Is society a “thing apart”? Ontological assumptions of the anti-sociological discourse

Josep Maria BechUniversity of Barcelona

ABSTRACT

This paper intends to prove that present-day social and historical thought questions in manifold ways the actual existence of society and that each of these ontological commitments is ancillary to a particular epistemic viewpoint. In that respect, several varieties of anti-sociological discourse can be discerned either within social science or fostered by cultural and historical doctrines. Their shared purpose has been to dismiss the ontological soundness of terms like “society” or “the social” (they merely designate reified totalities and thus are ontologically void), but they pose the problem of locating the common ground of their ontological skepticism. To tackle it we have surveyed the multiple strands of the current anti-sociological discourse, independently of their origin (inside or outside sociology), their focus (culturalist or historiographic), their procedural tool (mentalism or textualism), their favored topology (privacy or publicness), their source of efficiency (agentic or structural), and their actual scope (micro or macro). Our scrutiny reveals that, whereas all surveyed doctrines put in doubt the ontological consistency of the term “society”, their particular ontological concern tends to recede in favor of a prevailing epistemic commitment.

1. The chief commitments of the anti-sociological discourse. An overview

Though the term “anti-sociology” was coined by Helmut Schelsky in 1959, this event was only the academic recognition of a persistent and widespread “anti-sociological discourse” that had been developing both within and outside sociology and which is still effective in our days. During more than a century, indeed, this challenging way of thinking has been steering the course of social thought.

In general terms, the denomination “anti-sociology” designates a broad-gauged critical standpoint that has attained a high degree of visibility in our time, as the current cries of “the death of the social” attest. This rise has been deftly summarized by Peter Wagner by pointing out that sociology “had its heyday during the 1950s and 1960s, [when] hardly any text on sociological epistemology could be

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found that did not—implicitly or explicitly—insist on the principled superiority of sociological knowledge. By the 1990s, it had become common to criticize the lack of distinction between sociological and other knowledge of the social world […]. At the same time, the very existence of ‘social structures’, and to an ever greater extent their determining impact on human action, is doubted.”1

The designation “social structures”, in other words, might be ontologically void according to a widespread contemporary viewpoint. To elucidate the protracted rise of this ontological agnosticism in regard of “the social”, we will focus our attention on the episodes in the history of social and cultural thought that form a long-standing anti-sociological discourse. Its contentions have sprung both from within the ranks of sociology and from outsider thinkers. As Klaus Lichtblau2 observes, “the attempts to criticize sociology have been supported by quite different motives”, and it matters little “whether these criticisms have been raised by the very practitioners of that discipline or by outside observers”. What has been at stake, Lichtblau adds, is whether this critical attitude “implies a basic dismissal of modern sociology as an independent science” or, on the contrary, it is “an attempt to set up and vindicate a truly alternative brand of sociology”. Most importantly, the controversies that have plagued the history of sociology, whether emerging from inside the discipline or generated by an exogenous source, have been fought first and foremost over issues of social ontology and related aspects of sociological research.

Whereas the anti-sociological discourse that has developed within the discipline of sociology (or, at least, its disciplinary margins) has been flowing steadily and has focused on stabilized issues, the derogatory claims fostered by extra-sociological ways of thinking underwent a dramatic adjustment. At the start it consisted chiefly in criticisms responding to previous disapprovals from sociology’s ranks, of which the historian Charles Seignobos’ attacks, discussed below, against the sociologist François Simiand were a notorious instance. Yet these reactive beginnings soon gave way to a progressive acquisition of autonomy. Without prior provocations, an “exogenous” anti-sociological discourse has increasingly belittled the aims, the contentions and the procedures of social sciences. Above all, however, it has put in doubt the very reality of its subject-matter.3

1 Peter Wagner, “Sociology and contingency: historicizing epistemology”. Social Science Information 34/2 (1995), pp. 161 and 193.2 Klaus Lichtblau, “Soziologie und Anti-Soziologie um 1900”, in: Soziologie und Anti-Soziologie. Ein Diskurs und seine Rekonstruktion, ed. by P.-U. Merz-Benz and G. Wagner. Konstanz 2001: UVK, p. 17.3 Another crucial difference between the intra- and extra-sociologically originated discourses is that whereas agency was for the former a target among others, a great deal of the latter

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The “endogenous” anti-sociology, in its turn, insisted on the necessity of disbelieving the ontological pertinence of sociology. Since its beginnings, this discipline accepted that “a constitutive element of the social sciences is the controversy over their aims and procedures.”4 In its inception, the reductionist tendencies of mainstream sociology were the chief ontological tenet of anti-sociology. Reductionism was then viewed as a menace whose outcome would be the de-humanization of the world. As a reaction, most sociologists maintained that social facts are not soulless, rule-bound phenomena, explainable only by means of other social facts. Nor are human beings, in their opinion, role-bearing puppets governed by social norms and determined by external constraints.

In earlier times this restrictive standpoint within sociology was assumed unreflectively. (Outside the discipline, paradoxically, sociological reduction was often culturally explained and criticized. For instance, Ernst Robert Curtius interpreted this prospect of alleged de-humanization as “surrender before European nihilism” in his polemics with Karl Mannheim.5) Yet this ingrained anti-sociological animus was so pervasive that it singles out sociology as possibly the only science having faced a rigorous, institutionalized, long-term process of self-scrutiny. Its prevailing aims, as a result, were steadily challenged and this lack of inner consistency drastically redirected the course of the discipline. This in-built process of self-doubt affecting mainstream sociology, according to Peter Wagner, ensued from a “professional impairment” that was due to many causes. Foremost among them are “the imposition of an alien perspective, disregard for the knowledge of the observed, over-concern with rigor, operationalization and coherence at the expense of insight into the contexts of action and into the meaning with which actors endow their situations”.6

2. The established views of the anti-sociological discourse

2.1 The term “society” is ontologically a flatus vocis because it merely designates a reified totality

has increasingly seen agency as a prevailing untruth. In overview, the gain in autonomy of the anti-sociological discourse has paralleled its increasing dismissal of agency.4 Harald Homan, “Widergänger. Zur Aufklärung der Anti-Soziologie am Beispiel Friedrich Tenbrucks”, in: Soziologie und Anti-Soziologie. Ein Diskurs und seine Rekonstruktion, op. cit., p. 61.5 Ernst Robert Curtius, “Soziologie - und ihre Grenzen”, in: Der Streit um die Wissenssoziologie, ed. by V. Meja and N. Stehr. Frankfurt/M. 1982: Suhrkamp.6 In his commentary to Charles Lindbloom’s book Inquiry and Change (New Haven 1990: Yale Univ. Press), appeared on p. 148 of: Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity. London 1994: Routledge.

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Max Weber and Gabriel Tarde are the two outstanding proto-“anti-sociologists”. Either by doubting that society constitutes an underlying structural reality or by criticizing the notion of ontologically finished social wholes, they surmised that society, as a contemporary has put it, is merely “the sum total of the multiple and diverse relationships between subjectivities” through which “meaning arises”.7

According to Max Weber, indeed, “social” relationships are always “modes of action”. For instance, he described “communal” and “associative” social relationships, respectively, by means of the action-connoting terms of Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung. In accordance with his rejection of organic, holistic, reified conceptions of society, Weber developed an ideal-type of Sittlichkeit or morality to which “society” was ancillary. It entailed an ontologically-enfeebled model of society which saw in it a mere symbol of consensus. Weber held that individuals usually make a choice to act according to a moral (sittlich) code, and insofar society was in his view “nothing beyond a moral idea guiding the conduct of life”.8 To prevent any misunderstanding in this respect, Turner and Factor admit that “Weber does not, at least directly, attempt the heroic task of reducing Sitten to choice”. But they warn that at least “for the specific cases Weber has in mind, to say that one chooses to obey or treat political or legal orders as valid, or chooses the ideals one serves, is not inherently paradoxical”.9

Present-day anti-sociology, by contrast, has a quite different core concern. Its main plight is how to continue thinking in sociological terms in a historical time allegedly marked by “the end [or: the death] of the social”, a portmanteau formula that alludes to society’s thorny ontological consistency. The holders of this criticism agree with Peter Wagner in believing that “the social” amounts to the “particular perspective” developed by sociology in order to “mark its difference” as an alternative to “carving out a specific realm of social life”. In so doing, according to Wagner sociology “focused on sociality as a characteristic of human beings and, as a consequence of such sociality, on the emergence of a set of social relations between human beings, also called society”.10

7 Gareth Steadman Jones, “The Determinist Fix”, History Workshop Journal 42 (1996), p. 28.8 Vid. Liam Stone, “Max Weber and the moral idea of society”, Journal of Classical Sociology 10/2 (2010), pp. 123-136.9 Stephen P. Turner and Regis A. Factor, Max Weber. The Lawyer as Social Thinker. London 1994: Routledge, pp. 79-80.10 Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation. Cambridge 2008: Polity, p. 183.

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(Besides, the formula of “the end [or: the death] of the social” also laments the disappearance of the normative questions that an ontologically assured concept of society would pose. Its straightforward sociological meaning, accordingly, should be distinguished from its more “non-political” connotations. It is significant, in this respect, that in the 1990s Nikolas Rose theorized the “death of the social”11 choosing as subject-matter the erosion of the social logic that buttressed Western welfare states for much of the 20th century in the interest of new arrangements and procedures. According to Rose, indeed, “the social is no longer a key zone, target and objective of strategies of government”.12)

We have already alluded to the pioneer work of Gabriel Tarde as a significant strand of proto-“anti-sociology”. One of its crucial traits was the stress put on the remarkable degree of variation among and within social processes and the persistent contingency of all social outcomes. In so doing, Tarde presented an alternative to basic Durkheimian premises. In particular he challenged the belief on the existence of a social species which is supposed to transcend the contingency of history and provide an ontologically robust foundation for the social sciences. Besides, Tarde rejected as well the strong sociological conception of “the social”. He understood it as the assumed transcendental dimension that is laid out by sociology in order to think along universal premises. This “transcendental dimension” is ontologically troubling because it starts off, in Tarde’s view, the presumed necessity and universality of social science. In other words, it originate s the dismissal of heterogeneity and contingency that is quite customary within sociology.

In more recent times, Nikolas Rose has significantly contributed to clarifying the “death of the social”. He has concluded that “the social does not represent an eternal existential sphere of human sociality”. On the contrary, Rose contends, “its sets the terms for the way in which human intellectual, political and moral authorities, in certain places and contexts, thought about and acted upon their collective experience”. On the one hand, “sociology and all the social sciences would play their part in stabilizing the social as a domain sui generis”. On the other hand, however, “political forces would now articulate their demand upon the State in the name of the social”.13 It is important, therefore, to move from the assumption of an ontologically objective “society” to the description of how the category of “the social” was formed. In fact, the announcements of this “death of the social” have

11 Nikolas Rose, “The Death of the Social?”. Economy and Society 25/3 (1996), pp. 327-356.12 Ibid., p. 327.13 Ibid., p. 329. Italics in original.

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been lately so widespread that “the social” has only dared to come out in the moral domains of community and civil society.14

It should be mentioned, besides, that the denunciation of the allegedly un-scientific character of sociology has also been a recurrent motif in the anti-sociological discourse. It has been often claimed, indeed, that sociology cannot become a knowledge worthy of that name and thus it must renounce its scientific aspirations, embracing socio-political essayism or post-modern skepticism and nihilism.15 The ensuing attempts to reformulate the social paradigm imply the abandonment of both object and subject as the basic components of society. Their use as analytical concepts, in other words, is seen as no longer valid, and a focus on what might be called “constitutive categories of the social” is proposed instead.

Gabriel Tarde was also a precursor of this accusation of un-scientificness, sprung out of sociology’s own ranks. His defense of a radical anti-sociologism within social theory had the idea of a “pure sociology” as its main motif.16 It was grounded on the belief that “the relation of cause to effect, in fact, is not the only element which properly constitutes scientific knowledge”. The condition for a future-oriented sociology, according to Tarde, is to succeed “in substituting true repetitions, oppositions and harmonies for false ones, as all the other sciences have done before it.”17

In a nutshell, Tarde rejected Durkheim’s social holism and his search for social laws. He attempted instead focusing on elements of social interaction ontologically more basic than acting individuals. His innovative perception hinted at a radical disassembling of the social into sub- and supra-individual constructions. Bruno Latour has recently emphasized this originality by pointing out to the “two main arguments” that Tarde “introduced into social theory”: “a) the “nature and society” divide is irrelevant for understanding the world of human interactions; b) the micro/macro distinction stifles any attempt at understanding how society is being generated.”18

14 A suggestive genealogy of this “death process” is offered by: Jacques Donzelot, L’invention du social. Essay sur le déclin des passions politiques. Paris 1984: Fayard.15 See in this respect: Giovanni Busino, Critique du savoir sociologique. Paris 1993: PUF, and Wolf Lepenies, Die drei Kulturen. Soziologie zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft. Munich 1985: Hanser.16 Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation. Étude sociologique. Paris 1993: Kimé, reprint of the edition: Paris 1911: Alcan, p. 6.17 Gabriel Tarde, Les lois sociales. Esquisse d’une sociologie. Paris 1898: Alcan, pp. 10 and 11. Downloadable from: http://bibliotheque.uqac.uquebec.ca/index.htm

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2.2 The term “society” is ontologically a flatus vocis because all “sociologies” are prone to be agency-blind

The history of sociology is interwoven with an array of self-denying attitudes.19 While this “one-hundred-year-old tradition of criticism regarding sociology, which is a part of sociology itself”20 is a rarity among human disciplines, it is worth remarking that a number of these “anti-sociological” challenges wanted to rescue agency21 from sociological reductionism. In their view, human being’s “independence from society”22 was a capital issue23 and so the dispute over agency became a staple feature of mainstream anti-sociological discourse. At a given moment some upholders of agency seceded from sociology and declared themselves anti-sociologists, contending that human agency is to be retrieved and preserved, as Alan Dawe puts it, in the face of sociology’s “obsolete and imperious scientific pretension, which cuts us off from the world in which we are also members”.24 They argued instead that social science must elucidate how human action creates, reproduces and transforms the social structures and institutions that, in turn, shape the possibilities available to subsequent agents.25

Most anti-sociologists, however, suspected that in mainstream sociology the balance of this dynamics (the interplay of agency and structure, choice and constraint, freedom and fate) tilts in favor of structure and constraint. In this respect, both Friedrich Tenbruck and Helmut Schelsky contended that sociology contrives an impoverishment of the social by eliminating free choice. To understand 18 Bruno Latour, “Gabriel Tarde and the end of the Social”, in: The Social in Question. New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, ed. by P. Joyce. London 2002: Routledge, p. 117.19 A detailed account can be found in: Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “‘Anti-Sociology’ - A Conservative View on Social Sciences”. History of Sociology 5/2 (1985), pp. 45-60.20 Rehberg, “‘Anti-Sociology’”, op. cit., p. 53.21 In the present context, agency must be conceived in the established terms, according to which an agent is a locus of decision and action, and the action, in one way or another, follows from the actor’s decisions.22 Helmut Schelsky, Ortsbestimmung der Deutschen Soziologie. Düsseldorf 1959: Diederichs, p. 117.23 One of the most recurring anti-sociologist arguments admits that sociology was a legitimate science of a class-bound society typical of the 19th century, but also contends that the manifold improvements of society in the 20th century has made social science redundant. The locus classicus of this argument is: Helmut Schelsky, Ortsbestimmung der Deutschen Soziologie. Düsseldorf 1959: Diederichs. An alternative position was Tenbruck’s assertion that society developed thanks to the dissolution of originally autonomous units: free cities, status groups, feudal authorities, old universities, guilds, etc.24 Alan Dawe, “Theories of Social Action”, in: A History of Sociological Analysis, ed. by T. B. Bottomore and R. Nisbert. London 1979: Heinemann, p. 409.25 “Classical” anti-sociology, in sum, wanted to preserve (or recover) the “modernity” of sociology one way or another, thereby understanding, in Peter Wagner’s expression, that “sociology was ‘modern’ in the sense that it accepted the assumptions and outcomes of the revolutions: there was an autonomy of human action that could not be subjected to imposed laws”. (Cf. Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation, op. cit., p. 183.)

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the ontological dimension of such impoverishment, and thus to gauge the ontological purport of the anti-sociological discourse, it seems worthwhile to pit Schelsky’s position, outwardly uninterested in ontological issues, against Tenbruck’s far more ontologically-involved point of view.

To begin with, Helmut Schelsky took an externalist stance and insisted on gaining a standpoint in “a horizon of meaning placed outside sociology”.26 His anti-sociological program was both a rejection of a sociology that had forsaken its enlightening vocation, and a personal commitment (one of his last works was titled Back glances of an anti-sociologist [Rückblicke eines Anti-Soziologen]) to a specific blueprint for the future of the discipline.27 Above all, he feared that sociology might become a key science of the 20th century. In his view, a sociology able to control social change would shape the self-conception of a huge amount of people. Norms relative to social conditions would then replace all rules of personal ethic and foster a view of people as mere products of their social environment. The ultimate meaning of individual action would then be solely understood through the prism of social norms.

Friedrich Tenbruck, on the contrary, adopted an internalist point of view, far more attuned to the ontological tenets of anti-sociology. His peculiar brand of cultural sociology, inspired by Max Weber and occasionally presented as an alternative to Schelsky’s trademarked “anti-sociology”, suggested a self-reflective dive in the historical and cultural dimensions of society. In fact, Tenbruck extended the tendency to place sociology in a general historic-political context that had been started by Treitschke, Weber and Simmel. He contended that sociology had somehow “created and formed”28 the very society it purports to investigate. Social

26 Schelsky, Ortsbestimmung der Deutschen Soziologie, op. cit., p. 98.27 Anti-sociology can also be read along the lines established by Peter Wagner. In his book Modernity as Experience and Interpretation (Cambridge 2008: Polity) he argues that in the late 19th century intellectual, political and institutional configuration, “the ground was certainly prepared for an interpretation of the contemporary social world that distanced itself from the prevailing national culture”. The proponents of the emerging sociology, indeed, in many cases “found abroad the resources to develop their views”. Consequently, says Wagner, sociology could either develop as a counter-discourse to the prevailing one in each national culture […] or these borrowings could have proliferated to such an extent that a truly international discourse of sociology emerged”. Nevertheless, “no fully international discourse emerged [and] instead we see intellectual struggles over the interpretation of the contemporary social situation”. Wagner concludes by pointing out to the “similar lines” along which we can read “the opposition to sociology that arose in many countries”. The protesters, in his view, “were simultaneously making a case for a national tradition, their own, and against an opponent whose nation-transcending potential they well recognized—and feared”. (Ibid., pp. 180-182)28 Friedrich Tenbruck, “Der Neue Turm zu Babel”. Rheinischer Merkur of March 14, 1980, p. 23.

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theories, in a word, co-determine the very reality they attempt to possess intellectually. Their universalistic aim of “general statements, true for all societies”,29 according to Tenbruck could only yield an inhumane outcome. Sociology dissolves human beings in “data, factors, traits, indicators, functions, roles, behavior patterns” so that “there is no place left for the person”. Therefore, notions such as “responsibility, offence, obligation, duty, freedom, will and value standards” either are left aside or shrunk into jargon.30

3. The growth of anti-sociological discourse and its steady attainment of autonomy

An early instance of anti-sociological discourse sprang out of the historians’ disparagement of Durkheimian sociology and the ensuing counter-attacks, a debate where Charles Seignobos’ polemic with François Simiand occupied center stage. As is well known, disciplinary competition in early 20th century France fostered the attacks of historical researchers against the then budding social sciences. Émile Durkheim’s sociology, in particular, had been programmatically criticizing the historians’ procedures as presentist, individualist, nomophobic, and hence un-rigorous, antiscientific and inadequate. By contrast, he advocated positivist targets and a conception of theory that explained human demeanor in its totality. This antagonism started off a celebrated debate that confronted Simiand, a disciple of Durkheim, with Seignobos, a well-established professor of modern history. In Simiand’s view, historians are subservient of a superficial chronology, dependent on the ideology of the “origin”, too much bound to a political approach to events, and committed to an individualism that ignores collective attitudes or shared determining factors. The historians’s riposte by way of Seignobos’s arguments contended that the social sciences could not be objective, lacked any comprehensiveness in regard to human behavior, and suffered from the poverty of quantitative approaches. They denied, in sum, that sociology could be of any help to historiography. This debate prefigured the anti-sociological discourse as it has been practiced decades-long from outside sociology.

Seen from a more ontology-sensitive horizon of thought, however, “anti-sociology” means that “society” is an empty designation or, in other words, that this term just names a pseudo-reality. The consequences of this ontological restriction are quite dire for sociology, because doubting the reality ascribed to society involves in fact 29 Friedrich Tenbruck, Die unbewältigten Sozialwissenschaften oder Die Abschaffung des Menschen. Graz 1984: Styria, p. 180.30 Ibid., p. 38.

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the rejection of social science in toto. This wide-embracing standpoint, precisely, has led Volker Kruse to see “anti-sociology” as the “primary dismissal, affectually and/or rationally grounded, of sociology as science, its subject-matter, its methodology, and its cognitive ideal”.31 In particular, the wholesale rejection of sociology’s “subject matter” amounts to seeing in society an epiphenomenal, in-no-way-substantial pseudo-reality that must rely on something else for its very existence. Indeed an inchoate “anti-sociology” is already at work when society is seen as dependent and derivative. Then, of course, the very relevance of “social contexts” to all kinds of explanations is called into question.

Such questioning becomes aggravated when the formerly hegemonic “society-centered modes of explanation” face drastic revisionist currents that assign autonomy and constitutive authority to culture, language, institutions, or the state. Set in this wider prospect, therefore, the term “anti-sociology” registers the process that has been labeled “the dissolution of the social”.32 The alternative procedure, however, which consists in reifying “society” into the ontologically-warranted ground of social science explanations, according to most authors has become (in Charles Tilly’s words) the chief “Pernicious Postulate” of the 20th century social thought. Anti-sociology, in a few words, also endorses Tilly’s condemnation of, in his view, the capital offense committed by sociology: the postulate that “‘society’ is a thing apart”.33

Is “‘society’ a thing apart”, indeed? Max Weber notoriously said that whenever “the light of cultural problems moves on” new concepts will need to be built for that evolving world. One century ago he suggested that “objectivity” in the social sciences is possible as far as there is a relatively stable social world and, alongside it, a relatively common interpretation of that world.34 Since the times of classical anti-sociological theory, admittedly, the “light of cultural problems” has indeed “moved on”. In consequence, the anti-sociological attitude originated within

31 Volker Kruse, “Max Weber, der Antisoziologe”, in: Soziologie und Anti-Soziologie. Ein Diskurs und seine Rekonstruktion, op. cit., p. 38. (Our stress, JMB)32 See Scott Lash and John Urry, “The Dissolution of the Social”, in: Sociological Theory in Transition, ed. by M. Wardell and S. Turner. Winchester, Mass. 1986: Allen & Unwin, pp. 95-109.33 Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York 1984: Russell Sage Foundation, p. 11.34 In Weber’s wake, precisely, it has been argued (vid. Wagner in the chapter 9 of Modernity as Experience and Interpretation, op. cit.) that the history of sociology is a history of varieties of interpretations of modernity. The expectations of anti-sociology, in his view, arise from the relative consolidation of “organized modernity” between 1890 and 1960, which led to a separation of sociology as an academic discipline from philosophical and historical concerns.

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sociology has given way to a heterogeneous array of theories dismissing the very subject-matter of sociology which, for the most part, arise in extra-sociological domains.

In the sections that follow we shall prove that the ontological assumptions of the anti-sociological discourse are heavily dependent from one of the two separate branches, respectively of culturalist and historiographical bent, in which its revisionist thrust splits. Our guiding conviction in this task is that only a meta-theoretical overview may aid us to understand the ontological doubts regarding society, for we agree with Jeffrey Alexander and Jason Mast’s claim that meta-theories are “indispensable as an orienting device”, for they “think out problems in a general manner and, in so doing, provide more specific, explanatory thinking”. They are quite right, in our view, in stating that “the challenge is to move downward on the scientific continuum, from the presuppositions of meta-theory to the models and empirical generalizations upon which explanation depends”.35

4. The ontological assumptions of the anti-sociological discourse:the culturalist viewpoint

4.1 “High modern” cultural theories buttress the anti-sociological discourse

Redefining “the social” as “the cultural” has been a decisive trait of the anti-sociological discourse in several theoretical sectors during the past decades. The origins of this ontological revisionism are quite clear-cut. In the wake of the historicist tradition, enemy of both mechanisms (anti-nomothetism) and organicisms (anti-developmentalism), the classical “anti-sociological” argument fought the adoption by sociology of natural science’s metaphors and methods. By contrast, the main anti-sociological argument of present time highlights the difficulty of transiting from the un-meaningful, not-intentional social reality, to meaning-lead, understandable action. The ontological consequences of this precautionary attitude are quite at hand. It distrusts the naturalism-inspired probing into a social reality that might exist beyond or underneath culture. In this sense, the proponents of the “cultural turn” have often used the concept of discursive practice to discredit and challenge the legitimacy of social research.

35 Jeffrey C. Alexander and Jason L. Mast, “Introduction”, in: Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. by J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen and J. L. Mast. Cambridge 2006: CUP, p. 3.

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Social theory, as a result, has in part metamorphosed into cultural theory. From this new vantage point, the orderliness of the social world appears to be the upshot of symbolic structures. There is a tendency to understand “the social” as an exclusive result of individual-transcending symbolic orders like languages or discourses. After the “cultural turn”, as Andreas Reckwitz puts it, the social or material “functions as the ‘supplement’, as an element ‘added’ to something already complete in itself: to culture”.36 The anti-sociological standpoint of the culturalist mindset, incidentally, has found in the historian Roger Chartier a skillful supporter. In his view, mainstream sociology furnishes an inadequate account of social arrangements because it does not register the distance of any social practice from the cultural model that generates it. Chartier claims that the “differentiated appropriation” of pre-existent cultural models (which means “the same goods, the same ideas and the same gestures”) gives rise to the homologies that constitute the social groups and to which sociology has been steadily indifferent. He stresses the multiple ways in which a cultural model may be used and that, in his view, assist in re-defining cultural stratifications. On this score, he claims, “every dispositive of coercion and control generates an array of tactical moves that attempt to blunt and defuse it”.37

Despite all the differences in their conceptualization, what from now on we will name “high modern cultural theories”38 ascribe to “the social” no independent ontological reality. They see human actions as resulting from collective symbolic orders which themselves are in fact the last “foundation” of the so-called “social world” and thus cannot be derived from a more fundamental “social” stratum. For this “high modern culturalism”, in Reckwitz’s words, “the social is not separate from the cultural but largely is the cultural, i.e. it is identical with symbolic orders”.39 It is therefore not surprising that most cultural theories, according to this author,

36 Andreas Reckwitz, “The Status of the ‘Material’ in Theories of Culture”. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 32/2 (2002), p. 195.37 Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Princeton 1988: Princeton Univ. Press, p. 183. Most texts here asembled were originally published in: Roger Chartier, Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d’Ancient Régime, Paris 1987: Seuil.38 This happy denomination and its cousin “high modern culturalism” denote the doctrines that attempt to understand “the social” as an exclusive outcome of symbolic orders (languages, discourses, texts and the like) which transcend the individual human being and operate “behind his or her back”. They have been suggested by Andreas Reckwitz in: “Toward a Theory of Social Practices, A Development in Cultural Theorizing”. European Journal of Social Theory 5/2 (2002), pp. 243-263.39 Andreas Reckwitz, “The Status of the ‘Material’ in Theories of Culture”, op. cit., p. 203. Yet in other places this author mellows this drastic appraisal and moves away from maintaining that “cultural theorizing redefines the social as the cultural”. Indeed, he merely affirms on occasion that in cultural theories “social order appears embedded in collective cognitive and symbolic structures, in a ‘shared knowledge’ which enables a socially shared way of ascribing meaning to the world”. Cf. Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices”, op. cit., p. 246.

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“contrive to transform the theoretical field and the ways of thinking in the human sciences”. After all, they aim at “undermining the current assumptions, imposed by the social sciences, about a ‘pre-discursive’ level”. This is “the level of the pre-cultural, not-meaningful, formal, structural, material, or linked to an universal rationality, whether it emerges in the subject or actor, or in language, reason, power, economy, technology, human nature or social differentiation.”40 Since culture actually displaces society in cultural theorizing, it is fitting to conclude that this anti-sociological thrust ensures in fact the ontological disappearance of “the social”.41

4.2 “High modern” cultural theories re-locate “the social”

High modern cultural theorizing claims that there are no social properties or entities different from cultural properties or entities. All social features, in a word, can be “reduced to” cultural traits.42 The defenders of culturalism understand this reduction as being either “conceptual” or “scientific”. They view their theories as conceptually reductive when they claim that converting the usual descriptions of social entities and events into cultural descriptions entails a gain in accuracy without any loss of meaning. They deem their doctrines scientifically reductive when they avoid affirming that social and cultural phenomena correlate and maintain instead that a social fact is nothing more than a cultural event.43 The obvious ground for this reductive confidence has been the successes of reduction in the physical and natural sciences. Reduction has been there equally triumphant whether as eliminative reduction (the reduced notions no longer sustain any real meaning, as instanced by witches and phlogiston) or as retentive reduction (the meaning of the

40 Andreas Reckwitz, Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien. Zur Entwicklung eines Theorieprograms, 2nd ed. Göttingen 2008: Velbrück, p. 705.41 It is a remarkable paradox, however, that some currents of classical sociology came closer to overcoming the deficiencies denounced by the “cultural turn” than most of its upholders when they conceded that language is relatively autonomous in respect to the social reality it purports to represent, while claiming that human agency mediates this connection.42 In fact, “high modern” culturalists consider that the expression “is reducible to”, when applied to the social world, amounts to “is causally produced by” and hence comes to “is explained by”.43 In general, however, culturalist reductionism seems to contradict the current philosophical understanding of reduction, which applies when a new theory appears to be doing all the explicative work that in former times another theory carried out, albeit at a less elemental level. This was the case, for instance, when statistical mechanics managed to make intelligible Boyle’s law of the gases. Mainstream reductionism, indeed, from an ontological point of view is a deflationary procedure (which of course culturalist reductionism is not), since at bottom attempts to turn away from specific phenomena , at first sight essential in fulfilling the truth conditions of a given statement, in favor of other, more basic phenomena. For instance, the surmise that biological facts do not exist as such, led to reducing biology to chemistry, and a similar derogatory conviction concerning chemical facts contrived the reduction of chemistry to physics.

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reduced entities has been preserved somehow, as it happened, for instance, with temperature and genes). This means, in a few words, that reduction not necessarily amounts to ontological elimination.

This ambiguous result demands that we closely inspect the competing modalities of reduction that form the backbone of present-day anti-sociological discourse. As it is customary in the domain of the “hard sciences”, when exploring the reductive procedures of high modern cultural theory we must distinguish between eliminative and retentive reduction. From the viewpoint of eliminative reduction, “culturalist” concepts like symbolic or cognitive orders (discourse, language, text, etc.) render ontologically vacuous all sociological notions, which accordingly must be expelled from our vocabulary. When we speak of class, institution or role, for instance, we are not talking about anything ontologically real. As a consequence, we should drop all kinds of sociological vocabulary, replacing them by culture-related concepts. (Our “social” vocabulary should thus be pruned in the same way as notions like witches, electromagnetic ether, the planet Vulcan or the Martian channels were expelled in earlier times from our everyday or scientific vocabularies.44) According to retentive reduction, on the contrary, we may continue using “sociological” concepts on the condition that we understand them as mere “discourse”. This moderate reductionism is deftly exemplified by Geoff Eley and Keith Nield’s defense of classical sociological analysis. Granting the compatibility of the concept of “class” with prevailing discursive references, they affirm that “class discursively understood is a better starting point for the study of class formation than the classical ones of economics and social structure.” It should be borne in mind that, according to these authors, “class emerged historically as a set of discursive claims about the social world.”45

4.3 The ontological locus of “the social” in cultural theories

44 The anti-sociological discourse adopts this eliminative reductivism in the wake of dominant theories of the past that we now despise as false. For instance: the “crystalline” spheres of antique and medieval astronomy; the “humoral theory” in medicine; the theory of the “effluvia” to explain static electricity; the “catastrophist” geology to explain the Deluge; the “caloric” to explain temperature variations; the physiological “vital forces”; circular inertia; or spontaneous generation. Likewise, doctrines like alchemy or astrology do not deserve now any credit (their core concepts resist being reduced to those of established sciences) and thus most people agree that they must be eliminated.45 Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, “Farewell to the Working Class?”, International Labor and Working-Class History 57 (2000), pp. 18 and 19. Italics in the original.

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The major problem that “high modern” cultural theories have to face is setting up the place of “the social” in terms of symbolic and cognitive structures. No wonder, therefore, if as a consequence “the social” appears re-allocated in quite unexpected places or loci. The main re-assignments contrived by cultural theories46 are as follows: 1) According to culturalist mentalism (objectivist variety), the “social” is in the human mind, for mentalisms have given up the notion of “agents” in different ways. Mind or (pre)consciousness, therefore, replaces the role of the social agent. Mentalist objectivism rests upon the dualism between outward acts of behavior and mind as an internal self-producing array of schemes. 2) Culturalist mentalism (subjectivist variety) locates the “social” in the intentional acts of consciousness. In mentalist subjectivism, action results from consciousness and agents are ultimately intentional consciousnesses. In both cases, there is a problematic link between mind and action. 3) For culturalist textualism, on the contrary, the “social” is outside the mind. It dwells in chains of signs, symbols, discourse or simply “texts”. Textualism presents the agent as a specific cultural definition in discourse, as a discursive location of the subject or a simplifying inner-discursive ascription of social episodes to individual producers. 4) In its turn, intersubjectivism places the “social” in interactions, particularly those cast in ordinary language. The idea of an agent comes nearest to the classical (norm-oriented) theory of action, though in a linguistically enlightened version: agents are but interacting “communicators”. The foremost notion is that there are “agents” who in an assemblage of interactions follow pragmatic and semantic rules. 5) Practice theory locates the “social” is in a series of “nexuses of doings and sayings” (Theodor Schatzki dixit) appearing at different places and times and carried out by different bodies/minds. Social practices performed by agents inhabit primarily the social world. Agents, as it were, ‘consist in’ the execution of practices, which includes both bodily and mental routines. As carriers of a practice, they are neither autonomous nor judgmental dopes who conform to norms. On the contrary, they understand the world and themselves, and employ skilled and motivated knowledge. 6) Finally, according to actor-network theory the “social” dwells in a relational reality situated between human and material, non-human actors, all of them relationally constituted. As it is well-known, this doctrine does not distinguish a priori between humans (quasi-subjects) and “others” (quasi-objects).

46 The culture-theoretical cartography set out by Reckwitz in Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien, op. cit. inspires the following systematization of cultural theories.

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Let us examine in some detail these re-allocations of “the social” by the “high modern” cultural theories which form the culturalist branch of the anti-sociological discourse.

Objectivist mentalism as anti-sociology. Structuralism, applied to the social sciences by Claude Lévi-Strauss in paradigmatic way, is the branch of contemporary cultural theory that pre-eminently re-defines the social as the cultural. This mutation is so deep that it rules out an ontologically deeper “social” level from which symbolic orders could be derived. In Lévi-Strauss’ words, “social phenomena cannot be analytically isolated.”47 He claims that the place of symbolic orders is within the collective unconscious and, in consequence, the horizon of the social is identical with the horizon of collective mental qualities. “To decipher culture we must contrast the conscious and the unconscious dimension of phenomena. However, this opposition lacks symmetry and balance; whereas the conscious dimension acts as a static buffer for a multiplicity of unconscious elements, these express the dynamic character and also the inner cohesion of cultural systems.”48 Systems of signs are thus mental structures according to Lévi-Strauss. Since these classificatory schemes determine what can ever become an “object” within language and action, “culture remains the true enigmatic problem of the human sciences.”49 Lévi-Strauss affirms, in short, that there is a continuous link between the natural and the cultural orders and that in consequence “society” is a term devoid of ontological reference.

The real momentum of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist program is that it “placed ethnology at the centre of the human sciences, thereby reversing its traditional position of subordination to sociology.” It is so far-reaching, indeed, that “his proposal of a perspectival revolution would transform the very parameters of sociological theory.”50 The force of his claim, to be sure, should not be downplayed, since at bottom “he maintains that social phenomena are not analytically identifiable and that culture remains the truly enigmatic problem of the human sciences.”51

47 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “L’anthropologie devant l’histoire”. Annales 15 (1960), p. 630.48 Ibid., p. 637.49 Ibid., p. 630.50 Christopher Johnson, “Anthropology and sociology: from Mauss to Lévi-Strauss”. Modern and Contemporary France 5/4 (1997), p. 430.51 Angelo Torre, “Antropologia sociale e ricerca storica”, in: La storiografia contemporanea. Indirizzi e problemi, ed. by P. Rossi, Milan 1987: Saggiatore, p. 211.

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Discursive textualism as anti-sociology. Whereas for the theorist of agency the unintended consequences of action appear as a quandary, for Michel Foucault, whose earlier work has been predominantly interpreted as discursive textualism,52 this issue becomes a non-problem. He tackles it in terms of a relationship of non-correspondence between discourses, decisive for the formation of social reality and their historical effects. In his own words, we may “live in a world of programs, but the world does not follow a program”. In general terms, however, Foucault did not deny the possibility of explaining discursive practices by social determinations. In essence he contends that practices have a logic of their own whose source is not some universal feature of minds but the organization of institutional practices themselves. He was not inclined to study this issue, though he conceded that it posed a difficulty “connected”53 to his own preoccupations. “Historians conceive ‘society’ as the general horizon of their analysis [whereas] my general theme is not society but the discourse of the true and the false.”54 Though “in all Foucault’s writings the relationship between discursive and non-discursive events is ultimately central”, in Barry Smart’s pointed commentary to Foucault’s anti-sociological leanings, this author also concedes that “there has been a shift away from the systems of constraints interior to the human sciences (the discursive level) to a concentration upon the relations of power that made the human sciences at once possible and necessary (the non-discursive level)”.55

Foucault’s crucial view on this topic is that the subject matter of sociology, since Durkheim’s times, is “the social as constraint”, an entity he sees akin to the “disciplinary”, i.e. the system of compulsions that results in coercion. In the disciplinary society, he claims, power does not take the visible form of hierarchy and sovereignty, as happened until the 18th century. Thereafter, power operated through the habits instilled in social groups and took on the everyday form of the norm. As Foucault puts it, “it conceals itself as power and gives itself out as society”. In his view, therefore, society is the system of disciplinings. The ontologically real subject matter of sociology (society, social structure, social

52 Viewing Foucault as “discursive textualist” is of course a controversial tenet, and the opposite arguments by Philipp Sarasin, especially in his Michel Foucault zur Einführung (Hamburg 2010: Junius) are quiet convincing. Still, it is a common practice to tilt in favor of discourse the ever-delicate balance, always noticeable in his work, between the logic of practices that define categories and re-define properties, malfunctions or even potentials, and the source of these logics, which he locates on the very organization of institutional practices.53 Michel Foucault, L’impossible prison, ed. by M. Perrot, Paris 1980: Seuil, p. 29.54 Ibid., p. 5555 Barry Smart, “Foucault, Sociology and the Problem of Human Agency”. Theory and Society 11/2 (1982), p. 129.

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relationships), while emerging as “given”, is actually the product of relations and strategies of power. Not only is sociology, in a word, an upshot of the disciplinary system, but in addition it has a say in the system of power and knowledge relations that suppress and subjugate.

Symbolic textualism as anti-sociology. Another variety of cultural theory that re-locates “the social” in “the cultural” and therefore insists that symbolic orders cannot be deduced from a “social” stratum ontologically more profound, is the approach that may plausibly be called “symbolic textualism”. Clifford Geertz’s account of “culture as text” represents an eminent instance of this mindset. He criticizes all attempts to situate symbolic orders in mental structures and, instead, localizes them on a public horizon of extra-mental symbols.56 Beyond doubt, indeed, “Geertz has demonstrated more clearly than anyone before that social action should be considered as embedded in an implicit cultural text.”57

In Geertz’s anthropological “thick descriptions”, social order appears as a mere outcome of sign systems. Both material entities and events such as Balinese cockfights or funerals are seen as products of symbolic orders. Their only reality consists in being objects of knowledge that obtain their cultural relevance from their symbolic value. They “stand for”, so to say, phenomena as diverse as social conflicts or religious rituals. Geertz’s sternly dismissal of sociology, therefore, should not come as a surprise. Social reality, in his view, cannot be accounted for as an ontologically autonomous whole. It can only be conceived as the assembly of meanings generated by its members. Therefore, since institutional order springs from cultural order, the anthropologist’s main task should be to elucidate how intentions and actions become transformed in culture. “For Geertz culture was pervasive, ineffable and irreducible—the point of origin of social life.”58 A culture, according to Geertz, is the peculiar way by which the elements of a given context confer order to the mental world of people and in so doing institute the meanings that guide their actions.

Practice theory as anti-sociology. Sociology has persistently scrutinized the pre-experiential ground of cultural representations, believing that one of its primary tasks was to explore this “material base” underlying culture. Several pre-cultural

56 For many interpreters of Foucault, his “archeology of knowledge” represents a prominent variety of cultural semanticism because it holds that social order, after all, results from sign systems.57 Philip Smith, “The Balinese Cockfight Decoded”. Cultural Sociology 2/2 (2008), p. 181.58 Ibid., p. 181.

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entities have been suggested in order to fulfill this role, chiefly among them social differentiation, productive forces, or social institutions. In all cases, however, the base/superstructure dichotomy has been preserved. “High modern” cultural theories reject this approach and instead scrutinize the cultural constitution of the surmised “social bases”. In consequence, culturalism appears diametrically opposed to the more physicalist style of explanation favored by the social sciences.

Nevertheless, in the last decade of the 20th century the notion of “materiality” made an unexpected appearance in cultural theory. In a first step, the focus of theoretical interest shifted from cognitive constructivism and textual structures of meaning to social practices. This reorientation gave rise to the theories of practice, whose anti-sociological implications will be explored in the subsequent paragraphs. A further move extended to objects and artifacts this interest for the embodied materiality of practices. As a result, the “material” dimension of culture expanded dramatically. If at the outset it seemed to dwell in the practical demeanor of human bodies, thereafter it was located in culture-soaked but utterly material artifacts. This has been the origin of an important support of the anti-sociological discourse, viz. the actor-network theory, as we shall prove below.

For practice theory, above all, “social reality” amounts to nothing more than nexuses and sequences of social practices. The symbolic orders which preside over cultural theory, in this view, turn out to be forms of “practical understanding” whose very reason d’être is precisely to organize practices. “Every social practice has cultural or discursive conditions of existence; social practices, in so far as they depend on meaning for their operations and effects, take place ‘within discourse’, are ‘discursive’”.59 Practice has dire anti-sociological undertones because it is conceived as a repetitive bodily activity, held together by—and expressing—a socially standardized way of understanding and knowing. In Theodor Schatzki’s words, a practice is “a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings”,60 organized by a social understanding of these “doings and sayings” themselves.61

59 Stuart Hall, “The Centrality of Culture”, Media and Cultural Regulation, ed. by K. A. Thopmson, London 1997: Sage, p. 226.60 Theodor Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. Cambridge 1996: CUP, p. 211.61 The notion of practice means, at bottom, the skillful shaping or molding of the same normative codes that according to alternative accounts can only be repeatedly acquiesced and obeyed. This claim implies, therefore, that a basic ingredient of action originates outside it. After all, practice consists in making an action pertinent by linking it with a specifically legitimizing instance. This approach allows an insight in the way rules originate in actions. A decisive constituent of any action, in effect, are the hints and clues it sends to the same

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The main dessert of practice theories is that they are consistent with many sociological claims without succumbing to relativism. Their basic insight, according to Andreas Reckwitz, is that “both social order and individuality […] result from practices”.62 This author defines “practice” with unsurpassable limpidity: “A ‘practice’ is a routinised type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge.”63 It is important to note, though, that the recurrence of these bodily behaviors presupposes that they are the outcome of subjective ascriptions of meaning performed by actors. One basic apercu of practice theory is this analytical distinction between collective patterns and subjective attributions of meaning.

Practice theory insists on seeing social practices as bodily and mental routines. Thus, mental activities appear socially routinized whereas the “individual” domain amounts to the unique crossing of different mental and bodily routines both “in” one mind/body and in the interpretative approach to this constellation of “crossings”. In a nutshell: a practice “is a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood. To say that practices are ‘social practices’ is indeed a tautology: A practice is social, as it is a ‘type’ of behaving and understanding that appears at different locales and at different points of time and is carried out by different body/minds.” 64 This view indicates that practices are coordinated entities but also require performance in order to exist at all. Therefore, if a performance presupposes a practice, practice presupposes performances as well.65

Practice theory, in conclusion, patently belongs to the anti-sociological discourse. By linking the collective representations to interiorized schemata66 and not to

context that ultimately decides upon the very meaning of the action.62 Reckwitz, “Toward a theory of social practices”, op. cit., pp. 245-246.63 Ibid., p. 249.64 Ibid., p. 250.65 In Reckwitz’s words, “a practice represents a pattern which can be filled out by a multitude of single and often unique actions reproducing the practice [….] The single individual—as a bodily and mental agent—then acts as the “carrier” (Träger) of a practice—and, in fact, of many different practices which need not be coordinated with one another. Thus, she or he is not only a carrier of patterns of bodily behavior, but also of certain routinized ways of understanding, knowing how and desiring. These conventionalized “mental” activities of understanding, knowing how and desiring are necessary elements and qualities of a practice in which the single individual participates, not qualities of the individual.” Ibid., pp. 249-50.66 Sherry Ortner has clarified this point. In her opinion, practice theory seeks “to explain the relationship(s) that obtain between human action, on the one hand, and some global entity

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concretely observed, specific demeanors, as the historian Angelo Torre observes, “the relationship between schemata and reality does not lose its habitual character, authentically and unavoidably normative, since perceptions generate strategies and practices that prevail upon the social actors. Thus, social reality is viewed as a fractured place (sede di lacerazioni), whose generative processes, however, are deemed irrelevant.”67 Seeing society as a “fractured place” is doubtless a fitting way of describing its ontological deficit.

Actor-network theory as anti-sociology. As is well known, the actor-network approach has been developed within the sociology of science. It emerged from the surmise that sociological accounts have neglected the material or natural elements that buttress the practical supremacy of science. The anti-sociological stance of the actor-network approach of Bruno Latour et alii68 defends a relational ontology that does not make a priori distinctions between humans and others, or between transcendental reality and construction, and hence re-distributes agency among human and non-human actors. The only admissible “social” reality, accordingly, is the constructed world between human and material agency. Human agents and others are respectively “quasi-subjects and quasi-objects”, and there is no split between them. This doctrine distances itself, as a consequence, from both social constructionism and humanist sociology. The issues they attempt to explain in terms of human actors, according to the actor-network theory, demand the collaboration with non-humans.

This approach defends a radically relational ontology. A set of relations to other entities gives to any object its properties as well as its ontological status. Not only the human actors but also all entities are relationally constituted. The attributes of all things (including their capacity to “act”) are relational attributes. In particular, the human species is neither a “hard” transcendent reality nor a “soft” social construction, because in a relational grid social actors do not face social structures

which we may call “the system”, on the other. […] Society and history are not simply sums of ad hoc responses and adaptations to particular stimuli, but are governed by organizational and evaluative schemes. It is these (embodied, of course, within institutional, symbolic, and material forms) that constitute the system.” Sherry B. Ortner, “Theory in Anthroplogy since the Sixties”. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26/1 (1984), p. 148.67 Angelo Torre, “Percorsi della pratica 1966-1995”, in: Quaderni storici 90 (1995), p. 811. This statement arises from a commentary on Roger Chartier’s Les usages de l’imprimé, Paris 1992 : Fayard.68 Cfr. from Bruno Latour: Science in Action, Cambridge MA 1987: Harvard Univ. Press, and Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge MA 1999: Harvard Univ. Press. Also from Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Beverly Hills, CA 1979: Sage.

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as open projects confronting coercive structures. The main problem posed by the actor-network approach, however, is to ground sociology upon the interaction of all relevant entities in social settings, not just between human subjects. It seems difficult, at first sight, to insist on a resemblance between humans and non-humans without a philosophical groundwork evocative of the all-embracing systems of the past and contrary to the differentiating strands of thought that currently prevail. The actor-network approach admits that its gains in cognitive reliability are at the cost of banning sociological purchase. If even relationally constructed agency cannot be limited to social actors alone, and the relations among them depend on the agency of non-social actors, then sociological accounts are groundless. Their elucidations are intrinsically incomplete if non-human actors are crucial for human relations. Relationally-constituted, hybrid actors produce both society and nature, and for that reason society cannot be an ontologically sound reality.

Sociologists used to consider social structure as the initial condition that allowed further explanatory work. In the actor-network approach structural accounts are discouraged because the characteristically structural concept of network appears ubiquitously at the end of the scrutiny but never at the beginning. It supplies the foundation for a sociological account that, paradoxically, it cannot perform, for it envisages all actions as processes upon relations that are also effected by relations. In other words, social reality cannot exclusively develop from grid connections. If there is nothing but networks, then structures are but an intertwining of confined interactions, and social reality, as a result, viewed from an ontological viewpoint appears a mere fantasy.

5. The ontological assumptions of the anti-sociological discourse:the historiographical viewpoint

Revisionist social history as anti-sociology. The culturalist upheaval that took place in many human disciplines, by the mid-1980s made itself fiercely felt in historiography. At that time, in effect, the preeminence was shifting away from social history to the various forms of cultural history.69 New subject matters that social historians had not researched were then opened up and the usual borrowing 69 A note of caution is here in order. According to some authors, the “cultural turn” that occurred around 1980 and which in the historiographic domain replaced social history by a new cultural history, “surreptitiously took over the organizing gestures of the approach it aimed at supplanting”. (Richard Biernacki, “Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History”, in: Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. by V. E. Bonnell and L. Hunt. Berkeley 1999: Univ. of California Press, p. 63) A concealed continuity, therefore, may have linked the two allegedly opposed mindsets, social and cultural. The dramatic “cultural turn” in historiography, to sum up, may have rested on an unacknowledged permanence.

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from the social sciences was redirected towards anthropology and literary theory. In the eloquent words of Geoff Eley: “Most important of all, social explanation and social causality lost their hold in the imagination. Historians became ever more skeptical about the answers social analysis seemed able to deliver. ‘Materialist’ explanations based on social structure now seemed to oversimplify the complexities of human action.”70

Yet at first sight no discipline is more akin to history than is sociology. History’s assiduous leanings from sociological theories and concepts attest this overt affinity. In its many forms, social history seems to be the strongest ally sociology could ever dream. For that reason, social historians have persisted in their indifference towards the exceptional, the singular or the specific, the mounting tide of micro and cultural history notwithstanding. They carry on, in the words of Jürgen Kocka, “convictions and practices not shared by all historians” because “they are not primarily interested in single biographies and specific events, but rather in collective phenomena”.71

However, a revisionist brand of social history has been giving signs of antipathy to “social” explanations. Among other historians, Michael Seidman has sketched a key instance of this renewed variety of social history. In his opinion, “what is needed is a history of individuals and their interactions—a mode of social history—that does not presuppose the existence of society, or at least not the existence of a social order that is coherent, stable and binding on each of its supposed members”.72 The ontological implications of this statement appears less startling if we accept that “there is an as yet unanswered, because so far virtually un-posed, theoretical question about how much coherence we need, want or actually can have”.73 Such courageous proposal demands a name, according to Seidman: “we might call this mode of history antisocial”.74 He specifies this enigmatic label in the following terms: “Individuals act within the constraints of society, but society is likewise constrained by individuals’ antisocial acts. Calling those acts ‘antisocial’ suggests that they are less idealist than materialist.”75

70 Geoff Eley, “On Your Marx: From cultural History to the History of society”, in: The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences, ed. by G. Steinmetz. Durham 2005: Duke Univ. Press, p. 503.71 Jürgen Kocka, “Losses, Gains and Opportunities: Social History Today”. Journal of Social History 37/1 (2003), p. 26.72 Michael Seidman, “Social History and Antisocial History”. Common Knowledge 13/1 (2007), p. 45. Our italics (JMB).73 Ibid., p. 43.74 Ibid., p. 45. Italics in original.75 Ibid., p. 49.

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Macro-structural historiography as anti-sociology. Against the historiographic tradition that focused on agents and events and primed political action and decision, the defenders of macro-structural historiography have often expressed anti-sociological leanings. More specifically, the trajectory of macro-structural history in its dominant, French variety reveals the anti-sociological proclivities of large-scale historiographical approaches. The tradition of the Annales-school is illustrative of this aspect. At the beginning, to be sure, its founders Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre maintained that their historiographical program agreed with Durkheim’s sociology because both approaches fought a common foe, viz. the erudite historiography that avoided generalizing attitudes because it was obsessed with singularity. However, since the mid-1930s the historians of the Annales periodically demarcated themselves from sociology.76

Indeed the collective identity of the Annales School resulted in fact from continuously adjusted anti-sociological values. This protracted process of drawing boundaries against sociology reached their most significant peaks in the Braudelian phase of the School and in the 1980s. The initial qualms appeared by 1933 when Febvre accused sociology of lacking “historical depth” and temporal perspective. The anti-sociological highest point, however, was attained in the 1950s when Fernand Braudel perceived in the social sciences a forceful rejection of history. He reacted to this presumed hostility by arguing that the historian’s view of causal links does not coincide with the corresponding sociological account. He held, moreover, that history’s preference for singularities clashes with sociology’s persistent generalizations, and above all that “[sociology’s] time is not our time, it is less tyrannical and more concrete, and besides it is never the heart of their problems and their reflections”.77

This anti-sociological belligerence by the Annales historians revived in the 1990s.78 They argued that the opposition between history and sociology had been persistent along the 20th century because it was at bottom structural and hence insurmountable. Sociology’s abstractions were deemed incompatible with history’s empirical monographism. Both disciplines were in fact incommensurable and thus 76 The anti-sociological leanings of the “Annalists” are specified in: Jérôme Lamy and Arnaud Saint-Martin, “La frontière comme enjeu: les Annales et la sociologie”. Revue de synthèse 131 (2010), pp. 99-127.77 Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et science sociale”, in : Écrits sur l’histoire. Paris 1969: Flammarion, p. 75.78 A text written by Jacques Revel triggered it: “Histoire et sciences sociales: les paradigmes des Annales”. Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations, num. 6 of 1979, pp. 1360-1376, and it reached its peak with the article of Gérard Noirel “Pour une approche subjectiviste du social”. Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations, num. 6 of 1989, pp. 1435-1459.

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interdisciplinarity appeared a pure dream. The theoricism, nomothetism and invariant-seeking procedures of mainstream sociology, in conclusion, could not be matched with the cumulative and idiographic mindset of the historian.

This overall position of the Annales-school notwithstanding, some discordant voices have insisted on the close affinity between macro-history and sociology. For instance, Paul Veyne has seen in sociology a faithful ally: “There are historical events but no historical explanations. As it happens with many disciplines, history works by dint of another science, viz. sociology. In this same way, there are astronomic phenomena but no astronomical explanations, if I am not mistaken, since the explanation of astronomical facts is always physical. Still, an astronomy course is not a physics course.”79 Less strikingly, other historians have downgraded to “disciplinary issue”80 the differences between history and sociology. In contrast, however, most French sociologists tend to see the arguable differences between the two approaches as an intellectual deceit fostered by professional scuffles.81 In so doing, they openly endorse Durkheim’s tenet that historians never serve better their cause as when they “go beyond their usual point of view and focus in the general issues raised by the particular facts they observe”.82

Micro-structural historiography as anti-sociology. Micro-historians decry the kind of social history that draws inspiration from the traditional methodology of the social sciences. They believe that sociologists, in George Iggers’ words, “have made generalizations that do not hold up when tested against the concrete reality of the small-scale life they claim to explain”.83 Large-scale social studies, according to the defenders of micro-historical research, are ontologically erratic because they distort the reality on the individual level. To prevent this mutilation, micro-historians reduce the scale of observation well below current sociological approaches. They focus on small social units and the way people act their lives within them.84

79 Paul Veyne, L’inventaire des différences. Paris 1976 : Seuil, p. 8.80 Jean-Michel Berthelot, “Histoire et sociologie : une affaire de discipline”. Recherches Sociologiques 29/3 (1998), pp. 23-43.81 See for instance: Jean-Claude Passeron, Le Raisonnement sociologique. Paris 2006 : Albin Michel.82 Émile Durkheim, “Préface” to L’Année sociologique 1 (1887), p. iii.83 George G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Hanover 1997: Wesleyan.84 Micro-history, incidentally, has also forwarded an enlightening account of practice. In micro-historians’ view, practices are project-oriented behaviors set by available resources (material and/or symbolic), always limited by biased information, able to shape norms while being shaped by them, rooted in collective horizons though clearly subjective, and often ambiguous and self-contradictory.

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Micro-historians argue that narrowing the scale of observation reveals the sprawling relationships within each micro-social setting. This restriction, in their view, also gives away the distortions produced by larger sociological approaches and the normativity imposed by their research methods. The contradictions of these normative systems are a major focus of interest for micro-historians. In a blatant anti-sociological way, they value in particular the untied and untidy reality of collective life. Accordingly, they concentrate on its fragmented, deviating and inconsistent features.

Bent on analyzing and re-describing social reality from a proximal viewpoint, micro-historians had to reformulate basic sociological categories, chiefly that of society itself, and alongside it those of class, partnership, kinship or market as well. At close range all social processes betray a blend of unstable perceptions, shortsighted rationalizations and provisional truces in a never-ending conflict. As a consequence, the adequate analytical concepts, and contrary to the established sociological tradition, must be steadily re-elaborated and made more intricate. These continuously evolving concepts have to match both the manifold allegiances of the concrete individuals and the ephemeral unity bestowed by the lived coherence of their motives.

6. Conclusion. Ontology is ancillary to epistemology in contemporary anti-sociological discourse

Our meta-theoretical survey has yielded a clear outcome: the multiple strands of the current anti-sociological discourse, independently of their origin (inside or outside sociology), their focus (culturalist or historiographic), their procedural tool (mentalism or textualism), their favored topology (privacy or publicness), their source of efficiency (agentic or structural), and their actual scope (micro or macro), all put in doubt the ontological consistency of the term “society”. Our scrutiny has revealed that, whereas all surveyed doctrines put in doubt the ontological consistency of the term “society”, their particular ontological concern always recedes in favor of a prevailing epistemic commitment.

The arguments brought to buttress this overriding ontological indifference are of course manifold, and even in some cases interfere with each other. But their coincidence at a deeper level proves that the fundamental ontological assumptions of current social theorizing have not surpassed the ontological agnosticism claimed by Max Weber a century ago. For Weber notoriously defended “a form of knowledge

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not bound to any previous ontology”. In his view, according to an outstanding commentator, Catherine Colliot-Thélène, “the methodological constraints are determined by the cognitive aims, so that the ‘ontology’ (that is, the identification of the entities to which a reality not reducible to any other is assigned) results from those aims and in no way is their cause”.85

The cultural and historiographic theories we have examined confirm the Weberian contention that “there is a specific ontology for each discipline”. The tenet common to all doctrines surveyed above, indeed, is the precedence of their respective epistemic concern over their explicit ontological qualms. Moreover, as Weber clearly saw, “subordinating ontology to epistemology implies a principled plurality of possible ontologies”. This plurality, though, endorses in fact an all-embracing epistemic upper hand, for according to Weber, again in Colliot-Thélène’s words, “the validity [of each ontology] can only be measured through its adjustment to the demands of intelligibility posed by the problems that form the corresponding discipline”.86

As another Weberian commentator87 has put it, “Weber’s interest was to define the ontological tension found in modern culture”. The cultural and historiographical theories surveyed above and which form, as we have seen, the backbone of the prevailing anti-sociological discourse, in its turn are bent to confront this “ontological tension” in accordance with their respective cognitive project. We have been able to prove, in other words, that present-day social and historical thought questions in manifold ways the actual existence of society, and that each of these ontological commitments, on the other hand, is ancillary to a particular epistemic viewpoint.

85 Catherine Colliot-Thélène, Études wébériennes. Rationalités, histories, droits. Paris 2001: PUF, p. 162.86 Loc. cit.87 Andrew M. Koch, “The Ontological Assumptons of Max Weber’s Methodology”. Texas Journal of Political Studies 17:1 (Winter 1994-95), p. 19.

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