seen as a "closet Marxist" because of his emphasis on social classes and their roles in historical progress and attempt to keep Marxist traditions alive in social theory. Just as often, however, others argue that Mills more closely identified with the work of Max Weber, whom many sociologists interpret as an exemplar of sophisticated (and intellectually adequate) anti-Marxism and modern liberalism.
Jurgen Habermas – Habermas's works resonate within the traditions of Kant and the Enlightenment and of democratic socialism through his emphasis on the potential for transforming the world and arriving at a more humane, just, and egalitarian society through the realization of the human potential for reason, in part through discourse ethics. While Habermas has stated that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project," he argues it should be corrected and complemented, not discarded. In this he distances himself from the Frankfurt School, criticizing it, as well as much of postmodernist thought, for excessive pessimism, misdirected radicalism and exaggerations.
Habermas conceives of the lifeworld as a prereflexive framework of background assumptions, a “network of shared meanings that individuals draw from to construct identities, to negotiate situational definitions, or to create social solidarity.” It consists of taken-for-granted cultural know-how, customs, and norms through which we are able to construct common understandings of our social world. In addition, the lifeworld provides for the socialization of society’s members and the internalization of norms and values essential to the stability of the social order (721).
Habermas maintains that his notion of the lifeworld helps correct Marx’s reductive, one-sided theory of society. According to Habermas, Marx and his successors failed to recognize the significance of the symbolic and communicative domains of society, opting instead to emphasize the role of economic production and property relations both in generating conditions of exploitation and in sparking the eventual communist revolution. Nevertheless, to avoid developing his own one-sided, and thus incomplete, theory, Habermas introduces the notion of the “system” to address some of the concerns that Marx had earlier studied. The system comprises a society’s political and economic structures that are responsible for the organization of power relations and the production and distribution of material resources. As societies evolve, both the state and the economy develop their own formal structure and mechanisms for self-organization. Habermas calls these organizational mechanisms steering media and argues that two primary forms emerge: power and money (721).
As the complexity, power and differentiation of the system grows, it eventually becomes sealed off from the lifeworld and ultimately comes to engulf it. In one of his more famous expressions, Habermas describes this process as the colonization of the lifeworld. In this process, system steering media (money and power) and technical/instrumental logic come to replace the consensual negotiation of shared meanings as the foundation for social integration and the reproduction of the lifeworld. The result is a “totally administered” society in which social relationships are increasingly mediated by power and money and the interpersonal debates and discussions within the lifeworld come to have less and less impact on the constitution of the system. Thus, while modern societies have witnessed a phenomenal expansion of productive capacity and material wealth, they have yet to fulfill the promise of the Enlightenment (723).
communicative action – a process in which individuals come to mutual understand and consensus through open, no coercive debate and discussion freed from the corrosive effects of money, power, and manipulation. Encompassing the other forms of rationality and addressing simultaneously the worlds of objective, social and subjective experience, communicative action embodies a critical stance that allows for the negotiation of shared meanings, the coordination of action, and the socialization of individuals. In the process, communicative action—itself an outgrowth of the evolutionary rationalization of the lifeworld—reproduces the lifeworld by transmitting the cultural stock of knowledge, integrating individuals into the community, and securing the formation of personal and social identities (724).
the public sphere – is composed of an array of social spaces where, ideally, private individuals can publicly congregate and freely debate political, ethnical, and social issues in a noncoercive and “undistorted” manner. The public sphere is not an institution, an organization, or a system; rather it is:
a network for communicating information and points of view (i.e., opinions expressing affirmative or negative attitudes); the streams of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions. Like the lifeworld as a whole, so too, the public sphere is reproduced through communicative action (725).
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Edward Said
With the publication of Orientalism (1978), Said was catapulted to international academic fame. The book presented his ideas on Orientalism, the Western study of Eastern cultures. He contended that Orientalist scholarship was and continues to be inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, making much of the work inherently politicized, servile to power, and therefore suspect. Grounding much of this thesis in his intimate knowledge of colonial literature such as the fiction Conrad, and in the post-structuralist theory of Foucault, Derrida and others, Said's Orientalism (1978) and other works proved pioneering in literary theory and criticism, and continue to influence that and several other fields in the humanities. Orientalism affected Middle Eastern studies in particular, transforming the way practitioners of the discipline describe and examine the Middle East. Said came to discuss and vigorously debate the issue of Orientalism with scholars in the fields of history and area studies, many of whom disagreed with his thesis, including most famously Bernard Lewis.
Immanuel Wallerstein
Wallerstein began as an expert of post-colonial African affairs, which he selected as the focus of his studies after an international youth conference in 1951, and which his publications were almost exclusively devoted to until the early 1970s, when he began to distinguish himself as a historian and theorist of the global capitalist economy on a macroscopic level. His early criticism of global capitalism and championship of "anti-systemic movements" have recently made him a gray eminence with the anti-globalization movement within and without the academic community, along with Noam Chomsky and Pierre Bourdieu.
Anthony Giddens
Giddens, the author of over 34 books and 200 articles, essays and reviews has contributed and written about most notable developments in the area of social sciences, with the exception of research design and methods. He has written commentaries on most leading schools and figures and has used most sociological paradigms in both micro and macrosociology. His writings range from abstract, metatheoretical problems to very direct and 'down-to-earth' textbooks for students. Finally, he is also known for his interdisciplinary approach: he has commented not only on the developments in sociology, but also in anthropology, archaeology, psychology, philosophy, history, linguistics, economics, social work and most recently, political science. In view of his knowledge and works, one may view much of his life's work as a form of 'grand synthesis' of sociological theory.
Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location, and symbolic violence to reveal the dynamics of power relations in social life. His work emphasized the role of practice and embodiment or forms in social dynamics and worldview construction, often in opposition to universalized Western philosophical traditions. He built upon the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Georges Canguilhem, Karl Marx, Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Mauss. A notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.
Michel Foucault
Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. His work on power, and the relationships among power, knowledge, and discourse has been widely discussed. In the 1960s Foucault was associated with Structuralism, a movement from which he distanced himself. Foucault also rejected the post-structuralist and postmodernist labels to which he was often later attributed, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity rooted in Kant. Foucault is particularly influenced by the work of Nietzsche; his "genealogy of knowledge" is a direct allusion to Nietzsche's genealogy of morals.
Jean Baudrillard
Baudrillard was a social theorist and critic who is best known for his analyses of the modes of mediation and of technological communication. His writing, although consistently interested in the way technological progress affects social change, covers diverse subjects — from consumerism to gender relations to the social understanding of history to journalistic commentaries about AIDS, cloning, the Rushdie affair, the first Gulf War and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.
Dorothy Smith
In recognition of her contributions in "transformation of sociology", and for extending boundaries of "feminist standpoint theory" to "include race, class, and gender", Dr. Smith received numerous awards from American Sociological Association, including the American Sociological Association's Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (1999) and the Jessie Bernard Award for Feminist Sociology (1993). In recognition of her scholarship, she also received two awards from the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association: the Outstanding Contribution Award (1990) and the John Porter Award for her book "The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology." (1990).
Patricia Hill Collins
Collins draws on black women's experiences and voices to explain concepts that have been obscured institutionally, philosophically, and ideologically. Collins's interdisciplinary methodology employs a "both/and" analytical approach to domination and subordination. Collins rejects oppositional thought because "either/or thinking categorizes people, things, and ideas in terms of their differences from one another" which requires objectification and subordination.
C. Wright Mills
Mills is often seen as a "closet Marxist" because of his emphasis on social classes and their roles in historical progress and attempt to keep Marxist traditions alive in social theory. Just as often, however, others argue that Mills more closely identified with the work of Max Weber, whom many sociologists interpret as an exemplar of sophisticated (and intellectually adequate) anti-Marxism and modern liberalism.
Jurgen Habermas
Habermas's works resonate within the traditions of Kant and the Enlightenment and of democratic socialism through his emphasis on the potential for transforming the world and arriving at a more humane, just, and egalitarian society through the realization of the human potential for reason, in part through discourse ethics. While Habermas has stated that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project," he argues it should be corrected and complemented, not discarded. In this he distances himself from the Frankfurt School, criticizing it, as well as much of postmodernist thought, for excessive pessimism, misdirected radicalism and exaggerations.
Peter Berger
Berger was a fervent student of religion. He continuously contemplated his own Christian beliefs and spent a “very happy” year at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he studied to be a minister. Indeed, Berger is just as well known for his work in the sociology of religion as in phenomenology and the sociology of knowledge. His now-classic Invitation to Sociology (1963) continues to be one of the most acclaimed and inspiring introductions to the discipline of sociology today.
Thomas Luckman
Luckmann is a follower of the phenomenological school of sociology, established by the German-American scholar Alfred Schütz. In his works, he has developed a theory, known as social constructionism, which argues that all knowledge, including the most basic common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions.
Peter Blau
Blau's sociological specialty was in organizational and social structures, in particular bureaucracy. He produced theories with many applications within social phenomena, including upward mobility, occupational opportunity, heterogeneity, and how population structures can influence human behavior.
Erving Goffman
Goffman was at the forefront of important movements within sociology, for instance, doing ethnomethodology before the ethnomethodologist and exploring the central role of language in social life (the "linguistic turn") well ahead of most of his sociological brethren.
Robert K. Merton
Theories include - deviance, drug addiction, friendship formation, medical education, technology, media, and the history of science.