>Leaving out the "law-like fashion" -- because I don't
>think explanation has to be by means of laws -- I
>don't think this is a crazy idea. 15 years ago I wrote
>a dissertation defending it, which I supposed makes me
>a God-damned Logicla Positivist
well, for those who damn positivists, you don't fit. they damn them b/c they think positivists only advocate nomothetic explanation. (Reactive) anti-naturalists might snort, but they wouldn't damn you. They think reductionism isn't possible b/c society and nature are two different kinds of things. [1] (you know this, I know, so sorry if it sounds like lecturing.)
What you sound like is what is called a critical realist or critical naturalist (roots in prag). CR rejects the opposition of objectivism and relativism. They reframe the relationship between epistemology and ontology, accepting methodological pragmatism, insisting that this doesn't require ontological skepticism, only a rejection of a correspondence theory of truth.
>Isn't Marx one of those Founders?
well, first, I guess I should have made clear that I was talking about the discovery of society, so the 'founders' of which I speak aren't the Trinity, MD&W, to whom we bow at the altar ritual-like, but those who grappled with the "idea of civil society".
By the time the Trinity started addressing the problems, the idea of civil society had been killed. [2]
Yes, M is a member of the Trinity.[3]
While Marx obviously wasn't concerned that society would fall apart (which the typically 'official' founders, Saint Simone, Comte, Durk were, though see below), he spoke to a tradition of social thought that was animated by concerns over the relationship between individual and society, private and public, individual interests or passions and public ethics or concerns, the state and civil society, the juridical and the ethical.
What was MArx afraid of? Hegel (*grin*) Yeah, it's a little to facetious.
Marx did speak to values and morality and, since he was speaking to Hegel (who was speaking to Kant), consider, for instance, a passage from _Preface and Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Policital Economy_. He actually provides us with an example of a secularized version of the sacred and profane:
"When the political has attained its true development, man -- not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life -- leads a twofold life, A HEAVENLY AND AN EARTHLY LIFE (emphasis mine): life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a mans and becomes a plaything of alien powers."
For Marx, the political community is where we realize our social character is _heavenly_ (sacred). Life in civil society is earthly or profane. Civil society is where we, as private individuals, we treat one another as means to our own ends.
Marx turns Hegel on his head and sounds like ... Durkheim!
For Marx, society is characterized by a contradiction between the abstract citizen who realizes himself in and through society, by participating in public life -- what carrol calls struggle -- and the private citizen, a concrete individual (not abstract), who operates in civil society.
>And Weber knew that
>feudally ordered society was on its way out and
so did Durkheim (and so did Saint Simone and Comte). To ask the question, what holds society together?, is to concede that the Aristotelian doctrine of natural place no longer held sway. If our (moral) rights and obligations were no longer ordered according to this doctrine, how were they ordered? If political authority must be justified, what justified it? If individuals were capable of empirical knowledge of the world, what guaranteed they'd make moral decisions?
Kant, Hume, Smith, Ferguson, Locke, Hegel -- they all were grappling with this constellation of questions in one way or another. The Sc. Enlightenment pushed us toward an answer that stayed entirely within the realm of _this_ world with a conception of 'civil society' as morally validating and morally validated and a philosophical anthropology of humans as social creatures who were moral by virtue of our social existence.
Adam Smith, who supposedly glorified selfishness, argues that the moral basis of individual existence is found in the need to be recognized by others. And, not only that, it was the desire for recognition from others that drove people to "truck, barter, and exchange". The very goal of economic activity was to "be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency and approbation." To be recognized, was what drove "all the toil and bustle" of economic exchange. Recognition is "the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth."
>thought that choice of values was arbitrary.
Weber also ended up sitting in an asylum, staring out a window, obsessively picking at his fingernails. :) sorry, my favorite line.
Durkheim knew they were, too. That's what scared him. And it didn't none make Weber too happy, either, though he conceptualized the problem quite differently.
I first encountered Weber in my second college course. I'd take a course, History of the Family, and I kept asking my tutor, "What's this culture thing. They all say culture does this and culture does that." I must have really bugged him with my pestering questions, so he handed me _Economy and Society_ and said: Your next course will be, "What's Culture". go home and read this. In that work, Weber writes:
"Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now."
Not a happy camper! His _Protestant Ethic_ ends with some of the most soulfully despairing words about capitalism and the future he imagined it held for us. At the close, not only does he write the famous passages, he indicates that he sees the work as leading naturally to the question of values:
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of the monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment." But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. ... But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs... No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.
(Why Carl Remick hasn't memorized that last paragraph... I've never understood. Oh, and there are some other beauts both Carl and Doug would love....)
Weber goes on: But this brings us to the world of judgements of value and of faith... The next task would be rather to show the significance of ascetic rationalism, for the content of practical social ethics, thus for the types of organization and the functions of the social groups from the conventicle to the State. Then, its relations to humanistic rationalism, its ideals of life and culture influence; further to the development of philosophical and scientific empiricism, to technical development and to spiritual ideals would have to be anslysed.
Blah blah. Then he goes on to talk about how important it is to "investigate how Protestant Ascetiscism was in turn influenced in its development and its character by the totality of social conditions, especially economic."
But, you know, Carrol says Weber is a plantonist, an idealist, and can't be taken seriously. *rolls eyes*
i love carrol anyway.
not that anyone's read this far, but Durkheim's whole project was to show that values weren't derived from god, but from _this world_ -- from social life. In fact, though he regarded Marx's ideas about economics as a dead end, Durkheim supported socialism as way to supplant the religious systems that had collapsed. For him, socialism correctly advanced his understanding of the individual as realized only in and through society. And, as a good positivist, D thought that socialism was the best way to instantiate the moral principles discovered by a scientific study of society.
[1] But I've always read their arguments as defensive, as parasitic on positivism, anyway. They don't really challenge the claims of some positivists that real explanation is nomothetic. They focus, instead, on "understanding" conceding ground to the positivists -- that it isn't really isn't explanation.
[2] Founders was the wrong word to use, really, because I'm a little too aware that my training stressed the social foundations of social theory in a way that most sociology departments ignore. when I first attended the department, it was known as one of the few departments that focused on social theory. by my second yr there, a revolution had occured, and i was told there was no way that I could do my diss. on theory. it had to be empirical. so.
[3] but, thanks to Parsons, in the u.s. it's really only in the last 40 years that he's considered an important enough figure to be taught in all the major intro textbooks.In the states, at any rate. It's important to remember that ways of thinking about the disciplines, what animates them, what their essentially contested concepts are, are very particular. In the U.S. there's the legacy of Simmel and the Chicago school, as well as the very practical social reformers, that isn't as evident, say, in Australia or France.
"Finish your beer. There are sober kids in India."
-- rwmartin