The Future of Social Theory
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describes it as ‘a heady compoˆte of history, political science, philosophy and polemic’ (p. 16). Above all, it is engaging, and challenges democratic truisms and received theories in a fashion that is both unsettling and salutary. Barbara Goodwin University of East Anglia, UK.
The Future of Social Theory Nicholas Gane Continuum, London & New York, 2004, xii þ 210pp. ISBN: 0 8264 7066 1. Contemporary Political Theory (2005) 4, 336–338. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300201
In the course of nine interviews, Nicholas Gane explores the present situation and future of social theory. The central theme is the changed significance of the social. The presuppositions of classical sociology — the notion of the objectivity of society, or the idea that sociology is concerned with objects that are to be understood only in relation to the intentions of social actors, for instance — have been undermined today as a result of developments especially in the nature of technology. Gane and his interviewees do not claim that this means the end of the social as such, although there are suggestions that we may be speaking of the end of society. The key thesis that Gane attempts to advance in his lucid and insightful interviews is that the social is changing its form rather than disappearing. This is explored in a different way with each of the theorists interviewed. Zygmunt Bauman argues that the notion of postmodernity is no longer adequate to account for developments in the nature of modernity, the contemporary form of which he calls liquid modernity. This liquid modernity is characterized by social forms based on transience, uncertainty, anxieties and insecurity, and results in new freedoms that come at the price of individual responsibility and without the traditional support of social institutions. Judith Butler explores the language of theorizing about the social, noting that the social tends to fall away in the current concern with the political and the cultural. One way the social can be conceptualized is in the social organization of exclusions, such as in family and kinship structures. But this is always a way of speaking, a discursive constitution. There appears to be general agreement that the social is not a fixed condition, but is also constituted in language. Bruno Latour argues that the Contemporary Political Theory 2005 4
Book Reviews
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social as society explains nothing; it is, he says, like the notion of ether in late 19th-century physics, namely a necessary illusion we have lived to learn with. In his view, the central issue is associations, that is the social concerns relations between things and what social actors do, rather than something that lies behind them and constitutes, as in Durkheim and Bourdieu, a reality or objectivity of its own. Scott Lash argues for a notion of sociological vitalism in the recognition that technologized forms of social relations have transformed the social, erasing the distinction between media and society and creating new vitalic forms akin to the flows and flux Simmel wrote
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