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Atilio A. Boron

A Social Theory for the 21st

Century?

Introduction: An Anti-Theoretical Fin de Siècle and its Impact on

Social Theory

T here is a sense of malaise in culture, updating the diagnosis made by

Sigmund Freud in the early 1930s to the end of the 20th century with
even more elaborate brushstrokes. However, there is also a ‘malaise in theory
and with theory’ in the domain of the social sciences, particularly with
theories which, following in the footsteps of the classical tradition, persist in
their endeavour to explain the movement of society as a whole. In the current
ideological ethos, dominated by an intoxicating combination of postmodern
nihilism and neoliberal technocratism, theories on society arouse the annoy-
ance and sometimes even the disdain of many social scientists. Theories have
fallen into disgrace, and any beginner or dilettante feels bold enough to
denounce them, citing the inevitable accusation that they are nothing but
19th-century obsolete ‘grand narratives’ fit to languish in some musty
museum. This unprecedented discrediting of theoretical work is linked to a
combination of factors: (1) the crisis in what we might call, in somewhat het-
erodox terms, ‘the university format’, this being the institutional context
where social science teaching, learning and research takes place; (2) the
growing role now played, at least in the capitalist periphery, by non-academic
institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,
governments and several private foundations in drawing up the ‘agenda’ for
social science research, as well as in the increasingly laborious funding
process; (3) the scourge of conventional anti-theoretical knowledge, aided
and abetted by the demands of the social science labour market, which
rewards conformism, ‘pragmatic’ and ‘realistic’ attitudes, and punishes criti-
cal spirit and theoretical leanings with joblessness; (4) the deplorable influ-
ence of the contrived ‘practical approach’ required by the most important

Current Sociology, October 1999, Vol. 47(4): 47–64 SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
[0011–3921(199910)47:4;47–64;011103]
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48 Current Sociology Vol. 47 No. 4

sources of funding, completely debasing the work of social scientists, who

have now become incompetent social workers in whose hands the most
vulnerable and exploited sectors of our societies must fall; and lastly (5) the
lamentable consequences of the garbage-in, garbage-out cycle spawned by
the adverse conditions in which social-scientific research and teaching take
place: excessively low budgets, low wages, urgency to obtain results, and so
on, all damaging the quality of our intellectual output.
The anti-theoretical mood of our age is glaringly obvious when com-
pared with the splendour of the intellectual ethos in Europe a century ago,
an unforgettable portrait of which is to be found in the works of Henry S.
Hughes (Hughes, 1961). On the threshold of this century the names of
Weber, Durkheim and Marx (we could add a long list of distinguished theo-
reticians such as Simmel, Toennies, Pareto, Freud and so on) were key refer-
ence points in the domain of sociology and, despite its waning influence, their
names still cast their shadow over our age. In contrast, in more recent times
we are seeing what C. Wright Mills called ‘the grand theory’ disappear
without trace. Not only did Parsons’ synthesis fall into oblivion but the
alternative theories competing with it fared no better. We do not even
mention the work of Pitirim Sorokin, whose cumbersome style and sterile
encyclopaedism condemned him to a premature death; and the same fate
befell the theorizations of George Homans and Robert K. Merton. In politi-
cal science, a discipline increasingly exposed to the unhealthy influence of
neoclassical economics in the last 30 years, the theoretical crisis took the
shape of the irresponsible destruction of the political philosophical tradition
and a frenzied ‘flight forward’ in pursuit of a new philosophers’ stone: the
micro-foundations of social action. In their basic combination of egotism and
rationality, these would reveal the deeper cornerstones of human conduct,
with total disregard for the historical circumstances, structural factors or cul-
tural traditions which might determine it. In both cases, sociology and politi-
cal science, the results were disappointing.
The consequences of this unfortunate state of affairs are reflected in the
progressive marginalization of the teaching of social science in the universi-
ties of the developed world and in peripheral countries. In economics, for
example, this process of theoretical disintegration is at a very advanced stage,
so much so that many of the best doctoral programmes at the main North
American universities have now given up teaching the history of economic
doctrines altogether, supposedly because they are useless. The tragi-comic
result of all this is that young doctoral students, whose average age has fallen
sharply in the last 20 years, gain a very poor, biased theoretical training which
hardly extends beyond the limits of books and papers published from the
1980s onwards. Most are not acquainted with the works of Smith, Ricardo
and Marx, and only in exceptional cases have they studied the texts of writers
such as Marshall, Jevons, Walras, Pigou or Robinson. Even Keynes, not to
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Boron: A Social Theory for the 21st Century? 49

mention Sraffa, is vaguely imagined to be one of those antediluvian monsters

who populated the obscure, confused universe prior to the advent of econo-
metrics. For these future econometrists, many of whom will no doubt play a
decisive practical role as civil servants, experts in consultancy firms and big
transnational banks, or consultants in institutions such as the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund, ‘theory’ is no more than a series of
conventional ideas developed in papers published by their teachers – albeit
packaged in over-mathematical theorems – which have only a remote
relationship with the real problems of the economy. The repeated harping of
businesspeople and civil servants about the uselessness of conventional econ-
omic theory to predict events as spectacular as the ‘Tequila crisis’ of late 1994
or the mid-1997 Southeast Asian crisis, just to mention two most recent
examples, gives a very clear picture of the insurmountable limitations of
theoretical models which, in the glowing furnace of history, persist in their
mistaken belief that the mathematical elegance of their formulation testifies
to the fundamental richness and depth of their propositions.
It is clear that a situation like the one outlined here is not exclusive to
economics. We see it also in sociology and political science. In the former, the
collapse of ‘structural functionalism’ and the imposing edifice constructed by
Talcott Parsons since the mid-1930s left behind it an immense void which has
yet to be filled. The ‘grand theory’, constructed in the image of triumphant
postwar North American capitalism, extolled the ‘consensus on fundamental
values’ which, according to Parsons, predominated in the United States of the
1950s, playing down its structural tensions and fractures and putting forward,
with a mixture of naivety and conformism, a future conceived as the eternal
perpetuation of the idyllic North American postwar years. The history of the
USA itself in the second half of this century threw such illusions overboard.
And in Latin America, the optimistic expectations aroused by the sociology
and economics of those years for our peoples: economic development, expan-
sion of the middle classes, political democracy – in short, a marvellous
‘Northamericanization’ of Latin America – were swept away mercilessly by
the winds of history. Sadly, the crisis of hegemonic theory meant, quite
simply, the abandonment of any attempt to theorize society as a whole. Faced
with this situation, sociology sought refuge in a self-destructive ‘ultra-spe-
cialization’ which made it possible to study the tree while disregarding the
presence of the wood (Wallerstein, 1998: 50–1).
The situation is no more encouraging in political science. We need only
recall the rise and resounding fall of the so-called behavioural revolution and
the absurd attempts – with a theorist of the stature of David Easton at the
helm – to ‘expel’ the concepts of power and state from the domain of politi-
cal science owing to their supposedly hopeless inability to grasp and measure
the phenomena of contemporary political life with any precision. The famous
systems theory, following in Parsons’ footsteps, constructed by Easton in the
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50 Current Sociology Vol. 47 No. 4

1950s, came to no better fate than the person who inspired it. In more recent
years, Adam Przeworski corroborated the theoretical crisis and confusion in
political science in its surprising inability to anticipate such events as the fall
of the ‘people’s democracies’ of Eastern Europe. In Przeworski’s view, this
constituted an ‘astonishing failure on the part of political science’, similar in
magnitude and implications to the ineptitude of dominant economic theory
to predict some of the most significant events of recent years (Przeworski,
1991: 1). Notwithstanding, political science has persisted in a trend which we
consider to be suicidal: on the one hand there is the accelerated assimilation
of the methodological arsenal of neoclassical economics, reflected in the over-
whelming rise of theories of ‘rational choice’; on the other hand, there is the
foolish abandonment of a tradition of political-philosophical reflection
dating back 2500 years which, unlike the currents of thought in vogue at
present, has been characterized by its persistent focus on what is relevant and
what is significant. In brief: theoretical construction appears increasingly to
be a futile and superfluous endeavour.

The Origin of the Present Crisis

One of the most rigorous and fruitful attempts to diagnose the nature of the
crisis in the social sciences at the end of the 20th century is to be found in the
Gulbenkian Report. This was the work of a distinguished group of scientists,
six of whom belonged to the domain of social sciences; another two came
from what the Report itself calls, in somewhat obsolete terminology, the
‘hard sciences’, while the other two came from the humanities. Intellectual
command of the project fell to Immanuel Wallerstein, and the Report
reviewed some of the most important milestones in the development of the
social sciences from the 18th century to the present day.
As the Report, which has been widely disseminated, makes reference to
some central themes in our argument, we use it here as a basic reference point
for our discussion. First and foremost, we should say that broadly speaking
we agree with the diagnosis and the proposals of the Report, with some reser-
vations, which we outline later. In any case, we suggest it is necessary to
examine several nuances which we believe do not receive sufficient emphasis
in the Report, and which could possibly open up promising pathways for
progress in social theory in the next century.
To simplify an argument which is thoroughly expounded in the Report,
we might say that the origin of the present malaise in the social sciences dates
back to the crisis of a certain scientific model, one that has been in gestation
since the 16th century, and which we might call the ‘Newtonian/Cartesian’
paradigm. The ‘Newtonian’ component provided an idea, which is funda-
mental to scientific endeavour, namely the supposition, long evident and
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Boron: A Social Theory for the 21st Century? 51

undisputed, that there was an absolute symmetry between past and future.
Hence it was possible to establish essential certainties for the nascent natural
sciences as the whole universe of creation seemed to be suspended in an
eternal and imperturbable present, just waiting for the scientist who would
finally reveal its secrets. The ‘Cartesian’ view complemented and reinforced
this idea, postulating an insurmountable duality between humankind and
Nature, between matter and spirit, between the physical and the spiritual
world. It was within the perimeters defined by these two coordinates that the
social sciences would come about (Gulbenkian Commission, 1996: 2).
This scientific model from the 18th century onwards, upon which the
social sciences came to be based, has entered into crisis. In effect, the tra-
ditional paradigm began to be strenuously questioned from the 1960s
onwards, although the more remote origins of this challenge date back to the
end of the last century. Two innovations in the physical sciences and mathe-
matics are identified by the Gulbenkian Report as having been particularly
important due to their impact on the social sciences: first, the crisis in nomo-
thetic epistemology in the ‘hard sciences’; second, new theoretical develop-
ments in these disciplines which began to accentuate the importance of the
non-linear over the linear, of complexity over simplification, of the impossi-
bility of completely isolating the observer from the phenomenon observed
and, for some mathematicians, the superiority of qualitative interpretations
over quantitative precision. In short, according to the Report, ‘the natural sci-
ences were beginning to seem closer to what had been scorned as “soft” social
science than to what had been touted as “hard” social science’ (Gulbenkian
Commission, 1996: 61).
Not only did this put the supposed central tenets of mainstream social
theory and its positivist epistemological premises in crisis, it also helped to
erode some of the founding principles on which the social sciences were
organized, in particular their fragmentation into independent and compart-
mentalized ‘disciplines’ and the criteria for their ‘professionalization’. The
main contours of this crisis were summarized with absolute precision in the
talk given by Immanuel Wallerstein in the opening session of this conference.
For Wallerstein, the ‘culture of sociology’ – that is, the series of different
axioms, premises and suppositions which make up the structure of sociology
as a specialized knowledge – today comes up against six challenges. While
these do not necessarily constitute irrefutable truths, they do ‘express cred-
ible and realistic demands for academics to re-examine their premises’
(Wallerstein, 1998: 18). The price that may have to be paid for ignoring these
challenges is too high to afford to be complacent about. In brief, the chal-
lenges in question relate to the incorporation of the Freudian legacy into the
social sciences, the question of Eurocentrism, the social construction of time
(Braudel), the question of complexity (Prigogine), feminism and ultimately
modernity.
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52 Current Sociology Vol. 47 No. 4

It is appropriate to point out at this juncture that Wallerstein’s appeal to

sociologists and his recommendation with regard to reconstructing a social
science to put an end to the prevailing artificial fragmentation should also be
heeded intently by economists and political scientists. It would be irration-
ally arrogant to claim that the exercise of self-criticism Wallerstein invites us
to embark upon lacks meaning in these disciplines. Only an astoundingly
obstinate and dogmatic spirit could deny the depth of the crisis afflicting neo-
classical economics, which marches gaily onwards to its eventual dilution into
a sort of accountancy technique lacking any scope or perspective. And it is
not just a question of confirming the infinite abyss separating the broad view
– sociological, historical and philosophical, as well as economic – of an Adam
Smith, for example, from that of some Nobel prize-winners of our day, who
earn this distinction for having worked out some artificial mathematical for-
mulae to design instruments destined to be used by financial brokers to fore-
cast the price of junk bonds, derivatives and shares in what some respectful
economists of the classical tradition call ‘casino capitalism’. We need not go
that far: the decadence of economic theory may be confirmed simply by
holding up for comparison articles published in the American Economic
Review some 50 years ago, when economists – like Joseph A. Schumpeter, to
cite a brilliant example – still occupied themselves with problems in the real
world, with the mathematicized banalities which are published these days as
if they were scientific products. For example, highly formalized complex rea-
sonings aimed at trying to understand why the savings rate is so low in under-
developed countries, rambling on through three or four quantitative variables
while dodging the elemental fact that approximately half of the world popu-
lation survives on an income equivalent to US$1 a day, with the result that,
despite the laboured advice of neoclassical economists, the magnificent deci-
sion regarding what to save and where to invest it vanishes in the blink of an
eye. Or nonsense like that of Gary Becker, Nobel Prize-Winner for Econ-
omics who, on a recent visit to my country, Argentina, stated that unem-
ployment – at that time affecting 18 percent of the economically active
population – was a false problem which simply reflected the obstinacy of
workers, egged on by corrupt trade union leaders, in refusing to work for a
wage of US$100 a month. When one of those present reminded him that
owing to the overvaluation of the local currency the cost of living in
Argentina was similar to that of the USA, and that nobody could live on
US$100 a month, the ‘wise man’ replied categorically: ‘economics as a science
has nothing to say about how much money a worker needs to live’. We need
not list any further examples to prove the need for economics to take Waller-
stein’s suggestions on board.
The panorama is no less depressing when we examine the case of politi-
cal science, where the extent of the theoretical crisis has reached crushing pro-
portions. This is particularly true in the light of the two principal reasons,
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Boron: A Social Theory for the 21st Century? 53

which must be separated even though they are deeply intertwined. First, this
is a discipline privileged to have a venerable and fertile tradition of discourse
dating back 2500 years, now relegated to the sidelines of the profession. The
reasons for this are many and varied, and this is not the place to examine them
in detail. The rise of behaviourism was doubtless one factor. The loss of
political philosophy also contributed to its decadence, expurgating from its
core all vestiges of critical thought and resigning itself to being a tedious and
superfluous legitimization of the political institutions of capitalist society,
something that the pioneers of behaviourism did with more conviction, and
with a language more in keeping with the demands of the day. Second, in the
world of the social sciences, political science offers the most successful case
of the ‘colonization’ of a discipline at the hands of neoclassical economics
methodology. The paradigm of ‘rational choice’ and ‘methodological indi-
vidualism’ has not reached the appalling degree of hegemony in sociology,
anthropology, history or geography that it commands in political science, in
its most varied specialities, with all the consequences familiar to all, namely
the loss of relevance of theoretical reflection, the growing distance from
political reality and the sterility of its propositions – a political science that
has very little to say on the problems that really matter and which, to cap it
all, is unable to light the way in the search for a good society.
So, the theoretical crisis is very serious indeed. It is therefore a question
of seeing what path we might take to overcome this situation. However, first
we need to examine another issue.

‘Postmodern Sensibility’ and the Anti-Theoretical Rebellion

The theoretical crisis in the social sciences is also due to another series of
factors. In effect, the weakening of the ‘Newtonian/Cartesian’ paradigm did
not necessarily have to lead to a situation like the present if this process had
not converged with another, analytically different but closely related one: the
rise of postmodernism as a form of sensibility or a ‘common sense’ in
Gramsci’s definition of the term. In a pioneering work on the subject,
Jameson has defined postmodernism as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’,
thereby pointing to the close links between postmodernism as a style of
reflection, aesthetic canon and forms of sensibility and the sweeping, ver-
tiginous dynamic of globalized capitalism (Jameson, 1991).
The numerous and occasionally contradictory theories inspired by post-
modernism nevertheless share a series of basic aspects. First and foremost, we
should underline their visceral rejection of the universality of the Enlighten-
ment, expressed in its rejection of any conception in terms such as ‘truth’,
‘reason’ and ‘science’ (Morrow and Torres, 1995: 413). As David Ford posits
in a revealing work,
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54 Current Sociology Vol. 47 No. 4

. . . the current concepts of rationality and knowledge emphasise historical and

cultural variability, fallibility, the impossibility of going beyond language and
reaching ‘reality’, the fragmentary and particular nature of all understanding,
the penetrating corruption of knowledge by power and domination, the futility
of all search for firm foundations, and the need for a pragmatic approach to
tackle these questions. (Ford, 1989: 291)

Following Ford, we would add that the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ which
has largely ‘colonized’ the social sciences leads to a conception by which
flesh-and-blood men and women who are historically situated volatilize into
spectral figures inhabiting ‘texts’ of different types, developing their gaseous
identity as a product of the interplay between a myriad of heteroclitic signs
and symbols. As these texts contain all types of paradoxes and contractions,
we find that their ‘truth’ is unspeakable, thereby fuelling the ultra-relativism
of postmodern thought.
It is unnecessary to overly stress the fact that this radical attack on the
very notion of truth involves a devastating criticism of all conception of phil-
osophy as knowledge committed to the quest for truth, meaning, reality or
any other sort of ethical purpose such as the good life, happiness or freedom.
For this reason Christopher Norris made the acute observation that, in its
apotheosis, postmodernism ends up establishing ‘a terminal indifference with
regard to matters of truth and falsehood’ (Norris, 1997: 29). Insofar as reality
is conceived as a gigantic kaleidoscopic simulacre, any attempt to establish
what Machiavelli called ‘la veritá effetuale delle cose’ (the effective truth of
things) becomes futile and stupid. The boundaries defining the reality of
fantasy and those which separate fiction from what effectively exists faded
completely with the postmodernist tide. For postmodern sensibility,
however, reality is no more than an infinite combination of language games,
an uncontrolled proliferation of signs without referents and an accumulation
of unshakeable illusions, resistant to any attempt by reason to reveal its
mystifying and fetichizing contents. As Norris rightly observes, the work of
Jean Baudrillard took postmodern irrationalism to its ultimate conclusions:
‘we cannot possibly know’ if the Gulf War took place or not, said Baudrillard,
while the bombs fell on Baghdad (Norris, 1997: 29), consequently leaving
reality as a ‘purely discursive phenomenon, a product of the different codes,
conventions, language games or signing systems which provide the only
means of interpreting experience from a given sociocultural perspective’
(Norris, 1997: 21).
To recapitulate, if the paradigmatic crisis in scientific thought raised
doubts about the validity of the ‘Newtonian/Cartesian’ premises, the attack
of nihilism and postmodern irrationalism considerably aggravated matters,
and when faced with the uncertainty of the former, the only way out offered
by the latter is the plain and simple renunciation of all attempt to develop a
scientific theory of the social. Those who adhere to this perspective, the
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Boron: A Social Theory for the 21st Century? 55

complacent, conservative connotations of which escape nobody’s notice,

take refuge in a metaphysical solipsism which washes its hands completely
of the task of rigorously interpreting the world, let alone changing it. So, for
these authors Marx’s famous ‘Eleventh Thesis’ was definitively shelved.

What Type of Social Sciences?

This diagnosis requires radical thinking – that is to say from the roots up –
on the reasons for the current malaise in the domain of social sciences. At this
point, we think it relevant to challenge a supposition which is usually largely
avoided by analyses devoted to this subject. In reality, the social sciences must
be expressed in the plural not only because of the multiplicity of ‘disciplines’
they consist of, but also because these disciplines are not formed in the same
way from distinct theoretical/methodological approaches. Some social sci-
ences are constructed on the premises of positivist empiricism and culminate
in the constitution of sociology, political science, economics, anthropology
and history as separate and compartmentalized fields of knowledge; however,
there is another view of the social sciences, that of historical materialism,
which proposes, in the words of Albert Hirschman, ‘the art of crossing
boundaries’. For this is precisely what we are dealing with: crossing the arti-
ficial boundaries erected between the different disciplines.
Because, let us recall: what was Weber? Wallerstein reminds us, in the
work cited earlier, that the author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism was extremely reluctant to call himself a sociologist, and that for
most of his academic life he preferred to identify himself as a ‘political econ-
omist’ (Wallerstein, 1998: 6). But who would dare to deny Weber the title of
sociologist or political scientist? And as for his General Economic History –
in which ‘discipline’ should we classify it? And what should we do with the
marked anthropological slant of his classic study on ancient religions:
Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism? Lastly, would anyone dare to expel
Weber from the German political-economic debate at the turn of the century?
And what might we say about Marx? There is no doubt that his work
must be counted alongside that of the founding fathers of economics. Apart
from the irrefutable proof gleaned from an analysis of his main writings, con-
centrating precisely on criticizing political economy, there is a host of details
– often small, anecdotal or circumstantial – bearing witness to this fact. For
example, on the walls of the spacious, circumspect anteroom of the MIT’s
chair of the Department of Economics there hang a series of framed photo-
graphs and oil paintings of the main figures of the profession, all symmetri-
cally arranged. Flanked by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the minister
Thomas Malthus hangs the classic image of Marx at the end of the 1850s, with
his fiery gaze, challenging the orthodoxy of a place which, let us say, is not
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56 Current Sociology Vol. 47 No. 4

wholly keen on his theories. However, is there not also a social theory – on
the classes and their conflict, on social structure, on ideology – in Das
Kapital? And in what discipline should we put The Eighteenth Brumaire? In
history? Sure. In sociology? No doubt at all. In political science? Of course.
Let us take another case: Antonio Gramsci, along with Max Weber, perhaps
one of the greatest brains in 20th-century social theory. How do we classify
his analysis of the Italian ‘Southern Question’? This short essay, a true work
of art in terms of its depth and conciseness, is also a work on economics,
examining the role of protectionist duties and capitalist accumulation strat-
egies of the ‘industrial-agrarian’ bloc responsible for the construction of the
nation-state in Italy. But it is also a fine X-ray of the social structure of the
Mezzogiorno, defined as an ‘immense social disintegration’ reticulately sus-
tained by the intellectual petit bourgeoisie. Its analysis of the Italian peas-
antry combines the macro-focus of a structurally orientated sociology with
the subtlety of anthropological observation on the conscience of the social
actors. And his analyses of hegemony and domination in the modern state –
how should they be classed? An analysis like this undoubtedly constitutes a
major contribution to the theoretical renovation of political science in the
second half of the 20th century.
It would not be difficult to continue with this list. What could we say
about Vilfredo Pareto, the author of the famous The Mind and Society and
The Socialist System? Is he an economist? No doubt about it! Pareto is one
of the greatest economists of the century and his theory of the system’s equi-
librium associates his name with some fundamental economic concepts. But
he was also an acute sociologist and political scientist: his theory of social
change and his conception of social structure fully qualify him as the former,
while his theorizations on politics, the nature of power and the meaning of
the democratic system constitute lasting, albeit uncomfortable, contributions
to the study of these subjects, placing him in a distinguished class of politi-
cal scientists of this century. And Joseph A. Schumpeter? He made substan-
tial contributions to economic theory, but his conception of democracy is at
the basis of the ‘minimalist’ and ‘proceduralist’ consensus which now pre-
vails among the political scientists of our time. We could continue adding
many similar examples: was Thucydides just a historian? And what about
Alexis de Tocqueville, Montesquieu and Adam Smith?
What does all this mean? That the contributions of the most important
figures in the social sciences, including, incidentally, those who do not
support the epistemological perspective of historical materialism, are based
on their capacity to cross interdisciplinary boundaries imposing absurd
restrictions on their endeavours at analysis and interpretation of social reality.
Positivist empiricism, with its artificial and implausible dividing lines
between state, society and economy, and between past and present, with its
arbitrary fragmentation of the subject under study, has entered terminal
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Boron: A Social Theory for the 21st Century? 57

crisis. In the domain of philosophy this criticism began to be the subject of

epistemological debate on the Latin American social sciences from the end of
the 1960s, thanks to the work of the Czech philosopher Karel Kosik and the
Mexican-based Spaniard Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez (Kosik, 1967; Sánchez
Vázquez, 1971).
Since the Marxist tradition, the idea of a plurality of ‘social sciences’ was
always seen as a tribute to the very fragmentary conception of the bourgeois
view of the world and not as the product of a scientific operation. The posi-
tivist canon was correctly interpreted as a methodological posture which, in
the domain of science and knowledge, expressed the interests and eminently
conservative worldview of a class which, having transformed and recreated
the world in its own image, aspired only to perpetuate its domination over
it. Michael Löwy wisely identified the ‘elective affinities’ between the basic
premises of positivism and the conservative view of a bourgeoisie which –
following Hegel, conceived of itself as the final and highest stage in the evol-
ution of mankind. As explained by Löwy, the words of August Comte are so
clear that they spare all interpretative endeavour: ‘due to its nature, positivism
effectively tends to consolidate public order with the development of a wise
resignation’ (Comte, 1908: Vol. IV, 100).
This yielding attitude from the founder of sociology towards the estab-
lished powers helps us to comprehend the reasons why positivism was trans-
formed – no more so than in the century of the irruption of the masses! – into
one of the most valued ideological allies of the oligarchic regimes in Latin
America, from the Mexican ‘Porfiriato’ to ‘Roquismo’ in Argentina, not for-
getting the Empire and the Velha República in Brazil, whose flag was
inscribed with the fundamental political slogan of positivism, ‘Order and
Progress’. Positivism fulfilled the ideological function of ‘naturalizing’ social
inequality and the exploitation of man by man. This obviously required a
‘wise resignation’ which, in Comte’s view, could not be the product of tra-
dition or custom, unstable bases for the creation of a new order, but the result
of the ‘profound conviction that there are unchanging laws governing all
different kinds of natural phenomena’ (Comte, 1908: Vol. IV, 100).
As suggested by Löwy, Comte’s positivism is based on two essential,
closely linked premises (Löwy, 1975: 182):

1. On the one hand, from an epistemological point of view, society should

be put on an equal footing with nature. Indeed, it is no coincidence that
Comte calls the new discipline ‘social physics’, with the aim of under-
lining the profound similarity between the apparent automatisms of
social life and those governing the functions of physical bodies. Through
this operation the social – with its asymmetries, inequalities and oppres-
sive structures – is ‘naturalized’ and the ‘natural harmony’ existing in the
natural kingdom is projected brilliantly and without a hitch onto social
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58 Current Sociology Vol. 47 No. 4

life. The spontaneous harmony which Adam Smith discovered in econ-

omic life, governed by the wisdom of the ‘invisible hand’, now expands
to include all social life, foreshadowing the notions of kosmos (as the
‘spontaneous order of the social’) and catallaxia (as a synthesis unifying
market exchanges, community feeling and the conversion of the enemy
into friend) which in the last quarter of our century would be developed
by Friedrich Hayek in the most audacious contemporary attempt to
legitimate capitalist society (Hayek, 1976: 15, 23).
2. In postulating the fundamental resemblance between society and nature,
the second premise of Comte’s positivism goes beyond the strictly
epistemological: just as the latter is governed by natural laws, so is the
former. In its movements society obeys a ‘natural’ law, invariable and
unchanging, independent of the human will and actions. The urges and
revolutionary utopias of those who are determined to ignore this reality,
or, in Hayek’s language, those who interfere irresponsibly in the serene
evolution of the ‘natural order’ of the social, collide with this reality. The
French Revolution has reached the end of the road, and its aims – both
destructive and violent – should be replaced by the impeccable technical
knowledge of a benevolent technocracy (Gulbenkian Commission, 1996:
11–12). In condemning the futility of ‘social negativism’, Comte’s soci-
ology foreshadows an argument which, halfway through the 20th
century, would be developed by Friedrich Hayek and other authors
adhering to neoliberalism in their criticism of the mortal dangers of ‘con-
structivist rationalism’.

Elements for a Theoretical Unitary Reconstruction of the Social

Sciences

Consequently, the crisis in the social sciences must be reconsidered, above

all, to be the crisis of the positivist paradigm of the social sciences. In this
matrix of thought, from which even Max Weber did not manage to escape,
society is conceived as the juxtaposition of different ‘parts’ – institutional
orders or factors, according to the lexicon used by different authors – which,
in their concrete historical existence, may be combined in numerous ways.
If positivism can reduce the social dynamic of the different ‘parts’ to a uni-
versal law – permitting the passage from primitive ‘mechanical solidarity’ to
the ‘organic solidarity’ of industrial capitalism, as stated by Emile Durkheim
– in Weber’s case things are very different. In effect, the infinite Kantian
combination of variables, historical circumstances and individuals means the
chaos of the social cannot be reduced to any organizational principle: hence
Weber’s radical rejection of both Comtean positivism and the economicist
reductionism of the Marxism of the Second International – which he
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Boron: A Social Theory for the 21st Century? 59

regrettably confused with Marx’s theory – and his insistence on stating that
the classes are economic phenomena, status groups are creations belonging
to the sphere of the ‘social’ and parties are entities pertaining to the politi-
cal scene. These three types of factors – also composed of thousands of indi-
vidual aspects – are what combine to give rise to real, empirically observable
history, which invalidates any attempt to construct an abstract, more general
theory. Faced with this, the only option is to understand history through the
construction of ingenious ‘ideal types’, in the light of which history becomes
a mere succession of ‘diversions’ from a paradigm based on the complete
‘means/end’ rationality of social agents. Paradoxically, an intellectual of
Weber’s historical erudition concludes his enterprise by developing a social
theory and a conceptual system which are explicitly divorced from the his-
toricity of the social (Weber, 1973).
Contrary to the tenets of both positivism and comprehensive sociology,
societies are not collections of parts or isolated fragments capriciously organ-
ized by the mysterious ‘natural laws’ of positivism or by the arbitrariness of
Weber’s ideal types. This is not the place to open up an epistemological dis-
cussion on the impact of fetishisms on the social thought deriving from the
advent of the bourgeoisie as a class (Kosik, 1967; Cohen, 1978: 115–33,
326–44); however, it is worth recollecting Georgy Lukács’s devastating criti-
cisms of this trend towards fragmentation and reification of social relations
in his famous History and Class Consciousness. This objectification, notes the
Hungarian philosopher, led to the formation of economics, politics, culture
and society as so many separate spheres distinct from social life, each one
claiming its own specific knowledge independent of the others. In opposition
to this operation, affirms Lukács, ‘dialectics states the specific unity of all
things’, which does not mean, however, wiping the slate clean of its com-
ponents or reducing ‘its various elements to an undifferentiated uniformity
or sameness’ (Lukács, 1971: 6–12). Naturally, this idea is one of the central
premises of Marxist methodology, and was clearly expressed by Marx in his
famous 1857 introduction to Grundrisse: ‘the concrete is the concrete because
it is the synthesis of multiple determinations, therefore the unity of the
diverse’ (Marx, 1973: 101). Consequently, it is not a question of suppressing
or denying the existence of ‘the diverse’ – or, to use a very current vocabu-
lary, ‘the otherness’ – but to find the exact terms of their relationship with
the totality. The social determinants and elements in operation in any specific
social formation are many but, according to Lukács, the dialectic method
states that

. . . the apparent independence and autonomy which they possess in the capi-
talist system of production is an illusion only in so far as they are involved in
a dynamic dialectical relationship with one another and can be thought of as
the dynamic dialectical aspects of an equally dynamic and dialectical whole.
(Lukács, 1971: 12–13)
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60 Current Sociology Vol. 47 No. 4

Hence it is necessary to adopt a methodology which enables the observer

to produce a theoretical reconstruction of the sociohistorical totality. This
method, however, has nothing to do with economicist monocausalism given
that, as Lukács rightly recalls,
It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that consti-
tutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the
point of view of totality. . . . The capitalist separation of the producer from the
total process of production, the division of the process of labour into parts at
the cost of the individual humanity of the worker, the atomisation of society
into individuals who simply go on producing without rhyme or reason, must
all have a profound influence on the thought, the science and the philosophy of
capitalism. (Lukács, 1971: 27)

This influence is perfectly outlined in the first chapter of the Gulbenkian

Report, where it deals with the impact of the phenomena of professionaliza-
tion and specialization, which ended up establishing a series of specialized
‘disciplines’ throughout the 19th century. These supposedly refer to other
such ‘domains’ cut off from reality which, in virtue of the new scientific par-
adigm, acquire their own life and become – thanks to the illusion of posi-
tivism – separate spheres independent from social reality. A good example in
point is what happened to ‘political economy’, a term which was well and
truly established in academia towards the second half of the 18th century.
However, as the century progressed and, above all, once the next century
began, the liberal theories prevailing in the new discipline gradually masked
the ‘political’ character of economics to such an extent that towards the
second half of the 19th century the discipline came to be called simply ‘econ-
omics’. As noted by the authors of the Report, doing away with the adjec-
tive ‘political’ made it possible for new practitioners to state that economic
behaviour was the expression of the unvarying features of an individualist and
universal psychology rather than a product of socially constructed and his-
torically limited institutions. As will be easily understood, this argument
‘could then be used to assert the naturalness of laissez-faire principles’ (Gul-
benkian Commission, 1996: 17).
As the reader will also understand, a categorical conclusion emerges: if
social science has any future in the next century, if it can survive the barbarism
of the economicist reductionism characteristic of neoliberalism or the con-
servative nihilism of postmodernism – dressed up as ‘progressivism’ in some
of its variants – it will be on the condition that it is reconstituted as a unitary
endeavour, as a social science capable of capturing totality. Of course, it is a
totality which is different from the one imagined by postmodern theorists,
for whom it is a kaleidoscope which defies any possibility of intellectual rep-
resentation and which evaporates into the shape of a ‘system’ so omnipresent
and all-powerful as to become invisible to human eyes. Not only that, as
rightly noted by Terry Eagleton, ‘There is a weak boundary between
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Boron: A Social Theory for the 21st Century? 61

propounding that totality is sublimely unrepresentable and stating that it

does not exist’, a step which postmodern theorists took without any com-
punction (Eagleton, 1997: 23).
Consequently, the concept of totality that requires the reconstruction of
social science has nothing in common with formulations which interpret it
from ‘holistic’ or ‘organic’ perspectives, ‘which hypostasise the whole over
the parts, causing the mythologisation of the whole’. It might be appropriate
to recall the conclusions of Karol Kosik on this subject: ‘totality without con-
tradictions is empty and inert, and contradictions outside of the totality are
formal and arbitrary’. To which he adds that totality is abstract if not con-
sidered together with ‘the basis and the superstructure’ in their reciprocal
relationships, their movement and development; and, finally, if it is not borne
in mind that men and women are concrete, ‘real historical subjects’ who, in
the process of social production and reproduction, create both the basis and
the superstructure, construct social reality, institutions and the ideas of their
time; and that in this creation of social reality the subjects create and recre-
ate themselves as historical and social beings (Kosik, 1967: 74).

Crisis of Determinism, Uncertainty and Chaos in Social Theory:

Final Comments

The Gulbenkian Report proposes that new developments in the hard sciences
‘underline the non-linear over the linear, complexity over simplification, the
impossibility of removing the observer from the process of measurement, and
. . . the superiority of qualitative interpretations over the precision of quan-
titative analyses’ (Gulbenkian Commission, 1996: 61).
It is worth making some observations on this proposal. First, to register
our agreement and, en passant, to stress that these new orientations in more
advanced scientific thought simply confirm the validity of some of the central
methodological premises of historical materialism, traditionally denied by
the mainstream of the social sciences, and which, thanks to epistemological
developments in the domain of the ‘hard sciences’, are now being reassessed
and are unexpectedly topical. In effect, criticism of the linear nature of posi-
tivist logic; of the simplification of traditional analyses which reduce the
enormous complexity of social formations to a few quantitatively defined
variables; of the empiricist claim, shared even by Max Weber’s comprehen-
sive sociology, of the ‘valorative neutrality’ of an observer completely iso-
lated from the object of study; and of Marxism’s classical insistence on
gaining a qualitative interpretation of complexity beyond merely quantitative
visions – these are some of the distinctive features of the criticisms made by
Marxism of the positivist tradition since its origins. It is worth taking note of
this belated but deserved rehabilitation.
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62 Current Sociology Vol. 47 No. 4

We would like to express our second theme as both a reflection and ques-
tion: to what extent does chaos theory offer a promising direction in terms
of overcoming the current difficulties faced by social theory? The argument
outlined in the Gulbenkian Report starts by stating the crisis in determinis-
tic models in the natural sciences caused by the conviction that ‘the world is
much more unstable and complex, and disruptions play an extremely import-
ant role in it’ (Gulbenkian Commission, 1996: 62). Although the foregoing
does not imply a denial of the validity of Newton’s physics, it does state that
the stable systems – temporarily reversible – of Newtonian science represent
merely a special case, a limited segment of reality. It serves to understand the
equilibrium of systems, or situations close to it, ‘but not systems far from
equilibrium, and these conditions are at least as frequent, if not more so than
systems in equilibrium’ (Gulbenkian Commission, 1996: 62).
Although these statements indicate a radical and promising epistemo-
logical opening-up in relation to the traditional scientific model, it would be
advisable for the social sciences to avoid reiterating past mistakes – as
occurred with the rise of positivism – acritically accepting ideas and formu-
lations developed in scientific contexts on subjects of study and types of
methodological approach which are not relevant to the social domain. It is
no coincidence that to date there has been no systematic application of
heuristic approaches deriving from chaos theory to explain any specific social
process. It is not a question of denying the role the ‘chaotic’ elements may
have played in the remote beginnings of humankind. This is a subject which
is outside our scope of study and which will almost certainly never be studied
seriously. However, what has been amply confirmed is the fact that once con-
stituted, human societies have demonstrated a series of regularities in both
their structures and their historical course of evolution, putting them much
closer to a state of equilibrium – not in the Parsonian sense of the term, nor
in its neoclassical version, of course – than to the extreme of chaos. It becomes
extremely difficult to understand the dynamic of feudal or capitalist modes
of production by virtue of the productivity of chaos. On the contrary, careful
examination of very diverse societies indicates that in their development they
behaved and followed paths which, generally speaking, were quite closely
consistent with the stipulations of certain theoretical models. A theory
inspired by chaos models is unlikely to explain foreseeable systematic ten-
dencies exhibited by capitalist society, under all sorts of conditions, in terms
of concentration of wealth, income and revenues, for example; or to explain,
if you will excuse the repetition, the ‘urban chaos’ of Africa and Latin
America as a result of the influx of unpredictable and unknown disruptions.
In short, the usefulness of the chaos theory would appear to be rather limited
in social studies. Perhaps it might have some importance in the analysis of
extreme, short-lived situations, for example certain types of natural catastro-
phes like earthquakes and landslides; however, the literature which has
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Boron: A Social Theory for the 21st Century? 63

emerged around the 1985 Mexico City earthquake shows that what ‘lapsed
into chaos’ was the corrupt and decrepit state of the ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party, and that once the initial shock was over, society got
moving, reconstructed its collaborative fabric and set to work on helping the
victims and providing assistance to the survivors in ways which were by no
means consistent with a chaos model.
Furthermore, it is true that Ilya Prigogine’s insistence on the open and
non-predetermined nature of history is a useful reminder for dogmatics of
widely different convictions, both the supposed Marxists who believe in the
inexorable nature of the revolution and the advent of socialism and neolib-
erals who, with the same conviction, celebrate ‘the end of history’ and the
triumph of the markets and liberal democracy. History presents circum-
stances where some opportunities open while others close. In the final years
of his life, moved by the fall of the German Empire and the triumph of the
revolution in Russia, Weber coined a phrase which it is as well to remember
at a time like ours, so saturated by neoliberal triumphalism: ‘only history
decides’. However, it would be outrageously unfair to forget that it was the
very founder of historical materialism who time and time again pointed out
the open nature of the historical process, beyond the distortions that his
thought would suffer at the hands of sympathizers and encoders alike. For
Marx the concrete is concrete precisely because it is the synthesis of multiple
determinations and not the privileged scenario where the creative power of
economic factors is unfurled. It is for this reason that Marx – without whose
intellectual rehabilitation as an author it will be impossible to reconstruct the
social science we need – summarized his non-deterministic vision of the his-
torical process when he predicted that at some time in their evolution, capi-
talist societies would have to face up to a harsh dilemma: ‘socialism or
barbarism’. There was no place in his theoretical scheme for ‘historical fatal-
ities’ or ‘inevitable needs’ bringing in socialism against the will of the men
and women who make up a society. Prigogine’s observations must be
welcome because, from a completely different perspective and on the basis of
reflections deriving from the ‘hard sciences’, they serve to ratify Marx’s
important theoretical foresight.

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