Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Citation

Baert, P., & Carreira da Silva, F. (2010). Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (2nd ed.). Polity Press.

Chapter Summary

The second edition revises Patrick Baert's single-authored Social Theory in the Twentieth Century (1998), now written with Filipe Carreira da Silva. It has an introduction, nine chapters and a preface to the new edition; Simon Susen's review essay in Distinktion (2013) gives its length as 319 pages. Each chapter treats one school or thinker, and Susen describes a consistent three-part structure within chapters: the historical context, the central issues and contributions, and an assessment of strengths and weaknesses, followed by recommended primary and secondary readings. The book concentrates on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory rather than the classical founders, and ends with the authors' own proposal for social theory.

Chapter 1: A Timeless Order and its Achievement: Structuralism and Genetic Structuralism

An overview of French social theory, which Susen summarises as running from Durkheim and Saussure's linguistic structuralism to Pierre Bourdieu's genetic structuralism. New to this edition is a section on Luc Boltanski's pragmatic sociology.

Chapter 2: The Biological Metaphor: Functionalism and Neo-functionalism

Functionalist thought from early figures such as Spencer, Durkheim, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown to Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, Niklas Luhmann and the neo-functionalism of Jeffrey Alexander.

Chapter 3: The Enigma of Everyday Life: Symbolic Interactionism, the Dramaturgical Approach and Ethnomethodology

Micro-sociological theories of everyday life and social order: Mead's symbolic interactionism, Goffman's dramaturgical approach and Garfinkel's ethnomethodology. The second edition adds Randall Collins's work on rituals and emotions and Russell Hardin's on trust.

Chapter 4: The Invasion of Economic Man: From Rational Choice Theory to the New Institutionalism

Rational choice and game theory, discussed through writers such as Jon Elster, Martin Hollis, David Kreps and Gary Becker, followed by a new section on neo-institutionalism (Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell) and its relation to rational choice.

Chapter 5: As Sociology meets History: Giddens's Structuration Theory and Historical Sociology

Anthony Giddens's structuration theory, now joined by a detailed treatment of historical sociology covering Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, Michael Mann and Shmuel Eisenstadt.

Chapter 6: The History of the Present: Foucault's Archaeology and Genealogy

Michel Foucault's archaeological and genealogical studies, which Susen singles out for clarity and uses as the book's entry point to structuralist and post-structuralist influence on social theory.

Chapter 7: The Spread of Reason: Habermas's Critical Theory and Beyond

Critical theory centred on Jürgen Habermas, extended in this edition to more recent contributions by Claus Offe and Axel Honneth.

Chapter 8: A Brave New World?: Current Trends in Social Theory

An entirely new chapter on theories of the contemporary age: Manuel Castells's network society, Ulrich Beck's risk society, Zygmunt Bauman's liquid modernity, Saskia Sassen's global city and global society, and Richard Sennett's account of the decline of public life. According to Susen, the chapter's opening page is titled "A Brave New World? The Empirical Turn in Social Theory", and the authors criticise several of these theorists for not supporting their claims with carefully designed empirical research.

Chapter 9: Conclusion: Social Theory for the Twenty-First Century

A rewritten conclusion that argues for the continuing importance of social theory, criticises the deductive-nomological and representational views of how theory relates to research, and proposes the authors' own "hermeneutics-inspired pragmatism", in which social research is valued for offering new readings of the social rather than for mirroring a hidden reality.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–4: Schools of thought

• Genetic structuralism: Bourdieu's attempt to combine structural analysis with an account of how structures are produced and reproduced through practice.
• Functionalism and neo-functionalism: explaining social institutions by the functions they serve for the wider system, and later attempts to revise this approach.
• Dramaturgical approach and ethnomethodology: studying everyday interaction as performance, and as the methods people use to produce a sense of social order.
• New institutionalism: approaches that explain behaviour through institutional rules and settings rather than individual rational calculation alone.

Chapters 5–7: Major theorists

• Structuration theory: Giddens's account of structure and agency as mutually constituting.
• Archaeology and genealogy: Foucault's methods for analysing the rules of discourse and the historical emergence of forms of knowledge and power.
• Critical theory: Habermas's programme of a rational critique of society, continued by Offe and Honneth.

Chapters 8–9: The present and the authors' proposal

• Network society, risk society, liquid modernity: diagnoses of what is distinctive about the contemporary age.
• Social theory versus sociological theory: the authors prefer "social theory" as a transdisciplinary enterprise rather than theory serving sociology alone.
• Hermeneutics-inspired pragmatism: the authors' view that theory should help researchers produce new interpretations of the social rather than mirror a pre-existing reality.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Clear, consistent chapter design. Susen, who had placed the first edition at the top of his reading lists, praises the uniform pattern of context, contribution and evaluation, together with each chapter's guide to further reading. William Outhwaite, quoted by the publisher, calls the exposition clear and the level of discussion high yet lively.
• Evaluation, not just description. Each school is assessed for strengths and weaknesses, and the authors engage with primary sources rather than relying on secondary summaries, a point made both by Susen and by Outhwaite.
• A genuinely updated edition. All chapters were revised; new material covers Boltanski, Collins and Hardin, neo-institutionalism, historical sociology, Offe and Honneth, and a new chapter on Castells, Beck, Bauman, Sassen and Sennett.
• An argument of its own. The final chapter's pragmatist programme gives readers a position to test the earlier chapters against, which suits essay writing.

Limitations

• Limited treatment of the classics. Susen notes that Marx, Weber and Simmel receive relatively little attention and Marxist thought is treated only marginally; Durkheim is the exception through Chapter 1.
• Missing traditions. Susen lists approaches the book barely covers: feminist theory, theories of race and ethnicity, theories of space, postmodern and deconstructive thought, and actor-network theory. He also notes that almost all theorists covered are white, male and from Western Europe or North America.
• Contestable conclusions. Susen questions the authors' claims about the growing importance and uncertain role of social theory, their history of the deductive-nomological and representational models, and the relativist tendency of their pragmatism. Readers should treat Chapter 9 as an argument rather than a summary.
• Age. The edition dates from 2010; theory published since then is not covered.

Where It Fits in the Course

This book occupies the middle of the course: more analytical and critical than Anthony Elliott's Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction, which is written for students meeting these ideas for the first time, and organised by school, unlike Rob Stones's Key Sociological Thinkers, which gives one chapter to each thinker. A sensible route is Elliott or Stones first for orientation, then Baert and Carreira da Silva for a more evaluative account.

Craig Calhoun and colleagues' Contemporary Sociological Theory is a reader of original texts whose parts (Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas, structure and agency, modernity) map closely onto Chapters 1 and 5–8 here; reading the primary selections alongside the corresponding chapter is the best use of both. Two primary works in the course go deeper on single chapters: Anthony Giddens's The Constitution of Society is the full statement of the structuration theory surveyed in Chapter 5, and Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction shows the genetic structuralism of Chapter 1 at work in an empirical study. Because Susen identifies feminist, race and postcolonial theory as gaps, students should take those topics from the reader or from separate texts.

How to Use This Book

The book assumes some familiarity with classical sociological theory (Marx, Weber, Durkheim) and with introductory sociology; it suits upper-level undergraduates and master's students in sociology, politics and anthropology, which the publisher names as its audience.

A practical plan:

• Read the introduction first for the authors' framing, then take chapters in the order the course follows; each chapter stands largely on its own.
• Core chapters for most courses: 1 (structuralism and Bourdieu), 3 (everyday life), 5 (Giddens and historical sociology), 6 (Foucault) and 7 (Habermas).
• By interest: Chapter 2 for the background to systems theory, Chapter 4 for students in economics or political science, Chapter 8 for theories of globalisation and late modernity.
• Finish with Chapter 9 and read it critically, ideally together with Susen's review essay, which sets out objections to its argument.

Use the three-part chapter structure as a note-taking template: context, key claims and an evaluation for each school. Follow each chapter's recommended readings to at least one primary text. For essays, the strengths-and-weaknesses sections supply starting points, but they should be checked against the primary sources and supplemented with the traditions the book omits.