What is ‘Global’ Social Theory?
This discussion of ‘global’ social theory is drawn from a working paper titled The Major Problematics of Interdisciplinary Social Theory. (D. H. Bowles 2023)
Global social theory is a term that refers to a specific framework for the comparative analysis of interdisciplinary social theory paradigms, developed for the Social Science Consortium (SSC) curriculum in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The term ‘global’ used in this sense applies to the interdisciplinary scope required for a candidate to qualify as a relatively adequate[1] interdisciplinary social theory paradigm. It identifies an historically emergent set of competing, relatively adequate global social theory paradigms.
Motivation
I taught interdisciplinary social theory to doctoral students in the SSC program at UMKC for fifteen years; over that period, I probably had around two hundred students come through my introductory doctoral course in interdisciplinary social theory and philosophy of science. The introductory lecture frequently featured a joke that went like this:
Question: If you put an economist, a sociologist, and a political scientist in a room together and told them to have a theoretical conversation, what would you get?
Answer: Nothing.
It usually got a pretty good laugh; the point being, of course, that economists, sociologists, and political scientists (at least those who work in mainstream academia) hold no discernable theory in common. This would not be the case with Marxian economists, sociologists, and political scientists, however, for they all share a more or less explicit set of fundamental philosophical and theoretical propositions (at least within each of the various kinds of Marxism that exist), and they readily engage with one another in substantive dialogue. Marxian social theory, in fact, is a textbook example of a social theory that is genuinely interdisciplinary. You could say that disciplinarity in Marxian thought comes ex post facto, rather than ex ante.
Beyond Marx, however, interdisciplinarity in social theory can be . . . challenging. The disciplinary structure that dominates the institutions and enterprise of mainstream academia was–and remains–fully grounded in the early commitment to a reductionist model of scientific inquiry: the presumption that finer and finer levels of analysis will eventually discover the fundamental building blocks of nature. Once discovered, these fundamental building blocks will, of course, all fit neatly together. Finer and finer levels of analysis is what matters; a seamless synthesis will effortlessly follow.
The reductionist model actually seems to have worked tolerably well for the disciplines of the natural sciences. But the early effort by Durkheim to establish sociology as an academic discipline distinct from political economy was grounded in the positivism of Comte, which held that natural science was the proper model for the social science enterprise. And so the same reductionist logic that was applied to the natural sciences came to determine the academic organization of the disciplines of the social sciences as well: all disciplinary analytical development, with little or no institutional incentive to provide sustained support for any program of interdisciplinary synthesis.
Nevertheless, we neglect the synthetic challenges of interdisciplinary social theory at our peril, for the principal problematics of social theory persist: the problems of 1) human nature, 2) relativism, 3) distribution, and 4) consciousness. And it appears increasingly unlikely, from a disciplinary perspective, that a solution to any single one of them will appear on the horizon any time soon.
The commitment to cumulative, synthetic development of interdisciplinary social theory toward solution of the four principal problematics of social theory is the principal motivation behind the global social theory program and its associated framework for the comparative analysis of competing interdisciplinary social theory paradigms.
The Vienna Project
I remember with perfect clarity the precise moment during my sophomore year of high school when I realized I had both a passion and a gift for political and social theory and philosophy. That gift has persistently oriented me toward the synthetic enterprise. I can also remember with equal clarity, twenty-plus years after my high school graduation, sitting in the office of my academic advisor and mentor at UMKC, Jim Sturgeon, discussing my application to the interdisciplinary Ph.D program. “You could get admitted anywhere you want . . . why here?” he asked. And my answer was simply, “Because I want to do genuinely interdisciplinary social science.”
A couple of years later, I submitted my first dissertation proposal to Jim. He looked it over, handed it back to me, and said “This isn’t a dissertation, it’s a career.” So I went back to the drawing board and eventually wrote a dissertation (under Peter Eaton, my other mentor in the program) on the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for analysis of the complex metropolitan development process. But that first proposal did eventually bear fruit: it became the organizing logic of what we called the Vienna Project (with a tongue-in-cheek nod to “the Vienna Circle”). The Vienna Project was a day-long symposium on our approach to interdisciplinary social science in the SSC program, presented to the 1998 annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) . . . in Vienna, Austria of course. A report on that symposium[2] was published in the Jul-Aug 1999 issue of the Journal of Socio-Economics; it constitutes the first, early articulation of global social theory method and substance.
After the completion of my doctoral program in 2005, I remained in the faculty position I already held in the UMKC Department of Economics working with Peter as Associate Director of the Center for Economic Information (CEI), when Jim (who was also serving as department chair at the time) asked me to take over from him as Director of the SSC. It was at that point that I started teaching the introductory doctoral course in interdisciplinary social theory and the philosophy of social science. After fifteen years of teaching that course to a talented but sometimes skeptical and challenging cadre of doctoral students, the global social theory approach to interdisciplinarity in the social sciences has undergone considerable refinement from its earliest articulation and, setting out on my retirement from full-time employment at UMKC, I think it’s well past time to update the written record . . . for posterity, as it were.
The Great Divide in the Social Sciences
The rest of this discussion of global social theory will refer to an Appendix consisting of a set of figures taken from my course lecture slides. Reference numbering appears in the lower left corner of each slide.
Slide 1 illustrates the origins of modern social theory in the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo, both of whom asserted the labor theory of value as the basis for a new legitimating ideology of distributional ethics, following the erosion of the meta-theoretical[3] authority of ecclesiastical Christianity and the just price doctrine. The Great Divide in the social sciences originates with the split between the classical political economists who broke with Smith and Ricardo, turning to a utility theory of value in the quest for legitimation of the propertied classes’ claim to the social surplus, while Marx carried on with the labor theory of value, in his campaign to establish labor’s claim to the surplus.
From this split, Slide 1 illustrates the development of the schools of orthodox and heterodox economics, and the emergence of the neoclassical (neoliberal) consensus social theory paradigm on one side of the divide, and a number of competing critical social theories on the other side. All of these can be thought of as candidates for relatively adequate global social theory paradigms.
Slide 2 provides a more contemporaneous view. It shows how different positions taken on the problems of human nature and distribution determine on which side of the divide any given social theory, or theorist, will fall. You could say that the precise sense in which the term ‘critical’ applies to that group of theories is that they are all critical of the consensus theory so-called ‘solution’ to the problem of distribution.
Slide 3 details the historical emergence of a number of competing social theory paradigms. They are divided first between the pre-modern and the modern. Our concern here is primarily with the modern paradigms. Those also are divided between the consensus theory paradigm and a number of critical theory paradigms. Altogether, six modern paradigms are enumerated: the consensus theory paradigm occupying one side of the divide, and five critical theory paradigms residing on the other. Each is characterized by a distinct set of embedded meta-theoretical commitments. (See Slide 8, and discussion of the problems of human nature and relativism for an extended overview of these.) All five critical theory paradigms share a ‘critical’ view of consensus theory, and often view each other critically as well.
Slide 4 illustrates how the first five distinct critical paradigms can actually be resolved into three; this is (very creatively) called the first resolution. Slide 5 shows a second resolution of critical paradigms, from three to two. This is also called the post-positivist resolution. Note that the effect of (and the rationale for) this resolution, is that the embedded meta-theoretical commitments of the three remaining theories are reduced to:
- Consensus theory – Positivist
- Interpretive/Post-modern theory – Idealist/Relativist
- Marxian/Evolutionary theory – Realist
Refer back to discussion of the problems of human nature and relativism for more background on the significance and importance of these distinctions.
The Critique of ‘Grand Theory’
From within what we might call the typical postmodern theoretical perspective, the interdisciplinary social theory constructs just outlined here can be–and typically would be–viewed as illegitimate. The judgement of illegitimacy is rooted in something called the critique of grand theory. In the context of postmodern theory, the critique is a radical one, challenging the legitimacy of any effort to construct theoretical explanations and understandings–or narratives–of human society through history, or across cultures. Such efforts are dismissively referred to as grand narratives, or metanarratives. In The Postmodern Condition (1979), Lyotard famously states “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.” In the radical postmodern view, social knowledge can only be culturally and historically specific–at best. Any ideas of a universal human nature and social ontology are socially constructed. And, ultimately, we find that the radical postmodern critique of metanarrative, or grand narrative, depends on a commitment to that particular post-modern, utopian view of human nature. There are, however, other views of human nature and social ontology to be accounted for.
But the origin of the critique of grand theory predates radical postmodernity. Its actual origin is to be found in C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination (1959). In this broad critique of mid-20th century sociological theory and method, Mills actually criticizes three counter-productive tendencies in prevailing sociological thought. One of these he describes as the tendency to grand theory:
. . . conceptions intended to be of use in classifying all social relations and providing insight into their supposedly invariant features . . . with a static and abstract view of the components of social structure on a high level of generality. History can be altogether abandoned; systematic theory of the nature of man and of society becomes and elaborate and arid formalism in which the endless rearrangement of concepts becomes the central endeavor. (23)
The principal target of Mills’ ire in this regard was Talcott Parsons, the lion of mid-20th century American sociology. Parson’s social action theory and structural functionalism, with their pronounced status quo (and consensus theory) bias, were the dominant sociological paradigms of that era. Mills’ distaste for grand theory at this point clearly did not extend to the work of either Marx or Veblen, both of whom held substantive positions in Mills’ own radical theoretical pantheon. (Tilman 2004, Trevino 2012)
Mills’ critique of Parsons as grand theory did indeed capture the sociological imagination. In 1949, Robert Merton–one of Parson’s most gifted students–re-wrote the methodological canon for the discipline in a book called Social Theory and Social Structure:
. . . Throughout this book, the term sociological theory refers to logically interconnected sets of propositions from which empirical uniformities can be derived. We focus on what I have called theories of the middle-range, theories that lie between the minor but necessary working hypotheses that evolve in abundance during day-to-day research and the all-inclusive systematic efforts to develop a unified theory that will explain all the observed uniformities of social behavior, social organization, and social change.
After Merton, grand theory was out, middle-range theory was in. And, by and large, that’s where the action remains in that discipline today.
But that’s not quite the end of the story. With just a little deeper digging, we soon discover that both Mills and Merton, despite their apparent lack of regard for ‘grand theory,’ nevertheless claim to see significant value in some kind of totalizing, over-arching, synthetic theoretical narrative that, in the final analysis is not very different from the kind of interdisciplinary social theory constructs outlined above. Merton actually refers to such constructs as paradigms in the concluding section of his chapter introducing the concept of middle range theory, where he describes them as a necessary and valuable framework for integration. (69-72) At the same time, Trevino (2012, 34) cites Mills (1953), urging sociologists
. . . to shuttle back and forth between molecular research, characterized by “small-scale problems with generally statistical models of verification,” and macroscopic modes of inquiry dealing with historical social structures in a comparative and systematic way. (266) For only by considering the interplay between the immediate milieu and larger social structure, by employing the molecular along with the macroscopic styles of research, can proper attention be given to questions of theory formation and empirical measurement, while grounding research in the organization of society.
Let’s conclude this preemptive defense against the charge of ‘grand theorization’ by directing your attention for a moment back to Figure 2. Take a look at the bulleted list appearing there below the consensus theory heading. These bulleted items represent five identified (there are doubtless others) constituent elements of disciplinary (middle-range) theory that together, we assert, collectively constitute the body of consensus social theory.[4] Here it is readily seen that we are, just as Mills and Merton both prescribe, stitching together the consensus theory paradigm from a body of disparate middle-range theories, drawn from multiple social science disciplines. In other words, we are not grand theorists, constructing airy, insubstantial castles in the sky; we are, in fact, down here in the weeds, doing the nitty-gritty work of integrative, interdisciplinary social science.
Criteria for Comparative Analysis
Slide 7 lists the global theory criteria for the comparative analysis of relatively adequate interdisciplinary social theory paradigms. Some of these criteria will already be familiar based on preceding discussion, including metatheoretical dimensions, the problems of human nature and social ontology, social structure vs. agency, and the problem of social stratification (i.e. distribution). The only remaining criteria that have not already been discussed at any length are the goals and processes of material and social development.
The issue of social theory development goals is of particular interest in the sense that the incorporation of development goals in any social theory is technically ruled out-of-bounds by the positivist meta-theory embedded in the consensus theory paradigm, which adheres to the epistemic principle of fact/value duality for the social science enterprise. On the other hand, hermeneutic (or interpretive) paradigms reduce the positivist fact/value duality to a values identity. In contrast to both of these, realist paradigms are grounded in social and moral ontologies from which genuine trans-historical, trans-cultural values (and thus material and social development goals) may be legitimately asserted. We could call this an epistemological fact/value dichotomy. Marxian theory offers a straightforward textbook example for this.
Development processes provide for social system dynamics, which are diagrammed in Slide 9. These generate more or less either static or transformative impacts on structure, agency, and development goals, creating a social system feedback loop.
Slide 10 illustrates what we call the structural grid, which shows the intersection of institutional social structure and social stratification, represented by generic institutional and class entities.
Footnotes
[1] The term ‘relatively adequate’ is adapted from Stephen Pepper’s usage in World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (1942).
[2] Bowles, D. H. et al. (1999).
[3] Ontological, epistemological, axiological. See Slide 8 for a summary overview. An elaboration can also be found in the discussions of the problems of human nature and relativism.
[4] Harvey (1978, 74) identifies three of these as disciplinary components of what he refers to as bourgeois social theory.
Download working paper: The Major Problematics of Interdisciplinary Social Theory (D. H. Bowles 2023). See paper for References.