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On the Limits of Sociological Theory

JOHN LEVI MARTINRutgers—The State University of New Jersey

Sociological Theory is an attempt to make sense of an intuited level of order transcending the level on which we as individuals live and think. This implies a dual explanatory task: on one hand, to provide a substantively meaningful third-person framework for the formation of theoretical statements, and, on the other, to provide an intuitively accessible answer to the question of why social order exists in the first place. A coherent linkage between these two forms of explanation, however, requires the introduction of undemonstrable but nonaxiomatic claims, which undermines the coherence of the Theory. Consequently, there is pressure upon Theorists either to completely jettison one of the two explanatory tasks, or to attempt to redefine them in a way more amenable to this linkage but substantively unsatisfying.

Und dann werden Sie mich sagen horen: Alle!—Die Seerauber-Jenny

COMTE AND THE SUBSTANTIVE HUNCH OF ORGANIZATION AND ORGANICISM

I will argue that there is a fundamental impossibility in the central project of sociological Theory, namely the explanation of the existence of a transcendental level of social order. By sociological Theory (with a capital T), I mean "Theories of Society": grand attempts to account for the fundamental nature of social life. Such theories have a dual

Received 27 January 1999

An earlier version of this article, "Dialectic of Stupidity, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hermeneutic Circle," was presented at the 1996 Meetings of the American Sociological Association, 16-20 August, New York City, and I would like to thank the participants for their comments and critique. In addition, this article has benefited from the comments and suggestions of Jorge Arditi, Elizabeth Armstrong, Lissa Bell, Ted Gerber, John R. Hall, Francis Holland, Natasha Kraus, Charlie Kurzman, Alex Preda, and Ann Swidler. Finally, I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor for comments and criticism that greatly improved this article.

Philosophy rfthe Social Sciences, Vol. 31 No. 2, June 2001 187-223 O 2001 Sage Publications

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188 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES/June 2001

explanatory task, in that they attempt both to "make sense" of the strange existence of social order and to explain aspects of the regularity or development of this order. While such Theories clearly do not exhaust the set of all sociological theories of importance, they have assumed a privileged place in determining the evolution of sociological thinking and its relation to earlier attempts to make sense of social order.

Indeed, "presociological" social philosophy had largely revolved around this question of order, order primarily in the normative sense of a world without roving brigands, but also secondarily in the descriptive sense of predictability. Sociology assumed the competence to provide an answer to the puzzle posed by such order after political and economic explanations seemed to have exhausted themselves. Hirschman (1977, 50, 129f) beautifully charts the process whereby over the 18th century the answer to the question of how people can be checked went from being seen as having a fundamentally political answer regarding how a state may divide—and so conquer— the passions (e.g., Montesquieu 1949,25), to a fundamentally economic answer, as specifically economic interest assumed a privileged place among the passions.1 What made economic interest so special was not only that it led to the lasting, material improvement of the realm but that the person pursuing material gain was predictable in his actions.

This led to the idea of the economy as a predictable, mechanical order sui generis, perhaps able to serve as the basis for other forms of social regularity. As the French revolution permanently shook people's faith in the political sphere as the locus of order (Hirschman 1977, 87, 94,113), this left the economy as that order's sole ground. Sociology in turn was born when—perhaps for a limited interval— the economy could not be seen as the essential font of all supraindi-vidual organization (a good deal of the intellectual history of this process is given by Brown [1984]). Sociology inherited the explanatory problem of moral philosophy; it was to create its own subject to solve it.

Comte's Sociology

It was such a new subject that separated the new sociology of Comte ([1842] 1974) from the "invisible hand"-type explanation of emergent order given by the economists. Comte saw all such fundamentally individualistic analyses as anarchistic insanity, and his

Martin/ O N THE LIMITS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY 189

counterargument was that society is not a bunching of individuals, to stand or fall as it serves them, but is akin to an organism. Thus, Comte's sociology differed from other social theories most importantly in terms of its substantive theoretical basis, and only secondarily in terms of method.

Now certainly the idea of society-as-organism had been used before Comte.2 There was nothing distinctive about this in the new science of sociology. But previously, society-as-organism was an interpretive metaphor, not intrinsically different from other metaphors, such as the "ship-of-state." Even Hobbes ([1651] 1909, 8,171,183-88, 193f, 246-57), who took this metaphor so allegorically to imply correspondences in the body politic to nerves, blood, and joints and could liken its states of illness to pleurisy, Siamese triplets, and constipation, never hypostatized this metaphor (e.g., systems, "may be compared... to the similar parts of mans Body" [emphasis added]), and alternated between it and others (the commonwealth as building, as LEVIATHAN, or as "mortall God"). Indeed, despite his categorical rejection of metaphor, Hobbes's use of the organismic language stemmed as much from his love of pursuing a simile as from his explanatory goals.3

Presociological organismic metaphors generally were teleologi-cally motivated by the point to be made, for example, "since a body needs a head, monarchy is just." Comte was of course not immune to reaching such congenial conclusions himself. But for him, society-as-organism was not merely a useful political metaphor; instead it was a statement of fact, a manifesto that society could not be analytically treated as the aggregate of individuals. Another level existed that had to be studied with techniques akin to those of the biological sciences. Comte therefore did not stop with metaphors—rather, social institutions and groups had to be understood as organs, having accordingly both a determinate structure and a specific function, offering a powerful new approach to the study of social phenomena.4 But Comte never seemed to puzzle over the peculiar nature of the object he postulated. He was content to declare the existence of function without explaining its genesis. Furthermore, he was unfazed by the foreignness of this explanation to our individual-level understandings. Science was, Comte believed, not about understanding but about prediction. The ancients, as Spencer later put it nicely, could explain perfectly why a stone fell (e.g., its longing to be reunited with the earth) but could not predict its position. Positive science, on the other hand, can predict its position with great precision but cannot


explain why it falls at all. That is, we have a third-person description devoid of any first-person account that allows understanding, from the perspective of the stone, as it were, why it falls.

While Comte expended no effort to connect the nature of social function to first-person individual understandings, he provided a powerful substantive vision of society in opposition to that of the economists. In Comtian sociology, an "organ" of society is a set of individuals having the same function for society as a whole in its relation to its environments. Suddenly the motion of the individuals, which seemed chaotic, wasteful, even destructive, is revealed as harmonious, purposive, even necessary, thus contradicting political economy and its struggle for existence between individuals. It offers a completely different basis for the analysis of society, a wholistic one, one that considers the actions of individuals not to have meaning divorced from the purpose they serve for the whole, the true unit of analysis.

The Substantive Hunch and Sociological Theory

It is this type of wholistic vision that is distinctive about sociology as a discipline. It is not necessary that this wholistic vision be either as worked out as Comte's or as dedicated to conservatism. It may be a vague Substantive Hunch that social order exists on some level "higher" than the individual. As Durkheim ([1902-03] 1961,89) puts it,

We constantly have the impression of being surrounded with a host of things in the course of happening whose nature escapes us. All sorts of forces move themselves about, encounter one another, collide near us almost brushing us in their passage; yet we go without seeing them.

It is mis hunch that makes sociology as a discipline seem to be on the trail of something big, something very interesting. Sociological Theory, I maintain, has been—with certain exceptions5—an attempt to formulate analytic frameworks and syntaxes that codify this Substantive Hunch. In short, they are the more or less adequate forms given to communicate the substance of this hunch. But they take on another task, namely to "sell" this vision to individual minds by explaining why this is the case. Sociological Theorists basically agree with Comte that such an order exists but, unlike him, are consistently troubled by the discrepancy between its third-person order and our own first-person understandings, and the Theory tries to bridge that gap.

Martin / ON THE LIMITS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY 191

Such bridging requires a synthesis of two different types of explanation, one oriented to what Merton (1968) called manifest functions (our first-person accounts as actors who believe they possess motivations), and the other to what he called latent functions (those serving a supraindividual entity and inferred by the researcher). The problem of relation of manifest and latent functions (or first- and third-person accounts) is of course a general problem that transcends sociology, and there have been logically consistent and elegant solutions outside sociology. Perhaps the most influential was Hegel's "cunning of reason"; the principle that the universal did not come out of the aggregated individual acts (as in Adam Smith) but rather stood behind them (Hegel [1807] 1949, 411; [1837] 1953, 48). But while sociology is not alone in grappling with this problem, it alone is completely tethered to it; moreover, sociology's range of acceptable answers is limited by virtue of the acceptable "substances." These two limitations—that sociology cannot ignore the Substantive Hunch for long without losing its raison d'etre and that sociology cannot propose spiritual solutions— give sociological Theorists a limited set of options when they confront the tension between first- and third-person explanations.

It is my claim that no adequate solution is possible, since no theoretical structure can weld together first- and third-person perspectives; one cannot answer "how" and "why" at the same time.6 While this claim may not be widely accepted, it certainly is the case that the basic problem is repeatedly recognized as the crucial obstacle to sociological Theory (as we shall see, Habermas sees it as the basic dilemma in social Theory), though analysts often become distracted by philosophical issues and argue as to whether it is a macro/micro division, or regards individualism/wholism or perhaps structure/ agency or determinism /voluntarism. My claims are buttressed by an examination of key theories, which demonstrates that those that rise to the challenge of this dual explanation are flawed in predictable ways.

The Strong and the Weak

Confronted with the task of joining the two types of explanations, sociological Theory has three possible responses: (1) it may jettison any attempt to answer the "why" question, which amounts to a retreat back into positivism, in the sense of embracing an absence of first-person understanding (which I briefly discuss in the final sec-

192 PrnLC^PHYOFTHESOOALSOENCES/JwieMOl-

tion); (2) it may jettison any attempt to answer the "how" question, which I will term "Weak" Theory; (3) it may valiantly attempt to fuse the two types of explanation, which I shall call "Strong" Theory. (See Figure 1 for a schematic representation, which links examples discussed in the article to each of these options.) The first option is relatively nonproblematic; it is simply unsatisfying, since we are confronted with a set of generalizations that have no real meaning for us. The second and third options tend to predominate, and the bulk of this article is an examination of Weak and Strong Theories. Because they jettison the attempt to give a coherent propositional third person account in order to better "make sense/' the Weak simply give a lens, a vision or schema, which allows us to come to grips with the Substantive Hunch. Generally through subtle imagery, we not only can follow an argument as to the reasonableness of the Substantive Hunch, we can aesthetically accept it, remember why we accept it, and go on with sociology. However, such Theories—all of which are variations on what I shall call the "dialectic of instirutionalization"—exert no constraining force on possible explanations. They describe an archetypal motion, but their prescriptions for actual theory are generally only of the order "include everything." They do not imply anything (though implication-producing sub-Theories may be tacked on).

Strong Theories, on the other hand, do constrain possible explanations by incorporating specific substantive propositions into their basic assumptions or building blocks. But it is always where these assumptions touch upon the Substantive Hunch that they undermine the whole enterprise: in order to make the translation from social order reasonable to the individual mind, the Strong Theory shifts to a kind of would-be-empirical apologetics. That is, because Strong Theory attempts to tell us why things are the case, Strong Theory always implies that they must be this way, hence the eternal suspicion that Strong Theorists are "conservatives," secretly trying to defend the status quo, and the trouble that the Theorists themselves have on this point (e.g., Durkheim [1887] 1987,200)7 The simple attempt to answer the "Why?" question, unless coupled with an extremely strong developmental Theory (such as Marx's, and even then), implies the necessity of the status quo, and therefore seems not only a descriptive but a prescriptive statement.

But this slip into apologetics, which is frequently the cause of critique, is not as important for theory construction as the fact that in order to reach first-person plausibility. Strong Theory requires propositions about "how things really are," which must be fabricated out of

Martin /ON THE LIMITS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY 193

Does the Theory Attempt to "make sense" via a First Person ("why") Account?

No Yes

No (No Theory of Society)

WEAK THEORY Examples: The "other" Durkheim, Simmel, Giddens, Bourdieu

Yes POSITIVISM Examples: Comte, Luhmann, H. White

STRONG THEORY Examples: Durkheim, Parsons and Shils, Coleman

Figure 1: Three Approaches to Sociological Theory

thin air, and this desperate act leaves its trail in the theoretical structure as a series of contradictions or indeterminacies. These propositions are undemonstrable but nonaxiomatic claims, which I shall call "fudges," and they become an integral part of the apparatus. Finally, these fudges enter at the point of translation between first- and third-person explanations. Depending on which way the Theorist is traversing the distance—from Social to Individual, for example, Comte and Durkheim; or from Individual to Social, for example, Parsons and Coleman—this point happens later or earlier. There is a tendency for theories that start out with the social to put the point relatively early since they have difficulty proceeding without making the foreign world of social processes understandable, and they tend to begin with a hypostatized metaphor. The fudges usually come here, as the Theorist must smuggle wholesale qualities (both in terms of attributes and in terms of judgments) from the vehicle to the tenor.

With theories that go from the Individual to the Social, the link is more flexibly placed. One can start out from well within the individual understanding, and then run like mad, only employing the fudges when one finds oneself further from the Substantive Hunch than one thought (e.g., Coleman). More sophisticated Theorists may place the fudges early so as to build into the very individual model the distor-

Does the TheoryAttempt toExplain SocialOrder via aThirdPerson ("how")Account?


tions which will allow the social to seemingly emerge from it (examples here are Habermas and Parsons and Shils). But all share the fundamental structural unsoundness. As Holmwood and Stewart (1994) have recently argued regarding action Theorists, each attempts to balance the antinomies of the social and individual levels of analyses, only to be found wanting by the next generation, whose further syntheses either multiply the contradictions or return to the dialectic of institutionalization (cf. Cormack 1996, 85, 96, 98 for a similar argument regarding Durkheim).8

To conclude, there is a real reason why Strong sociological Theory is impossible and why the different approaches are all unsatisfactory. I go on to introduce Weak Theories, drawing out the common vision of a dialectic of institutionalization, and then turn to key Strong Theories, demonstrating the presence of fudges (undemonstrable but nonaxiomatic empirical claims) at key points. I briefly discuss the appeal of theories I term positivist, only in the sense that they reject the importance of first-person explanation (usually by rejecting the person as a theoretical entity) the chief characteristic of positivism as Comte saw it. (Examples here are Niklas Luhmann and Harrison White.) I close by discussing three forms of "retreats" from the Substantive Hunch: the retreat into heuristic (e.g., Weber), the retreat into interaction (e.g., network theory and ethnomethodology), and the retreat into normativity (e.g., Habermas).

WEAK THEORIES

The Other Durkheim

Durkheim, as one might expect, will be a key example of a Strong Theorist below. At the same time, alongside his idea of the social body as moral entity, Durkheim ([1902-03] 1961, 255) had a sophisticated sense of emergent properties based on the idea that social life consists of what, for the purposes of comparison with other thinkers, we will call institutions; that is, patterns of regularized conduct9 This is Durkheim's Weak Theory. The point here, which flies in the face of his "dual nature" thesis, is that these institutions, rather than being explicable in terms of the functional organization of the social body, must be understood as the emergent effects of the dynamics of social action.

Martin /ON THE UMTT5 OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY 195

"Certain of these social manners of acting and thinking acquire, by reason of their repetition, a certain rigidity which on its own account crystallizes them, so to speak, and isolates them from the particular events which reflect them" (Durkheim [1895] 1938, 45). Note that explanation here does not rely on providing a function or a relation to another "social fact"—instead our attention is directed to a set of many particular happenings which, though historically unique, are predictable in their outlines.

Sociology is then not as straightforward as the Comtean perspective would imply, for it attempts to grasp the ineffable. But the predictability of the relation between institutional life and the flux of social reality allows us to use the former get a handle on the complexity of the latter.

Social life consists, then, of free currents perpetually in the process of transformation and incapable of being mentally fixed by the observer, and the scholars cannot approach the study of social reality from this angle. But we know that it possesses the power of crystallization without ceasing lobe itself. (Durkheim [1895] 1938, 45)

This process is obviously reminiscent of the vitalistic dialectic of the ossification and self-shackling of content in its form, and I shall therefore call it the "dialectic of institutionalization," where dialectic is understood in this Hegelian sense of the dynamic interplay between form and content.

This understanding of social life as being the crystallization of the myriad movements of active individuals was a very powerful vision, but it should be apparent that such a pleasing definition of the formation of social institutions offers no constraint for sociological theorizing. Here we have, then, the classic form of Weak Theory—in fact, as we shall see, all Weak Theories (including versions not discussed in this article, for example, Stark [1958,244]) are based on this dialectic of institutionalization. Of course, the valences could differ dramatically. For Durkheim, this process of crystallization is a welcome one, for it makes the study of social life easier. Those more sympathetic to basic vitalist currents, however, would pay more attention than Durkheim to this process of crystallization and might even consider it akin to the "reification" of the critical theorists. The most important classical sociologist to have this critical approach to Weak Theory was Georg Simmel.


Sinimel

Given Durkheim's harsh criticism of Simmel,10 it is surprising how much their Weak Theories have in common. For Simmel, society itself is the set of permanent interactions, "crystallized as definable, consistent structures"; that is institutions, plus less noticed forms that flesh out the picture. These forms are the "crystallized" residues of life, structures that remain even after the feeling or reason that gave rise to them is gone. "As they crystallize they attain their own existence and their own laws, and may even confront spontaneous interaction itself." This was perhaps Simmel's chief theme, namely that society is the reificati on of interaction. (In keeping with his interest in the effects of numbers on social life, he argued that it was large numbers that led to the "emergence" of the general element as a seemingly independent existence.) The forms and materials we create to realize our own ends acquire a life of their own, "they come to play freely with themselves and for their own sake; they produce or make use of materials that exclusively serve their own operation or realization." But this is not a simple process of goal displacement, it is a continuous dialectic: "Sociation continuously emerges and ceases and emerges again. Even where its eternal flux and pulsation are not sufficiently strong to form organizations proper, they link individuals together" (Simmel 1950, 9f, 41,96,380f).

We see that Simmel preserves a more Hegelian balance between vitalism and ossification than does Durkheim in his version of the dialectic of institutionalization. (Simmel explicitly refers to this process as a dialectic and adds a note on the significance of play11 [Simmel 1950,42].) From this interest with the "eternal flux and pulsation" of Social life comes Sirnmel's concern with the loss of substantive meaning that necessarily accompanies the purification of forms. He who says organization, Simmel might have said, says estrangement.12

Sunmel's attempt to explain the Substantive Hunch was simply a nuanced dialectic of institutionalization—and one which could not inspire a research tradition in the way his much less insightful predictions as to the effects of numbers on group dynamics did.

Bourdieu and Giddens

The leading contemporary version of Weak Theory is, I believe, Anthony Giddens's "Theory of Structuration," which obviously resembles the formulation of Simmel. In fact, it can be thought of as the

Weak Theory par excellence, since it deliberately attempts to answer the Mertonian question as to the difference between manifest and latent functions without recourse to the functionalist claims that lead to Strong Theory (Giddens 1984,12). Hence, the heart of his theory is the purest form of the dialectic of institutionalization: "The flow of action continually produces consequences which were unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences also may form unacknowledged conditions in a feedback fashion." While Durkheim tried to take the crystallized social-level structures as permanent enough for systemic and developmental analysis, Giddens emphasizes that one can never leave this loop of action: there is no "structural" explanation apart from reference to the motivation of agents, and no general answer to whether structure determines action or vice versa {Giddens 1984, 27,179,181,192, 219).

Of course, there is only so much one can say about the dialectic of institutionalization, and so the bulk of Giddens's theory has to do with differences between types of society. But the central—and insightful— distinctions Giddens (1984,33,258,262) makes, such as that between "allocative" and "authoritative" resources, have no connection with the Weak Theory of the dialectic of institutionalization. Giddens's Theory of agency simply says that abstractly, people in general make their world, though not in conditions of their choosing and not necessarily in the way they had planned. But from the ontological potential of agency one cannot derive anything useful about which "agents" actually have authority over which other "agents"—whose essence is actualized in command and who exercises "agency" merely in choosing to obey.

Similar to Giddens's Theory is the Weak Theory of Pierre Bourdieu. I am inclined to concur with Wacquant's (in Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992,3, note 3, and 15f) general assessment as to the main difference between Bourdieu and Giddens being the latter's greater interest in completing an abstract, formal ontology of the pure "actor" endowed with a metaphysical and inalienable quantum of "agency." Seeking to tweak the Weak Theory so that just the right amounts of structure and agency come out, Giddens tends to fall back on the explication of generic attributes, as opposed to Bourdieu's interest in how these "attributes" (such as practical agency) are distributed, and how they become transformed through contestation. At the same time, the dialectic of institutionalization underlies both theories.

We can summarize Bourdieu's (1984; cf. 1990,31) theory of the connection between social reproduction and individually motivated action

1*0 rnuAJSurm uf int WX.IAL SCIENCES / June 2001

as follows: social action takes place by persons who have internalized a cognitive structure corresponding to objective social structures ("structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures" [Bourdieu 1977, 72]), social structures that are structures of domination. Action, both that which is conceived as strategic and that which is conceived of as nonstrategic, thus tends to reproduce the structure even as it also can contest the principles of structuration. It is worth pointing out that Bourdieu's account of reproduction and the link between interest and knowledge effectively solves the problem of imputation that the sociology of knowledge always struggled with, and in a very reasonable manner. It is a distinctly Weak answer to this question regarding the link between beliefs and interests corresponding to social position (hence Brubaker [1985,760, cf. 762,770] terms it metatheoretical), but it is a good one, whereas the Strong answers were bad. It is Weak (though it may well be correct), in that it abstractly solves the logical question of how action serves interests without its being intended to, without requiring a specific plan of research—its empirical constraints are simply the admonition to the researcher to study the complete trajectory of all the participants through all the relevant dimensions of "capital"; that is, to "ignore nothing/' and the general framework is in its essential aspects no different from Giddens's.

It is significant that as Bourdieu spends more time on general matters, and therefore on his fundamental framework, he is paying explicit attention to the dialectic of institutionalization and trying to get as much explanatory power out of the semimystical imagery as anyone can. If, stealing Taylor's terminology for Hegel, we distinguish Bourdieu's ontological dialectic of institutionalization (what he called "the dialectic of the internalization of 'externality and the externaliza-tion ofinternality, or more simply, of incorporation and objectification" [Bourdieu 1977, 72, cf. 84, 90]) from the historical dialectic of pretension and distinction/reconversion, we see relatively more attention given to the ontological in the later work. Indeed, Bourdieu has even tried (in contrast to Giddens) to link his concrete distinctions between social forms to this ontological vision.

For example, in The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu ([1980] 1990,57,130) speaks of two states of capital: history objectified in institutions and history incorporated in the body; the Habitus is thus the internalization of history that

makes it possible to inhabit institutions, to appropriate them practically, and so to keep them in activity, continuously pulling them from


the state of dead letters, reviving the sense deposited in them, but at the same time imposing the revisions and transformations that reactivation entails.

He then suggests that the degree of the objectification of capital—its position in the dialectic of institutionalization—is the most important difference between different modes of domination (cf. Bourdieu [1983] 1986, 243).13

Ending the analysis of Weak Theories with Bourdieu should reassure us that Weak Theory is not associated with weak theoreticians. In fact, the ability of Simmel, Durkheim, Giddens, and Bourdieu to recognize that in certain respects formal theorizing could add little to the imagery of flow, crystallization, and rupturing, might be seen as preferable to the indeterminacies introduced by Strong Theorists, some of whom we now analyze.

THE STRONG

Durkheim

Weak Theories, then, do not build substantive statements about social order from a third-person perspective into their answers to the "why" question. Comte, with his positivist disregard for first-person explanations, was also unconcerned with this connection. But his theoretical heirs (including Spencer14) made this one of their central concerns; most important here was Emile Durkheim.

Durkheim's Strong Theory, unlike his Weak Theory analyzed above, clearly started with society as a unit of analysis, and the explanation of social facts in terms of function. But Durkheim (unlike Comte) had to grapple with how these functions were incarnated in actual acting persons, partly because he generally (though somewhat inconsistently) rejected the organ analogy as the explicit basis for his sociology, since he believed that society was not so much a body but a mind, a moral entity (see Durkheim [1897] 1951,30; [1906] 1953,91). Durkheim's answer was to grasp the nettle firmly and posit a realm of "latent functions" all their own, that is, the existence of the social sui generis, including a collective conscience. After postulating this level of specifically social functionality, Durkheim ([1893] I960,11, 42, 43) was forced to challenge individual-level explanations by denigrating the


importance of the individual will,15 even before he was ready to provide an alternative.

But when it came time for the explanation, Durkheim bravely rested his case on a fundamental ontological dualism of the human being—in the head of any person, there were two minds (i.e., sets of representations): an individual and a collective—"two beings . . . which remain distinct" (Durkheim [1914] 1973; [1898] 1953; Durkheim 1956,124). There was no more need to explain where the latter came from than the former. Durkheim understood that there was an implicit problem in the reasonableness of such an account, given that his audience consisted of the individual minds who were disinclined to believe in the existence of their putative cotenants. Durkheim accordingly had to consider not only social functions and social order but the relation between such social variables and individual acts and thoughts. How would he do this? Durkheim had two strategies. One was to show how the latent and manifest functions were intimately tied together; the subtext to both The Division of Labor and Suicide (see, for example, Durkheim [1897] 1951, 213; also Durkheim [1902-03] 1961, 38,66) is that individual happiness, health, and feeling are dependent upon social health. The functional interdependence of society makes itself felt in each's breast; the society out of equilibrium is a world we are willing to quit by taking our lives.

The second, and more characteristically Durkheimian, strategy was to demonstrate that despite the ontological division between the collective and individual minds, the individual half could basically "get" what was going on in the social half. To make this connection between explanation as substantive theory and explanation as intuitive understanding, Durkheim relied upon a hypostatized metaphor, going from saying that the division of labor was like functional differentiation in an organism to saying that it was such, and hence possessed various properties (Durkheim [1918] 1960, 112). Of course, were society an organism (which Durkheim himself denied), the division of labor might indeed be akin to functional differentiation. But lacking such a generative definition, Durkheim's method (contrary to his prescriptions calling for induction from observed characteristics) involved the constant infusion of fudges (undemonstrable but non-axiomatic claims), in this case, somewhat personalistic value judgments as to which states were healthy and which were not.

Durkheim imagined that normalcy and health were directly observable in an example of a "social species," thereby compounding the difficulties he had in positing the shadow realm of the social being by


also positing the clarity of the very properties of this realm. The division between social health and pathology is crucial, because Durkheim's "how" account does not always jibe with our first-person understandings, and his response is that this is due to the presence of social pathology: the problem is in our society, not his theory But whence comes the schema that allows the classification of societies into healthy or nonhealthy? Not from unmediated knowledge—the individual mind cannot simply tap into the collective (and even if it could, who would trust the judgment of a pathological mind as to its degree of pathology?), and not from deduction from first principles. Instead, the schema is precisely that which leads to the maximum plausibility of Durkheim's arguments—social species that fit the theory are healthy; those that do not, are not, thus the well-known tendency Durkheim has to trap himself in circles. The metaphor of the collective organism, which, unlike an allegory, does not guarantee a correspondence between parts, when transferred tout court to the realm of actuality (as opposed to merely inspiring hypotheses through analogy) immediately generates disconfirmation, and each patch Durkheim supplies only leads to new difficulties.

We see the difficulties arising in his methodological Rules: the social is the average, which is the general16 not because it is found in all individuals; rather it is found in all individuals because it is the social. Similarly, any regularity and consistency is "symptomatic" (but not, nota bene, conclusive) of an objective social fact (Durkheim [1895] 1938,8f, 28; 1956,96). The induced social facts should be classified on the basis of "certain common external characteristics, and all phenomena so defined should be included in the group"—one should not attempt to remove the seemingly inharmonious elements to purify the concept "for the pathological forms of the phenomena are not different in nature from the normal forms." This of course raises the question of how one tells the pathological from the healthy. After dismissing several options, Durkheim launches into a discussion of how one detects the normal (again, it's the average) and argues that there is no difference between normality and health: "The healthy constitutes the norm par excellence and can consequently be in no way abnormal" (Durkheim [1895] 1938,35,50,56-58). Thus, we are (as usual) brought full circle. Include the pathological in the category of some social fact, determine its pathology by its deviation from the average; yet, it therefore ceases to be part of the social fact at all. The only possible recourse Durkheim leaves himself is to move to a higher level of comparison and thus show that a social fact in one society is

202 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES /June 2001

not normal in a general sample of equivalent societies (Durkheim notes that what is normal for a society at one stage of development is not normal for another). But not only does Durkheim lack the comparative sample this requires (for he thinks that all modern societies share the same pathologies—no exceptions are ever cited), but to determine which societies are equivalent without knowing yet what is normal requires another circularity. So he cannot have used this method to detect health and pathology.

In sum, Durkheim's link between his Theory of social order and our first-person understandings relied on his ability to differentiate between healthy states (which the Theory explained) and unhealthy ones (which did not disprove the Theory). But this differentiation was accomplished via fudges;17 elaborate rules (no sooner framed than violated) all skirt around the most important theoretical procedure, namely the methodologically arbitrary but substantively significant classification of social facts into good and bad, normal/healthy versus abnormal/temporary. In the end, he had only a rhetorical strategy of persuasion, not an axiomatic derivation. This rhetorical strategy began to wear thin as sociology shifted into a highly theoretical gear in the postwar period. The most important attempt to retread the explanation of the Substantive Hunch in this period was that of Parsons and Shils.

Parsons and Shils

Parsons, with Shils in Toward a General Theory of Action, perhaps more methodically than anyone before attempted to rigorously connect the Substantive Hunch to lowest level terms by formulating a motivational system that could then be used to derive the social order, from little more than the dialectic of institutionalization: "Social systems work through their impact on the motivational systems of individuals, and the intra-individual complications and elaborations of motivations into systems lead back into the social system" (Parsons and Shils 1956, 226).18

Parsons and Shils begin with a simplified actor attempting to maximize his happiness in encounters with others through his ability to sanction or reward them. People orient their actions toward one another, and most importantly, they learn from one another what actions of their own bring rewards and punishments, thus forming expectations as to the conduct of others both conditioned and unconditioned on their own action. Here is the birth of society" and here we

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also reach the formation of institutions—patterns of regularized conduct and expectation. The essential point is that society exists as subjective expectations as to the actions of others—and clearly these expectations must be pretty much in line with each other and pretty much followed for society to work. These requirements Parsons and Shils called, respectively, the "complimentarity of expectations" and "conformity."

The complimentarity of expectations does make society seem like a hoedown where everyone knows the steps and no one crashes into another. Of course, this seemingly rosy picture was ridiculed and criticized by skeptics who pointed out that at the hoedown, someone was calling out the steps and, more insidiously, paying the fiddler. Mills's (1959,29f) wonderful reply: "Have you ever been in an army, a factory—or for that matter a family? Well, those are institutions. Within them, the expectations of some men seem just a little more urgent than those of anyone else."

Critics like Mills, however, were wrong to think that a theory that focused on expectations was the same as a theory that focused on desires. A worker may expect to be overworked and treated with hostility and suspicion not because she or he wants this but precisely because, as Parsons and Shils would say, she or he has learned how to avoid sanctioning behavior. Expectations do not imply equality, though they are compatible with it. But institutions, and social life, do seem to imply regular expectations. Left as it is, we would seem to have a nice, but Weak, Theory.

But Mills can be forgiven his mistake, since it was first made by Parsons and Shils themselves; indeed, it is the error that holds the theory together. Parsons and Shils did expect a kind of mutuality in all interactions, for they tended to assume that both parties would sanction the other for nonconformity to expectations, since "appropriate" (i.e., expected) reactions of alter are intrinsically gratifying to ego (Parsons and Shils 1956,106). This is plainly false. People can be nicer to us than we expect, and this Pleasant Surprise does not necessarily bring sanctioning behavior.20 But by assuming that all parties had an interest in sanctioning violations of expectations, Parsons and Shils could derive a mutuality, though not equality, of gratification, a gratification that is interestingly not based on shared interests but on conformity for conformity's sake (conformity established as "an intrinsic good" [Parsons and Shils 1956, 216]). A cunning solution to the Hobbesian problem of order—-one resulting from the conflict of interests—that Parsons (1968) started with (cf. Wrong 1994,126)! In


other words, ruling out the Pleasant Surprise was the necessary fudge to turn a Weak Theory of the dialectic of institutionalization into a Strong Theory that explained order. The possibility of a Pleasant Surprise would suggest a potential dislocation between our own individual motivations and our expectations.

And of course, this fudge sits exactly at the crucial first-person/ third-person nexus of the explanation of social order to individual minds, in two senses that are, as Parsons might say, "complimentary." The first sense is the apologetic one, in which Parsons and Shils attempt to convince the reader that social order is as okay as okay can be; the second sense is the theoretical one, in which they attempt to join the social system of normative constraints to individual motivational systems. These two senses are hopelessly entangled, and at mis crucial theoretical node, Parsons and Shils must leap into an apologetic discourse of reasonable explanation and grasp the common-sense threads of our everyday consciousness to tie their theoretical balloon to, using "fair" and "reasonable" qualifications with attendant examples.

This involves, first, reservations mat the internalization of expectations is not all of personality and, second, pointing to the imperfections that allow for "faulty internalization," which can produce the "derivative" need-dispositions "to refuse to fulfill expectations." And since these malcontents may join up with ideological dissenters, there arises a clear "possibility of disequilibrium," which is reduced by the mechanisms of traditionalism and authoritarianism. But the patching doesn't stop here—even if people do accept these common orientations, it turns out to be insufficient to maintain order, and so "some sort of institutionalized mechanism is indispensable, and this is the function of authority."

Social integration, however much it depends on internalized norms, cannot be achieved by these alone. It requires also some supplementary coordination provided by explicit prescriptive or prohibitory role-expectations (e.g., law) enunciated by actors in specially differentiated roles to which is attached "responsibility" in collective terms.

The reader who sees that this does in fact describe "society" might be forgiven for thinking that the theory is doing quite well, when in fact all coherence vanishes as a set of fudges are successively introduced. While Parsons and Shils discuss the allocation of "facilities"—generic good things—to roles, they also admit an anomic "competition for facilities" of the strong getting stronger; thus allocation exists as a

Martin /ON THE LIMITS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY 205

social function except when it is a bloody spoils system, assuming away their very emphasis on the relation of values to allocation (Parsons and Shils 1956,155f, 168,200,203, 220).

To summarize, one might say that according to Parsons and Shils, society as an order exists because of common value orientations except when and to the degree that it don't. After an exhausting elaboration of the implications of expectations in ego-alter interactions, we are so far off from explaining the Substantive Hunch that the Theory seems unreasonable, and therefore the remaining distance is quickly closed by "authority" and other sleights of hand unconnected to their theoretical principles. While many of these statements are eminently reasonable, they are still absolutely false to Parsons and Shils's principles; and just as with Durkheim's undemonstrablebut nonaxiomatic claims, they rest on what is sometimes called "proof by assertion" (e.g., "and this is the function of authority").

Parsons and Shils thus took the dialectic of institutionalization and attempted to strengthen it. This entailed a fudge at the critical juncture of the relation between social-level cultural systems and individual-level motivational systems. Further ad hoc fudges entered later at regular intervals, but the basic one came early. In marked contrast is the rational choice theory of James Coleman, which is admirably consistent almost till the end, when a mad dash toward reality throws all first principles to the wind.

Coleman and Rational Choice

Coleman's (1990) Theory can be thought of as action theory with the addition of major constraints. First, there is a rigorous exclusion of supraindividual phenomena, the emergence of which is not explainable by recourse to individual action (what Coleman likes to call the micro-macro link). Second, no action orientations other than instrumental rationality will be taken into account (though of course, action that might be attributed to one of these other orientations is not necessarily ignored and may in fact be explained by a more thorough application of the instrumental rational orientation). Most importantly, norms are not used to explain action; rather, they are themselves to be explained. Consequently, norms are not considered constitutive of human beings or of their action for theoretical purposes; instead, Coleman's building blocks are actors, the things (resources and events) in which actors have interests and over which they have control, and the initial distribution of control over things by actors (roughly, what


most people call "power") (Coleman 1990,39). Action is postulated to seek to maximize utility, and however utility is defined, it cannot include norms or values (and therefore any appeal to norm-satisfaction as an intrinsically rewarding experience—as in Parsons and Shils— and therefore "rational" would be inconsistent).

Since rational actors will not take any action that imposes costs on them without sufficient compensation, it is natural that most truly social action will occur in the form of exchange. To satisfy their interests, actors exchange things they have control over (but little interest in) for others that they have great interest in (but little control over). While he is aware of the technical complications in two-person exchange theory, Coleman still assumes that such transactions are balanced (always with the explicit understanding that this balance is relative to power). Clearly, this bears resemblance to the perhaps useful myth of the origin of the division of labor in classical political economy. But generalized, it quickly leads to absurdities. It is worth pointing this out, because it is Coleman's premonition that such absurdities loom that leads him to begin to progressively dismantle his axioms as he winds up the book.

The problems first arise in Coleman's acceptance of the initial distribution of control, including the means of violence, as a valid factor in determining exchange "prices"; this step toward realism leads Coleman to break with the theory of classical liberalism (for example, Locke), which conceived of interpersonal exchange as only occurring in a protected environment where force was ruled out.21 Coleman ends up positing a world of anomic sociopaths, in which there is no difference between the exchange and the fight, and in which every act of terrorism results in an efficiency price.22

Such a world, while admirably consistent with first principles, is also understandableby the individual—especially the individualistic— mind. But it is not a world that gets us far in understanding the Substantive Hunch. So Coleman attempts to derive social order from these presuppositions; indeed, his book is a series of derivations, each leaving the presuppositions further behind. For example, in the simplest case, a norm is created to solve a problem of action with "externalities" (consequences for people other than the actor) when transaction costs are sufficiently high to discourage the creation of a market. Aset of people decide that they will all "transfer control" of this action to the group in exchange for the partial control of others (this directly follows Hobbes).

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The interpretation of many norms as being in the interests of the members of the group (for example, the norm may be the only way to solve a collective action problem) can be a powerful rhetorical support to Coleman's premises, and Coleman provides many such convincing examples. Of course, already there is a fatal problem, since Coleman—in claiming as his methodology a concrete focus on micro-micro linkages, as opposed to a heuristic model—must therefore maintain that norms do in fact arise in such a manner, when there is little evidence that this is generally the case. By attempting to deny ab initio the possible differences between latent and manifest functions, his explanations are really more "just-so" stories than "as if"explanations.

It is, then, not surprising that it is as Coleman moves toward norms that are further on the side of latent functionality—when he must shift from the individual-level understanding to the social level of the Substantive Hunch—that the problems arise. Coleman begins by noting an exception to his discussion of norms: some norms do not deal with action having externalities but instead merely provide conformity for conformity's sake (though this is not their explicit content); that is to say they are norms that provide integration as a by-product. Thus, a latent function is smuggled back in, and it is no longer clear why norms in general are defined differently from these integrative norms.

Furthermore, Coleman points to the existence of a class of norms that basically proscribe individuals from acting on the basis of particular, as opposed to general, interests. But whenever such a norm exists, the theoretical structure so far constructed becomes worthless, except insofar as it can explain the institution of the norm of generality as rational. Further action covered by the norm is no longer amenable to treatment within Coleman's system. These "pro-social" norms, since they are so far afield from individual maximization of satisfaction, seem to imply a more socialized personality. And yet Coleman forbids the norm from being an essential part of action. It is as if Coleman believes that once upon a time, a group of individuals got together and said, "Henceforth, let us no longer be individuals, but a solidary social entity," yet he still, for some obscure reason, insists that our first methodological principle must be to ignore this crucialtransubstantiation.

Perhaps the last blow to the system Coleman comes up with is to introduce "ideology" as a factor affecting social capital (the degree to which relations serve as resources for individuals).23 Here, Coleman


(1990, 320) writes that "An ideology can create social capital by imposing on an individual who holds it the demand that he act in the interests of something or someone other than himself." {Note that this does not fall under the category of deviations-from-maximization-due-to-ignorance, which Coleman discusses earlier and separately.) While norms that seemed to be followed contrary to individual interests were first explained (however successfully) by recourse to the presupposed individuals, this ideology comes as a dens ex machina rescuer of failed predictions. We must not underestimate the importance of this addition. To say that the things that individuals believe can lead them to act in the interests of another (not even simply to say that beliefs determine subjective interests, the definitional rescue) and not their own is to say either that ideology can lead people not to be rational actors, or that the rational actor is not necessarily a utility maximizer. In fact, the idea of the rational individual maximizing utility goes from being a presupposition to being a substantive claim, which Coleman himself has disproved in order to reach the Substantive Hunch. While this negation of the rationality of the actor may have been implicit in Coleman's discussion of the possible discrepancy between objective and subjective interests (which I have not discussed), this notion of ideology brings matters to a head. While Durkheim and Parsons and Shils introduced undemonstrable but nonaxiomatic claims at crucial junctions, Coleman—perhaps due to the mathematical rigor of this thinking—introduces undemonstrable but anrtaxiomatic claims in order to reach the Substantive Hunch of the existence of order.

To recap, Coleman's healthy attachment to reality leads him to recognize that individual interests are not wholly selfish, that these interests are to some extent integrated, that "ideology" can lead to individuals neglecting their own interests, that social orders are not really constructed by social contract but imposed by some upon others, and so forth. But the framework chosen for his theorizing cannot cope with these facts. While a common criticism of rational choice frameworks is that they are tautological, Coleman's framework rather aspires to tautology but is forced to remain on the level of substantive claims and a methodology that tells us the following: first appeal to "dirty-objective" interests; when this fails, appeal to norms created to solve problems; when that fails, appeal to integrative/identification processes in the interests of actors; when all else fails, appeal to ideology. This is dearly a methodologically arbitrary procedure that Coleman,


somewhat like Durkheim, uses to maximize the fit of the world to his model.

RETREATS FROM THE SUBSTANTIVE HUNCH

Weak Theories, then, offer an image or heuristic to come to grips with the Substantive Hunch but do not involve any constraints on what type of theoretical arguments can be made. Strong Theories do, but such Theories are inevitably marred by a reliance upon undemonstrable but nonaxiomatic claims. Even the reader convinced of this, however, will not fail to recognize that many sociologists often thought of as Theorists cannot be fit under either of the categories "Weak" or "Strong." First of all, it is possible for Theorists to emulate Comte and scorn any attempt to make their third-person account intuitively understandable, which I am calling "positivist" in this sense only. Such approaches have evidently become appealing in recent years, due to a curious theoretical animus against the person. One important example is the Systems Theory of Luhmann ([1984] 1995). Luhmann is far from anxious at the thought that his rejection of the first-person concepts of subject and action will alienate those "who have been inspired by the classics of sociology and see in them the essentials of all sociological analysis." Instead of seeking to link his explanation to our first-person understanding, according to which our actions are internally motivated (Merton's "manifest" functions), he dismisses this perspective as an attributional artifact. By rejecting the person, he rejects the correlative question of social order, and hence does "not... offer a theory of society." Consequently, he happily accepts that his efforts will not have an intuitive accessibility to persons: "We must rely on our instruments [i.e., like an airplane pilot at night]. Occasionally, we may catch glimpses below of a land with roads, towns, rivers and coastlines that remind us of something familiar," but in general, we will not feel "at home" here {Luhmann [1984] 1995, xxxviii, xliv, 1,4).24

Harrison White's recent work also begins from a principled rejection of first-person concerns, which White, like Luhmann, also sees as involving the abandonment of the Substantive Hunch. "Effective theory of social relations is hindered by assuming that social action comes only from individual biological creatures—humans—as a consequence of their nature and consciousness as persons. This mirage of


the person as an atom breeds an obverse mirage of society as an entity" (White 1992, 3). Instead of beginning with persons, White (pp. 3,196) begins from formal characteristics of social organization that can occur on multiple levels and only quite late derives persons as overlaps between identities. While White is accordingly able to achieve a degree of formalization without fudges that is far beyond (hat of the theorists we examined above, it is unsatisfying to the extent that it does not make one see the reason for order. And again like tuhmann's work, because of the rejection of first-person understand-ability as a criterion of successful explanation, White's Theory is largely indecipherable to the general reader.25

This discussion of a new positivist response to the Substantive Hunch rounds out the treatment of the categories produced in Figure 1. But not all theorists whom we see as sociological are encompassed in this schema, because there are in addition other strategies that I am terming retreats from the Substantive Hunch. From the point Of view of one struggling with the contradiction of Strong Theory, there are three forms of this retreat, {See Figure 2 for a schematic representation.) The Brst form (labeled retreat via denial of society) is to compromise on providing a third-person Theory of society, in essence by denying the Substantive Hunch itself. This is seen in Theories that restrict themselves to interactions that are "close enough" to the individual first-person perspective as not to require any interpretive dislocation. In essence, the Theorist says, "Don't worry about why society seems to have a life of its own, just deny its existence and don't look up." The second form (retreat into heuristic) is to compromise on making the nature of social order understandable by relying on the heuristic adequacy of a first-person vision that is not defended as actual. In essence, the Theorist says "the Substantive Hunch can be understood as if...." The third form (retreat into normativity) combines elements of both, for it provides only a hypothetical unification of first- and third-person perspectives that has meaning only in a different—and nonexistent—world. In essence, the Theorist says, "Were things the way they should be, order would reflect our decisions as follows ...." I conclude by briefly discussing each of these.

The Denial of Society: Network and Interaction-Based Theories

Over the past 30 years, a new approach in sociological theory has come up with a radical solution to the question of the Substantive Hunch and that is to deny it altogether. Those associated with this

Martin/ON THE LIMITS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY 211

Does the Theory Attempt to "make sense" via a First Person ("why") Account?No Yes Pseudo- Sense

No Does the Theory Attempt to Explain Social

(No Theory of Society) WEAK THEORY Examples: The "other" DwUieim, Simmel, Qiddens, Bourdieu

Order via a Third Yes Person ("how") Account?

POSITIVISM Examples: Comte, Luhmann, H. White

STRONG THEORY Examples: Durkheim, Parsons and Shils. Coleman

RETREAT INTO HEURISTIC Example: Weber

Pseudo-Explanation RETREAT VIA DENIAL OF SOCIETYExample: Ethnomethodology, Somers, Lawler etai.

RETREAT INTO NORMATIVITY Example: Habemus

Figure 2: Retreats from the Substantive Hunch

approach look at a "level" in between the two poles that most sociological Theory tries to unite and claim that no theoretical insight is lost by ignoring the idea of "society." For one, network theories refuse to be baited by the Substantive Hunch. They replace "society" with networks or nested levels of networks (see recently Lawler, Ridgeway, and Markovsky 1993; cf. Somers 1993,595). The neatness of the argument and the simplicity of the terms, as well as the basic reasonableness, can make us think that something really has been solved and forget that the real questions driving sociological Theory have not been a formal problem—"How can we produce a set of theoretical terms that span different levels of analysis without absurd simplifications"— but ^.substantive one. To deny the significance of society (not as system but as lived experience) and replace it with a formal maxim to look at networks (which is in no sense a theory) is purely a retreat.

A second version of this denial is found among ethnomethod-ologists, who may appeal to its principle of "ethnomethodological indifference" (Garfinkle 1988,107) to suspend their belief in the existence of social order per se (here I follow the argument made by Hilbert [1990]). In a word, while others assume the existence of some


sort of social order that requires explanation, ethnomethodologists prefer to analyze those who believe in this order without thereby so believing themselves. But while there is something appealing in replacing "society" with the virtual society formed by ethnomethods (indeed, it has some clear affinities to Weak Theory but collapses the dialectic of institutionalization to a single moment), ethnometho-dology is as a result fated to find the same thing over and over again, namely its presupposition that society is simply the virtual result of compounded ethnomethods. They insist that the lack of a third-person account of society is not a theoretical failure but itself constitutes a bold theoretical claim; without taking a position on this, one can recognize that it does mean an abandonment of the project of explaining the Substantive Hunch.26

Both these variants, then, only give a pseudo answer to the nature of social order, for they are not as silent as Weak Theory (which provides only an aesthetically pleasing vision), but neither do they touch the Substantive Hunch that there is some transcendent level of order. Their accounts are eminently accessible to a first-person understanding, but they fall short of providing a Theory of Society. In contrast is the retreat into heuristic, which gives a detailed framework for the analysis of social regularities but only offers a pseudo answer to the question of first-person understanding.

The Retreat to Heuristic: Weber

The most important retreat to heuristic is that of Max Weber. While Weber, unlike Durkheim, had no tolerance for the Comtean/ organismic analogy,27 he still confronted the basic problem of relating tile social order to the individual; he was, after all, equally concerned with concrete human institutions and their interrelations. But while the French school got to institutions from above, namely as organs in the whole, Weber got to them from below, through individual action. It was clear to Weber that institutions could not simply be seen as the aggregate of individual acts. To do so made no sense, for the orientations of actors were often obviously different from what might be judged to be the orientation of the institution. Weber would neither simplify away social reality as being merely the sum of individual actions (as did Coleman), nor would he mystify the nature of social reality by intoning significantly that it was real.™

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Instead, Weber retreated into heuristic. He claimed that we can understand the institution by imputing an abstract action orientation to it, even though this may be different from the individual orientations of individual acts composing this institution. The concept of an institution, or more generally, of any of Weber's "generalizing" ideal types (in contrast to the historical, following the terminology of von Schelting), is thus formed not by the simple (and universal) process of selective abstraction, that is, choosing to look at some of the infinite characteristics of the world and not others, but by an extrapolation from this particular "pure type" of orientation to action (Weber 1978, 4). Weber's ideal-typical form of the institution (e.g., a form of household, business enterprise, state, taxation system, legal system, etc.) thus assumes that the conduct regularized in the institution is consistent with regard to its orientation. This allows us to study the social on the level of the social without, for the time being, reference to concrete individual acts (though of course the actual empirical study makes reference to these acts).

The crucial point, then, is that Weber justified the construction of these ideal types based on imputed orientations heuristically, not ontologically. (In contrast, Durkheim also employs types but argues that they are ontologically justified.) Appeal to the inherently provisional and heuristic nature of all scientific theories has been used to mask the radical nature of Weber's solution. Weber's retreat to heuristic meant that he, unlike other sociological theorists, does not provide a substantive picture that lets us make sense of social order in general. We only have a "pseudosense"—were these assumptions true, there would be a clear relation between social order and individual in-tentionality, and though they're not true, it still works. We are left with the question of why, if the imputed subjectivity may differ from those of the actors in question, does the method still work? What is this unexperienced subjectivity, this "pure" as opposed to "actually existing" meaning of an act? Of course, Weber never intended to provide a sociological Theory of Society—to help people "come to grips" with the Substantive Hunch—and he is not being taken to task for failure in that regard. On the contrary, it is probably "no accident" that perhaps the greatest sociological theorist never came up with a Theory of Society. By adopting the/orm of explanation without any explanatory content—that is, by the retreat into heuristic—he could remain fresh as a significant sociological theorist while never directly addressing the most central concern of the sociological imagination.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / June 2001

The Failed Retreat into Normativity and Heuristic: Habermas

Finally, we could not conclude this discussion without at least mentioning one of the most influential works in current social Theory, the theory of communicative action of Jiirgen Habermas. Habermas is a fining end point of the discussion for his work captures all of the essential contradictions arising from the impossible nature of the Strong version of the sociological project, despite the fact that he explicitly recognizes the problem of the Substantive Hunch as central for sociological theory and deliberately tries to avoid contradictions by retreating into normativity (and also into heuristic). Hence, he not only offers a pseudo-first-person account (by denying the reality of his derivations and emphasizing their heuristic nature) but also a pseudo-third-person account (by claiming to chart the good, not the actual, society). Let us briefly examine how Habermas, who begins with the centrality of the project of explaining the Substantive Hunch, ends up with all the defects of Strong Theory, without any of theadvantages.

Habermas specifically faults Luhmann's systems theory for what I have termed its positivism, that is, its lack of concern with translating its concepts to "the internal perspective of the lifeworld-bound self-understanding of system members." In stark contrast to Luhmann, Habermas believes that "the fundamental problem of social theory is how to connect in a satisfactory way the two conceptual strategies indicated by the notions of 'system' [i.e., order behind our backs and over our heads] and 'lifeworld' [i.e., the world we understand ourselves to inhabit]." Habermas connects these with the externalist and internalist approaches—that is, the human as object versus subject— which is clearly equivalent to the project of explaining the Substantive Hunch to first-person minds. Since he confidently believes that the "counter-intuitive knowledge of the social sciences" is basically sufficient to the task of the externalist approach (here see the recent critique of Schwinn [1998]), he need only modify it slightly and tie it to the internalist approach. Habermas attempts to do this with a Strong developmental account that builds on Durkheim, Mead, Weber, and Parsons (Habermas 1987, 284,151,153,173, cf. 200f).

Like all Strong Theorists, Habermas must stack the deck through convenient definitions, but he attempts to justify these tendentious substantive claims by making disclaimers as to their ontological status and referring to his central tenets as "hypotheses" as if their hypothetical status were irrelevant for the argument. But at the same time


as he claims to only discuss the "structural aspects" of supposed historical developments, the factuality of which he does not feel able to support, he repeatedly indicates the significance of such historical factuality, and, needless to say, his main claims are empirical ones not analytical conventions. He must therefore repeatedly make provisional conclusions that depend on the degree to which his analysis is approximated by reality (for examples, see Habermas 1987,107, 86, 88, 77,231,90,91,144,148,196,383).

Thus, like the Strong Theorists, Habermas inserts strong substantive assumptions at the crucial points in the argument, such as that the history of language is preserved in the formal structure of the speech act, or that the historical formations assumed by Durkheim actually existed. Furthermore, by attempting to answer the "Why?" questions, Habermas too ends up falling into apologetics by making society definitionally a legitimate order and inventing a fictitious entity whose needs justify the commonly existing forms of domination: "Every society has to face the basic problem of coordinating action: how does ego get alter to continue interaction in the desired way? How does he avoid conflict that interrupts the sequence of action?" But of course, it is not ego who needs to ensure that nothing changes— it is master. While he attempts to qualify this by remarking that the above holds "so long as they are not oriented egocentric ally to their own success but to mutual understanding," he undermines his use of such ego-transcending orientations as the test of good communicative behavior by recognizing that those with power can set the collective goals (Habermas 1987,62,138,179,262,271). So while studiously avoiding every claim that this or that extravagant historical process really took place, Habermas finds himself telling us that society just is this and that; therefore the Order that exists is sensible, if not (yet) perfect.

Because of his repeated qualifications that some of his claims are merely "hypotheses," it is sometimes difficult to determine whether they are necessary to the structure and whether they are axioms, but Habermas clearly introduces a fudge at a crucial nexus. As signal language becomes grammatical speech—more or less when we become human—and we get a new form of communication that can have the three moments of truth, legitimacy, and honesty, the generic speaker must suddenly become the "chief" of the tribe, that is, one who has the right to command, a right which thus must precede the formation of the communicatively structured lifeworld. But as it is, this lifeworld that has the exclusive ability to legitimate this right (Habermas 1987,25),

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the link between the lifeworld and system, between the is and the ought—indeed, between the first and second volume of Habermas's work—hangs on this sleight of hand, in which a substantive fudge is necessary to escape from a logical circle.

BRIEF REFLECTIONS

We have seen that any attempt to give a theoretically coherent explanation of society that includes both substantive statements regarding how social order operates and why it is there in the first place is inherently unstable and requires the introduction of undemonstrable but nonaxiomatic claims at the critical juncture between these two types of explanation. These "fudges," as I have called them, undermine the Theory's claim to be anything more than a set of at best philosophically consistent abstractions and generalizations (as opposed to, say, a deductive analytic vocabulary). The difficulties in such Strong Theory lead to five responses, all of which can be envisioned as a movement away from the cell representing Strong Theory in Figure 2. Three of these I termed retreats from the challenge to explain the Substantive Hunch of transindividual order to individual minds, in that they do not wholly deny the importance of this project but try to make opportunistic redefinitions as to what constitutes a decent explanation to allow them to escape the problems that beset Strong Theory. These redefinitions do not seem to me to be compelling from either a logical or (as Weber would say) a "human" point of view.

The other two options are more principled: one simply rejects part of the dual task of explanation. That response that I have termed posi-tivist in that it rejects explanation as involving an answer to the question "but why?" might seem to assume most favored status since it allows for theoretical rigor as opposed to the vague imagery of Weak Theory. Yet, we need to ask ourselves what is truly gained when intuitive accessibility (that is, Anschaulichkeit) is sacrificed. Do any of our theoretical productions lead to startling new abilities to control social forces (the sociological analogy to the technological advance that justifies scientific positivism)? Are new methodologies derived from theoretical principles? Are fields of research truly cultivated that would otherwise have lain fallow?

If, as I imagine, we have a difficult time defending a positive response to any of these, then we must conclude that Weak Theory is the best we can hope for. It can allow us to satisfy our intellectual curi-


osity enough to turn our attention to other theoretical investigations without being misled (as is often the case with Strong Theories) into thinking that our adoption of some Theory of Society has implications for our development of particular sociological theories, let alone that we can then ignore theories, and even facts, that do not find a place in that Theory. "There is nothing," wrote George Meredith, "that so blinds a man as a good theory." But the dialectic of institutionalization that lies at the heart of all Weak Theories carries no such blinders with it; while it is indeed Weak, the attempt to go further is doomed from the start.

NOTES

1. While the pre-Smithian discussions of the conflicting passions did focus on material interests, and therefore were substantively economic, they did not involve a separation of economic order from political order. For example, Mandeville's argument in The Fable of the Bees, that private vices such as love of ostentation could lead to public goods (opulence through high employment), is predicated on the politician's skilled hand in making this connection (Hirschman 1977,18).

2. On Comte's use of the organismic metaphor in contrast to others', see Levine (1995).

3. Thus, not only is the distribution of goods analogous to nutrition but these goods ultimately come from either the land or the sea, "(the two breasts of our common Mother)", adds Hobbes ([1651] 1909,189).

4. This is in contrast to Spencer (e.g., 1910,265,278,312), who—when push came to shove—always admitted that there was only an "analogy" or "metaphor" between individual and social organisms. Spencer was interested in the idea that life displayed self-similarity, that is, that the same basic laws (outlined in his First Principles [Spencer 1915]) held on multiple levels of analysis, and hence he lacked Comte's incentive to collapse levels. But compare Stark (1962, 30f, 35, 42) for a somewhat different take on Spencer.

5. This qualification does not detract from the argument of this article, for these exceptions are exceptions in that they are either not sociological or are not (capital T) Theory.

6. It is important to distinguish this claim from claims by neo-Kantians like Nagel (1979, 196-213; 1986, 29-37; 1995, 101) who also employ the opposition between first-person and third-person accounts. Such philosophers, following Kant (e.g., [1785] 1938, 72, 77, 81, 83), emphasize the irreducibility of first-person self-understandings, including the existence of such faculties as will and moral freedom, to third-person causa! accounts (the law of necessity). While of course there is an affinity in Sociological Theory between freedom and first-person accounts on one hand (since manifest functions are compatible with, though do not require, freedom of the will) and necessity and third-person accounts on the other (since latent functions seem to move us about with-outus willing them to), the two are not the same, forit is the Substantive Hunch of social order, and not the hunch of moral freedom, that sociologists try to reach. Hence, while

218 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SO^ICES/June 2001 Martin / ON THE LIMITS OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY 219

Kantians emphasize that one cannot disprove the necessity of first-person accounts, and—somewhat loosely—that mind isn't simply brain, I argue that sociologists can quite gracefully ignore first-person accounts in favor of third-person accounts but thai they cannot gracefully wed the two.

7. In his critique of Parodi, who argued that morality was becoming increasingly rational, Durkheim ({1910] 1986,187) argued that "All moralities have their own rationality. All moral forces have their own reality. All are natural and consequently rational, like the rest of nature." Contemporaries took Durkheim to task for such statements, and the force of their critique evidently bothered him. In his fascinating debate on positive morality with Belot, Durkheim ([1908] 1979: 57) argued against Belot's claim to find a positive morality in the reflexivity of society and therefore a morality that transcends the dominant morality at any time, without thereby being fundamentally arbitrary, which Durkheim saw as contradictory. Belot queried whether Durkheim was asking "How it arises that rationality can determine the ends, the rules of action, other than those which are already present in the real." Durkheim answered: "I am raising the objection which has often been made to me, and I should be happy to see whether you are better able than I am to reply to it." (Belot's deft reply: "It is precisely in order to avoid the force of that objection that I have never wished to adopt the purely sociological point of view.")

8. Holmwood and Stewart's point is that this is a general flaw in at least one tradition of sociological Theory; they are, however, most decisive in their critique of Habermas. Since Habermas's system/lifeworld distinction maps onto the Kantian phenome-non/noumenon bifurcation (system is, emotively if not definitionally speaking, that area in which we are determined by general laws as opposed to being determining actors), in showing that these problems reappear within each of Habermas's halves, Holmwood and Stewart demonstrate that even a neo-Kantian definitional save does not allow one to reach the Substantive Hunch.

9. Durkheim here seems to have been influenced by Schmoller; see Durkheim ([1887] 1987,199). This notion of explanation through crystallization is of course also found in Spencer's (1910,20,24,104) analysis of the origin of ceremony as the formalized residue of what were once meaningful interpersonal actions.

10. Durkheim ([1900] 1981,1060), usually the exponent of the virtues of crystallization, took the opposite tack in trying to paint Simmel's version of the dialectic of insti nationalization as overly formalistic:

Structure itself is revealed in society's becoming and one can only illuminate it on the condition of not losing sight of this process of becoming. It [social structure] is constantly becoming and changing [forming and breaking down]; it is life having crystallized itself to a degree; and to distinguish it from the life from which it derives or the life that determines it amounts to dissociating inseparable things.

As we shall see below, Durkheim unfairly uses Simmel's own intuition against him. Of course, it is Simmel's own fault that he is often taken as the archetype of formal theory, (e.g., Mannheim (1929J1936,278), but I suspect that Durkheim's rather rancorous treatment of Simmel's work (e.g., his [(1902) 1980,98] offhand dismissal of Simmel's Philosophy of Money as "bastard [bdlard] speculation") comes from their similarities as much as their differences.

11. As in Hegel's ([1807] 1949,182-95) "play of forces."12. And this is why Durkheim criticized Simmel's version of the dialectic of

institutionalization (see note 10)—Simmel implied that social life was fundamentally changed by being crystallized, and thus form was separable from content. In criticizing this conclusion, Durkheim deliberately cast Simmel as a cold formalist, which was a perverse injustice akin to blaming the messenger, especially perverse because unlike Simmet, Durkheim (as we have seen) welcomed the effects of this crystallization for the scholar.

13. Finally, it is worth pointing out that like Habermas (1987, 202, 233, 301), Bourdieu suggests that we had to have a society with truly objectified social relations that seem to reproduce themselves behind the backs of actors before we could have true sociology (as opposed to the individualistic type of theory of Hobbes, where people continuously produce social life of their own efforts). In other words, Bourdieu agrees that sociology as a distinctly modern enterprise is about explaining the Substantive Hunch of social order sui generis.

14. Spencer not only tried to integrate the individualistic-lev el mechanisms of competition into his theory of general development but he held an epistemology that treated abstractions as abstractions, only useful when they could be tied to the individual-level understanding by a clear series of comprehensible steps.

15. Durkheim had early on taken arms against what might be seen as the "action" view of social sciences, emphasizing that much of our "action" was not a means to a goal:

How many times we act without knowing the purpose of our action!... What is more, it is highly contentious whether or not all our actions have a conscious goal. Changes arise in societies (no less than in individuals) which have causes but no ends—something which is analogous to Darwin's individual variations. (Durkheim [1887] 1987, 206)

16. Here Durkheim—like other members of the French schools of social statistics— confused the intriguing work on the stability of averages, associated with the "law of large numbers," and the shared (the intersection of many particular sets). (This confusion goes back to their intellectual precursor, Rousseau, in his discussion of the general will.)

17. Even the sympathetic Radcliffe-Brown (1952,182) had to state, "Probably there is no sociologist who will hold that Durkheim really succeeded in establishing an objective basis for a science of social pathology."

18. An excellent and sympathetic discussion of Parsons's attempt to make the linkage between the problem of order and the orientations of actors is given in Habermas (1987, especially 208, 214, 217, 234, 237, 241f, 283).

19. The reader generally realizes at this point that it is unclear whether what is being described is something that happened a long time ago to create society or something that continually happens to generate society anew. The language of equilibria distracts us from this question, which is an important one; as Maimonedes said, the properties of things once they are created are entirely different from their properties when they are being created, and by ignoring this difference, Parsons's pleasing account is, like that of Coleman we will encounter shortly, a just-so story. Parsons, of course, tics a concrete


theory of child socialization to this general theory, but this is no way resolves the problem as to the ontological nature of this account.

20. Curiously, Parsons and Shils (1956,191) do make a brief note along these lines but seem to muddle things even more: they speak of alter being gratified by "ego's conformity with expectations or transcendence of them"—in other words, they assume a positive content to all expectations such that an increase in volume (such as my boss being even bossier than I expected) is itself pleasurable. After writing this, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Wrong (1994,68) explicitly includes the Pleasant Surprise as part of his theory of the development of expectations. Wrong himself tends to stay with the Weak version of the formation of sociation through expectation a la Spencer (see Wrong 1994, 48, 52), which avoids the specific problems of Parsons's version but still has the just-so story quality of using examples regarding the formation of expectations between two people living in the same society (and therefore sharing understandings as to what actions communicate commitment) as the explanation of the formation of that very society. But this paradox is inherent in the nature of the attempt, and Wrong should be singled out only for the grace with which he handles this problem, not the problem itself.

21. Though it is worth noting that here Coleman is quite close to Hobbes's own insistence that liberty and constraint—including force—were not inconsistent.

22. It is this war of all against all, as opposed to the generalization of primary sociative bonds, that is the paradigmatically social situation for Coleman; he even goes beyond Hobbes (who apparently exempted the family from the war of all against all and hence saw no need for contracts between parents and children to generate paternal authority) in positing that parents and children agree to the price of mowing a lawn on the basis of ever-present threats of violence. At the same time, one must concede that Coleman (1990,65) does begin his discussion of authority relations with an analysis of the Family—the Manson Family.

23. The other weakness is his sophisticated problematization of the self, but space forbids an analysis of this.

24. While he claims this results from the necessity of rejecting any theoretical grounding in the "subject," due to the inconsistencies that arise given the privileged (indeed, solipsistic) epistemological position of the subject, it seems likely that the same formal characteristics hold for his Theory, given the definition of the environment as all that is not (one epistemologically privileged) system. If intersystemic analysis is possible, it is not clear why intersubjective analysis is out of the question.

25. Hence the appreciative critique that Identity and Control will be the most influential theoretical work in America in a decade, once it is translated into English.

26. Indeed, it is worth noting that Garfinkel (1988,104ff) explicitly (and with great satisfaction) points to the inability of Strong Theory to unify its account and explain the existence of actually occurring social order, an explanation that Garfinkel accurately calls "analytic sociology's big prize." Discussing the work of Parsons, Garfinkel makes the basic argument that Parsons was unable to join his analytic scheme with those actions which he was able to describe "concretely," which is more or less the same argument I have made above (albeit in somewhat more opaque prose).

27. See his wonderful remarks on the spleen at the beginning of Economy and Society and his more serious discussion of the limitations of organismk thinking (Weber 1978, 15).

Martin / ON THE LIMITS OP SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY 221

28. As Levine (1995,260) points out, Weber said he decided to call himself a sociologist in order to combat the metaphorical connections that were used to justify supra-individual entities.

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