2004-4

 

 

OBSAH

 

 

 
John Holmwood:
Hodnoty, validita a sociální zkoumání; sociální věda a její publikum     5
Jan Balon:
Koncept jednání v sociologické teorii: zdánlivě bezvýchodný příběh
jednoho pojmu                                                                                              15

Martin Jay:

Za teorii                                                                                                   37

Michael D. Kennedy:
Za teorii a její protipóly: komentář k Jayovi                                          59

Hans Herbert Kögler:

Projekt kritické hermeneutiky                                                                       71

Alvin W. Gouldner:

Anti-Minotaurus: Mýtus sociologie oproštěné od hodnocení                     85

 

Recenze

Jan Balon:

Peter Winch: Idea sociální vědy a její vztah k filozofii                               105

 

 

 

Abstract

 
Values, Validity and Social Inquiry;
social science and its audiences

 

John Holmwood

 

This paper examines the increasingly polarised arguments about social theory and social inquiry. Social science can no longer assume an undifferentiated audience for its findings. Recent commentaries on the nature of social inquiry suggest fundamental disagreement about its concepts and even its task. Where once there was an agreement about the desirability of a science of society, now it appears that those who share that aim feel beleaguered. In this paper, I discuss in detail the work of Goldthorpe and Steur, who recommend economics as an exemplar of a proper social science, together with other calls for the development of general theory and disciplinary foundations in other disciplines to match that found in economics. Goldthorpe and Steuer’s greatest concern is the „politicisation“ of social inquiry, but their conception of publicly relevant social research independent of politics is, as I try to show, flawed. In contrast to the way in which Steuer and Goldthorpe seek to defend practical social science, I think that politics and values are not an obstacle, but create the very „binding“ that secures the mutual engagement that makes both dialogue and a practical social science possible. The „open society“ need not be in conflict with science, but „open“ public dialogue, in which many social theorists would wish their work to serve an educative function, also requires an engagement with the knowledge that social science can afford.

 

 

 

Abstract

 

The Concept of Action in Sociological Theory:

A seemingly desparate story of one term.

 

Jan Balon

 

I this paper, I address the concept of action, one of the most contested categories in sociological theory. The historical analysis takes Weberian and Parsonsian theories as its point of departure. Their failure to develop a consistent action frame of reference have stimulated theorists who attempted to elaborate synthetic general theories of action; amogst them the structuration theory of Anthony Giddens, the multidimensional theoretical synthesis of Jeffrey C. Alexander, and the theory of communicative action of Jürgen Habermas, were perhaps the most prominent. The intention of all these authors is to interconnect both the perspective of the systems analysis and the perspective of the action paradigm. The fact that the systems paradigm and the action paradigm have followed its own logic and lost sight of each other, is understood to be the source of the present disarray in social inquiry. Although they are aware of the deficiencies of earlier approaches, they also fail in transcending the subject/object, action/structure, observer/participant dualisms in their generalised categorical schemes. The basic premise of action that the actor “could have always done otherwise“ causes that all attempts at synthesis have to take account of the voluntaristic aspects of action. Even if they were successful in transcending those dualisms they tried to avoid, there would be one apparently residual dualism of possible/actual actions, which they were not able to address properly. Their presuppositional framework of categories based on action can, in the logic of their argument (in most part proceeding through mere conceptual innovation), only explain, or describe, possible actions, not the actual ones. However, although action is an open, inconsistent and contradictory concept, it does not follow, I try to argue, that it is in principle untheorizable. And that the way out of the dilemma of action does not lead us to its dismissal, but to more attempts to reconstruct it.

 

 

Abstract

 
For Theory

 

Martin Jay

 

Martin Jay in his paper begins with the evaluation of Alvin W. Gouldner’s conception of reflexive sociology and situates the discussion of Theory within present context. He argues that in the years since Gouldner’s appeal to found a community of reflexive sociologists, theory itself, after a brief period of apparent triunph, has suffered a series of assaults from many different directions. Theory became identified as a game of mastery, tainted by its association with the evils of transcendentalism, foundantionalism, essentialism and the vain search for a meta-language, all of which were seen as unwarranted extrapolations from the priviliged position of those who arrogantly pretended to speak for the whole. A growing resistance to theory is identified in the humanities and the social sciences, which expressed itself in the rise of a „new historicism,“ which refused to foreground its theoretical sophistication, and the revival of interest in pragmatism. When the standard scientific procedures, such as abstraction, subsumption, and analogizing form paradigmatic examples, are understood as threats to dominate and overwhelm the object rather than illuminate its meaning, resistance emerges in the name of the concepts under which they are seen to be being violently subsumed or the examples to which they are analogized. After summarizing the most typical approaches to theoretical thinking, Jay develops his own position through analyzing „the others“ of theory, which have to do with the ways in which subjects relate to objects: practise, subjective experience, objective (or intersubjective) experience, story-telling (naration), and hermeneutical skills. Theory must be situated in a semantic network with these „others“ and discussed as a moment of reflexive self-distancing, a moment that subverts the self-sufficient immanence, presupposed by earlier approaches. Jay holds that rather than seeking to construct a grand edifice of theory, solidly grounded on firm foundations, and hierarchically organized in levels of even more refined abstraction, we can enter the dynamic force-field of theories and their others that swirl around and through us. Only then theory can give us (though never fully definitive) insights into the nature of what goes on in the outer world.

 

 

Abstract

 
For theory and its others: comment on Jay

 

Michael D. Kennedy

 

Michaell D. Kennedy in his paper evaluates Jay’s discussion of theory and adds to it more concrete questions, such as political strategy, geopolitics, and radical transformation, missing in Jay’s general analysis. He approaches in detail the work of Eastern Europe’s social theorists and argues that the quality of theory (not only in terms of a mode of explanation and repository of theoretical tradition but especially in terms of the premise of questions), coming out of Eastern Europe is important for reflexive socilogy and critical theory grouded in Western Europe and North America to engage. For it is tackling some of the big historical questions, such as the collapse of communism and the victory of liberal capitalism, the critics of cultural studies seeks, but without the normative commitments that typically mark reflexive sociology and critical theory. All this is a result of the incredible progress (geographical extension) that sociology has made in the last two decades, and thanks to which we have become far more reflexive about our modes of explanation and the alternatives legitimately sociological (for example, the appreciation for narrative and historical analysis). The proper reincarnation of the founding reflexive ambition of Alvin W. Gouldner to be a ridge rider between sociology and Marxism can be, in Kennedy’s view, neatly extended to ridge riding between theory and its others. Together with the elaboration of alternative methods within sociology and the elevation of race, etnicity, nation, gender, and sexuality to key terms of the critical discourse, it is an important development that requires further cultivation. It seems to him that the social theorist can still be an agent of historical change, but in totality more fragmented than ever. Theory’s engagement with this multiplicity, in the refashioning of our imagiation of resistance and emancipation, is still our opportunity, he concludes, although it has to pay attention to composite issues, such as the reflexivity of actors and the complexity of identity formations, which might not always give satisfactory results.

 

 

 

 

 

Abstract

 

The Project of a Critical Hermeneutics

 

Hans Herbert Kögler

 

“The Project of a Critical Hermeneutics“ is an introductory chapter from Hans Herbert Kögler`s book The Power of Dialogue (Cambridge – London: The MIT Press, 1996). It outlines the project of critical hermeneutics, based on a conception of interpretation that stresses the structural constraints on dialogue as well as the critical capacity of dialogue to make us conscious of, and to free us from, such limitations, whether these obtain in our symbolic order, in unquestioningly established power relations, or in idiosyncratic power relations. Kögler`s investigation is thus an attempt to explicate systematically a conception of critical interpretation. The objective of the project is both to clarify and to preserve the insights of the structuralist/poststructuralist tradition by integrating them into the conceptual framework of hermeneutics. There are four main methodological aspects in which these traditions differ according to Kögler: (1) how an analysis of the symbolic medium of thought is to be undertaken; (2) how interpretive theorists relate to their “object domain”; (3) how language and discourse are connected to social power; and (4) how the question of cultural universals is to be answered. Analyzing each of these aspects, Kögler argues that the integration of the methodological and conceptual advances gained by the Foucauldian approach will inevitably call for the restructuring of the hermeneutic theory that will at the same time radicalize and strengthen its position.

 

 
Abstract

 
ANTI-MINOTAUR: THE MYTH OF A VALUE-FREE SOCIOLOGY

 

Alvin W. Gouldner

 

This is an account of a myth created by and about a magnificent minotaur named Max – Max Weber, to be exact; his myth was that social science should and could be value-free. The lair of this minotaur, although reached only by a labyrinthian logic and visited only by a few who never return, is still regarded by many sociologists as a holy place. The image of a value-free sociology is more than a neat intellectual theorem demanded as a sacrifice to reason; it is, also, a felt conception of a role and a set of more or less shared sentiments as to how sociologists should live. That we are in the presence of a group myth, rather than a carefully formulated and well-validated belief appropriate to scientists, may be discerned if we ask, just what is it that is believed by those holding sociology to be a value-free discipline? Does the belief in a value-free sociology mean, in point of fact, sociology is a discipline actually free of of values and that it successfully excludes all non-scientific assumptions in selecting, studying, and reporting on a problem? Or does it mean that sociology should do so? At its deepest roots, the myth of a value-free sociology was Weber’s way of trying to adjudicate the tensions between two vital Western traditions: between reason and faith, between knowledge and feeling, between classicism and romanticism, between the head and the heart. Like Freud, Weber never really believed in an enduring peace or in a final resolution of this conflict. What he did was to seek a truce through the segregation of the contenders, by allowing each to dominate in different spheres of life. It is precisely because of the deeply dualistic implications of the current doctrine of a value-free sociology that I felt its most appropriate symbol to be the man-beast, the cleft creature, the minotaur.