The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (56 page)

that both offered the nourishment of tradition and served as the springboard

for action. It represented an attempt to steer a course between the value-

neutrality of the liberal model of quantitative social science and the reductionism of the Marxist base±superstructure mode of social analysis. Privileging a

concept of culture that was ordinary and historically constructed, it under-

mined the high culture canon on which traditional literary criticism rested. If

culture could no longer be counted on as a stable resource, then the organization of the institutions (and implicitly of society) reproducing it, and reproduced

by it, was also thereby severely challenged. The widening acceptance of the

various structuralisms and the turn tò`reading'' the social text only aggravated the rejection of the traditional norms of the humanities and the social

sciences.

From the late 1960s, developments at the level of theory were mirrored on the

ground of practice. Those groups which had theretofore lacked à`voice'' gained

admittance to the academy and began to transform it from the inside. Multiple,

not always harmonious, varieties of feminism have contested received premises

of knowledge formation through a conception of values expressed in hierarchies

of difference and power. They challenged the division of the two cultures by

directly undermining what they saw as the male universalism and objectivity by

which science laid claim to a distinctive arena of knowledge production. Their

work disputed thèèssentialist'' categories of man and woman, and situated the

female body as a pivotal site positioning women in society through scientific

discourse. In a fashion similar to the way feminists have questioned the struc-

tures of knowledge formation, scholars and activists working in the areas of race Structures of Knowledge

233

and ethnicity and non-Western civilizations have, in the course of producing

their own empirical studies, elaborated theories of difference that likewise

challenged Western universalism and objectivity. Their work also unveiled how

the essentialism of received categories of difference functioned to inscribe whole groups into subordinate positions.

For the past three decades, social studies of knowledge (``science studies'')

have offered exogenous analyses of the historical development of science. They

argued that (social) scientific methods could be applied to scientific work and

that science was not a privileged domain exempt from historical/social explana-

tion and interpretation. Initially, in the tradition of the classical sociology of knowledge, the emphasis was on the ways the social field, or `ìnterests,'' shaped or influenced science, thus reproducing the Cartesian duality of nature and the

human. Very soon, however, the accent shifted to the degree to which the

construction of scientific knowledge was contingent and situated in local con-

texts. Cultural studies of science have emphasized the possibilities of participating in the construction of authoritative knowledge by engaging critically with

scientific practices of making meaning.

These developments led to a strong backlash on the part of those committed to

traditional epistemologies. The result was the so-called ``culture wars'' and

``science wars.'' In the culture wars in the humanities, the defenders of traditional norms argued that the proponents of culture studies ± especially various strands of race and gender studies, deconstruction, and poststructuralism ± intended the politicization of all thought via the breakdown of objectivity located in canons of taste. The tone of the exchanges attests to the far-reaching consequences of the critiques from within the humanities and the social sciences and the position of authority and power occupied by the intellectual and the university in public

debates.

In similar ways, some scientists have been denouncing what they see as a

serious shift toward relativism put forward by what defines an `àcademic left''

located in the humanities and the social sciences. This relativism is said to

constitute a challenge to rationality itself. This high-pitched defensive attack has gone under the label of the science wars. In response to these attacks, others have alleged that what is really at stake in this scientific side of what is actually a single epistemological controversy is the fear of the undermining of the legitimacy of scientific authority (carefully defining scientists in very specific terms) and the allocation of societal funds that has gone with it.

It is thus particularly significant that the premises of classical science, the

anchor of the true associated with universal legitimacy and authority in the

structures of knowledge, has been put into question endogenously, via develop-

ments within the natural sciences and mathematics themselves. The sciences of

complexity have attacked the universal validity of Newtonian dynamics, insist-

ing that it represents a special case of the processes of the natural world. This new standpoint sees the world quite differently from the Newtonian worldview,

which emphasized equilibrium and stability. Rejecting the presumed generality

of determinism and linearity, which had allowed the discovery of universal laws, dynamical-systems research has reconceptualized the world as unstable and

234

Richard E. Lee and Immanuel Wallerstein

complex, explicable but unpredictable, one in which irreversibility (thèàrrow

of time'') is as fundamental to nature as it is to humans.

Investigations in complexity studies fall into three interrelated categories:

order-in-chaos, associated with strange attractors; order-out-of-chaos, asso-

ciated with self-organization and dissipative structures; and fractal geometry,

associated with visual representations exhibiting non-integer dimensions. Stud-

ies in these areas constitute implicit calls for a reappraisal of the assumptions of classical science. Scientists are now providing us with alternative models of

physical reality in the form of relationally constituted self-organizing systems and fractal geometry, and alternative models of change and transition expressed

in complexity theory and chaos theory. These defy the law of the excluded

middle so fundamental to classical science, classical logic, and (as a result of long socialization) current common sense. This synthetic, non-reductionist

approach questions the sacrosanct concept of natural laws that permit predic-

tions, and emphasizes in their place the permanent reality of contingency and

creativity.

Re-evaluations of the conceptual centrality of contingency, context-depend-

ency, and multiple, overlapping, temporal and spatial frameworks are moving

the humanities in the direction of the analyses of the historical social sciences.

Studies of embedded order in both stable and chaotic systems and bifurcations

leading to unpredictable new structures in far-from-equilibrium systems are

moving the natural sciences in the same direction. Amidst the turmoil, the social sciences are becoming more concerned with thè`stuff' of the sciences rather

than their methods. Scholars across the disciplines are recognizing the centrality of broad ``cultural'' issues common to them all. As a result, the previous intellectual justification for those disciplines based on assumptions of radically

different and independent domains or proprietary methods is collapsing.

Certainly there is some evidence of organizational rethinking. Of particular

note is how studies embodying fresh intellectual approaches have transgressed

not only particular disciplinary boundaries but those of the super-categories as well. The establishment of centers of advanced study and the deliberate restructuring of disciplinary/departmental relationships in new institutions or in rehabilitated ones are important developments. New disciplinary/departmental

groupings have also emerged, directly challenging the fact±values divide. For

instance, ecology takes a relational approach to the natural world and reaches

down through the sciences to the social sciences and the humanities to reinteg-

rate our understanding of the relation of human reality to the non-human world.

A new form of stratification studies has built on work focusing on race and

gender inequality, seeking to show how the historical construction of particular identities was associated with specific sets of values, and then legitimated by

scientific, and social scientific, justifications of existing hierarchies.

Overall, we observe processes today in the structures of knowledge which

seem to confirm evidence from developments in thè`politics'' and `èconomics''

of the world-system that what we are living through in the contemporary world

is the vastly increased possibility for human action to effect change offered in a period of systemic transition (see Lee, 1999). As complexity studies has made

Structures of Knowledge

235

apparent, moments of transition, ``where the system can `choose' between or

among more than one possible future,'' are historically rare and arise only when dynamical systems, including social systems, become unstable because they have

been driven far from equilibrium by their own internal development (Prigogine

and Stengers, 1984, pp. 169±70). It appears that we may be experiencing the

beginning of such a secular crisis ± that is, a crisis of the material structures and social relations of the Europe-centered world as it has developed since the

sixteenth century (see Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1996) ± and therefore are living in one of those unstable moments of transition, comparable to the transition

from feudalism, when the future becomes an open future, rather than a law-

bound Newtonian one, a future determined only by creative choices and

contingent circumstances. The study of the structures of knowledge, with its

emphasis on the secular trends and cyclical shifts in the cognitive limits on

human action, offers a means of modeling interpretative studies directed at

imagining possible futures for a world in transition.

17

The New Sociology of Ideas

Charles Camic and Neil Gross

Over the course of the past twenty years, an important field of study, which we

call ``the new sociology of ideas,'' has been quietly taking shape. The field

focuses on women and men who specialize in the production of cognitive,

evaluative, and expressive ideas and examines the social processes by which

their ideas ± i.e. their statements, claims, arguments, concepts, beliefs, assumptions, etc. ± emerge, develop, and change. For much of the twentieth century,

interest in these processes fell, along with many other concerns, to the often

marginalized specialty area of the sociology of knowledge, where they suffered

relative neglect. Recently, however, a major turnabout has occurred, as a result of the work of scholars in a number of specialty areas, including ± in addition to the sociology of knowledge itself ± the sociology of science, the sociology of

culture, and general sociological theory, as well as intellectual history.

Rich in new theoretical formulations, methodological proposals, and empir-

ical findings, however, this work has generally lacked consciousness of itself as a unified social-scientific undertaking, as specialists in each area have tended to operate in isolation from developments in related areas ± thus retarding the

growth of the sociology of ideas as a recognized area of theory and research.

The goal of the present chapter is to help to rectify this situation. We aim to do so not simply by pointing out that scholars in a variety of fields have, in relative isolation from one another, employed the tools of sociological analysis to explain why thinkers make the intellectual choices they do. In addition, we seek to

characterize the contours of the intellectual transformation that the sociology

of ideas has, despite conditions of fragmentation, undergone in recent years. On the whole, the sociology of ideas as it has been developing since the 1970s is

substantially different from its approximate counterpart in earlier eras, and we can think of no better way to encourage contemporary scholars to recognize that

they are at work on a common project ± and that they would benefit enormously

The New Sociology of Ideas

237

from a dialogue with one another ± than by identifying some of the main

theoretical and methodological principles that they seem increasingly to share.

Taken together, these principles distinguish the new sociology of ideas from

earlier sociological approaches to the development of ideas, or what we will

schematically term the old sociology of ideas.

But a clarification is in order before we proceed. Ideas are the monopoly of no

one social group: claims, beliefs, arguments, etc. are symbolic configurations

formed and expressed by all members of human societies in all domains of

human activity. Because a field of study so unbounded would exceed the scope

of any social-scientific inquiry, the sociology of ideas focuses primarily on those who are relatively specialized in the production of scientific, interpretive, moral, political, or aesthetic ideas. In contemporary societies, such specialists often have academic locations; they are natural scientists, social scientists, or humanists working in university settings. But at the present time they are also found in

many other social locations, in both the public and private sectors, and histor-

ically they have occupied an even wider range of social roles. As a shorthand for this broad array of specialist knowledge producers, we will sometimes speak of