Toward the New Objectivity: An Introduction to Theory and SocietyAuthor(s): A. W. G.Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1974), pp. i-vPublished by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656957 .Accessed: 30/03/2011 16:48

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i

Toward the New Objectivity

An Introduction to Theory and Society

Theory and Society has no choice but to be a child of its time. It comes at a moment when the institutional and departmental life of social theory and sociology seem exhausted and drifting. At a time when sociology sees the road back more clearly than the one forward. The old intellectual paradigms are losing their ability to convince, let alone enthuse, and are being challenged increasingly by competitor-paradigms: by critical theory, ethnomethodology, the neo-Marxisms, linguistically-sensitive sociology, structuralism, and a stir- ring of neo-Weberianism.

Theory and Society arrives also when the hinge of history is moving rapidly and with noisy paradox. For example: the first substantial American effort at world detente was launched by one of the most reactionary and scandal-invol- ved presidents Americans ever had. The detente must have a Metternichian character, born as it was of that dinosaur of "socialism", the USSR, and that most powerful and bumbling of imperialisms, the United States. Inevitably, it is the peoples of the world who will pay for this "detente". The Americans by the increase in their cost of living, incident to the wheat give-away, and the Russians by the further loss of their political freedom and civil liberties, as the United States accommodates to the Soviet system. Irony is blended with paradox when we note that the United States now says nothing about Soviet labor camps while the Chinese People's Daily recently (Jan. 8, 1974) claimed that there are a thousand camps in the Soviet Union, holding more than a million prisoners. "Anyone who expresses discontent and resistance to the fascist rule of Soviet revisionism," contended the People's Daily, "will be declared a 'lunatic' or 'unbalanced' and forced into a mental hospital. .." Thus the paradoxes of detente.

Here, where international stability means dinosaur counterbalancing dinosaur, and now, when there are few political commitments devoid of the sharpest ambivalence, there may be an enlargening social space for the growth of a new objectivity in social science today.

In this fluid period, other major developments also portend massive world transformation. The Arab utilization of oil as an economic and political weapon has already produced an irreversible change of incalculable conse-

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quence. And the Mid-East, Yom Kippur, War already probes the limits and meaning of the detente. The oil crisis slammed closed the door on the epoch of cheap energy supplies for the industrial nations. And this is a harbinger of an endemic energy crisis that will only be beginning when the Arabs supply oil once more. And it is not only energy but also raw materials that will be acutely problematic. For all the underdeveloped countries possessing raw materials needed by the great powers understood the Arab message quite clearly.

It is likely that the sheer fiscal consequences of the oil crisis will be as important as any. For the increased price of oil will play havoc with industrial countries' balance of payments which, in turn, means the radical unstabiliza- tion of world currencies. With the ending of cheap energy supplies fundamen- tal changes are also impending for the style and standards of living in indus- trial countries. If the Club of Rome is correct, industrial societies will in time stop being growth economies and become tread-mill, down-beat societies. And where will the vast energies of young people be expended in a zero- growth society without socially sanctioned enthusiasms?

All this means inevitable and massive ideological shifts in industrially devel- oped nations. At least two possibilities suggest themselves: One is a new ideology of "interdependence" that perhaps resurrects Emile Durkheim's encomium to The Division of Labor in Society. Another is toward a brazen imperialism that justifies its open claims to superiority in terms of a vulgari- zed Nietscheanism. (Given the manifest bumbling of our masters, one hesi- tates to say that we verge on the time of the new super-men.)

In any event, there will be massive changes in national consciousness that can have only the most profound effects on social theory and sociology. As the old national myths lose their hold, but before the new ideologies gain sway, there is an opportunity for a new objectivity in social theory.

The third massive event that plainly indicates how serious a transition we are now living through is the Watergate Affair. This scandal is not of parochial relevance to Americans alone. In a world tautly stretched between two great powers, anything that seriously affects the American political system pro- foundly affects the entire world. Watergate certainly means a massive under- mining, at home and abroad, of the legitimacy of the American political system. It therefore means - as do the Oil Crisis and the Ddtente- growing limits on America's world power.

Indeed, together these several events portend the end of the American for-

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ward momentum in world events. They mean America's retreat to an essen- tially defensive posture aimed at holding, rather than extending, its sway. These events trace out the highpoint of the American Empire and the begin- ning of the world roll-back of American power. The self-confidence (not to say the smugness) of some Americans, and with it the ideologies they sustain- ed, are now surely archaic.

Again: the decline of this old, conventional, consciousness creates the new infrastructure for a new objectivity in social science and social theory.

Because of its critical importance, we attempt here a modest effort at the sociological interpretation of Watergate in the articles by Jack Douglas, Milton Mankoff, William Domhoff, Devra Davis. Despite the theoretical and political differences among these authors, there is surprising agreement among them on specific points of interpretation as well as in their overall estimate of Watergate's significance. None see it as a routine scandal, even if all recognize it as grounded deeply in characteristic institutions.

When Jack Douglas suggests that Watergate is the outrunner of the "new American prince", he premisses a depth of crisis in the American Empire surely agreed to by those, such as Mankoff, writing from a neo-Marxist per- spective quite different from Douglas' version of ethnomethodology. The new American prince means, of course, the end of the old American liberal- ism. Since this liberalism was once the basic social infrastructure of "objectiv- ity" in the social sciences, the latter are developing a new concept of objectiv- ity in their everyday life, although this has not yet been articulately theo- rized. Certainly Watergate means the further embarrassment of the liberalism which was once the unchallenged and blanketing ideology of the American campus. Now, to be objective need no longer mean - as it once did ~ tacitly to consent to liberalism's or social democracy's definition of social reality.

Today, the construction of "convincing accounts", by social theorists and social scientists, no longer subjects them to quite the same pressure from liberalism that it once did. The older view assumed that objectivity depends on a proper relation between a "scientist" and his method. The overtones of liberal individualism are evident here. Now, however, objectivity is not focally seen as a question of the conscientious individual scientists's (often tormen- ted) compliance with the requirements of scientific method. Increasingly, objectivity is seen as resting on something behind the method, on the choices of men; increasingly, objectivity is not reduced to a question of "empirical evidence". It is, rather, seen as resting on the interpretations of the meaning of this evidence, and on such consensus as may be achieved about these matters of judgment by the community of scientists.

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David Silverman's article here, Speaking Seriously, deals with the manner in which a Personnel Review Board constructs its judgments and, in particular, how they t others to view them seriously. In other words, Silverman ex- amines what board members do to make their accounts convincing to one another. We may read Silverman's ethnomethodological analysis of this bu- reaucratic process as having a wider implication; as a tacit commentary on how a group of men, including social scientists, render their accounts convinc- ing to others in their communities (at least within modem societies). We may read Silverman as showing us how social scientists construct "truth" and "knowledge" of society.

But such a notion of truth, as grounded socially in the consensus of com- munity members, exhbits a shift from older notions of objectivity 'n social science, which (paradoxically) often rested on a tacit absolutism; this now gives way to an objectivity unabashedly rooted in an open relativism. Truth is thus viewed as dependent on the construction-work of men, on a work that varies with their different social positions, group involvements, and communi- ty arrangements. The problem of relativism thus emerges sharply.

Relativism in social theory is directly confronted by Derek Phillips' article here, compar'mg the older sociology of knowledge with the new sociology of science of Thomas Kuhn. Phillips shows that, unlike many of those interested in the older sociology of knowledge, Kuhn's sociology of science was charac- terized by an openness to the epitemologcal implications of the paradig - centered, community-structured organization of "normal" science, thus gen- erating a new crisis of relativism for philosophers of science. Phillips' article is also concerned with reopening- and encouraging others to reopen - key issues in the recent history of social science, as a basis for their self-conscious renewal.

No social theorist today has been more concerned with this than Jiirgen Habermas. Boris Frankel's interview with Habermas may be read as an infor- mal discussion by a social theorist who, while rejecting epistemological abso- lutism, is also seeking for an alternative to conventional relativism, to arbitrar- iness, and Jdeed to nihilism.

The new freedom from liberalism, and hence the new objectivity, is mani- fested by social scientists today on both the political left and right. For some, this expresses itself in a new openness toward Marxism, and in a new willing- ness to use Marxism to deepen their theoretical work. For some others, however, the new objectivity manifests itself in a paradoxical sectarianism, in which Marxism is taken as a given, as a completed, unproblematic, thing. This

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essentially positivistic view of Marxism can, then, have no rational answer to the question of which Marxism it advocates: Marx's or Engels'? Louis Althus- sers or George Lukacs'? Lenin's or Trotsky's? Karl Korsch's, Colletti's, or Sartre's? Which? The issue here is not an empty one, for it has to do with the essential question of what one is committed to when one is committed to Marxist theory. It is precisely such concerns that undergird my own article on Marxism and Social Theory in this issue. Dealing as it does with the "meta- phoricality" of Marxism, it takes a step toward answering the question, what does Marxism believe in and want?

Certainly, the new social science objectivity is not manifested only by devel- opments on the left. The collapse of conventional liberalism also provides opportunities for the right. (Indeed, if the left does not see this it is in for a rude awakening.) The right, no less than the left, feels itself vindicated by the decline of liberalism. In the university and its social sciences, however, this is not usually manifested by an outright affirmation of a positive political ideol- ogy. Rather, it expresses itself - on both right and left - by an increased freedom to speak out openly about matters concerning which liberalism had previously maintained, and enforced, a silence. Thus if liberalism convention- ally discouraged a sociological analysis of corporative capitalism, this same liberalism also repressed any social science that was not premissed on the equality of races. It is thus we find, with the decline of liberalism, a resur- gence of comparative intelligence testing claiming important racial differen- ces.

The decline of liberalism today in social science does not so much entail an affirmation of right wing ideologies as the growth of certain structures of sentiment congenial to these ideologies, particularly a growing cynicism. The dispersed troops of the New Left sometimes feel that their choices are: either Marxism - which for some means a new Stalinism - or an unreflexive cyni- cism that has forgotten that the cynic is only an idealist who is trying to escape further disillusionment. The difference between these two, that is, between a cynicism and a Stalinist-turning Marxism is, of course, not as great as might seem. Both are prone to a new Machiavellianism. A Machiavellianism which is sometimes used on behalf of the state and sometimes against it.

The new objectivity, then, manifests itself today in paradoxical ways. Yet, for the moment, this emerging new objectivity also expresses a precarious, an ambiguous, yet genuine liberation from outworn shibboleths.

A.W.G. 11 January 1974

Article Contentsp. ip. iip. iiip. ivp. v

Issue Table of ContentsTheory and Society, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1974), pp. i-vi+1-116Front MatterToward the New Objectivity: An Introduction to Theory and Society [pp. i - v]Speaking Seriously: The Language of Grading [pp. 1 - 15]Marxism and Social Theory [pp. 17 - 35]Habermas Talking: An Interview [pp. 37 - 58]Epistemology and the Sociology of Knowledge: The Contributions of Mannheim, Mills, and Merton [pp. 59 - 88]Watergate and SociologyWatergate: Harbinger of the American Prince [pp. 89 - 97]Watergate: Conflict and Antagonisms within the Power Elite [pp. 99 - 102]Watergate and Sociological Theory [pp. 103 - 109]Watergate: Government by Negation [pp. 111 - 115]

Back Matter