The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought 1803828064, 9781803828060

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The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s

[Šubrt] skillfully situates his work in the concerns and events of historical time, geographical space and political power. Specifically, he clarifies how US, as well as Western and Eastern European, political and economic structures shaped and legitimised specific ways of thinking. Especially informative and powerful for analysing today’s historically situated social problems, Dr Šubrt’s work provides the context needed to better understand the development and use of sociological theory, as well as society itself. — Dawn Norris, Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, USA Understanding the 1960s as a decade of hope and a call for radical change, Šubrt masterfully makes astute observations outside of ideas already posited, using language that demonstrates that sociologists are not only dry repeaters of previous thinkers, but instead creative, thoughtful minds, reflecting on society and how it can move forward, even if there is no clear trajectory where that forward might take us. The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s is a useful tool for sociologists as both a reference and as a means to better understand their field, giving credence to the value of historical sociology and placing social phenomena in its appropriate time and place along with context. This is done to the benefit of all, demonstrating that the past, present and future are all connected in a continuum, showcasing that the present state of sociology did not arise out of nowhere. — Haylee Behrends, Instructor in History, Political Science, and Sociology, Western Technical College, USA

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought

BY

JIěÍ ŠUBRT Charles University, Czech Republic

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Publishing Limited Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL. First edition 2024 Copyright © 2024 JiĜí Šubrt. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited. Reprints and permissions service Contact: www.copyright.com No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-80382-806-0 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-80382-805-3 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-80382-807-7 (Epub)

Contents

List of Reviewers

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Chapter 1

A Time When We Still Believed in Progress

1

Chapter 2 Societies of the 1960s, Sociologically Speaking 2.1. Late Capitalism 2.2. On the Issue of Industrial Society 2.3. Heralding a Knowledge Society 2.4. Modernisation Theory

5 6 7 8 10

Chapter 3 The Legacy of Positivism, or How to Make a Sociological Theory 3.1. Sociology Modelled on the Natural Sciences 3.2. Two Viennese 3.3. How to Make a Sociological Theory 3.4. Sociology from Behaviourist Positions 3.5. Where to Start 3.6. In the Footsteps of the Minotaur

13 14 16 18 19 21 22

Chapter 4 How to Focus the Systems Approach on Modern Societies 4.1. Peeking Beneath the Surface 4.2. A Conception with Universalist Ambition 4.3. Systems, Structures and Functions 4.4. Development and Change 4.5. Depth Sociology

25 26 29 30 32 34

Chapter 5 Social Classes and Stratification 5.1. Classifying the Population 5.2. Stratification and Related Issues 5.3. Two Interconnected Topics

35 36 38 40

vi

Contents

Chapter 6 Conflicts May Not Bring Only Evil 6.1. The Functions and Dysfunctions of Conflicts 6.2. Moderating Conflicts 6.3. Other Perspectives

43 44 47 49

Chapter 7 Media and Mass Communication 7.1. Mass Communication in a Mass Society 7.2. The Medium is the Message 7.3. The Commencement of the Electronic Media Age

51 52 54 55

Chapter 8 Imagination – Creative and Sociological 8.1. The Need for Sociological Imagination 8.2. Vision and Tasks for Sociology 8.3. Emancipatory Cognitive Interest

57 59 60 61

Chapter 9 The Birth of Sociological Constructivism 9.1. Expectation Structures and Breaching Demonstrations 9.2. Life on Stage and Behind the Scenes 9.3. Constructing and Maintaining Social Reality

63 64 66 67

Chapter 10 What About Individual Human Freedom? 10.1. What Others Expect from Us 10.2. Connecting to the System 10.3. Life as a Theatre Performance 10.4. What is Under the Mask? 10.5. Are We Really Free?

71 71 73 74 75 76

Chapter 11 The Point is to Change the World 11.1. One-Dimensional Man and How to Emancipate Him 11.2. The Prague Spring

81 82 84

Chapter 12 One Thing Ends, Another Begins 12.1. A Crisis Announced 12.2. What’s Next? 12.3. The Future is Open

87 88 89 92

Bibliography

95

Index

103

List of Reviewers

Assoc Prof Dr Dawn Norris, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Dr Haylee Behrends, Western Technical College, La Crosse

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Acknowledgements

The author of this book was still a child during the period it considers. Despite this – or perhaps, precisely because of it – it had a significant impact, etched in his memory, and became an important stage in the formation of his personality. Not only the memories, but everything subsequently learned about the 1960s, significantly shaped his attitudes and interests over the decades which ensued. For these reasons, certain aspects of the author’s personality and life experience are reflected in the content of this book, while its intention is primarily to be a professional text. Moreover, although the main goal is to convey the general characteristics of the sociological thinking of the 1960s, it was unthinkable to the author not to mention – albeit very briefly – what was happening in his homeland at the time, i.e. primarily the period of the so-called Prague spring and the subsequent invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. The sad truth remains that most of those who personally shared with the author their memories of the 1960s during his youth and university studies are no longer with us. To all of them, although not mentioned here by name, his thanks are due. Special thanks go to his longtime language advisor and editor, Ed Everett, whose assistance underpinned the finalisation of this work.

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Chapter 1

A Time When We Still Believed in Progress When we think about the 1960s, we must consider that what may appear to us as a self-contained whole, a largely specific period that began and ended in some way, was undoubtedly felt differently by those who lived through and were involved in those years. People who entered this period with experience from the previous decades carried relatively fresh memories of the 1950s and, largely speaking, the World War II. They nevertheless had a future ahead of them, the outlines of which they imagined in some way – more or less concretely – with associated expectations, without of course knowing what the following years would bring and how expectations or wishes would turn out. In our work, we mainly focus on the dominant currents of sociological thinking that emerged in Western countries, however, as a certain complement and at the same time contrast, we also mention – to a very limited extent with brief remarks – occurrences in the East European countries and the Soviet Union.1 Our aim in this respect is not to create some kind of comparative representative survey, but to try to capture a little of what may be vaguely termed the ‘spirit of the time’ (Zeitgeist). To note – albeit to a limited extent – the above-mentioned contrast is particularly justified because in the 1960s there was a certain, though not very prolonged, relaxation within the framework of the ongoing Cold War, with a certain influence on the development of sociology in the countries of state socialism, intensified in that for most of these countries sociology had been suppressed and banned in the previous decade, while now, just in this decade, there was room for the revival and development of contacts with Western social science. Our focus on this period does not aspire to any exhaustive interpretation and certainly does not seek to present a standard history of the sociology of the time. Our main concern is to detect and describe some of its basic tendencies, while recognising that all writings about past times are more or less influenced by the present; in other words, present authors turn to the past, often (though not exclusively) seeking answers to questions confronting us today.

1

Let us leave aside what was happening in other parts of the world.

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought, 1–4 Copyright © 2024 by JiĜí Šubrt Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-805-320231001

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One of the features of the 1960s – compared to today – was the still widespread and lively belief that the human societies were on an upward line of development and that progress was manifest in history. Sociology too participated in the formation of grand, emancipatory narratives (meta-narratives), in which human collective actors, through their actions, jointly set in motion processes that ensured the arrival of happy tomorrows. However, the idea of progress is not some self-evident part of human consciousness, but rather a relatively late product of it. It was the Enlightenment that brought the idea of the linear process of historical time corresponding to the realisation of social development with an upward character, characterised as progress. This idea accompanied the notion that history had a certain direction and meaning. Tendencies were perceived across epochs towards a certain goal in which the plan of history was to be fulfilled. The future was a kind of promised land that humans would probably soon arrive at after a long journey. Among the important products of this ideological disposition was Marxism in the nineteenth century, where the eschatological expectation of the historical finale took the form of a classless society. The idea of progress predominated in the social science thinking of the nineteenth century and for the large part of the twentieth century in spite of appalling human experiences during those times. Only with postmodern philosophy and culture, reacting to the great traumas of the twentieth century, was a fundamental distrust and scepticism of the ‘grand narratives’ of the past (theories of history, theories of progress) and future (emancipatory projects, ideologies) expressed, relegating the category of progress to the storehouse of discarded concepts. We can now ask whether this has happened definitively, once and for all. Ideas about growth and rise developed in both West and East, and became a subject of theoretical discussions, and, furthermore, ideological competition; at the same time – on both sides –growth was primarily associated with economic development and increasing economic potential and productivity. In the United States at that time, the formation of the idea of modern society was dominated by industrialism. It was assumed that the development achieved by North America and Western Europe could be achieved only by following and imitating the path that advanced countries had gone through. Countries that had not achieved this were considered in the lower reaches of development, from which they could only advance by travelling this unique path. American economist and political theorist Walt Whitman Rostow meaningfully expressed these thoughts in The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1965 [1960]).2 Rostow’s explanatory model, based on trust in the effi-

2

Rostow’s book on the stages of economic growth was subtitled ‘A Non-Communist Manifesto’, highlighting the author’s ideological position. This corresponded to America’s foreign policy interest in orienting and influencing the future of the newly independent states during the period of decolonisation, to avert their becoming part of the Soviet bloc. A staff member in the administration of President John F. Kennedy, Rostow promoted his development model as part of US foreign policy.

A Time When We Still Believed in Progress

3

ciency of capitalism, free enterprise and liberal democracy, influenced not only economics, but also other contemporary social sciences. His model assumed that economic growth took a linear form and proceeded gradually through stages that all developing societies must pass through. Rostow (1965 [1960], p. 4 ff.) talked about five basic phases, each of different duration: (1) traditional society (agriculture dominates); (2) preconditions to take-off (non-agricultural sectors of the economy begin to develop); (3) take-off (a short period of intensive growth, the onset of industrialisation); (4) drive to maturity (a long phase associated with technological development and economic diversification); (5) age of high mass consumption (the United States was the first to reach this stage). According to Rostow, all countries were at some phase of this linear spectrum, which they could gradually move along. Another American economist, John Kenneth Galbraith,3 wrote on The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State. In the first of these, he pointed out that nations’ experience with prosperity was not of long duration, and most had been poor throughout their histories. What had happened in recent generations of the small part of the world inhabited by Europeans was an exception, in his view. The abundance achieved there and in the United States was something completely new and unprecedented (Galbraith, 1998 [1958], pp. 1–5); for economists and social scientists; therefore, it was necessary to learn to think in a new way, to consider things and tasks which had not occurred to people of earlier times but were now emerging. Galbraith emphasised the need for investment in education, science and infrastructure. In the second text, (Galbraith, 1985 [1967]) he outlined, among other things, the possibility of a gradual convergence between the centrally planned economies of the Eastern bloc and Western market economies. Among the authors to attract attention at this time was the French economist, sociologist and futurologist Jean Fourastié, author of 40,000 Hours (in French Les 40 000 heures; Fourastié, 1972 [1965]). The number of hours stated in the title of his book represented the total length of time he estimated the average person would work, spending 30 hours a week for 40 weeks a year during a 35–40 year working life. Fourastié believed that his vision would be realised by the end of the twentieth century, and that humanity was undergoing development that would bring about prosperity on a mass scale, and with it the prerequisites would arise for the cultivation of new and nobler human needs, to which a greater amount of leisure time would contribute. Notions of progress that emerged on the other side of the ‘Iron Curtain’, especially in the Soviet Union, were not as elaborate and colourful as those of the West, but nevertheless shared a certain specific feature: the high self-confidence

From 1964 to 1968, as a special national security adviser to US President Lyndon B. Johnson, he was influential in shaping US policy in Southeast Asia and supported US involvement in the Vietnam War. 3 Galbraith, even though standing on a different position on the opinion spectrum than Rostow, he also served as a presidential advisor to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s.

4

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of their formulators, and the pride of belonging to the part of the world which had progress and the future – so to speak – on their side,4 based on the common theory of progress founded on understanding laws of social development. Soviet academics at that time claimed the right to speak on behalf of all progressive humanity, and many of their Western sympathisers supported them in this. As we began by saying, to understand the specificity of the 1960s, we must note how they differed from the preceding and following decades. The 1950s was a period of post-war reconstruction and rebuilding on the European continent which required a certain amount of discomfort, renunciation and sacrifice. In Western Europe, a consumer society was born, the fruits of which people began to enjoy to the full in the following decade. In the United States, the situation was somewhat different, but even there the 1960s brought many important changes compared to the previous decade. Developments in the fields of politics, economics, science, technology, culture and lifestyle raised many hopes, but also many illusions. Compared to this dynamic, the 1970s saw a certain slowing down and pragmatic sobering up. This also manifested somewhat in the East Bloc, because while in the 1960s there was still a decisive prospect of transformation to a future higher than the limited present, the 1970s largely nullified this perspective with the adoption of real socialism, declared by communist ideologues not only as a fait accompli, but also the best of all possible worlds, right there in the present moment. Even though the people of the Eastern Bloc were kept as isolated as possible at this time, the little that reached them from the West condemned this ideology of deception and distortion and taught the people of these countries to live a double life – private and public.

4

A concise illustrative sample is provided by a slim publication Where Is Humanity Going? (Srovnal, 1962), which provides an overview of the main papers and discussions at the international conference ‘What the Future Holds for Mankind’, which took place in May 1961 in Royamount (France) and Paris. The initiator of this conference was the journal of the international communist movement based in Prague, Problems of Peace and Socialism, and the Centre for Marxist Studies and Research (CERM) of the French Communist Party.

Chapter 2

Societies of the 1960s, Sociologically Speaking The effort to get a general view of the tendencies in the post-war social-scientific thinking that influenced the sociology of the 1960s can perhaps lead to the idea of a unity of opinion in this period, or to the sense of dominant stream of opinion. But this would not correspond to reality. The intellectual output of that time actually made for a rather diverse picture, with a varied range of differently oriented opinions. What partially worked as a unifying and integrating factor in sociology was a considerable interest in certain problems and thematic orientations. One of the dominant topics post World War II was the specific character of the advanced societies of that time, or rather, how these societies – in the sociological output of their representatives – saw themselves. In the discussions dominating Western sociology, three main perspectives arose, and in certain cases intermingled. The first was offered by the Frankfurt School, following stimuli from Western Marxism, characterising contemporary Western society as ‘late capitalism’. The second stream, whose key representative was Raymond Aron, was associated with the term ‘industrial society’. The third orientation was brought by Talcott Parsons and the American sociologists who started working with the term ‘modern society’ after the World War II. In addition to these approaches, other conceptions appeared during the 1960s, but were not as distinctive. In the countries of the Soviet bloc, in which social-scientific thinking was to one degree or another subjected to the dictates of communist ideology, the present was postulated as a time in which the foundations of a communist society were under construction, to reach completion in the near or more distant future. For this reason, sociological thinking attempting to capture the shape of contemporary society in its wholeness did not develop significantly.

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought, 5–11 Copyright © 2024 by JiĜí Šubrt Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-805-320231002

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The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s

2.1. Late Capitalism While in the 1960s, the population of Eastern countries was perpetually dealing with economic deficiencies, in the West, from a generation that grew up in relative prosperity, the criticism of ‘consumer terror’, or consumerism, as a new totalitarianism, began to be heard. Leading representatives of the Frankfurt School, Theodor WiesengrundAdorno and Max Horkheimer (2017 [1947]) formulated the starting points for their critical approach to capitalist society in their joint work, Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in exile from Nazi Germany in the United States at the end of World War II. They showed that the result of rationalisation, with the associated notion of ‘instrumental reason’ brought by the Enlightenment, was not only the rise of labour productivity and the growth of economic production, but above all alienation, exploitation and negative tendencies, the result of which was the pathology (in the Freudian sense of the word) of bourgeois culture and the related madness and suffering wrought in the 20th century. In the late 1960s, T. W. Adorno (1969) during the 16th German Sociological Days (16. Deutschen Soziologentages),1 via the German Sociological Association (Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie – DGS), initiated a debate on the topic of Late Capitalism or Industrial Society (Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft), where he formulated the question of whether it was possible – as a result of the changes brought about by industrialism – to consider Marx’s analysis of capitalism as outdated. Unlike other representatives of the then West German sociology, he emphasised that the development and transformations of advanced societies had not changed anything about the nature of production relations, and therefore it was still a capitalist society, or namely ‘late capitalism’. A more thorough idea of Adorno’s view of late-capitalist society is presented in Negative Dialectics (in German: Negative Dialektik; Adorno, 1992 [1966], pp. 139–207). This shows its author was inspired by Marx and his historical perspective of the functioning of the capitalist economy, where all social relations are mediated by the regulating agents of the exchange principle. The primary goal of this economy is the accumulation of capital and the maximisation of profit; satisfaction of human needs is secondary. Adorno understood a social reality resting on these foundations as an antagonistic totality, whose contradictions suffused all areas of life and caused conflict between society and the human individual. A situation where individuals must act against the interests of others was characterised by social coldness and isolation, leading to the formation of pseudo-personalities marred by conformity and weakness of the human self. Late-capitalist society and its culture individualised human beings primarily to more perfectly break them in isolation. The culture industry produced a substitute world to give individuals the illusion that they are personalities. But instead of real individuality, these were merely

1

This event took place on 8–11 April 1968 in Frankfurt am Main.

Societies of the 1960s, Sociologically Speaking

7

stereotyped personality patterns cut from prefabricated schemes disseminated through the mass media. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School was influenced not only by Marx, but also by other influences, among which Hegel’s dialectics played a key role. Regarding the title of Adorno’s book Negative Dialectics, this emphasises the second stage of G. W. Hegel’s triad –negation – but lacks the positive outcome represented by Hegel’s third stage – ‘negation-negation’. In this sense, G. Hegel still – as was common in the nineteenth century – believed in progress, but with Adorno this belief was being questioned and lost; the potential of human freedom for him remained merely potentiality.

2.2. On the Issue of Industrial Society In the 1960s, the term capitalism was largely replaced by the notion of industrial society in the vocabulary of Western social sciences. Although the concept had appeared in sociological writings as early as the nineteenth century,2 after the World War II it took on a new and attractive sense, developed not only by Raymond Aron (1970 [1963]), but also by other scholars – for example Clarence E. Ayers who worked with him (1961), Talcott Parsons (1971, pp. 74–79; 124–136), or the economist John K. Gallbraith (1985 [1967]). The message conveyed was that industrial society was the most successful way of life which humanity had encountered, because never before had people lived so well. Raymond Aron, a French journalist, sociologist, political scientist and historian, contributed greatly to this approach. During the World War II, in exile in London, he worked as an assistant to General Charles de Gaulle and publisher of the exile magazine Free France (in French: La France Libre). After the war, he returned to France and engaged in journalism. From 1955, he worked at the University Sorbonne in Paris, later College de France (The Collége de France). After the World War II, Aron gave attention to the international situation, especially to the Cold War. The first results of this professional orientation were two books: The Great Schism (Aron, 1948) and The Chain Wars (Aron, 1951). In the immediate post-war decades, when most French intellectuals were Marxistoriented, Aron represented something of an exception: he was alone in defending liberal positions and criticism of Marxism as a totalitarian ideology. Two books provide evidence of this isolated but nevertheless firm stance: Opium of intellectuals (Aron, 1955) and Democracy and totalitarianism (Aron, 1968). Aron characterised Marxist ideology as a secular religion and concluded that Marxist intellectuals had replaced the idea of the Kingdom of God with the idea of communism, casting themselves as prophets of this religion (Aron, 1955, pp. 78–105). He saw the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime that cynically trampled down declared ethical and political goals in practice, while he viewed the

2

In the dichotomous conception of Herbert Spencer (1966 [1880], pp. 486–536), the industrial society was that what replaced in evolutionary development the previous type of militant (military) society.

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The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s

United States as a democratic, free-spirited civilisation. Aron rejected Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea that the Soviet Union was the only guarantor of humanity’s future. Aron believed (1970 [1963], pp. 85–107) that the United States and the Soviet Union represented respectively two distinct social types in which contemporary industrial society found expression. The western type of industrial society was characterised by the market economy and a pluralistic democratic system, while in the eastern type, a centrally planned economy and rule of one political party prevailed. Although his Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society expressed the opinion that pluralistic democratic systems with market economies had better prospects than systems with planned economies, he did not assume that centrally controlled economies might not be able to function and survive in the future, and while he considered a certain approximation of both these social types as possible, he never accorded with convergence theory’s position that the two social systems could merge in the future. Convergence theory had been formulated in 1960 by Clark Kerr, Professor of Economics (Kerr, Dunlop, Harbison, & Myers, 1973) from the University of California, Berkeley, and then followed up by other scholars. It assumed that as a result of ongoing industrialisation, the Western and Eastern countries would become more and more similar,3 not only when it came to technology, but also in terms of social organisation. This conception took root mainly during the relaxation of relations between the East and the West, but after the intervention of the Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia in 1968, it became clear that the supposed rapprochement had ended, and thus the development of convergence theory ceased.

2.3. Heralding a Knowledge Society At the end of the 1960s, it began to dawn on people that advanced Western societies had entered a new phase of development. The American sociologist Daniel Bell was among the first to draw attention to this, gaining a world-wide reputation in three books: The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Bell, 1988 [1960]), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (1999 [1973]), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), all of which reflected an interest in ongoing social change. In The End of Ideology, Bell (1988 [1960], p. 393 ff.) comprehended the transition from one historical phase to another primarily through the prism of a change in thinking style. He observed that the era of ideologies was coming to an end with a new epoch in which they would lose influence and importance. Bell drew a parallel between ideologies and religion. Ideologies are a set of ideas that show how not only to interpret the world but also to behave in it and change it.

3

The concept of Pitirim A. Sorokin (1960), who in the book Mutual Convergence of the United States and the U.S.S.R. is sometimes referred to as the predecessor of this theory to the Mixed Sociocultural Type engaged in the comparison of that what the both countries are similar geographically, culturally and powerfully.

Societies of the 1960s, Sociologically Speaking

9

Their heyday was in the nineteenth century when ideologies filled the vacuum left by the decline of religion as a result of secularising tendencies in the period of developing industrialism. Bell looked at ideologies not just negatively, but also saw certain positives in their influence; he drew particular attention to their role as important carriers of the ideas of social emancipation, equality and freedom. Nevertheless, he understood ideologies as distorting human thinking that significantly reducing life and its richness, thereby dehumanising it. The further development of industrial society would lead, in Bell’s opinion, to their abandonment and replacement by objective, reliable and scientific research-based knowledge. A few years later, Bell heralded the emergence of a post-industrial society, primarily in the sphere of modern science and technology (Bell, 1999 [1973]). He was not alone; alongside him, for instance, the French sociologist Alain Touraine or the American political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke out on the topic. Touraine (1969) described the emerging society as a programmed society, techno-economically programmed and politically controlled by technocratic power. Brzezinski (1970) spoke about a technetronic society, characterised by the combination of technology and electronics. In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, Bell distinguished three basic types of societies: pre-industrial, industrial and postindustrial. From the schematic overview published at the time he associated preindustrial societies with the regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America, industrial societies with Western Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan; he considered the United States, meanwhile, to be the country moving towards post-industrialism (Bell, 1999 [1973], p. 114). To elaborate on this schema a little. Pre-industrial societies are economically dominated by agriculture and mining. The economy is based on obtaining resources from and mastering nature. Physical labour using the power of human or animal muscles and craft skills (imparted by practical learning) predominate. Workers apply traditional, routine procedures. The main unit of economic life is the household (extended family), where traditional authority reigns. In the industrial society, industry becomes the decisive economic sector, based on the machine-led mass production of consumer goods. Production utilises machinery, energy resources and advanced technologies, the application of which requires expertise – engineers and skilled workers. Organisation is bureaucratic and hierarchical. Production is focussed on economic rationality, leading to the mobilisation of capital and controlling (managerial) capabilities. Bell (1999 [1973], p. 51) observed that industrialism had contributed to one of the most rapid booms in economic history, lasting for a quarter of a century until the early 1970s. In the post-industrial society, there is the rise of service sector (jobs in industry decline, jobs in services multiply). In no way does this mean that industrial production has become obsolete, however, as even a developed post-industrial society cannot do without it; but the production of services becomes decisive (for that matter, industrial production moves to a significant extent to third world countries). In this society, it is primarily qualified workers who find employment, while jobs for the unskilled decrease.

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The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s

Bell popularised the term ‘post-industrial society’ to express the change in the professional structure of developed countries, characterised by the shift of labour forces from the agricultural and industrial sectors to the tertiary sphere (service society). This corresponded to the ideas of the French scholar Jean Fourastié at the time (Fourastié, 1972 [1965]). Nevertheless, Bell’s interpretation of postindustrialism went further; essential for him was the production of information and theoretical knowledge, becoming the main source of economic value. In his ideas, the future society was above all a society of education and knowledge. Bell assumed that the number of vocations with academic and technical qualifications would increase, the importance of theoretical, scientific knowledge would grow, and experts would have the main say. While the factory as a place of production of material goods was the basic institutional element of the industrial society, in the post-industrial society the university becomes the decisive institution, because scientific rationality increasingly affects economic, social, and even political spheres. Theoretical knowledge represents the basis of innovations, discoveries, new technologies and overall economic development. This knowledge is produced by university workplaces, scientific institutes and research organisations, which become key institutions of the post-industrial society. Let us add that this emphasis on knowledge appeared in another context at the end of the 1960s, in the vision of an active society from the American sociologist Amitai Etzioni (1968), who was a prominent representative of the political movement known as communitarianism. Etzioni developed the idea of the human individual as an active social being driven by interest and effort to participate in shaping society where destiny is shared with many other individuals, using certain knowledge arguments which Etzioni characterised as a ‘societal knowing’ – the ability to perceive and understand the social world, and on this basis to judge and evaluate it.

2.4. Modernisation Theory Talcott Parsons’ approach to the issues considered in this chapter was linked to the concept of modern society. Parsons opined on this issue from the positions of structural functionalism, and at the same time from the perspective of evolutionary theory. Regarding the first point of view, we can observe that modern society is what Parsons’s German follower Niklas Luhmann would later call a functionally differentiated society. It is a society differentiated into sub-subsystems, each performing certain functions that contribute to the preservation of society as a whole.4 Within its framework, we can distinguish economic, political, legal and educational subsystems (represented by the family, religion and school). The links between these subsystems were ensured by what Parsons called generalised media, classified as money, political power, influence and value-commitment. From the evolutionary point of view, Parsons viewed the development towards modernity as a line leading from primitive social forms, through

4

See Chapter 4 for more details on the approach of Parsons.

Societies of the 1960s, Sociologically Speaking

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various transitional types of society, to modern society. Parsons associated the genesis of modern society with the geographical triangle of France – Britain – the Netherlands, whose role was later superseded by the United States. Parsons (1971, pp. 71–98) saw the concurrence of three revolutions as playing a crucial role in this genesis: industrial, democratic and educational. According to Parsons, the industrial revolution led to the growth of the adaptive capabilities of the social system, supported by the commencement of financial markets. The democratic revolution was associated with solving the problem of the relationship between those who rule society and those who form its societal community. This revolution dynamised nationalism and stimulated the rise of nation states. One of the essential results of these processes was the demand for universal suffrage, which motivated the revolutions of the nineteenth century. The educational revolution led to the mobilisation of cultural potential, contributed to the promotion of social rationalisation, assisted the development of new technologies and stimulated new professional differentiation. The theory of modernisation and modern society, which had become the subject of criticism by the 1970s, was related to the then increasingly negative attitudes towards Parsons’ conceptions. It returned to sociological thinking in a certain, significantly modified, way in the 1990s, when it began to be re-develop especially in connection with ideas about the course and goals of the transformation process that post-communist countries were undergoing at the time.

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Chapter 3

The Legacy of Positivism, or How to Make a Sociological Theory The belief in progress was maintained in the 1960s, among other things, by developments in the field of science, research and new technologies. Above all, we may recall the development of cosmonautics, whose major milestones include 1961, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, and 1969, in which the American spacecraft Apollo 11 landed on the Moon and Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin set foot on its surface. As Armstrong exclaimed, it was ‘one small step for (a) man’ but ‘one giant leap for mankind’. A number of breakthrough innovations also occurred in the field of medicine, most notably the human heart transplant performed in 1967 in Cape Town by Christiaan Barnard. Many other areas of science (e.g. ocean research) and technology also recorded numerous developments. At the same time, however, early warnings about the negative effects of human activity on the environment also appeared. The progressive path of development in the field of science was confirmed in a way by the philosophy of science. Key to this was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published by American scholar Thomas S. Kuhn, in 1962. Kuhn (2012 [1962]) traced the historical transformation of science and showed that its development was not linear, with a gradual cumulation of the latest items of knowledge, but marked by upheavals which may be described as scientific revolutions. Kuhn’s work popularised the concept of paradigm (a word of Greek origin, meaning pattern, example or model) in further reflections on science, using it to express how science develops around a core that determines its basic direction, the choice of scientific issues and the methods of solving them at the level of both theory and research methodology. Paradigms shape scientific life, are widely shared by the scientific community, and guide the research that takes place within it. Conducting scientific work in accordance with the paradigm is what Kuhn refers to as ‘normal science’ (Kuhn, 2012 [1962], p. 23 ff.). Over time, however, certain ‘anomalies’ arise in this research through observations and findings in contradiction to the accepted paradigm, and unexplainable on its basis.

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought, 13–23 Copyright © 2024 by JiĜí Šubrt Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-805-320231003

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The increase of such problems leads to a situation of science in crisis (Kuhn, 2012 [1962], p. 52 ff.). This crisis can only be overcome when a new paradigm is developed and accepted, re-evaluating the foundations of existing knowledge and aligning with new knowledge. Kuhn refers to this change as a ‘scientific revolution’ (Kuhn, 2012 [1962], p. 92 ff.) where an old paradigm is replaced by a new one. What Kuhn described made some generalisations about how development took place in the area of the natural sciences. However, turning to the history of sociology, we find another characteristic – from its beginnings to the present day, there has always been a significant plurality of ideas. For this reason, sociology is referred to as a multi-paradigmatic science. In the history of sociology, at any given moment, a greater or lesser number of different paradigms existed side by side, and that goes for the 1960s as well.

3.1. Sociology Modelled on the Natural Sciences After World War II, American sociology became dominant within global sociology.1 While the theories that arose at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still contained what Auguste Comte referred to as social dynamics, the new American sociology ceased to consider historical development as the subject of interest and left history almost completely (with certain exceptions)2 to historians. Sociology began to be understood as the science of contemporary societies. Two other tendencies joined this. The first was – under the influence of the dysfunction brought about by the Great Depression (beginning in October 1929) – a primary orientation towards investigating what holds societies together, what encourages cohesion and solidarity. This led, as we will see, to an emphasis on conformity and understanding conflicts as pathological phenomena. The second was the idea that sociological knowledge must be based on empirical research (dominated by quantitative methodology), which left previous theoretical approaches as largely speculative and therefore insufficiently scientific. At the same time, however, it became clear after the World War II that sociology needed theory for its further development and growth. Consideration turned to how a new great sociological theory could be constructed. This was to be a theory free from the speculation that burdened previous thinking, connected with and corresponding to empirical research and its findings. However, opinions differed on how this new theory should be built.

1

After World War II, the spread of American sociology in Europe was financially and professionally supported by American foundations within the framework of denazification. Neo-positivist empirical sociology and Parsons’ functionalist conception were promoted. 2 Such exceptions included, for example, books: Neil Smelser (1959) Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, Seymour Martin Lipset (1963) The First New Nation, Reinhard Bendix (1996 [1964]). Nation-Building and the Citizenship, Barrington Moore (1967) Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.

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In the 1960s, American sociology was still influenced by tendencies dominant since the 1930s, which can be generally termed neo-positivism. Neo-positivism, as the name suggests, was a continuation of positivism, founded by Auguste Comte (1967 [1830], pp. 8–320) in the first half of the nineteenth century. Comte’s philosophical positivism strove to put an end to the former metaphysical interpretation of the world and replace it with an approach modelled on the natural sciences. Metaphysics, against which positivism fought, can be understood as the formerly widely held view that philosophy should reveal a kind of deeper truth about things, to uncover the hidden essences concealed behind the visible surface of the world (‘behind physics’), which was inaccessible to the senses. In positivism, on the other hand, only facts accessible to the senses, that is, empirically, may be postulated. Philosophical positivism has been through several stages. In the 1920s and 1930s, neo-positivism was associated with the activities of the Vienna Circle, dealing with philosophical problems of language, symbolic logic and structure and scientific research. American neo-positivist sociology became a phenomenon a bit later. The general principles of neo-positivist sociology were formulated in the late 1930s by American sociologist George A. Lundberg (1939). The neopositivist conception works on the assumption that sociology is to be conceived as a natural science and its role model must be the developed natural sciences, physics in particular. For these reasons, neo-positivist sociology was also referred to as a natural science, mathematical or physical specialisation. A key requirement of neo-positivist sociology was to make sociology more scientific in nature. Its supporters criticised earlier sociology for using less precise, quantifiable concepts and procedures, and for preferring a vague and often ‘impressionistic’ approach to social phenomena. Sociological research, they asserted, should come as close as possible to the requirements of exact sciences, and replace previous speculation with empirical knowledge, meaning established facts. In neo-positivism, the idea became dominant that sociology should formulate scientific laws became dominant- laws as universal and timeless as the laws of science (like the law of gravitation). This naturalistic approach tended towards programmatic ahistoricism (where revealed laws are supposed to apply always in every type of society). Quantitative depiction of studied phenomena using mathematical tools became decisive. Emphasis was put on the mathematisation of sociology. According to neo-positivists, revealed scientific laws should be expressed in mathematical formulas. Only such cognition could enable thorough analyzes and reliable predictions of social phenomena. Neo-positivist sociology found a great response in behaviourism3 (Klofáþ & Tlustý, 1959, p. 39), with its effort to base the study of psychological phenomena

3

Behaviourism (the name is derived from behaviour) is an important psychological school founded by John B. Watson in the book Behavior from the year 1914. One of the leading representatives of behaviourist psychology was the American psychologist Burrus F. Skinner.

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on objective indicators and abandon the vague terminology of introspective psychology. Behaviourism was distinguished by its orientation on empirically observable behaviour, understood as the reaction of an organism to stimuli primarily from the external environment. This orientation was focussed on searching for connections between incentive/stimulus and response (analogical to cause and effect in physics). Positivism, meanwhile, strove to put an end to the metaphysical interpretation of the world. The Vienna Circle tried to overcome metaphysics through logical analysis in scientific language. Thus, sociological neo-positivism introduced the conception of operationalisation into sociology.4 A certain notion or a hypothesis was operationally defined, or more precisely operationalised, if defined by an operation that could be measured or verified in sociological research. In other words, operationalisation meant defining a certain concept or hypothesis through empirically observable and measurable indicators (Buriánek, 1993, p. 9 ff.).5 Radical representatives of neo-positivism add that problems and concepts that cannot be operationalised, meaning, cannot be empirically captured, do not belong to scientific sociology. This conclusion is clearly directed primarily against general sociological concepts and the statements made from them.

3.2. Two Viennese The intellectual atmosphere of sociology in the 1960s was influenced to no small extent by the ideas of two researchers whose initial work took place in pre-war Vienna and the intellectual discussions there. The first was the empirical researcher Paul Felix Lazarsfeld; the second was the philosopher of science Karl Reimund Popper. Lazarsfeld came to the United States as an intern in 1933, but after Adolf Hitler came to power was forced to settle there permanently. Equipped with a mathematical and psychological education, he began his research career in Vienna in 1931, where he established the Research Centre for Economic Psychology (Wirtschaftspsychologische Forschungstelle), focussed on what could be described as market research. In the United States, Lazarsfeld worked successively at several universities. From 1937 to 1940, he established and directed the Princeton Radio Project, dedicated to American radio research, affiliated with Princeton University. Shortly after, he headed The Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) at Columbia University in New York until 1950. Lazarsfeld made a significant contribution to the development of quantitative sociological methodology and questionnaire research. He dealt with the issues of mass

4

The conception of operationalisation was elaborated in the context of physics even before the World War II by P. W. Bridgman (1927), who observed that all concepts of modern physics must be defined by an operation that refers to their empirical denotation. 5 As a typical example of an operational definition is one that says ‘intelligence is what intelligence quotient measures’ (Petrusek 1993: Theory 99).

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communication (radio and print media), its effects, flows of communication, pre-election research, and opinion leadership (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1966 [1955]; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, Gaudet, 1944). His American collaborators included Hadley Cantril, Elihu Katz, Robert King Merton and many others. In the context, we should recall Lazarsfeld’s contribution to operationalisation, which played a key role in the methodology of quantitative research, but for which hitherto no precise rules existed. Lazarsfeld used his extensive research experience to conceptualise operationalisation as a four-phase procedure consisting of the following steps (Lazarsfeld, 1970; Lazarsfeld & Rosenberg, 1955): 1. 2.

3.

4.

Creation of an initial (often quite intuitive) idea of the researched concept. The concretisation or specification of this concept by breaking it down into individual aspects or dimensions, leading to the creation of an initial overview of the spectrum of possible indicators (many of which may even be interchangeable). Selection of empirical indicators to appropriately cover the dimensions monitored. From their large potential range, only a limited number are in line with the focus of research (at the same time, one may distinguish between expressive indicators that indicate the properties of the investigated object and predictive ones, that forecast its behaviour). A synthesis is then carried out on the selected elements, usually associated with their summation in the form of measuring scales or indices (the operational definition of the term thus becomes an index constructed from the sum of indicators).

However, Lazarsfeld’s methodological efforts were also linked to the promotion of mathematical procedures in the field of data analysis, especially in terms of establishing causality, revealing hidden variables, and latent structures. All this influenced sociological approaches not only in the 1960s, but also in the decades following. At that time, the neo-positivist orientation found inspiration and support in the critical rationalism of Karl Reimund Popper. Popper was forced to flee from Nazism to New Zealand in 1937. There, at the end of the war, he completed two works which later received acclaim. These were The Poverty of Historicism (Popper, 2002 [1957]), and The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper, 2011 [1945]), in which their author presented his critique of historical determinism, Marxism and totalitarianism. After the war, Popper worked at the London School of Economics, and dealt with the philosophy of science, in which he emphasised empiricism and the testability of scientific theories. Against the ideas of representatives of the Vienna Circle, who pointed out the role of induction and verification in forming scientific theory (from individual observations aiming at their generalisation in the form of a theory), Popper (2002 [1959], p. 57 ff.) proposed a conception based on the principle of falsifiability. If verification means the search for facts that support the relevant hypothesis, falsification is the search for cases that disprove it. According to Popper, the truthfulness of some statement can never be definitively proven inductively (i.e. by the

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method of endlessly including more and more empirically detected items), but it can be proved that a statement is false if we encounter an empirical case that contradicts it (one can never prove that all crows are black because we can never see them all, but it is enough to see the first white crow to disprove such a statement). According to Popper’s principle of falsification, claims are rational only consciously at risk of refutation. With regard to Popper’s distinction between open and closed societies, we can observe that while an open society is characterised by democratic discussion and openness to rational criticism, a closed society is characterised by opinion-rigidity and dogmatism.

3.3. How to Make a Sociological Theory The question of the nature of sociological theory has been asked many times and in various contexts. It is enough to randomly open a few professional publications to see that the concept of theory in sociology has many different interpretations. In his time, Robert K. Merton pointed this out (1968 [1949]) in Social Theory and Social Structure. Merton concluded that the term ‘sociological theory’ is broadly used to designate the results of six different types of activities carried out by those who call themselves sociologists: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Methodology; General sociological orientations; Analysis of sociological concepts; Post factum sociological interpretations; Empirical generalisations in sociology; Sociological theory (in the narrow sense of the word) (Merton, 1968 [1949], p. 140 ff.).

American sociologist Hans L. Zetterberg (1965) talked about two different interpretations of the concept of social theory depending on two different traditions of sociology: 1.

2.

In the humanistic tradition of sociology, two interrelated but distinct issues are described as social theory: (a) classic works or the more important sociological writings of older vintage, which may be more appropriately called ‘sociological classics’ or ‘great works of the founding fathers of sociology’; (b) sociological criticism or commentaries on these writings, usually following a historical perspective with something like continuity in the accumulation of knowledge as a result of developments and reinterpretations. In the scientific tradition of sociology, the concept of social theory refers to two specific but at the same time interrelated areas; such as: (a) sociological taxonomies or systems of definitions arranged in schemes that define individual concepts and relationships using sociological terminology; (b) systematically classified statements in the form of laws, or more precisely ‘nomological’ statements (statements about ‘legal’ contexts) about society, which can be supported by evidence (Zetterberg, 1965, pp. 1–29).

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Even as empiricism prevailed, some neo-positivist-oriented researchers were aware that for sociology to be truly scientific, it could not do without theory, which required the adoption of certain theoretical assumptions and starting points Thus, American sociology attempted to create a theory based on neopositivist positions. George Andrew Lundberg (1895–1966) played a key role in this regard, as a researcher working at a number of American universities and lecturing for a while in Europe, including at Stockholm University. Lundberg (1939) formulated the theoretical principles of the neo-positivist approach in the ‘Foundations of Sociology’, arguing for the existence of a single science of the ‘external world’, internally differentiated in its subject matter in terms of objective orientation and subject focus, but unified in its methodology. According to Lundberg, methodological unity (one can speak of methodological naturalism) must be manifested in all steps of the reconstitution of sociology. The basic task of sociology, according to Lundberg, was to develop tools of social measurement, to achieve a more accurate and complete capture of social reality. Thus, the focus of sociological theory was not society, nor human individuals, but sociological methodology. The core of Lundberg’s theory can be summarised in the following principles: ⦁ Sensory (empirical) knowledge is the only source of all scientific knowledge. ⦁ There is only one scientific method, the one used by the natural sciences, which

is also applicable to social reality. ⦁ There is only one kind of fact for scientific study, and these must be exam-

ined as things,6 in the natural sense of the word. Thus, the phenomena of social science, such as norms and values, must be understood as natural scientific facts. ⦁ The basic goal of sociology is to reveal general laws to determine the connections and sequences in the behaviour of social phenomena, and on this basis, using mathematical methods, to formulate scientifically supported predictions. (Lundberg, 1939, p. 133 ff.) Overall, in the first decades after the World War II, sociological neo-positivism was influential and spread from America to Europe. However, it subsequently came under fire, so that as confidence in Parsons’ structural functionalism faded, so did the credibility of neo-positivism.7

3.4. Sociology from Behaviourist Positions Related to positivism was the sociology of George Caspar Homans, which from its inception contained criticism of Parsons’ prevailing structural functionalism.8 6

Let us recall that the first person, within the framework of positivism, to formulate the demand to examine social facts as ‘things’ was Émile Durkheim (1967 [1895]). 7 An important role was played by interpretive sociology, which raised arguments against the limitations of neo-positivist naturalism. 8 See Chapter 4.

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According to Homans, Parsons’ theoretical schemes did not meet the strict requirements for a scientific sociological theory based on a system of empirically established and verified hypotheses. Homans propagated instead the idea of a theory as a deductive system consisting of a set of hierarchically arranged, logically related hypothetical statements about a certain part of reality. Explanation was a deductive procedure where a hypothesis at a lower level of a theoretical system (with a lower degree of generality) could only be explained through more general hypotheses (Homans, 1972, p. 9 ff.). The power of a theory, in this view, is associated with the ability to deduce a large number of empirical claims from a small number of highest-order claims. We can view theory then as a game in which the winner is the one who, under certain assumptions, can clear up as many different empirical findings as possible from the fewest possible number of general laws (Homans, 1967, p. 21 ff.). A characteristic feature of Homans’ sociology was psychologism. Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (1961), based on the interpretation of human social behaviour from the starting points of behaviouristic psychology. According to Homans, there was only one scientifically supported way of explanation in the social sciences, which was the deductive interpretation of human behaviour (or its results, e.g. social institutions) based on the theses of behavioural psychology (Homans, 1972, p. 132). This psychological explanation was founded on the assumption that human behaviour followed universal laws. Variables were only the circumstances under which behaviour was updated. The theses of behaviourist learning theory were general not only for sociology but for all social sciences. The foundation of Homans’ sociological theory was represented by five behaviourist propositions, or hypotheses (Homans, 1961, pp. 30–82), which can be simplified as follows: (1) People repeat rewarded behaviours. (2) The more often a behaviour is rewarded, the more it occurs. (3) The more valuable the reward is, the more frequent the response. (4) The more often the behaviour has been rewarded, the more the value of the reward decreases. (5) If people have not been rewarded as expected, they perceive it as unfairness and respond accordingly. In Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, Homans (1961) describes how social interactions occur between people and how social relationships are created from repeated social interactions. Social interaction was understood by Homans as a process of exchange. The laws that control it were independent of the conditions of individual societies and could be predicted and calculated to a large extent. Homans refers to his approach as ‘methodological individualism’ (Homans, 1967, p. 61), which in his view led necessarily to the study of human behaviour and thus to psychologism. Few sociologists have followed Homans’ example of transforming sociology into behaviourist psychology. Because Homans’ conception failed to move beyond the circle of social psychology and the research of small groups, it lost influence relatively quickly. What does to a degree follow on from Homans’ methodological individualism is rational choice theory, and today, analytical sociology.

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3.5. Where to Start It was Talcott Parsons who became the main player in the field of sociological theory. His basic intention was a new grand theory by establishment of a new frame of reference, not only for further theoretical thinking, but also for empirical research. Parsons worked on the assumption that contemporary social sciences had not reached the level of theory accomplished by the natural sciences, for example in classical mechanics, but would gradually move towards it. Therefore, he considered the primary task to be the development of a new conceptual scheme that would enable such development. His goal was thus not to formulate a theory in a hypothetically deductive sense, but a new conceptual apparatus in sociology. Parsons distinguished this conceptual apparatus, on the one hand from ad hoc classifications, which lacked systemic unity and were random with respect to objects, and on the other hand, from theoretical systems represented, for example, by contemporary mechanics, able (at least in laboratory conditions) to formulate claims of regular connections between variables. In response, some critics have accused Parsons of not contributing to the enrichment of sociological knowledge by concentrating on writing a dictionary, on dividing phenomena into compartments, on labelling them, or – even more critically – on the construction of terminological ‘pigeonholes’, without being able to determine more precisely how the investigated phenomena are interrelated. If Parsons saw the starting point for forming a new theory in the creation of a new conceptual apparatus, his companion Robert K. Merton considered another way, connected with his idea of middle-range theory. In his study from the 1940s (Merton, 1968 [1949], pp. 39–72) he concluded that, compared to the natural sciences, sociology was not sufficiently developed to create a grand general theory. Therefore, he came up with a conception that task of sociology was to create middle-level theories based on generalisations derived from empirical research, which would be a kind of intermediate link between research and future general sociological theory. According to Merton, middle-range theories were to fulfil several functions: (a) generalise, systematise and explain partial aspects of social reality, (b) create prerequisites for the development of future general sociological theory (de facto understood as a generalisation, systematisation and explanation of medium-range theories), (c) provide conceptual support for subsequent empirical research, (d) to enable sociological research to acquire and deepen its cumulative character. For the sake of completeness, we should note that another idea of sociological theory existed at this time, more or less successfully promoted in the Soviet Union and in its controlled countries, which was that historical materialism, based on the teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, should be considered a sociological theory, a kind of meta-theoretical foundation of all social sciences. With this, there was the conception of sociology as a science of socio-economic formations. Efforts to establish contacts with Western sociology and to adopt its concepts encountered a great deal of resistance from communist ideologues. In Soviet

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sociology, this led to the creation of what was referred to as ‘Marxist-Leninist sociology’. Although it worked with a terminology close to Western sociology, individual terms were mostly defined in a slightly different way, consistent with the prevailing ideological canon. This dogmatic view has often been associated with criticism of empirical sociological research, casting doubt on the sampling statistical procedures used in questionnaire surveys. However, even in countries dominated by Marxist– Leninist ideology, empirical research based on American models – albeit with many complications – began to gain ground in the 1960s.

3.6. In the Footsteps of the Minotaur It is to some extent a paradox that the German sociologist Max Weber, who was otherwise an anti-positivist-oriented researcher, inspired neo-positivist sociology in one essential respect: value neutrality. Weber was the first to systematically formulate the demand that sociology should be a value free (in German wertfrei) science, because the formulation of value judgements disrupts scientific objectivity. Neo-positivists took this view to the extreme by distinguishing between two types of statements: (1) statements about facts based on the empirical study of things; (2) statements about values based on subjective preferences. While empirical judgements could be evaluated with respect to their truth and logical correctness, evaluative judgements could not be scrutinised by any scientific procedure, and therefore did not belong to science. According to neo-positivists, sociology should not concern social problems in terms of their correction, because ethical questions and their evaluative assessment (in the sense of right – wrong) do not fall into science.9 American sociologist Alvin Gouldner expressed disapproval of this neopositivist point of view (1962) in a well-known essay entitled ‘The Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of Value-Free Sociology’. According to Weber (1988 [1917]) evaluation based on subjective wishes, irrational elements (beliefs, emotions, prejudices) taken from politics, philosophy of life, or ethical and religious value systems, distorts the result of the scientific cognitive process. Achieving objective knowledge therefore, in his judgement, presupposed freeing oneself from such value influences, depoliticising sociology. According to Gouldner, however, Weber’s conception had contradictory consequences, expressed with the help of a metaphor, the Minotaur, an isolated being, half human, half animal. By this, he meant that the very conception of a valuefree sociology is internally divided and monstrous, and a myth. He submitted that,

9

It is necessary to add that, according to neo-positivists, the sociologist had a double social role: (a) as a scientist who may not formulate value judgements; (b) as a citizen who has the right to express value judgements, but must not claim that these judgements have scientific justification, because the weight of the sociologist’s value judgement is on the same level as the value judgement of any other citizen (Petrusek, 1978, p. 127).

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from a historical perspective, Weber’s plea for a sociology free from evaluation had rational grounds (Gouldner, 1962, p. 202 ff.). It was motivated by the effort to ensure freedom and autonomy for universities, and sociology itself, away from the pressure of political entities and endowed with research freedom. Renunciation of evaluative judgements meant, according to Gouldner, a ‘temporary suspension of moralizing reflexes’, which contributed to freer intellectual growth and the emancipation of sociology, but at the same time brought the danger of disorientation by an absence of standards, a state of moral indifference. Gouldner observed that the conception of non-evaluative sociology tended to ignore common human problems, alienating sociologists themselves. It could give rise to the opinion that their duty was to exclude themselves from society for methodological reasons, because their isolation in a certain intellectual ghetto was a kind of scientific commitment. Moreover, for many researchers, the slogan of a value-free sociology could become a welcome excuse for rejecting social responsibility for the consequences their findings might contribute to, for example when involved in research that serves to manipulate people. Gouldner formulated the question of whether the principle of evaluationfree sociology was appropriate for contemporary America and the needs of its universities, answering in the negative (Gouldner, 1962, p. 212) because, in his view, it presented students with a simplified and incomplete picture of social science, freed from the dilemmas, passions and responsibilities that should always be linked to the undertaking of the sociological profession.

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Chapter 4

How to Focus the Systems Approach on Modern Societies Seeking continuation of the positivist line of science-oriented sociology, two new theories appeared after the World War II. One was general systems theory, and the other was cybernetics. Despite their novelty, these were theories founded in a certain traditional way of thinking, arising from holistic metaphors suggesting that human society can be viewed, metaphorically speaking, as a human body (or organism), building or machine. Holism was therefore one of the basic assumptions of general systems theory (from Ancient Greek holos – the whole or total), where the system – as a certain structured and arranged whole – was more than just elements and parts but possessed irreducible holistic qualities. In the 1960s, the rise of systems thinking was talked about everywhere. The eyes of hundreds of researchers from various fields of science (physics, biology, technical sciences, economics, psychology, linguistics, management theory, political sciences and last but not least, sociology) were turned to the general systems theory. There was even talk of a fundamental reconstruction of science on the foundation of systems, and many believed that a system approach could become the basis for a new, non-philosophical unification of science. Terms such as ‘system’, ‘structure’, ‘system analysis’ and others became familiar in a number of scientific fields, not only in the science of Western countries, but even within the then Eastern Bloc. To clarify, the term system appears in sociological literature in several different concepts. In the first case, it simply means systematically arranged knowledge and knowing within a certain science or a specialised sub-scientific discipline. Alternatively, systems can be referred to as real – separately identifiable parts of objective reality, characterised by certain specific – system – features in their manifestations. Often, however, the term system is used for artificial abstract scientific models that can serve as a tool to explain real phenomena, often constructed in an experimental way, as something that does not occur in reality. In sociology, we can also find social entities referred to as systems – most often society itself. This is found even among authors who do not work with system theory or methodology. For other theorists, however, the concept of a system is associated with

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought, 25–34 Copyright © 2024 by JiĜí Šubrt Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-805-320231004

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specific system manifestations, referred to as functioning, operation, communication or autopoiesis; this approach is characteristic of systems analysis. The concept of structure, too, is understood in different ways in different contexts. In classical structuralism, structures are understood as rules (often hidden) and principles that arrange social reality. In systems theory approaches, social structure appears as the division of a social whole into parts that through mutual relations, interconnections, and cooperation, form a whole. In addition to the concepts of system and structure, the notion of function is among the core ideas in this context. In the tradition of British cultural anthropology, this is understood primarily as preserving the social system.1 Individual structural elements of the system perform certain functions, thereby contributing to the functioning of the whole. In the 1960s, these ideas developed not only within sociology but also in other social sciences. In political science for example, Karl Wolfgang Deutsch (1963) developed communication research in the political system on these grounds. Deutsch associated the pivot to systems theory with certain intra-scientific needs triggered by the transition from domination by empirical research to the search for new symbolic models and strategies in the field of science. He finds inspiration in Parsons’ conception of symbolically generalised media. However, efforts to use the stimulus of the system approach also appeared in the then Soviet Union (see e.g. Blauberg, Sadovskij Vadim, & Judin Erik, 1969), which became more open in the 1960s to inspiration from Western social sciences. It began to be noted that this approach might be compatible with the Marxist– Leninist position, and also well suited to the ambitions associated with the scientific management of society and the need to improve methods of solving complex social problems.

4.1. Peeking Beneath the Surface Structuralism developed in linguistics in the early twentieth century, but penetrated the social sciences in a significant way only after the World War II, associated with the idea that science can find, see and understand something that is normally hidden from human sight. The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss considered the most important postulate of the social sciences the fact that the world is arranged and that there is order in it. Although very diverse, colourful and changeable, behind all this variety and movement certain unchanging general characteristics could be detected (Lévi-Strauss, 1973, p. 72), so-called invariants,

1

However, British cultural anthropology and its two prominent representatives, Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, are credited with constituting and expanding functionalism in the social sciences, where the concept of social function was defined in analogy to human needs (Malinowski, 1990 [1939], pp. 5–7; RadcliffeBrown, 1990 [1935], p. 30). Just as a person, in order to survive, must satisfy certain needs, so certain functions must be implemented in society necessary for it to continue to exist, function and develop.

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or more precisely invariant rules. The entire life of society is determined by latent structures (or rules) that direct, coordinate and regulate the activities of individuals. In order to discover this hidden order, the researcher must not be limited to the observation of phenomenal diversities, but must focus on the deeper hidden level, which enables order to be seen where previously there was only chaos. The essence of this structuralist approach was characterised by Lévi-Strauss as ‘the search for an invariant, or invariant elements among superficial differences’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1993, p. 16). Society, according to Lévi-Strauss, (1962, 2002 [1962]), consists of individuals and groups where exchange takes place (échange). In every society, this exchange is realised on at least three levels: (a) marriage agreements, (b) exchange of goods and services and (c) message exchange. These correspond to (a) the rules of kinship and marriage used to exchange wives and enable kinship relationships, (b) economic rules guaranteeing the exchange of goods and services and (c) the rules of speech which serve to convey messages. At the same time, these forms of exchange are also different ways of communication, or communication games (jeux de communication) taking place between members and groups of society (Lévi-Strauss, 1985 [1958], p. 353). These communication games are played according to rules that structuralist-oriented researchers try to uncover. According to Lévi-Strauss, the inductive process from concrete to abstract models, and from these individual models to structure, led to cognition of the structure of social life (Lévi-Strauss, 1985 [1958], p. 332 ff.): 1.

2.

3.

4.

These models are supposed to be systemic. Thus, they are conceived as models of game rules, arranged so that changing one causes other rules to change too, so that the game acquires a new character and turns into a different one. Models created in this way should form a common ‘family’, consisting of variations or transformations of games that together make a special group of games (not just a random grouping). A system created in this way would enable the prediction of how a certain model would react to a change in one of its elements, meaning a certain individual rule. Each model should be constructed to take into account all established facts, corresponding in all respects of research interest.

Verifying whether a group of contemplated models could be considered as a structure in their entirety was linked by Lévi-Strauss (1985 [1958], p. 333) with a procedure he referred to as ‘experimentation on models’ (in French expérimentation sur les modéles), meaning all procedures that allow us to learn how a given model reacts to changes of individual elements, or how models of the same or different types can be compared with each other. Structuralism in the French social sciences was significantly associated with left-wing thought in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. One of its prominent representatives was philosopher Louis Althusser, who claimed that Marx’s Capital represents an epistemological turning point in the history of science (Althusser, Balibar, & Brewster, 1970). According to Althusser, even Marx’s previous works

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had a pre-scientific character. Only Capital brought a new scientific method of understanding society as a complex, internally structured whole, where individual components are interconnected and conditioned. Althusser termed this mutual conditionality, in which economy, politics, ideology and many other elements of the social structure coexist, ‘structural causality’. He rejected economic reductionism. Although the social structure was dominated by the economy, it was linked to other levels in this conception. Politics was relatively independent and did not have to be directly determined by economic contradictions. The level of the economy was decisive only in the last instance, while its influence did not appear in a direct, pure form. A significant influence on sociological thinking in the late twentieth century was the structuralism or post-structuralism of Michel Foucault, who considered the matter of power and the mutual relations between power and knowledge to be the key issue. Foucault was not a structuralist in the sense of seeking some timeless invariant structures; on the contrary, his interest was attracted by historically variable ones. In the 1960s, he published The Order of Things (Foucault, 2002 [1966]), in which he examined the structures of knowledge from the sixteenth century onward using the method of ‘archaeology of knowledge’. Where Tomas S. Kuhn used the term paradigm,2 Foucault worked with the concept of episteme, by which he meant a cognitive scheme that was the basis of the scientific and philosophical knowledge of one historical epoch. Foucault showed that two radical ruptures could be noted in the given time span: in the seventeenth century between traditional and classical epistemes, and in the nineteenth century between classical and modern epistemes. The episteme of the Renaissance based the knowability of the world on the principle of similitude and analogy; the episteme of the classical age (enlightenment) by contrast, no longer rested on unifying, but on division and classification on the principle of identity and difference (Foucault, 2002 [1966], p. 51 ff.); with the commencement of the modern episteme, scientific findings were arranged in an orderly line of historical sequence and development (Foucault, 2002 [1966], p. 136 ff.). His book The Order of Things sparked a very extensive discussion in its time. Even Foucault himself became involved, in his treatise on L´archéologie du savoir – The Archaeology of Knowledge (2002 [1969]), which further contemplated the conception of the archaeology of knowledge, as distinguished from the procedures of traditional history. In the 1970s, he nevertheless turned away from this perspective, focussing on a ‘genealogical’ approach. This worked on tracing the genealogy of certain sets of knowledge and practices of power as formed in individual areas of social life. Thus, he replaced the structuralist premise of timeless invariant rules with the hypothesis of the variable and open ‘play’ of diverse and contingent events. Structuralism and post-structuralism, however, have one key feature in common, which is the de-subjectification of theoretical thinking, a theoretical denial of the subject. Louis Althusser (Althusser et al., 1970, p. 119) in this context called

2

See Chapter 3.

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the structuralist method ‘theoretical anti-humanism’ with social development as ‘a process without a subject’. The idea of the self-confident person entertained by existentialism in France lost its justification, and instead the structures de facto became the real driver of human coexistence and human communication.

4.2. A Conception with Universalist Ambition Systems theory suggested that what structuralism revealed could now be captured not only statically, but also dynamically, in the form of system processes. This was enabled because the structuralist approach was complemented by functionalism. The general systems theory, associated initially with Ludwig von Bertalanffy, had been evolving since the 1930s from its basis in biology. It soon became a universal scientific conception and methodology not only in the natural sciences, but also in those focussed on man and society. After the World War II, Bertalanffy worked at universities in England, Canada and the United States. He assumed that living organisms were open systems that exchange substances, energy and information with their surroundings, and gradually moved on to a more general goal: the creation of a general system theory (Bertalanffy, 1968), which was supposed to become a kind of transdisciplinary superconception to provide a common theoretical and methodological starting point not only for biology, but also for the entire spectrum of existing sciences, including social and humanistic ones. The thematic breadth of the general systems theory is considerable. It includes so-called static structures (a schematic representation of various phenomena), mechanical systems (machines), cybernetic systems (devices capable of regulating themselves), open biological systems (cells), plants, animals, human beings, social systems and ultimately transcendental systems. General systems theory was oriented towards the transdisciplinary study of the abstract organisation of all these objects, to explore common principles and create models for their theoretical description and explanation. Bertalanffy’s conception of a general systems theory was relatively favourably received in his time. Great hopes and expectations began to be placed in it, and a number of other researchers worked on it, among whom the most famous were Kenneth Ewart Boulding, who mainly dealt with the issue of economic and social development (Boulding, 1969) and Russell L. Ackoff, dealing with so-called operational research (Churchman, Ackoff, & Arnoff, 1957) and the application of systems theory to the field of state institutions and political goals. A further contribution was made by another new discipline, arising after World War II, which was cybernetics, founded by Norbert Wiener, the American mathematician and philosopher.3 Cybernetics (derived from the Greek word

3

Wiener acquainted the public with this new science at first in the book named Cybernetics or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Wiener, 1965 [1948]), and two years later then through the more popular explanation The Human Use of Human Beings (Wiener, 1989 [1950]).

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kybernétes – steersman) was concerned with the laws of transmission and processing of information, and especially the self-organisation and self-regulation of complex dynamic systems.4 The essence of cybernetics was to study the governing laws in general for both machines and living organisms and societies. General systems theory and cybernetics came to be viewed as compatible, able in tandem to solve a very wide range of scientific and even practical problems (see, e.g. Ashby, 1952, 1956). Related to all of this were the wider penetration and strengthening of mathematical and logical methods, and especially mathematical modelling, in the field of natural and social sciences (see e.g. Rashevsky, 1947).

4.3. Systems, Structures and Functions Talcott Parsons can undoubtedly be described as the most important American sociologist. He studied economics at Amherst College (Amherst, Massachusetts) in the early 1920s, then left for Europe, where he attended the London School of Economics (LSE) and Heidelberg University. Parsons worked at Harvard and from 1945 to 1965 he was among the most influential and commentated on figures in world sociology. At the end of 1960s, in the time of political, cultural and intellectual upheaval, his influence began to fade, though more than 20 book publications and about 100 articles and studies bear his name, and secondary literature on his work runs to hundreds of titles. The other major figure in structural functionalism was Robert King Merton, associated with Columbia University in New York. Functionalism became influential in sociology particularly thanks to the revised version authored by Merton. He started from the view that the small cultures studied by cultural anthropologists were usually more integrated and showed greater solidarity than the large industrial societies focussed on by sociologists. When studying modern societies, therefore, even tendencies that lead to disintegration must be considered. Thus, Merton criticised the postulates of anthropological functionalism and divided functions into two groups according to their consequences for the social system. Those activities led to positive consequences, he referred to as positive ‘functions’ because they led to the stability of the social system. Those activities with negative consequences he described as ‘dysfunctions’. Of a disintegrative nature, these implied disharmony and social tension, meaning anomic phenomena (Merton, 1968 [1949], p. 55 ff.). The second problem that Merton considered (Merton, 1968 [1949], p. 73 ff.) in developing functional analysis was the difference between the subjective motives of an action and its objective consequences. This led him to distinguish between manifest and latent functions.

4

One of the concepts that were widely popularised thanks to cybernetics is the concept of feedback, which is used to describe the mechanism by which the output of a system retrospectively affects its input. Other conceptual tools include the terms entropy (to denote a quantity indicating the ‘degree of disorder’ of the system under examination) and negentropy (for negative entropy).

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Manifest functions were obvious functions intended and recognised by the participants or actors in social events, corresponding to original intentions and resulting in expected consequences. On the contrary, latent functions were hidden and unrecognised, being unintended, unanticipated and unintentional. Talcott Parsons in the early 1950s, via The Social System (Parsons, 1966a [1951]), presented a theoretical conception based on social reality as a system within which individual phenomena and processes are above all determined by their functional relationships. This system was an internally differentiated, structured whole, characterised by stability, repeatability and homogeneity. The starting point for investigating social systems reflected the interaction of two or more individuals forming an interdependent system. The highest, most extensive and complex type of social system, then, was society. Each system was thus created by the interaction of at least two units, understood as systems or more precisely subsystems of higher-level systems. The Social System contained formulations which, it soon became clear, were only provisional. Soon after publication, Parsons set to work on building new foundations for his functional theory, which led him to what is known as the fourfunction paradigm. The four-function paradigm assumes that any social system, if it is to last over time, reproduce and maintain itself, must ensure four basic functions in its framework. According to Parsons, the essence of these is expressed by the acronym AGIL: 1. 2. 3.

4.

Adaptation (adaptation to the external physical environment, obtaining resources from it), Goal attainment (achieving goals – mobilising resources and energy to achieve system goals and set priorities), Integration (integration – the need to coordinate, adapt, and regulate relations between the different actors within the system through the implementation of standards), Latent pattern maintenance (conservation and maintenance of latent patterns of behaviour that in social reality are based on accepted culture or more precisely the cultural system). If we transfer this scheme to the social system of society, we see that:

⦁ Adapting to the environment and acquiring natural resources is a function of

the economic subsystem (the economy); ⦁ Setting and achieving goals is a function of the political subsystem (the polity); ⦁ Integration is a matter of the societal community and legal system; ⦁ The task of maintaining latent patterns of action is realised within the frame-

work of the family, school and church – collectively the fiduciary system – which motivates actors to perform roles that correspond to the functions necessary to maintain the system. According to Parsons, there is a tendency towards stability and persistence in systems. The idea of society as a system of mutually arranged and integrated

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elements was based on the assumption of social order, while the key factor of social integration was value consensus, a jointly shared system of values. The core of human coexistence in every society was thus its normative order, containing universal values, differentiated norms and culturally embedded rules (Parsons, 1966a, p. 31). This normative order was legitimised by a cultural system, which can be said to have a religious basis. The population, organised by normative order and related statuses, rights and obligations, represented a societal community which maintained its identity and integrity through shared cultural orientation. Parsons emphasised not only consensus, but also the need for the individual conformity to the social system, and the suppression of deviant phenomena. In his essay ‘Full Citizenship for the Negro American’ (Parsons, 1969) Parsons interpreted the societal community as a nation. Although he was – especially in the late 1960s and early 1970s – often criticised for conservatism, here he demonstrated not only professional interest but also considerable sensitivity to the question of equal rights for African Americans, raising the concept of inclusion, which he defined as a process where groups formerly excluded or grossly disadvantaged were to gain the full citizenship, or more precisely membership in the societal community [Parsons, 1969, pp. 257–260].

4.4. Development and Change While thinkers such as Comte, Marx or Weber were interested in explaining social change, Parsons from the beginning took more interest in the opposite: how to stabilise the structure of the system of society and prevent shocks and instability. Unsurprisingly, one of the frequent objections he encountered was that his theory was too oriented towards the status quo and too little towards change. Parsons began to pay attention to the problem of change only in the mid1960s, when his approaches were gradually exposed to criticism and were longer considered sufficient and satisfactory. It was then that he developed a scheme of social evolution supposed to be compatible with his structural functionalist theory. It was a conception of developmental change based on the assumption of the increasing adaptive capacity of the system through differentiation. To a certain extent, this was reminiscent of the evolution of the social organism, already put forward by Herbert Spencer at the end of the nineteenth century (1896), in which, as a result of evolutionary development, initially simple organisms or more precisely systems gradually became more and more differentiated and complex. The legacy of this effort was the book Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Parsons, 1966b), and its sequel The System of Modern Societies (Parsons, 1971). In this Parsons presented his conception of long-term evolutionary development, identifying three evolutionary types of society: (1) primitive societies, (2) transitive societies and (3) modern, contemporary societies. Regarding the AGIL scheme outlined above, it can be added that the modern societal system, according to Parsons, was divided into the four mentioned subsystems in the course of historical, evolutionary development. The consequence of this differentiation process was that within each relatively autonomous subsystem there were specific symbolically generalised media: in the economic

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system – money; in the political system – political power; in the societal community – influence; in the fiduciary system – value-commitment. For Parsons, these symbolically generalised media were a means not only for mutual communication and exchange processes to take place within subsystems, but also between them, thereby significantly contributing to the integration of the overall system. Parsons’ conception of evolution proceeding through functional differentiation was also related to his idea of modernising development. The parameters of modern society could be viewed through the AGIL scheme, where: A – the economic system of modern society was characterised by industrialism and a capitalist market economy; G – the political system was associated with democratic establishment and the existence of a civil society; I – the legal system was characterised by the guarantee of basic human rights and the equal application of legal norms to all; L – in family life, the model of a small ‘nuclear’ family was applied; the educational system was widely developed in all its stages; in the field of religion meanwhile there was secularisation, as the church lost its pre-modern influence on the individual areas of life. The idea of modernisation development, extensively accepted in the 1960s, was connected with the idea that social development had only one direction, that of contemporary advanced Western societies. If other countries were to achieve the same level of maturity, they would have to undergo the same developmental course to obtain the same characteristics: industrialism, capitalism, democracy, civil society, human and civil liberties and rights. In the 1970s, this idea became the target of criticism, especially from the perspective of dependency theory (Wallerstein, 1979), which pointed out that so-called third world countries were in a position of being exploited, not being given the opportunity simply to imitate the example of the (exploiting) developed countries. The critical view of Parsons culminated in the writing of Alvin W. Gouldner in the early 1970s (1971) with The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, in which the prediction of decline was associated with very extensive and harsh criticism of Parsons and individual aspects of his theoretical work. Parsons’ thinking maintained its currency – despite the adversity of the seventies – within the framework of systems theory and neofunctionalism; however, it cannot be said that the representatives of these approaches viewed it with piety; on the contrary, it was critically assessed, supplemented and even substantially revised. In Germany, Niklas Luhmann (1984) and Richard Münch (1984) were responsible for the further development of Parsons’ ideas. In the United States and even in the global context, Jeffrey C. Alexander made a significant contribution to updating Parsons’ ideas in the 1980s and 1990s (1983, 1988). As the idea of the importance of culture had played a key role in Parsons’ thinking, significantly reflected in his theory of social systems in the 1950s and 1960s, so Alexander began to consider culture in connection with Parsons’ functionalism, and later he developed it into so-called ‘cultural sociology’ (cultural sociology), promoting the so-called ‘strong program’ of cultural sociology (Alexander & Smith, 2002). In Alexander’s view, culture and its associated meanings and interpretations are a fundamental, independent and irreducible part of social reality.

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4.5. Depth Sociology This theoretical conception, developed in France after World War II by Georges Gurvitch, (1963 [1950], 1964 [1958]), was seen as something of a response to the efforts of Parsons and scholars working under his influence in America. Gurvitch (1964 [1958], p. 1) defined sociology as a science dealing with the totality of social reality, whose objects were ‘total social phenomena’. These phenomena are manifested by social units differing in size, function and structural characteristics. Gurvitch spoke of three types of social unit – micro-social phenomena, social groups and macro-social formations. The building blocks of all more complex phenomena are forms of sociability, i.e. micro-processes of association. The middle form of social units is represented by social groups. The social ‘macrocosm’, meanwhile, is represented by ‘superfunctional’ total phenomena, social classes and global societies. Gurvitch’s (1964 [1958], p. 5) conception of social reality is marked by multidimensionality and structuration, distinguished by certain depth levels (hence the sociological conception of ‘depth’).5 In Gurvitch’s view, 10 hierarchically ordered levels could be identified, and the task of sociology was to research all these individual levels, going from the most accessible, represented by the ‘ecological surface’, to the deepest, constituted by collective mental states and psychic acts. Social reality, as approached by Gurvitch through the dialectical method, is characterised by instability and changeability; a constant movement of structuring, destructuring and restructuring (Gurvitch, 1963, p. 175) where various collisions and sometimes ‘explosions’ occur. On his death in 1965, Gurvitch’s sociological achievement and significance were compared in some obituaries and commentaries to Parsons. Unlike Parsons, however, Gurvitch’s work was followed by no significant successor, and so his once highly ambitious conception has – with the possible exception of Francis – fallen into oblivion.

5 Gurvitch talked about 10 depth levels of social reality: (a) the morphological and ecological surface, (b) social organisations, (c) social patterns, (d) collective forms of behaviour, (e) social roles, (f) collective attitudes, (g) social symbols, (h) innovative and creative collective behaviour, (i) collective ideas and values and finally (j) collective mental states and collective psychic acts).

Chapter 5

Social Classes and Stratification Among the important topics of sociology in the 1960s – if not the most important – was the class structure of society. The emphasis on the problem of classes occurred because not only was Marxism dominant in Soviet ideology at that time, but it also had relatively strong positions even in Western countries (in the form of Western Marxism). For non-Marxist or anti-Marxist-oriented Western scientists, this topic presented the challenge of dealing with it in an alternative, nonMarxist way. In sociology, this issue was often associated with the concept of social structure, which we must add may include other types of structures, such as, in addition to class differentiation, socio-geographical, demographic, or economic, political and cultural institutions. However, for many sociologists – especially but not exclusively for those of Eastern European countries – the concept of social structure was synonymous with social class structure. The existence of class differentiation and class inequality, as is well known, was central to the theory of Karl Marx. However, even before Marx, French and English economists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries considered the issue of class (François Quesnay, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Adam Smith, David Ricardo) and French historians (Augustin Thierry, François Guizot, François Mignet) paid attention to the issue of classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Marx’s teaching, the membership of individuals in a certain class was determined by their unequal position in the system of production. According to Marx, the basic class opposition of capitalist society was represented by two classes: capitalists – the ‘bourgeoisie’, meaning the class of owners of the means of production, and workers – the ‘proletariat’, who do not own the means of production and, as a result, are forced to sell their labour power to the capitalists. In addition to these two basic classes, according to Marx, the class structure of this society was completed by other classes, for example, the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, or the lumpenproletariat. In the reflections on classes of Western authors after the World War II, it was sometimes stated that Marx’s nineteenth-century image of classes had changed significantly during the twentieth century, and that the working class was in a

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought, 35–41 Copyright © 2024 by JiĜí Šubrt Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-805-320231005

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different situation than a hundred years previously, mainly because its standard of living had risen significantly. Thus, many theoreticians expected that the sharpness of class distinctions would be blunted mainly due to the rise in the purchasing power of the population, which would lead the members of the lower social classes increasingly move to positions in the middle class, which would grow as a result of this social movement. At the same time, there were voices that claimed that the bourgeoisie was also losing its position. This was especially the case with some conceptions that appeared in the interwar period, and before the end of the World War II; in particular, there was the idea of the separation of the ownership and control presented in the book The Modern Corporation and Private Property, written by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means (1991 [1932], p. 112 ff.), and the vision of The Managerial Revolutions, presented by James Burnham (1962 [1941], p. 73 ff.). In them, it was stated that those who headed contemporary corporations and had the power to manage them were not the owners of capital, but a managerial and bureaucratic elite.

5.1. Classifying the Population While in Marx’s original conception, the fundamental and practically only criterion for the division of people into social classes was their position within the social system of production, in sociological research the indicators of class position had to be operationalised, that is, translated into measurable indicators. This proved necessary both for those who adhered to the Marxian basis in their research and especially for those opposing this conception. It was mainly the latter who developed the concept of social stratification in place of social-class structure. This term was derived from the Latin word stratum (layer), originally used mainly in geology. Its adoption also opened up an ongoing debate about whether social inequalities in contemporary societies should be associated with notions of ‘class’ or ‘strata’. At the time we are discussing, however, the understanding of stratification as a matter of the class division of society was generally unproblematic. The beginnings of the stratification approach are usually associated with Max Weber’s conception of social inequalities (1968 [1922]), distinguishing three dimensions: Economic processes, leading to the division of people into classes; socially, according to respect and prestige, where one can talk about social status (in German die Stände)1; and in share of power via the formation of political parties and groups. A little later, Pitirim A. Sorokin (1927) in Social Mobility2 stated that social space is multidimensional, and that stratification inequalities arise not in one but

1

The English term status has acquired a broader meaning in stratification theory than Weber’s original term der Stand (status), especially when it came to be understood as a summary expression of the social position of human individuals. 2 In this work, Sorokin made a substantial contribution not only to the theory of stratification, but also to the related theory of vertical and horizontal mobility.

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a number of different areas. However, the most important of these for Sorokin were economic, social and power differences. Thus, the three areas of inequality identified by Weber came to be understood as three essential dimensions of one social phenomenon, known as stratification. Sorokin also observed that stratification was not, as Marx believed, a historically temporary phenomenon, characteristic only for a certain – although prolonged – historical period, but accompanied human societies throughout history. From functionalist positions, Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1944) later defended this notion, arguing that stratification inequalities were important for the reproduction of social systems, being associated with the unequal distribution of goods and rewards, which plays a fundamental motivational role in attracting people to perform occupations that are functionally most important for the maintenance and reproduction of the system. In other words, the most functionally important positions place the greatest demands on talent, qualifications and performance, and must command higher material rewards and demonstrated prestige.3 The conception of social stratification presupposes the existence of a certain ranking, or rather ranks, of social classes or strata. Further efforts to capture stratification hierarchies were inspired by the research of William Lloyd Warner. Warner was an anthropologist and sociologist who applied anthropological approaches to his research in the United States, especially in the early days. Focussing on the local community of a medium-sized and relatively closed city, referred to in his publications as The Yankee City,4 he talked about classes but did not work with the concept of stratification. He understood classes as really existing entities, emphasising the aspect of prestige in identifying them, that is, how the position (status) of a certain individual was evaluated by other members of society. On this basis, he arrived at a class hierarchy model of six stages: (1) upper-upper, (2) lower-upper, (3) upper-middle, (4) lower-middle, (5) upperlower and (6) lower-lower Warner & Lunt 1973 (1941). Later, attempting to capture class positions more objectively and accurately, he formed a summary category for further research, known by the abbreviation ISC (Index of Status Characteristics), in which he included sub-indicators of status such as occupation, source of income, house type and dwelling area (Warner, Meeker, & Eells, 1949). In doing so, he significantly foreshadowed the approach of stratification research using quantitative methodology, which, with the help of mathematicalstatistical procedures, arrived at the formation of what can be termed ‘synthetic’ or ‘multidimensional’ status.

3

After Davis and Moore’s conception was published, it became the subject of various controversies. While some have criticised it for challenging the notion of American society as one of equal opportunity, others have pointed out that the highest income earners are usually not those whose activities are functionally the most important to society. 4 The set of books put out under the name The Yankee City Series was published for two decades (from 1941).

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5.2. Stratification and Related Issues Sociology, generally speaking, struggles to agree on how to understand the individual problems of its discipline. This fully applies to the stratification conceptions of the 1960s.5 Dominant in the sociology of this time was Talcott Parsons, and his approach to these matters thus commanded attention.6 Parsons saw the main topic of sociological research as how society could be maintained in a stable harmonious state, and its social equilibrium ensured. We must keep this in mind to view and understand his conception of stratification, sometimes referred to as an evaluative conception. Parsons (1940, pp. 842–843) drew on the general theory of social action, and from the assumption that this action becomes the subject of moral evaluation for individuals, so that individuals are socially evaluated. It is assumed that the criteria for this evaluation are in line with the general moral value system, based on the culture that the given society accepts. According to Parsons, the basis of stratification could be seen in the normative value structure of society, or more precisely in the moral values of its culture. Stratification was among the important prerequisites for the integration and maintenance of society in a state of equilibrium, and thus essential. Parsons understood social stratification as a differentiated, graded ranking of individuals within the social system., This ranking occurred primarily on the basis of six criteria for status in the hierarchy: (a) membership in a kinship group; (b) personal characteristics (gender, age, beauty, intelligence, strength); (c) achievement; (d) possessions; (e) authority and (f) power (Parsons, 1940, pp. 849–849). Parsons observed that in American society, performance was becoming the stratifying dominant. In his opinion, ownership was not that important. Neither was kinship a primary determinant of status. Significant, however, was American society’s emphasis on the values associated with family, marital unions and child–parent relationships. Regarding America at that time, Parsons identified a man’s performance (primarily a married man with dependent children) in his occupation as the main criterion of class status. He defined a social class as a group of persons consisting of members of certain kinship units, which can be taken as a whole (Parsons, 1940, p. 850): in other words, a number of kinship units whose members had approximately the same status (Parsons, 1940, p. 851). Another sociologist of that time, Ralf Dahrendorf, developed a different approach. He wrote about class and stratification as two distinct aspects. When he dealt with classes, he had power-political differences in mind, linking stratification to economic differences. In his theory of class conflict, Dahrendorf understood

5

Let us add that in the 1960s, those who became authorities on stratification research in the following decades began to prepare for their professional careers. On the one hand, one can mention the Marxist-oriented Eric Olin Wright, on the other hand, John Goldthorpe, developing a non-Marxist approach (sometimes referred to as neoWeberian). 6 Parsons’ structural functionalism is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.

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classes as power-political groupings.7 He developed the idea that changes in society were the result of clashes between two opposing forces, one attempting to avert the deterioration of their position, the other seeking to improve theirs. Classes were thus groupings in conflict; in a union where one class controlled the other, one class would be the ruling class, the other the ruled. When Dahrendorf (1968, pp. 94–115) spoke of stratification, he meant economic differentiation, not conflicting classes. While the concept of classes was bipolar in conflictualistic theory, the stratification model had multiple levels. On the question of stratification in German society, Dahrendorf drew inspiration from Theodor Geiger’s approach, arising from occupational statistics of 1925, and based on the assumption that social classes were real groupings with a common social mentality associated with specific economic and political behaviour (Geiger, 1932, p. 77 in Dahrendorf, 1968, p. 102). Dahrendorf’s sketch of the strata of contemporary German society has roughly four levels. The first, the highest, was represented by the 1%, the elites. The second level was made up of the middle class (20%), the ‘service class’, meaning civil servants (12%), and the working class elite (5%). The third level was occupied by the workers (45%) and the so-called ‘false middle class’, mainly workers in tertiary industries (12%). The fourth, lowest level, was occupied by the unemployed and vagrants (5%) (Dahrendorf, 1968, p. 105). While the importance of class was strongly emphasised in the ideology of the state socialist countries, social class structure was not explored by sociological approaches for a long time, not least because sociology was labelled there as a bourgeois pseudoscience in the early post-war decades. Communist ideology largely confined itself to the a priori statement that the structure of society was made up of two allied classes – the working class and the peasantry – supplemented by a layer of working intelligentsia. The first to challenge this construction in a significant way was former Yugoslav communist official Milovan Djilas (1983 [1957]), who, in the book The New Class, showed that instead of the declared classless society, a new privileged class of communist functionaries had been born, occupying the highest social positions and benefitting from their power and collectivised property. The first attempt at stratification research in the countries of state socialism took place in Hungary in the 1960s (Ferge, 1968). Particularly worth mentioning, however, is the fate of research that took place in 1967 in the then Czechoslovakia. Pavel Machonin was the head of the research team (Machonin, 1969, 2005), basing its findings on data obtained by the Czechoslovak State Statistical Office as part of the ‘Investigation of Vertical Social Differentiation and Mobility of the Population of the CSSR’. Its statistically representative sample consisted of more than 13,000 male heads of Czechoslovak households.8 From a sociological point of view, the conception of Talcott Parsons was an important inspiration,

7

For more on Dahrendorf’s concept of conflict, see Chapter 6. Through the interviewees, data on their wives and girlfriends were collected.

8

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enriched by other influences, especially by Gerhard E. Lenski’s (1954, 1966) concept of multidimensional social status. In Machonin’s research, aggregate status was created as the average achieved by individual respondents on five six-point scales of (a) the highest educational attainment, (b) the complexities of their work, (c) participation in process, (d) income level and (e) lifestyle.9 The social stratification that the research arrived at took the form of a six-level status hierarchy, which appeared pear shaped in graphical representation (narrowest in the upper, first and second status levels, widest in the fourth and fifth, meaning penultimate levels).10 Machonin’s work and its results11 were subjected to harsh criticism by Communist ideologues, while the authorities made sure that the entire edition of the newly printed book (Machonin, 1969) was destroyed and could not reach its readers. Members of the research team were subsequently persecuted.

5.3. Two Interconnected Topics The emphasis on issues of class and stratification in the 1960s was coupled with other themes where attention was focussed on classes. Of these, two require mention: the sociology of work and of leisure. In the 1950s and 1960s, work and leisure were thought of both as two distinct spheres of life and as interrelated themes.12 The sociology of work underwent development in the 1960s which originated in the 1920s with George Elton Mayo, founder of the school of human relations, emphasising the importance of the social environment and social factors in the work process. French sociologists Georges Friedmann and Alain Touraine were among the major exponents in the 1960s. Friedmann (1955, 1961) became influential through books on the impact of industrial work, mechanisation and automation on the human position in the production process, coupled with his critique of ‘fragmented’ work (Friedmann, 1964). Alain Touraine was also involved in the sociology of work and industry but became best known for his focus on trade 9

No significant differential effect was attributed to asset ownership, job complexity was categorised based on expert judgement, and lifestyle was determined using a composite index. 10 The first status level accounted for 2%, the second 8%, the third 15%, the fourth 28%, the fifth 30% and the sixth 18%; due to rounding, the total is not exactly 100%. 11 It was at a time when, after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 (which suppressed the so-called revival process known as the Prague Spring), socalled ‘normalisation’ began to be promoted, associated with a return to dogmatic Marxism–Leninism. 12 This interconnectedness was suggested, among other things, by the nowadays accepted hierarchy of human needs of psychologist Abraham Maslow (1943), schematically depicted in the form of a five-level pyramid, whose first level – which means the base – consists of physiological needs, the second level of needs of safety, the third level of love/belonging, the fourth level of esteem and the fifth level – and therefore even the top – self-actualisation.

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unions, social movements and the transition of society from the industrial to the post-industrial phase (Touraine, 1966, 1971). French sociology was also prominent in the sociology of time. It promoted the view that leisure could not be addressed in isolation from the sphere of work. Jean Fourastié (1961) foresaw the fundamental transformation of human civilisation under the influence of the ever-increasing amount of leisure time enabled by scientific and technological progress. The culmination of sociological thinking on this issue was Joffre Dumazedier’s (1962) Towards a Society of Leisure, in which leisure was presented as a central theme of emerging society. The increasing extent of leisure time came to be seen as a factor that fundamentally transformed not only the core of class conflict in the nineteenth century – the length of working hours – but also something that would significantly humanise emerging society.

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Chapter 6

Conflicts May Not Bring Only Evil In the dominant explanatory models created in sociological theory after the World War II, the prevailing tendency was to view social reality at rest. What was lacking was sufficient attention to the dramatic and bloody events that had marked the course of the twentieth century. It seemed as if the horrors humanity had gone through had no place in sociological theory. At the same time, even the years after the World War II were not spared serious conflicts. As for the 1960s, the Caribbean Crisis (1962) particularly attracted the attention of the world public; so too did the Vietnam War (1955–1975) and the backlash it generated. Other notable conflicts included The Six Day War in the Middle East (1967) and the civil rights movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the United States (1954–1968). In addition, there were student revolts in both Europe and the United States (late 1960s), and the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the countries of The Warsaw Pact (in 1968). Although we encounter the issue of conflicts in social science even in the nineteenth century, for American sociology from the 1930s to the mid-1950s interest was above all focussed on the issue of reaching consensus through jointly shared value orientations. This sociology tended to consider a state of integrity, cohesion and balance as the desirable state of the social system and to understand conflicts as a disease of the social organism. Meanwhile, in the ideology of the USSR, there was much talk about peaceful coexistence, but the rhetoric of class struggle continued. In reaction to the one-sidedness of the dominant sociological approach, conflict theory was developed in the 1950s and later in the 1960s, aiming to prove that conflicts might not only harm society but also be beneficial to it. The main representatives of this direction were Lewis Alfred Coser and Ralf Dahrendorf. These authors declared that conflicts were omnipresent and could neither be abolished nor settled once and for all. They were encountered in every ‘healthy’, dynamic society, and their denial or suppression was not only foolish, but even damaging.

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought, 43–50 Copyright © 2024 by JiĜí Šubrt Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-805-320231006

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6.1. The Functions and Dysfunctions of Conflicts Lewis Alfred Coser, founder, and in the 1960s a key exponent of modern conflict theory, was born (as Ludwig Cohen) in Berlin. In 1933, he emigrated from Hitler’s Germany to Paris, and later left for the United States, where he studied at Columbia University. He worked at Brandeis University and the State University of New York – Stony Brook. Among his publications were The Functions of Social Conflict (Coser, 1968 [1956]) and Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict (Coser, 1967). In textbook interpretations, consensual and conflict paradigms are usually set against each other as two opposing lines of thinking. However, if we approach Coser’s work in this way, we cannot understand him adequately, because Coser – perhaps paradoxically – started precisely from the assumptions of consensus theory, although differing from Parsons, who understood them as pathological. Coser was influenced by his teacher Robert K. Merton,1 who considered society the result of the operation of both positive and negative forces. This Mertonian perspective provides the key to understanding the Coser’s way of thinking. In no way did Coser wish to deny the importance of consensus to society, nor did his approach one-sidedly extol or praise conflict. While his work problematised the consensual model of the structural functionalism, he did so not to replace it with a conflictualist model, but to supplement it. In contrast with Parsons, he did not understand conflict only as something negative, but as a phenomenon that also fulfilled certain positive functions. Coser, significantly inspired by the German sociologist Georg Simmel,2 observed that no human coexistence could be completely harmonious and conflict-free. Group processes are cooperative but also conflictual in nature, while conflict may be associated with situations that not only divide but also unite people. Coser defined social conflict as a struggle, as a fight for values, higher status, power and resources, in which the goal of each side was to neutralise, strike or eliminate their opponent (Coser, 1968 [1956], p. 8). From the point of view of

1

Let us add that R. K. Merton was an example for Coser, even when it comes to his way of writing. It is characteristic that Merton never created a large, comprehensive, structured and at the same time internally connected theoretical system; he authored a number of very interesting but partial theories (sometimes – not quite adequately – referred to by his term ‘theories of the middle-range’). Merton’s most famous work, Social Theory and Social Structure (Merton, 1968 [1949]) is actually nothing more than a set of diverse theoretical texts. Even Coser’s book The Functions of Social Conflict has quite a similar character (Coser, 1968 [1956]); even this does not present any coherent and internally integrated theory of conflict, but rather a series of partial analyses and theoretical observations, which are not significantly integrated into a single whole, but rather are just freely arranged next to each other. 2 Coser’s book from 1956 has formally the character of a commentary on the ideas from Simmel’s book Sociology (1908 [1992]), contained in the chapter entitled ‘Der Streit’ (‘The Dispute’). Coser, who proceeds from Simmel’s work, presents 16 theses (propositions) that form the outline of his book.

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the society-wide system, according to Coser (1968 [1956], pp. 133–137), conflicts contribute to the creation and maintenance of the balance of power. The mutual conflict repulsion of individual groups represents a mechanism by which individual pressures balance each other out and thus maintain the overall social system in a state of equilibrium. What is also significant about conflict is that it can lead to the establishment of relationships where none existed before (Coser, 1968 [1956], pp. 121–128). Again, we may recall Georg Simmel, who considered the mutual relations of human groups in ancient times to have been predominantly hostile, so that war represented an extended form in which contact with foreign groups was made. Although Simmel realised that the result of war was often the complete destruction of one of the parties, he pointed out that it may also lead to new forms of interaction, to the acceptance of common rules3 of conflict management, which may then impose certain restrictions on it. Conflict also contributes to the formation of various associations and coalitions (Coser, 1968 [1956], pp. 139–149). If several groups face a common enemy, a new bond can be formed between them. The common enemy thus represents the impulse to the creation of transitory, instrumental associations, and sometimes also for the emergence of new groupings with newly defined boundaries, common values and ideology. In Coser’s view, fringe conflicts over less essential issues could strengthen a society, while those that threatened its basic consensus and solidarity could be fatal and lead to its disintegration (Coser, 1968 [1956], pp. 72–80). A far-seeing society therefore creates institutionalised channels that give direction to conflicts so that they do not threaten its core values. According to Coser, a large number of peripheral conflicts could be less dangerous than one essential conflict. However, individual societies and social groups differ in the extent to which they are able to tolerate and endure conflicts. At particular risk are rigid societies, where there is a much greater risk of destabilisation and disruption by conflict. A stable society can usually afford to allow conflicts because it does not fear its disintegration. This allows a continuous release of tension, which in turn contributes to further strengthening its stability. On the contrary, unstable, vulnerable societies are afraid of conflicts and therefore try to avoid them. However, as a result, internal pressures build up and the hazard of uncontrolled explosion and collapse increases. Although the absence of conflicts is often considered an indicator of social stability, it may actually be quite the opposite. For example, the presence of conflicts between ethnic groups may, under certain conditions, be a sign of a greater integration than their absence. The point is that the minority group may not enter into open dispute out of fear, but quietly accumulates ambivalent feelings and

3

Coser (1968 [1956], pp. 128–133) observes that where there is a relative balance of power at the beginning of a conflict, there is also a desire for that conflict to be conducted according to certain rules and for similarly organized opponents to face each other (e.g. two armies, but not an army and a guerrilla).

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hatred against the other side. By contrast, if this minority feels sufficiently secure, it will even be able to risk entering into a conflicted relationship with the other party. The image of an external enemy is extremely important for the cohesiveness and mobilisation of forces in many social groups. Such an external enemy may even be deliberately sought out, and if it does not exist, fabricated. For similar reasons, there may be a search for the enemy within. For example, if a group suffers a defeat, it may be attributed not to the strength of the opponent (since that would mean admitting weakness) but an internal betrayal. The ‘punishment’ of the thus constructed ‘traitor’ then becomes a prerequisite for establishing a new consensus. In response to Simmel, Coser (1968 [1956], pp. 48–55) distinguished between ‘true’ – realistic and ‘false – unrealistic’ conflicts. The motive force behind realistic conflicts was usually frustration stemming from the failure or unfulfilment of certain demands or needs. Realistic conflicts have a certain goal, to eliminate the source of frustration and fulfil unrealised expectations. The conflict then serves to achieve that end. In addition, realistic conflict arises in the relationship between its participants and is also resolved between these participants. An example of realistic conflict is that between two duellists. In this case, it is characteristic that both the means of the conflict and the end to be achieved are in accordance. An unrealistic conflict arises when there is no agreement between the means and the goal. This type of conflict is caused not by the opposing efforts and goals of the adversaries, but by the effort of at least one of them to release existing tensions in some way. Essentially, this type of conflict has two possible ways of resolution. One is the release of emotions by means such as joke (satire) or unwinding. As when a boiler overheats and threatens to explode, a little steam must be released, so in society, if tension rises, it must be ventilated by transference to another area, for example, dramatic mass spectacles. In social systems, we find, according to Coser, ‘venting’ institutions whose function is to release the excessive pressure arising from the hostile and aggressive emotions. These institutions help to maintain the system by preventing otherwise likely social outbursts and their disruptive effects. The second, more destructive way of resolution is represented by the concept of ‘scapegoating’. Here, aggression is directed not at the real culprit, but at a kind of ‘substitute’ object, labelled as a saboteur, despite not being responsible for anything. This ‘scapegoat’ usually emerges in the form of a minority (often ethnic or religious) group. In addition to the typology of true and false conflicts, Coser (1968 [1956], pp. 111–119) made yet another distinction inspired by Simmel; in this case, between conflicts whose goal is personal and subjective in nature, and those whose goal is impersonal and objective. According to Coser, ideologies and their creators play a role in how subjectively motivated conflicts may be transformed into conflicts of eternal truths. Conflicts in which participants are not fighting for themselves, but for ideals, tend to be more radical and relentless than those in which (only) personal goals are pursued. Indeed, the energy of those who see

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themselves as the embodiment of ideals they uphold tends to be amplified by feelings of significance that stem from this superpersonal role. Moreover, the knowledge that a person is the bearer of some higher mission often helps justify otherwise unjustifiable actions. Paradoxically, the role of bearer of supra-individual ideals dehumanises the individual in conflicts.

6.2. Moderating Conflicts Ralf Dahrendorf completed his studies in Hamburg and London. As a professor, he worked at universities in Germany, and from 1974 for a decade he was in a leadership position at the London School of Economics. Among Dahrendorf’s works influential in the 1960s, we may recall Soziale Klassen und Klassenkonflikt (Dahrendorf, 1963), published two years later in revised form under the title Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Dahrendorf, 1959), Gesellschaft und Freiheit (Society and Freedom; Dahrendorf, 1961), Pfade aus Utopia (The Paths from Utopia; Dahrendorf, 1967). What Dahrendorf primarily paid attention to in the 1950s and 1960s was class conflict, a conflict which in his view caused dichotomisation, meaning a tendency to form two opposing positions. Although Dahrendorf’s attitude towards Marx was critical, he followed up the idea that changes in society are the result of the clash of two opposing forces, one defending their position from deterioration, the other seeking to improve their own. However, he considered Marxian class theory to be outdated. Dahrendorf located the structural origin of conflicts of this type in the power relations between units summarised by Max Weber’s term ‘dominion bundle’ (Herrschaftsverband – ruling association). Classes are groupings of holders of certain positions in the dominion bundle who are united by sharing power against those excluded from it (Dahrendorf, 1959, p. 138). According to Dahrendorf, dominion is a historically ubiquitous social relationship that produces social conflicts. Therefore, accordingly, there are no societies without conflict. Wherever there is dominion, there are classes and class conflicts. The path of conflict development from a certain initial structural position to a developed social conflict leads through three stages, represented by: (a) structuring the initial situation, (b) the awareness of latent interests and (c) the creation of conflicts (Dahrendorf, 1963, pp. 218–220). In the first stage, the basic conditions of the conflict are established, where two aggregates of holders of social positions form the two sides in confrontation. The distinguishing criterion is predetermined, objectively describable interests – so-called latent interests. The bearers of the same latent interests do not yet form social groups in the true sense of the word, but rather a kind of quasi-group, or aggregates of people not yet aware of these interests. However, their similar position in society predisposes them to come together under certain conditions and start joint action. The second stage of conflict development consists of the crystallisation or awareness of latent interests and organisation of quasi-groups into actual groupings – interest groups.

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Dahrendorf believed that antagonisms found expression in group conflicts when there was no chance of alternative satisfaction, especially of individual satisfaction through, for example, mobility. The formation of interest groups as structured interests of many individuals was not an automatic process. In this sense, a latent dispute took on the nature of a class conflict when a large number of people could not satisfy their individual interests through their own efforts. The third phase related to the fact that when conflicts break out, they can manifest themselves in the very different ways. Dahrendorf considered the possible variations of conflict in terms of two independent dimensions: ‘violence’ and ‘intensity’ (not every intense conflict is necessarily violent and vice versa) (Dahrendorf, 1963, pp. 221–222). Intensity refers to the social relevance of the conflict, determined by the degree to which participants are drawn into it, the degree of their interest and the energy invested. Intensity is significant when the participants in the conflict care, and the cost of defeat is high. The greater the importance participants attach to the conflict, the more intense it becomes. The dimension of violence refers to the expressive forms of conflicts. This may be imagined as a scale with raging war and armed coups on the one pole, while on the other polite discussions and negotiations. Between these two extremes lies a range of more or less violent forms, such as civil disobedience, ultimata, namecalling, quarrels, etc. Conflicts are omnipresent, according to Dahrendorf. They cannot be destroyed or resolved once and for all. Social conflicts, which means contradictions arising systematically from social structures, is inherent in every society. These conflicts may have a positive, creative significance, as initiators of development, but, on the other hand, they may threaten society with destruction and collapse. In Dahrendorf’s view, the removal of this danger was possible when conflicts became the subject of calculable social manipulation. The basic question was therefore what form this manipulation should take. One could of course suppose that conflicts should be violently suppressed. This possibility, Dahrendorf asserted, must be rejected, as neither the cause nor object of conflict could be despatched from the world. Another method might be an effort to resolve conflicts, combined with an attempt to eliminate conflicts at their roots. But even this effort may not succeed, because conflicts have roots in the very nature of the social reality. The only hope was therefore conflict regulation (Dahrendorf, 1963, p. 227), understood as an attempt to manage conflicts in the sense of their action potential. The regulation was a crucial means of lowering the degree of violence in almost all types of conflicts, which would not disappear, nor become less intense, but become controllable in as far as they were regulated. To make this possible, four conditions had to be met (Dahrendorf, 1963, pp. 227–228): 1.

Conflicts and contradictions must be recognised as necessary, justified, meaningful and completely normal, not pathological deviations from the normal state. Opponents in a conflict should understand each other as parties with different goals and interests.

Conflicts May Not Bring Only Evil 2. 3.

4.

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Any intervention into conflicts must give up ineffectual attempts to eliminate their causes and limit itself to managing their forms. The better organised the opposing viewpoints, for example in political parties, trade unions, associations, etc., the better the regulation. Therefore, it was necessary to create organisational prerequisites for the manifestation of conflicts within interest groups. It was necessary to reach agreement on certain ‘rules of the game’ according to which the conflicts would be decided. These rules could only be effective where participants are seen as equal partners and no-one is favoured in advance.

For Dahrendorf, regulation was the only conceivable productive option for the conflict management. He emphasised that conflicts would not thereby disappear, for where society exists, there are conflicts. However, the forms of regulation affected the violence of conflict, and regulated conflict blunts its edge to some extent. Although they could still be extremely intense, they were not necessarily dangerously violent and destructive.

6.3. Other Perspectives The approaches to conflicts offered by Coser and Dahrendorf in their work were not exhausted by the theoretical efforts in the sociology of the 1960s. In Soviet sociology, which programmatically recognised Marxism–Leninism, the thesis of the escalation of the class struggle, which had been characteristic of the previous decade, was otherwise abandoned. In the 1950s, this thesis had served to justify ongoing Stalinist processes; however, the class struggle did not lose its currency, remaining the guiding principle of Soviet ideology and its social sciences. In Western Marxism, the idea of the class struggle was blunted to a certain extent as discussions about the embourgeoisement of the working class raised the question of who could be the collective subject to lead the struggle to transform the world. Some saw revolutionary potential in the poor masses of the Third World, while others again placed hopes in student revolts. In the African Congo, then in Bolivia in South America, Ernesto Che Guevara tried to stir up the flames of revolution by way of guerrilla warfare, but in 1967, with the aid of the CIA, he was captured by Bolivian forces and executed. On a theoretical level, the topic of revolutions became the subject of American scholar Barrington Moore, an expert on modern Russian history at Harvard University, who supported his two students, Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol in their research on revolutions, violence and wars.4 In contrast to Marx, who considered the peasantry a passive mass that could not be an active creator of history, Moore

4

Tilly (1964) drew attention to himself even in the 1960s, primarily with the book The Vendée: A Sociological Analysis of the Counter-revolution of 1793; Skocpol (1979) in an innovative way developed Moore’s stimuli in her book States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of Social Revolutions in Russia, France and China.

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identified the peasantry and landowner groups as the main actors in the violent clashes in the birth of modern states, in addition to the bourgeoisie. In the book The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Moore (1966) showed that the formation of modern societies did not take place in a peaceful way and took three basic forms: bourgeois revolution (England, France, United States), conservative revolution (revolution from above) carried out by the rulers (Prussia, Japan), and peasant revolution (in Russia and China). A study of these three historical lines showed that bourgeois revolutions led to the establishment of democratic systems; the conservative revolutions were followed (after some time) by fascism, and the peasant revolutions resulted in a communist dictatorship. In the 1960s, inspiration from behaviourism and systems theory began to show in considerations of conflict in political science and international relations theory. In sociology, approaches influenced by game theory and mathematical modelling were undertaken by Kenneth Boulding. In his book Conflict and Defense: A General Theory, Boulding, (1963) defined the cycle through which all conflicts go – birth, development and termination – in order to identify the processes that led precisely to termination. Like Dahrendorf, Boulding tried to prove theoretically, albeit in a different way, that conflicts in contemporary society could be ‘subdued’ in a certain way, so as not to pose such a threat as in the past. The political détente between East and West, manifest especially after the overcoming of the Caribbean crisis (1962), spread similar optimism among the masses as well, but this was snuffed out by the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, after which the boundary line between the two systems once more intensified.

Chapter 7

Media and Mass Communication We can perceive the term mass communication within the framework of a conceptual cluster formed by terms such as mass society, mass production, mass consumption, mass culture, mass media, mass entertainment, mass persuasion, etc. The original concept of mass society spoke of the breakup of traditional communities into contemporary society described as an aggregate of atomised individuals with actions influenced by institutionalised information channels. According to Hannah Arendt, a person in a mass society was no longer connected to other people by awareness of common interest but stands alone among the influences of mass culture and propaganda (Arendt, 1961). At the same time, there is not just a loss of communication with loved ones, but a gradual disappearing of contact with external reality, and thus a fading of the ability to experience this reality and consider it. According to Arendt, mass culture contained certain dangerous tendencies to promote a totalitarian way of thinking. Even at the beginning of the 1950s, a book by David Riesman and his colleagues entitled The Lonely Crowd (Riesman, Denney, & Glazer, 1950) analysed how the social character is dependent on the society in which it is formed. In this book, the authors distinguished three types of societies and the three personality types that belong to them. The first type is a society dominated by traditions (myths, legends), traditional values and norms that support the social cohesion and stability. The second type is societies in which mobility in the form of voyages of discovery, colonisation efforts and commercial activities are born and developed, which cultivate a tendency to accept a certain complex of life goals to guide citizens even when they leave their original society. In the third, which means the contemporary type of society – as shown by the example of the United States – the ability of individuals to perceive and reflect the expectations and demands that come from others is cultivated above all. Riesman and his colleagues refer to the personality associated with the first type as tradition-directed. This is a person accustomed to acting as tradition dictates, because not to respect it would mean exclusion from the community (family, tribe, etc.) and destruction.

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought, 51–56 Copyright © 2024 by JiĜí Šubrt Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-805-320231007

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The second type, inner-directed, appears when social changes taking place on the threshold of the modern age have intensified to such an extent that a person needs to have their own inner compass, because without it they could be lost in changing social situations. The values adopted and internalised assist survival in unfamiliar situations and environments. The situation then changed in the twentieth century, with the emergence on the social scene of other-directed human beings. This individual in the midst of an endless crowd can move in the easiest and the safest way when blending in with others. The inner compass is no longer focussed on a lifetime of shared values, but on prevailing social expectations. Mass consumption, mass entertainment and, above all, mass media provide lessons about these.

7.1. Mass Communication in a Mass Society In the 1960s, Harold D. Lasswell had a significant influence on the understanding of the communication process in mass society, considering the tension between such basic elements of communication as (1) sender, (2) message, (3) channel, (4) receiver and (5) effect, summarised in the formulation: Who (says), What, to Whom, (through) What Channel (With), with what effect (Lasswell, 1967).1 The source is usually associated with the term communicator; the transmitted message is the communication; the receiver is the communicant; while the means of transfer from source to receiver is the communication channel. Individual acts of communication bring effects which can subsequently – either immediately or with a delay – manifest themselves in the reaction of the recipient. The roles then change: the recipient becomes the source, and the source becomes the communicator; the message travels in the opposite direction, and if this communication act is completed, so-called feedback has taken place, which can then become the starting point for another communication act. Communication is a permanent exchange of information, or messages, between individual elements of a social structure. The communication process consists of individual communication acts. Mass communication is the process whereby messages (information) of a public nature are transmitted through technical means (media) to an audience of individuals dispersed (dispersed audience) in time or space. The media allow the communication to reach a large number of people in a short period of time. The content of messages in mass communication is usually divided into two basic categories: information (news, journalism, education) and entertainment (recreation, free time)2; sometimes a third category is added, which is art. 1 One by one, a number of different communication models and ideas appeared, in which some others are added to Lasswell’s original five fundamental components, such as communication context, communication situation, intention of communication, communication topic, language of communication, etc. 2 In the United States, with the commencement of cable televisions in the 1970s, the so-called infotainment began to gain ground, which combines news with features of entertainment programs, began to gain ground.

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In the 1960s, mass culture shaped by mass communication produced phenomena and products distinguished by attractiveness and high viewership. Magazines that set the tone of the time included Life, Newsweek, The New Yorker and Time. A number of films grabbed audiences, such as The Magnificent Seven (1960), Breathless (1960), Psycho (1960), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Dr. No (1962), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Jules and Jim (1962), The Leopard (1963), 8 1/2 (1963), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), A Hard Day’s Night (1964), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), The Graduate (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Planet of the Apes (1968), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Easy Rider (1969) and Midnight Cowboy (1969). Celebrities to appear on media pages included film actresses and actors such as Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Claudia Cardinale, Monica Vitti, Ursula Andress, Gregory Peck, Paul Newmann, Steve McQueen, Sean Connery, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon; musical performers abounded, such as Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard, Tom Jones, Aretha Franklin, The Supremes, Nancy Sinatra, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Doors, The Who, and even sportsmen featured, such as Cassius Clay, Pelé, Eusébio and George Best. Personalities of political life were not excluded, notably John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro and Alexander Dubcek. Additionally, the aesthetics of mass media, comic books, advertising and consumer packaging became the inspirational impulse for a new artistic movement, labelled ‘Pop art’ (Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein). Concepts of mass communication initially assumed that mass media acted directly on all individual members of the mass. This has sometimes been referred to as the hypodermic needle model (Croteau & Hoynes, 1997) (each individual directly and personally ‘injected’ with a certain message, and either affected or not), or as the magic bullet theory (Berger, 1995). This proceeded from the aforementioned idea of the individual standing alone amongst the mass media, with the dissemination of information linear and individualised, and the media considered omnipotent. The focus was thus on the movement of messages from communicator to recipient and the reaction to them. During the 1940s and 1950s, however, it was discovered that the flow of information was more complicated,3 and that recipients lived, one way or another, in formed groups that influenced their behaviour and understanding of the world. In addition to this oriented research focus, enduring for several decades, during the 1960s another, fundamentally different approach to media emerged - that of Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan.

3

The book Personal Influence (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1966 (1955)) played a significant role in this direction, in which the thesis about the two-step flow of communication was formulated, according to which public opinion is often formed in such a way that ideas spread from the mass media to the opinion leaders and from them to the less active groups of the population.

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7.2. The Medium is the Message In the 1960s, the worldwide prestige of Marshall McLuhan was primarily associated with his three books: The Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan, 1995 [1962]), Understanding Media (McLuhan, 1964) and The Medium is the Massage (McLuhan & Fiore 1967). McLuhan considered media to be any technology that caused an extension of the human body, human organs and senses; for instance, the bicycle was an extension of the leg, the telephone was the extension of the ear, etc. The concept was so broad that media included everything that a person created to fulfil needs (furniture, vehicles, money, alphabet, communication media). McLuhan coined the slogan that the medium in itself is the message. The key to understanding the title of his famous book The Medium is the Massage is a pun – massage and message – based on two differently spelt but almost identical sounding words. The ‘massage’ can be understood as an adjustment (adaptation) of consciousness under the influence of the communication medium. It can also be read, however, as a reference to the ‘mass age’.4 For McLuhan, the fact that we receive a message through a certain medium was more important than the content of the message itself (so, for example, the act of watching television itself had a more significant impact than what was shown on television). Neither programmatic nor content analysis could explain the subliminal influence of the media. According to McLuhan, the ways of communication were simply more important than the information conveyed. Television became significantly differentiated in its influence from the print media. Everyday life in a television-dominated society took a different aspect from that of print-dominated societies, partly because television news brought information from around the world quickly and immediately to millions of viewers. According to McLuhan, the electronic media was forming a global village (1995 (1962), p. 39), in which people all over the world would follow the development of major events and thus become their co-participants. McLuhan (1964) divides communication media into ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. ‘Cold’ media are, for example, spoken word, telephone or television. These means deliver messages containing relatively little information, require completion5 and at the same time activate the recipient, generate a sense of community and stimulate direct engagement. ‘Hot’ media – especially the press (books and periodicals) deliver communications that are richer in information, more complete, and therefore less engaging, leading to low participation, individualisation and fragmentation. 4

In addition, one can also read the observation that this book was originally to be titled The Medium is the Message, but McLuhan preferred the new title, which looks like a printing error. 5 In this day and age, it should be noted that the television of McLuhan’s time produced an image of the significantly lower quality than was offered by photography or film at that time. With a certain simplification, it can be stated that what television provided was a grainy mosaic-like image made of tiny black, grey and white dots, which the viewer often had to actively work to understand.

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7.3. The Commencement of the Electronic Media Age McLuhan observed that certain media had had an influence on the development of humanity, creating entire historical epochs. These included: spoken language, the phonetic alphabet, printing and also electronic media. According to which medium prevailed, history could be divided into (1) the pre-alphabetic period, (2) the period of the alphabet and printing press and (3) the era of electronic media. The pre-alphabetic period was the period of people living in tribes, where the most important means of communication was spoken language. This corresponded to the fact that the ear was the primary sensory organ. McLuhan considered the essential characteristics of the tribal man to be the preference for spoken language and the ear. Dependence on the spoken word meant enmeshment in the web of the tribe. As the spoken word had a stronger emotional colouring than the written word, life in tribal bonds was more spontaneous and more easily excited by passions. Pre-alphabetic man was not a distinct individual and could neither develop into a specialist nor (like Western humanity) remain indifferent to the fate of others. In a tribal society, everyone experienced and suffered everything together. The preference for the ear corresponded with the fact that tribal people lived in acoustic space, characterised by having neither the centre nor boundaries characteristic of visual, eye-constructed space. The supremacy of the ear, according to McLuhan, allowed for a harmonious balance of the senses, which disappeared with the invention of the phonetic alphabet (McLuhan, 1995 [1962], p. 21 ff.). The phonetic alphabet caused the magical world of the ear to make way for the neutral world of the eye. The advantage of the phonetic alphabet was that all possible meanings and speaking manners could be reproduced with a small number of characters or letters. Against this advantage, however, was the necessity of the eye to understand it, leading to over-emphasis on the eye, but also the isolation of the visual sense from other senses. According to McLuhan, the original harmonious balance of the senses was thus disturbed. The acoustic space in this view was an organic space perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses. Where the eye dominated, by contrast, perceived sensations could no longer be transferred to the sensations of other senses. The human became a visual being, in a visual space, and this, according to McLuhan had serious consequences. The inner world of tribal humanity was a creative complex of emotions and feelings, which the literate man of the Western world had suppressed in the name of efficiency and practicality. Non-relational visual space, as opposed to acoustic space, has its centre and boundaries. This encourages humanity to measure and divide it, developing the intellect but stunting other faculties. A literate person begins to think in a uniform and linear way, categorising and classifying data. The invention of the printing press intensified and radicalised (McLuhan, 1995 [1962], p. 193 ff.) the changes caused by the phonetic alphabet, and finally sealed the demise of the tribal man. The new medium gave the eye absolute dominance among the senses, which led McLuhan to refer to the modern age as ‘Gutenberg’s Galaxy’. The printing press, with repeatability at its core, led to the gradual

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advancement of machines and mechanisation in all other areas of human activity. Books could be produced in unlimited quantities, creating one of the conditions for universal alphabetisation. As the printing press made general knowledge available, people became independent of authorities that passed on knowledge orally, encouraging independent thinking but also leading to phenomena such as the Reformation or nationalism. McLuhan hailed the age of electronic media, beginning in the early nineteenth century with the invention of the electric telegraph (McLuhan, 1995 [1962], p. 313 ff.). This was to bring to a higher level what had been lost with the invention of the phonetic alphabet and printing. By overcoming the dominance of writing humanity was regaining its wholeness, and on the global level. Returning to the acoustic world, feelings and emotions were reconstituting after their separation by the alphabet 3,000 years ago. The acoustic space offered the possibility of returning the senses to a state of harmonious equilibrium, but at a higher level than in the pre-alphabetic period. McLuhan considered television the most important of the new electronic media. The objection that, intuitively speaking, television was a visual medium, was countered by the assertion that television forces the viewer to feel the image with his eyes, making the eye effectively a hand for groping. Television was thus an ‘auditive-tactile’ medium, rather than a visual one. Television removed the predominance of the visual and took us back to the acoustic space. The electronic media had a healing effect because it expanded not just one isolated sense, but the central nervous system, improving our social and psychological existence. As a result, we could no longer avoid experiencing the joys and sorrows of other people, and thus it was no longer possible to play the exalted and distanced role of the alphabetic Western man.

Chapter 8

Imagination – Creative and Sociological The 1960s was a period that showed it was possible to influence the course of the world and make changes in various areas by the power of the human intellect. This turned the interest of many to the subject of invention, imagination and fantasy. Imagination is usually associated with fantasy, and thus with the ability to conjure up ideas and mental images in a broader sense, with creative potential to reject or reshape the present. But the term imaginary can also mean something unreal, even illusory. The creation of imaginary visions can thus have, ultimately, an escape function. In science, imagination is often the first step of orientation towards a certain research problem, or to the formation of scientific hypotheses. More often than scientific (or technological) imagination, we talk about imagination in art. It was characteristic of the 1960s that many artists tried stimulating their imaginative capacity in certain ways, even ways problematic and illegal in nature. In the 1950s, the beatnik movement was already making itself known in America, associated primarily with jazz music, an unrestrained lifestyle, experiments with drugs (marijuana, LSD), and new forms of literary expression (William S. Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, etc.). After the beatniks, the hippies entered the scene in the 1960s,1 associated with the start of rock music, the sexual revolution, new experimental forms of mutual coexistence (communes) and non-violent resistance against the war in Vietnam (flower power). In America, San Francisco became the centre of the search for new paths in the field of lifestyle and art. One of the key representatives of the American counterculture,2 and a spokesman for the opening and expansion of consciousness through drugs, was Timothy

1

The word hippie is a diminutive of the term hipster, often used by beatniks to describe nonconformists. 2 The term counterculture was coined in the late 1960s by the American historian and sociologist Theodore Roszak (1969) in his work The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, in which he

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought, 57–62 Copyright © 2024 by JiĜí Šubrt Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-805-320231008

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Leary, an American psychologist, researcher and populariser of LSD. His expression Turn on, tune it, drop out became a kind of informal slogan for the hippies. The strange states of consciousness induced by hallucinogenic substances inspired psychedelic art, which found expression in both music and visual art (concert posters, record covers and printed media). Other approaches associated with efforts to transform consciousness were oriented towards the search for alternatives in the spiritual realm, particularly in Indian spirituality. In February 1968, media attention was sparked by the Beatles’s trip to Rishikes, India, attending a course in transcendental meditation at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Ashram. The development of creative imagination, however, took other forms at this period. One was conceptual art, which stood in opposition to classical visual art by emphasising the artist’s idea as the most important, rather than its representation in the form of an artistic artifact. Thus, the idea of art and art itself not only merged into one, but were meant to involve the viewer, who was supposed to actively participate in the completion of the work with their imagination. The beginnings of conceptual art are associated with the work of Joseph Kosuth.3 It found ideological support in the manifesto Paragraphs on Conceptual Art by Sol LeWitt (1967), who defined it as an art of the inner world of the artist. Much conceptual art was and is presented in the form of written proposals, presentations, documents and photographs, which are often visually uninteresting. It is assumed that one’s own work of art should not be presented to the viewer but take place in their head. In sociology, we should add, the call for imagination was not nearly as fundamental and radical as in art. Nevertheless, despite taking a more traditional and disciplined form, it certainly did not lack gravitas and motivational appeal, resonating strongly in the left-leaning social science circle of the time. In his book Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, Peter Berger observed that the magic of sociology is that its perspective allows us to see the world in which we live in a new and different way. This is because there is an inherent motive in sociological consciousness to unmask social systems; moreover, in his opinion, the roots of this motive are not psychological, but methodological in nature. The tendency to unmask Berger (1963, pp. 38–42) characterises as an effort to penetrate behind the smoke screen of what is presented as the official version, as the art of ‘seeing through’ the facade of social reality.

discusses what unites student radicals, members of the hippie movement and the New Left. In his view, this link is resistance to the domination exercised by the technocratic class in American society. 3 Joseph Kosuth, in his work One and Three Chairs from 1965, presented three objects together: (1) a real chair as a tangible object, (2) its visual image (a photograph) and (3) its verbal, conceptual expression according to the encyclopaedic dictionary.

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8.1. The Need for Sociological Imagination Among the most important and influential representatives of American critical, radical, left-leaning sociology was Charles Wright Mills. Although appointed a full professor at Columbia University in 1956, he chose a career as a public political figure and devoted himself to the New Left movement. He died in 1962 of a heart attack at the age of 46. Although Mills presented no systematically formulated sociological theory, there are certain unifying moments in his work that allow his key works to be seen as a whole. These books are sometimes referred to as a ‘trilogy’: The New Mean of Power; White Collar; The Power Elite. What binds them together is Mills’ search for what constituted the dominant tendency in contemporary American society, its main driving force, and therefore, so to speak, the maker of history. In The New Mean of Power (Mills, 1948), he focussed on American union leaders. In White Collar (Mills, 1951), the new American middle class became the subject of analysis. In The Power Elite (Mills, 1956), the American ruling elite was the focus of interest.4 According to Mills, neither union leaders nor the new middle class could be considered a collective social subject capable of making history. The potential for such a task in American society might lie with the power elite, but even it could not be expected to perform it. Mills considered the American power elite to be arrogant, depraved and irresponsible, but was similarly critical of the other part of society, the masses, who were in his view indifferent, apathetic and easily influenced. The power of the elite was therefore directly proportional to the weakness of the masses. Mills’ sociological legacy is often seen to lie in The Sociological Imagination (Mills, 2000 [1959]), where he characterised the sociological imagination as a disposition to understand what is happening in the world and likewise what is happening in oneself as a miniature social intersection of biography and history; the sociological imagination helps to understand history and biography and their interrelationship in society (Mills, 2000 [1959], pp. 11–12); it is the ability to move from one perspective to another and gradually acquire the right view of society as a whole and also its individual components (Mills, 2000 [1959], p. 232). Mills addressed several core problem areas in this book. These included the relationship between biography and history (between small and large histories, individual destinies and social conditionality), the basic structural social transformation prerequisite for the humanisation of fates, and, above all, a critique of sociological research, which, he suggested, was not capable of adequately

4

According to Mills (1956), the power elite consisted of people whose position enabled them to make decisions on important issues affecting the whole country. These were political, economic and military circles that, through a network of interconnected cliques, made collective decisions of at least national importance. Some years later, Robert A. Dahl (2005 [1961]) formulated the theory of polyarchy, arguing that power in the United States was pluralistic in nature and was in need of further development.

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noticing social reality, frequently dealt with matters of no consequence, and even consciously served the power elite. In this case, Mills’ sharp disputation was concentrated on two dominant streams of American sociology, referred to as ‘grand theory’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’. Grand theory, represented by Talcott Parsons, according to Mills (2000 [1959], p. 33 ff.) created a static abstract conception of the general components of the social structure, which in essence was nothing more than a complicated and arid formalism, in which the main goal was unravelling concepts, and their endless rearrangement. Regarding abstract empiricism – represented especially by George A. Lundberg, Samuel Stouffer, Stuart C. Dodd and Paul F. Lazarsfeld – Mills criticises (Mills, 2002 [1959], p. 60 ff.) the fragmentation of attention and the examination of a number of unrelated and often insignificant facts about society, combined with the purposeless development of research methods. In 1964, when Mills’ ideological legacy was dealt with in Poland by Zygmunt Bauman (1964), the fundamental reason to study sociology was seen as the desire for change and the effort to improve the world. Bauman considered Mills’ idea of the connection between biography and history, the problem of determinism and human freedom, to be extremely important, and he pointed out that people are predisposed to attribute disorders in their lives to causes in themselves, in their personality, character and weak will, leading to frustration, apathy and indifference to wider social issues, which then makes them easily manipulated by those in power.

8.2. Vision and Tasks for Sociology If, in his so-called trilogy, Mills dealt successively with the influence of three social subjects (union leaders, the new middle class and the power elite) on contemporary American society, in 1959 his interest turned to a fourth subject, social scientists, or intellectuals. Ideas about the social role of social scientists were developed by Mills (2002 [1959], pp. 198–200) based on the relation of the intellectual to the ruling power. He observed that this relationship could take three forms. First, it was possible to consider social scientists themselves as possible ‘rulers’; he rejected this option as utopian, undemocratic and even dangerous. The second possibility for the social scientist was ‘advisor to the ruler’. Even this was considered problematic by Mills, because science would tend to transform into a functionally rational machinery, while the scientist lost spiritual independence in the service of perfecting administrative management and the manipulation of others. The third solution he considered as the social scientist independent both in theoretical thinking and selection of scientific problems and solutions. The themes and results of scientific research would be addressed both to managers of society and the managed. Mills preferred this independent conception of the role of the social scientist. In Bauman’s view, in The Sociological Imagination (1964), Mills touched what his colleagues at that time considered sacred, attacking their self-complacency with the conviction of the neutral position that the social sciences should occupy in society. While most American sociologists, according to Bauman, asked

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themselves how to adapt human needs to existing social reality, Mills was looking for how to adapt reality to human needs. He criticised sociologists for turning the discipline into a science of manipulating human behaviour, using their knowledge to aid those interested in controlling others. Mills’ attitude was seen by Bauman as activist and reformist, linked to a belief in human potential to improve the world. It is evident that what attracted Bauman to Mills in the 1960s, and what also later influenced even his own work, was the view that the activity of a social researcher should not only be a struggle, but also a command of the conscience, from the conviction that the roles of citizen and sociologist were inseparable.

8.3. Emancipatory Cognitive Interest In the post-World War II period, the ranks of critical theory were expanded by Jürgen Habermas, who in the 1960s developed the idea that the foundation of all science is interesting, and that the idea of science devoid of interest and values was therefore just a fiction. At the same time, he attempted to show that there is a plurality of possible cognitive interests and, accordingly, a plurality of scientific procedures that can legitimately claim their place among the sciences. As far as the empirical-analytical sciences are concerned, Habermas pronounced that the basis of their orientation is technical cognitive interest. According to his view, this does not reflect reality as it is, but interprets it from a certain selective, interest-conditioned point of view, namely from the point of view of possible technical use (Habermas, 1970, p. 173). The necessity and legitimacy of this approach are given, according to Habermas, by the fact that the survival of the human race depends to a large extent on the solution of technical problems. As much as this approach is adequate in the natural sciences, it is problematic in the field of social sciences. According to Habermas, a positivist, empiricalanalytical social science in its consequences necessarily leads to the production of knowledge that can be used to control people and manipulate their behaviour. However, in addition to the interest in the technical application of knowledge, there are other necessary and legitimate interests and scientific approaches. Habermas names in the second place practical cognitive interest (Habermas, 1970, p. 222), which he characterises as an interest in establishing and maintaining social or intersubjective relationships, or in understanding other subjects. According to Habermas, this interest is the basis of hermeneutic sciences, which include historical sciences, but also so-called understanding (hermeneutic) sociology. The basic task of the hermeneutic sciences is the interpretation of a spoken or a written text, which involves such an understanding that makes it possible to understand the purposes or intentions of individual social actors. According to Habermas, the necessity and legitimacy of the mentioned type of scientific orientation are justified by the fact that the coexistence of people depends on the existence of at least a minimal intersubjective consent. Finally, a third – emancipatory cognitive interest could be defined (Habermas, 1970, p. 244), characterised as an interest in establishing and maintaining undisturbed communication, or as the case may be overcoming communication disorders. According to Habermas, the model of such philosophical-critical science is

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represented by Freud’s psychoanalysis. As far as the critical theory of society is concerned, in Habermas’s conception, it should deal with the disorders of interpersonal dialogue. Habermas sees the causes of these disorders, which manifest themselves as resistance and struggle at the social level, in the social-power conditions, in the repressive character of the social order, which leads to such phenomena as control, oppression, outclassing and ignoring of the oppressed. Habermas, it is clear, is not only concerned with questioning the claim to monopoly that the empirical-analytical sciences try to appropriate, but also to protect society from the practical consequences of such a monopoly, meaning against the danger that people will increasingly become objects of manipulation by the technologists of social power. For him, the goal of emancipatory cognitive interest is connected with the promotion of conditions for undisturbed and uncontrolled communication, in which only one criterion is decisive, and that is the quality of arguments raised in the public sphere.

Chapter 9

The Birth of Sociological Constructivism The world was changing in the 1960s, and people were more conscious than in previous decades that it was they themselves, their dreams and desires, but above all practical efforts and actions, which were changing and could change it. This self-awareness was reflected not only in political activism but also permeated the social sciences and, not least, the arts. In sociology, this approach to the social world was reflected in incipient sociological constructivism. In the field of art, new movements were born, such as performance art, the art of action and happenings.1 A key representative of this new art was the international movement of visual and musical artists founded in New York in 1960 by George Maciunas, Fluxus. Among its notable representatives were John Cage, Yoko Ono, Charlotte Moorman, Emmett Williams, Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys Wolf Vostell and others. In the then communist Czechoslovakia, the movement’s contemporary was Milan Knížák (later appointed by Maciunas as director of Fluxus East). Among the events Knížák organised during his visit to the United States in December 1968 was the Lying Ceremony, held at Douglas University in New Jersey. The artist’s brief at this time was, ‘People lie quietly on the ground blindfolded. For a long time’ (Knížák, 1996). It is clear that events such as this sought to put participants in a state to stimulate unusual experience or activity. In sociology, with a somewhat different goal, Harold Garfinkel conducted similar experimental actions and referred to them as breaching demonstrations. Sociological constructivism brought a distinctly different type of a sociological thinking than positivism and structural functionalism. The birth of constructivist sociology was linked to inspiration brought to sociology by Alfred Schutz, who before World War II lived in Vienna, and after the Nazis’ rise to power was forced to move to the United States, where he worked at The New School for Social Research in New York from 1943. Here, in the post-war period, his students included Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann - whose joint book published in 1966 is associated with the beginnings of constructivism.

1

Allan Kaprow is considered to be the originator of happenings, who began to develop this artistic manifestation even at the end of the 1950s.

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought, 63–69 Copyright © 2024 by JiĜí Šubrt Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-805-320231009

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Phenomenological sociology, as presented by Alfred Schutz, combined Max Weber’s concept of social action with impulses from the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl. After the World War II, this line was followed in American sociology by ethnomethodology, pioneered by Harold Garfinkel. There were other influences too, in particular symbolic interactionism, based in American pragmatic philosophy. Symbolic interactionism was developed by Herbert Blumer, drawing on the ideas of his predecessors at the University of Chicago, William I. Thomas, and especially George H. Mead. In post-war sociology, this trend was loosely followed by the dramaturgical approach of Erving Goffman, also influential on the formation of constructivism.

9.1. Expectation Structures and Breaching Demonstrations Schutz’s phenomenological sociology, which was developed theoretically, lacked a research dimension. As is often observed, this was added by American sociologist Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodology, which focussed on the investigation of social interactions and analysis of the knowledge used by acting persons to understand and act in the social world around them.2 Garfinkel’s professional career was associated with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1954 to 1987. His major and most important work was Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 2002 [1967]). From the methodological point of view, ethnomethodology is close to cultural anthropology. Its object was supposed to be ‘the ethnomethods’ of coping with everyday life proper to individual cultures. However, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology focussed (as cultural anthropology does) not on preliterate cultures and tribal communities, but on contemporary modern society. The methods it explores are those people have developed to understand and navigate social reality, organising everyday social activities accordingly. This knowledge in the minds of social actors can be described as first-order constructions; the scientific theories of social scientists on the basis of this knowledge are second-order constructions. For Garfinkel, the actions of social actors (in the tradition of both Weber and American pragmatism) were linked to the matter of meaning. This approach brought him to the question of the rationality of the action and social reality (Garfinkel, 2002 [1967], pp. 262–283). This was not obvious and visible at first glance, but on the contrary, hidden as if ‘in the background’. Through ethnomethodological research, however, it could be accessed. The main goal of ethnomethodology was to identify the practical immanent rationality of everyday life, non-identical to scientific rationality. This rationality could not be imposed on the phenomena under study, but on the contrary, must be discovered directly in social action itself and in the way the everyday world was organised and structured.

2

Other representatives of this direction include Aaron V. Cicourel and Harvey Sacks, who together with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson laid the foundations of conversation analysis.

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The structures of the lifeworld revealed by ethnomethodology were structures of expectation. The everyday activities of individuals, Garfinkel believed (Garfinkel, 2002 [1967], pp. 35–75), were organised through background expectations, relating to individuals’ perceptions of their social world. These expectations acted as ‘rules’ during interactions and formed the basis of social standardisation. By organising actions in accordance with expectations, individuals reveal and at the same time create and reinforce social standardisation. Garfinkel’s research strategy was based on the assumption that the interactions of everyday life led to the creation of the social order. This order was made up of a complex structure of relatively stable interrelated interpretations of meaning and action which enabled life to function relatively smoothly. The stability of the social order was nevertheless vulnerable, and Garfinkel was interested in precisely situations of disruption as precisely at this moment it became evident how its participants understood it. For such situations, he developed a special type of experiment known as breaching demonstrations, the task being to disrupt normal interpersonal communication in its predictable path and sequence and bring it to collapse. An oft-quoted example of a disruptive experiment is the task Garfinkel assigned his students to act at home as if they were visitors or staying at a hotel. The students then reported on the parents’ badtempered reactions and conflict situations, which sometimes had a very dramatic outcome. The method of breaching demonstrations has become a component of ethnomethodological research, shrouding it in a certain legend; it was even referred to by the name ‘garfinkeling’ in professional jargon. The methodological starting point for this type of research is a carefully executed documentary (Garfinkel, 2002 [1967], pp. 76–103) of what the observer sees and hears. In their protocols and transcriptions, ethnomethodologists very accurately record everyday verbal expressions, including accompanying characteristics (intonation, tempo, facial expressions, etc.). They record individual sentences of actors, including vague and unclear expressions, 3 which subsequently become the subject of interpretation.

3

The everyday communication that Garfinkel focussed on was distinguished by one important characteristic. Although participants’ speech was often full of vague and indefinite expressions, they could agree on its meaning and understand each other. Our language is characterised by indexicality and vagueness (Richter, 1995, p. 95). Indexicality means a sentence can only be interpreted in the context in which it was uttered. Indexicality works with ‘occasional’ expressions (indexical expressions) which the listener is not able to understand without knowing the situation, previous development, the biography of the mentioned individuals, or the relationship between the speaker and the listener. The meaning and sense of indexical expressions are therefore situationally bound and cannot be determined without prior knowledge of certain assumptions. What is surprising, however, is that while speech is full of vague and indexical expressions, this is socially accepted and usually does not cause serious problems in interpersonal contact.

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9.2. Life on Stage and Behind the Scenes Erving Goffman worked at the University of California at Berkeley and at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During his scientific career, he published a number of books which gained a wide response and were translated into many languages. Among the most famous are The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman, 1956), Asylums (Goffman, 1961a), Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Goffman, 1961b), Behavior in Public Places (Goffman, 1963a), Stigma (Goffman, 1963b) and Interaction Ritual (Goffman, 1967). Although Goffman was close to symbolic interactionism and phenomenology, he cannot be clearly assigned to these trends and is noted for his dramaturgical approach. Goffman long worked as an outsider in sociology and in his lifetime, few considered him a theorist of the first order. He became recognised after the publication of Frame Analysis (1986 [1974]), a book sometimes rated his major work.4 The considerable popularity of Goffman’s texts can be explained mainly by the fact that they analyse everyday life in a humorous and intelligible way. For Goffman, social contact was constructed like a staged scene, and had a number of dramaturgical aspects. As in the theatre, we encounter performers who show something to others, meaning to an audience, while trying to control the impression their surroundings create on them. Performances between performers and audience take place in a certain space, captured by Goffman with the concept of regions. The front region is where the performance takes place, and its material or signage represents the stage. This region can keep the audience under surveillance and control. The back region, referred to as backstage, usually remains hidden from the audience. From the point of view of ‘impression management’ according to Goffman (1956, pp. 69–70), the most interesting moments are those when a performer comes from the backstage to the scene, or leaves it, because in these moments the role is embodied or put aside. The fundamental importance of Goffman’s work lies in demonstrating how a meaningful interaction order (the interaction order) is created and maintained in elementary communication situations. This order is made up of rules governing behaviour in the manner of grammatical rules. Some of these rules are symmetrical, others asymmetrical (Goffman, 1967, p. 52) (e.g. the military rules of saluting). Certain rules are binding, while with others compliance is

4

Goffman understood the frame as a unit of the organisation of experience. With its help, he examined the structure of experiences that individuals have and use in individual moments of their lives, or respectively in all situations where they have to answer the question: ‘What is going on now?’ Frames allow actors to somehow locate, perceive, identify and to put into place a seemingly infinite number of concrete events. But at the same time, they also organise their involvement in certain activities. The basic frameworks adopted by members of a certain community represent elements of its culture.

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only an expectation. However, all rules serve as guidelines for solving practical problems of interaction. The stability of interaction is not something given but must be striven for. The dramaturgy of everyday life was not interpreted by Goffman (as is often suggested) only as a theatrical play, but also as a moral process of creating order. The point of interaction is not just to present ‘the Self’ in a way that others accept, but also to protect this ‘Self’ from others. The observance of interaction rituals and respect for interaction conventions serve this to a significant extent.

9.3. Constructing and Maintaining Social Reality The names of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann are often listed together. Both were students of Alfred Schütz, the founder of phenomenological sociology, at the New School for Social Research after World War II, and together they published the Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Berger & Luckmann, 1991 [1966]), which had a great influence on the further development of sociological thinking and research methodology. However, each author had his own scientific biography, associated with a number of remarkable research projects and independent publications. Berger was the author of a number of books, mainly on theoretical questions of general sociology (Berger, 1963), sociology of religion (Berger, 1967, 1969) and the issue of socio-economic development in the contemporary world (Berger, 1986). Thomas Luckmann processed a significant part of the manuscript legacy of Alfred Schütz (Schütz & Luckmann, 1979, 1984) and – similar to Berger – paid attention to the sociology of religion; his study The Invisible Religion is especially famous (Luckmann, 1967),5 significantly influencing the sociological view of the phenomenon of religion in contemporary society. In The Social Construction of Reality, these authors turned their attention to the reality of everyday life from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge.6 From this position, they addressed how everyday knowledge was produced, maintained and transmitted. Inspired by the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen, they understood humans as ‘poor in instincts’. This inadequate human equipment was 5

Luckmann was an opponent of this type of secularisation theory, which does not regard religion as compatible with the modern rationality. He did not deny that religion undergoes the transformation of social forms of social life, but he did not believe that it would lose its meaning and place in a modern society as a result. Man is a religious being and, according to Luckmann, religion does not disappear in modern society, it only changes its social form – it is individualised and ‘privatized’ through modernisation development. 6 While for the founders of this discipline, Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim, the sociology of knowledge was primarily oriented towards large systems of knowledge what represent religion, ideology, utopia, science or art, Berger and Luckmann (1991 [1966], p. 13 ff.) wanted to start working on a sociology of knowledge that would deal with everything that can be considered knowledge in society.

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compensated by the creation of institutions. Thus, the establishment and maintenance of the social order were closely related to processes of institutionalisation, and for Berger and Luckmann (1991 [1966], pp. 65–109) the fundamental question was how this happened. They stated that every repeated activity encouraged a person to habituate, meaning stable repeated activities formed into patterns from which a general stock of knowledge was created through routinisation and typification. If such habitualised activity became reciprocal and mutually recognised, it could turn into an institution (Berger & Luckmann, 1991 [1966], p. 70 ff.). In individual experience, institutions assert themselves through social roles, as individual by playing them participated in the reproduction of the social order. In the course of development, institutions constructed in this way detach themselves from their originators and become independent existences, capable of exerting pressure on society. Society is, therefore, a creation of humans, but also an objective reality creating and shaping them. The relationship between individuals and society is dialectical. The process of institutionalisation is completed when established institutions are passed on from one generation to another. To be successful, it must be accompanied by legitimisation. According to Berger and Luckman, the process of legitimisation of institutions takes place on four levels (Berger & Luckmann, 1991 [1966], p. 110 ff.). Basic legitimations are built into vocabulary (e.g. by marking specific roles performed within the institutional rules). The second level is represented by the formulation of basic explanatory schemes that characterise the rules supposed to be followed (these schemes are represented by moral principles, traditional proverbs, catch-phrases and lessons). At the third level, there are specialised legitimisation theories that go beyond practical use, formulated by specialists as professional theories. Thereafter, at the fourth level, the whole set of this legitimising knowledge is anchored in what Berger and Luckmann refer to as ‘symbolic universes’. These symbolic universes (in German symbolische Sinnwelten) are maintained by certain ‘apparatuses’ which tend to take several basic forms: mythology, religion, philosophy and science (Berger & Luckmann, 1991 [1966], p. 113 ff.). After Berger and Luckmann theoretically dealt with the problem of social order as an objective reality, they turned their attention to subjective reality. The externalisation of the subject through institutions is thus complemented by the analysis of subjective internalisation – the initiation of the individual into the objective world of society in the process of socialisation. They distinguished between primary and secondary socialisation. Primary socialisation was the first socialisation which the individual went through during childhood, becoming a member of society. Secondary socialisation was the subsequent process introducing the socialised individual into new areas of the objective world of society (Berger & Luckmann, 1991 [1966], p. 157 ff.). Because every socialisation took place in a certain social environment, its content and also success rate were co-determined by social conditions. Thus, every functioning society must create procedures for ‘maintaining reality’. The reality of everyday life was maintained by being embodied in the routine operations and also continuously and repeatedly confirmed when an individual interacted

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with other people. Berger and Luckmann attributed a fundamental role to speech (communicative action) and knowledge in their conception. At one point, they express this idea with the sentence, ‘The most important means of maintaining the reality is conversation’ (Berger & Luckmann, 1991 [1966], p. 172). In their conclusion, Berger and Luckmann (1991 [1966], p. 207) observe that even though the task of their work was theoretical, there was a need to translate their theory into the field of empirical research. With the passage of time, we can state that this idea was somewhat fulfilled, because The Social Construction of Reality became one of the basic starting points of social constructivism. It is characteristic of this that all social phenomena and problems are viewed as – intentionally or unintentionally – socially constructed creations of acting human beings. The theoretical work of Berger and Luckmann thus resulted in a stream of research activities that move not only in the field of pure theory but deal with individual concrete areas of social reality from the constructivist point of view through empirical research.

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Chapter 10

What About Individual Human Freedom? Humans are the creators of social reality, but at the same time shaped by this reality. This simple thesis created and still creates a number of opposing positions within the framework of sociological thinking, leading to diverse streams of opinion. Disputes over the basis of sociological thinking are reminiscent of the chicken or egg conundrum. Two basic schools of thought, individualism (atomism) and holism (collectivism), have been forming for more than a hundred years. The foundations of the former are attributed to Max Weber, who identified the human individual and their actions directed at others as the starting point; the foundations of the latter are associated with Émile Durkheim, who defined sociology as the science of society as a whole, as supra-individual social (collective) facts. Weberian individualism was developed in the 1960s through exchange theory and interpretive sociology. Durkheimian holism found its continuation in structuralism, functionalism and social systems theory. Talcott Parsons, meanwhile, worked on connecting both theoretical perspectives within the framework of American sociology from the 1930s, peaking in the 1960s, but declining sharply in popularity at their end. Nevertheless, the interconnectedness of both perspectives was evident in the much-discussed topic of the 1960s, which is the subject of this chapter. This is social roles and their playing (or performance).

10.1. What Others Expect From Us The copybook definition of a social role is still the one formulated by Ralf Linton. Linton (1964 [1936], pp. 113–114) defines a role as a set of expectations associated with the behaviour of an individual of a certain status in society.1 For Linton, not

1

The concept of status is generally understood in the sense of social position, primarily in the concepts of social stratification (in which summary indicators are usually made, referred to as ‘synthetic’ status or ‘multidimensional’ status). This term came to American sociological literature through the translation of the German expression ‘der Stand’ (the state) into English (Warner, 1959), which was used by Max Weber to refer to the unequal distribution of prestige, esteem and respect in society. Today’s

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought, 71–79 Copyright © 2024 by JiĜí Šubrt Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-805-320231010

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just role but also status was defined through ‘the expectation’. Status was defined by what a person of a certain position or rank in society could expect from others, leading to expectations based on the claims and demands they could make in relation to them. A role, by contrast, was defined by the expectations others might have in relation to an individual in a certain position. As an anthropologist, Linton was primarily interested in communities where these expectations had no codified form; in contrast, contemporary societies define a number of roles, in diverse organisational systems, by various regulations, norms and sometimes even laws. German sociologist Heinrich Popitz (1967, p. 21) for this reason defined social roles as ‘norms of behaviour’. A significant contribution to the considerations of social roles was made by George Herbert Mead in the early twentieth century, especially with his theory of the human Self (Mead, 1967 [1934]). This concerned the ability of individuals to view themselves from the perspective of others, inspired by Charles Horton Cooley (1902) and his concept of the looking-glass self, which says that if we want to know how we look, look in the mirror. When we want to know who we are, we must turn to those with whom we are in contact and their reactions to our person and behaviour. In other words, to know who we are, we must try to look through the eyes of others. In Mead’s conception, the formation of the human individual in the process of socialisation was not only learning, but also of discovering society and gradually integrating it into their lives. The child gradually gets to know what society is mainly by taking on the roles of others in play (Mead, 1967 [1934], pp. 174–176). Even at the beginning of the 1950s, a rather extensive conception of roles could be found in the joint book of Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure, subtitled The Psychology of Social Institutions (Gerth & Mills, 1970 [1953]). Many themes that later emerged regarding roles were foreshadowed in this work. A new impetus to thinking about roles was later brought by German sociologist Uta Gerhardt, who drew on Schütz’s phenomenological sociology (Gerhardt, 1971, pp. 155–166). According to Schütz, a ‘natural attitude’ was characteristic of an individual in the world of everyday life, associated with a specific ‘everyday knowledge’ based on experience, a stock of knowledge and typifications. Typifications were primarily designations for certain typical areas or manifestations of human action. Therefore, role could be defined as a specific social type, and the typical behaviour associated with it. Typification schemes make navigation in the everyday world easier for actors, but can be burdened with certain simplifications, prejudices and stereotypes. Certain designations of typical roles can then become ‘labels’ used to denote

understanding and use of the term status is therefore associated with a certain shift in meaning; the term is understood more broadly and more generally than it was originally. Sociologists also usually distinguish between statuses and roles that are ascribed, meaning beyond the individual’s control, without their own contribution, and statuses and roles, which, on the contrary, are the result of individual performance and effort (Linton, 1964 [1936], p. 115).

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not only institutionalised but also deviant behaviour. Labelling people may eventually lead them to behave according to expectations, even causing them to behave deviantly.

10.2. Connecting to the System As mentioned, structural functionalism was attaining dominance in the American sociology of the 1960s. While interpretative sociology (later constructivism) or social psychology focussed on the issue of roles mainly from a micro-social perspective, functionalism enriched these considerations with a macro-sociological perspective. While the concept of function served to express the specific contribution of social components (organisations and subsystems) to the preservation of society as a whole, the concept of role expressed how the human individuals contribute. The concept of role represented a connector or ‘gearbox’ between human individuals and social functions. To put it more robustly, ‘through roles, a certain social system seizes individuals and their activities and uses them for its purposeful functioning’ (Urbánek, 1979, p. 104). Talcott Parsons applied the structuralist perspective to this, making the concept of role among the foundational categories of social structure. The structure was thus understood as a network of relations between actors of interaction processes, formed into established patterns of relations between actors (Parsons, 1968, p. 54). This network was formed by the roles, institutionalised norms and values. Roles thus represented basic structural units; in The Social System, Parsons referred to a system of differentiated roles as ‘a structure in the narrower sense’ (Parsons, 1966a [1951], p. 114). George A. Lundberg, a neo-positivist sociologist who used functionalist arguments, observed that all human societies classify their members into groups and categories to which they assign different degrees of importance and social status. This classification had religious, political, economic and other bases, related to the distribution of roles in that each role represented a pattern of behaviour expected of people in a given classification (Lundberg, Schrag, Larsen, & Catton, 1968, pp. 145–148). Peter L. Berger made the observation on the distribution of roles – not from a purely functionalist position – that the sociologist turned on its head the commonsense idea that certain institutions arise due to certain persons. For sociology, warriors appeared because there were armies, religious people because there were churches, and scholars because there were universities (Berger, 1963, p. 110). Functionalist explanatory models were connected with the evolutionary conception of functional differentiation, studying how social units, institutions and, together with them, also social roles, were differentiated based on the principle of division of labour towards an increasingly complex structure and higher specialisation. Along with this, they considered how functionally differentiated complex units reproduced themselves over time, what held them together and integrated them, and also what led to introversion, disintegration and even pathological phenomena.

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Some roles resembled scarce ‘goods’, a role that could not be played by just anyone. Appointment to these roles thus became the subject of power conflicts, disputes over the legitimacy of related structures, and even violent conflict. The differentiation of roles was related to class differentiation, or the stratification hierarchy, and so to the structure of social inequality, in which the holders of different roles found themselves in power relations of superiority and subordination. Roles were associated with so-called role conflict, discussed by Ralf Dahrendorf (1963, p. 206). This might arise because each person played not one, but several roles. Such diverse roles could place significant demands on individuals in terms of time and performance, but could also be associated with conflicting expectations, while playing certain roles could even negate the performance of other roles altogether. Conflicts could also arise from conflicting expectations attached to a certain specific role, even concerning the relationship between the role and an actor’s personality, especially where the role was assigned to an individual who – usually for psychological or ethical reasons – was not suited to it. Role-playing could also bring other problems. A person assigned to play a large number of very different roles could face considerable demands on psychological resilience, leading to an identity crisis. Another problem could be so-called role entrapment, when a certain role seized an individual to the extent that they could be no one but a representative of just one role. In this context, the concepts of dysfunction and anomie developed by Robert K. Merton were of great importance (Merton, 1968 [1949], pp. 105 ff., 215–216). Although Lundberg and his colleagues characterised a role as a pattern of behaviour corresponding to functions carried out by individual social institutions, they allowed for the concept of a role to be associated with dysfunctions and anomic phenomena too (Lundberg et al., 1968, p. 551 ff.). Social roles were often associated with the distribution of power, forcing someone to play a certain type of role in a subordinate position, or by contrast to benefit from a superior post. Above all this, the system of roles was accompanied by a system of criminal sanctions, designated as mechanisms of social control. These sanctions applied to those who failed to meet expectations; thus society’s power over the role player was demonstrated, or rather, the power of those who judged the performance of the respective role.

10.3. Life as a Theatre Performance Reflections on social roles led to numerous analogies between the social reality and theatre. Romanian-American psychologist and psychiatrist Jacob Levy Moreno was among those responsible for popularising the concept of roles in the human sciences. His key themes included spontaneous role-playing as a therapeutic tool within psychodrama, and his method of group therapy inspired by theatrical improvisation (he published his first major work on this in the 1940s (Moreno, 1977 [1946]). The theatre environment also inspired the sociology of Erving Goffman (1956), associated with the dramaturgic or theatrical approach. In The Presentation of

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Self in Everyday Life, Goffman gave attention to the dramaturgic problems of human individuals presenting their activities to others. Whatever the presentation, the essential thing was the attempt to make a certain impression on others. The event associated with this self-presentation is seen by the environs as consisting of two parts: one part can be relatively easily manipulated by the individual, mainly comprising verbal statements. There is minimal control over the overall impression of the performance, however, which is used by the environs to verify the former element. An individual conscious of this tendency of the environs, however, tries to accompany their verbal expressions with an appropriate outward expression, to make the impression desired. Goffman (1956, p. 132) spoke of the art of impression management being connected with the control of means of expression, therefore having a number of dramaturgical aspects which he proceeded to analyse in his work. In the second half of the 1960s, there was further inspiration from the theatre world, in The Society of the Spectacle (La Société du spectacle), introduced by left-wing French intellectual and avant-garde artist Guy Debord.2 Debord (1994 [1967]) analysed the transformation of Western society into a spectacular society. While in early capitalism the worker was subjugated and exploited as a result of material poverty, in present-day capitalism they were controlled and manipulated by psychological pressure that led to numbness and mental passivity. Symptoms of this transformation included the empty models of consumer life associated with advertising and the promotion of branded goods, driven by those playing the role of celebrities. The more a person was dominated by the spectacular images of consumption torn away from reality, the less they were able to understand themselves and their authentic desires. According to Debord, the spectacle was not a kind of supplement to the real world, or additional decoration, but the very core of the unrealism of real society. As with the Frankfurt School’s critical theory,3 Debord sought to show that the Enlightenment did not lead the Western world to its desired emancipation, but on the contrary to the development of new and even more thorough forms of subjugation.

10.4. What is Under the Mask? At the time of the 1960s, many Nazi war criminals were still in hiding around the world, searched for by those referred to as ‘nazi-hunters’. While the most famous of these hunters was Simon Wiesenthal, among the most wanted Nazis was Adolf Eichmann, who emigrated to Argentina in 1945, only to be tracked down after many years. In 1960, Eichmann was kidnapped by Israeli intelligence

2

Debord developed a movement which he called Situationism, and which followed the previous art movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism and Letterism. His goal was to revolutionise everyday life. Even though Debord engaged in film production, its purpose was not to add new spectacles to the contemporary world, but to negate the spectacular society. 3 See Chapter 2.

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and taken to Israel, where he faced trial in 1961 and was sentenced to death. Eichmann, a leading organiser of the Holocaust, responsible for mass deportations of Jews from the occupied territories to Nazi extermination camps, was described by Wiesenthal as a ‘desk murderer’ (Arendt, 1963). Awareness of the Eichmann trial is maintained to this day largely thanks to Hannah Arendt and her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The first post-war trials of Nazi leaders had shown that the worst crimes, exceeding all limits of human imagination, were often committed by completely average people who could even act as nice friends or considerate family members to their loved ones. Arendt depicted how with Eichmann a new kind of crime came into the world, epitomising what she called the ‘banality of evil’. Eichmann was a civil servant, conditioned by mass society and motivated only by career advancement, who was turned into a mass murderer by a totalitarian regime. Arendt pointed to this as emblematic of the crisis that humanity and its conscience can come to in the contemporary world, when performing something undesirable within modern institutions. Another view of the working of the modern world was brought at this time by the American sociologist Anselm L. Strauss, who in Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity (Strauss, 1974 [1959]) asked the question of why people put on ‘masks’ when interacting with others, and what these masks concealed. A mask can cover a person’s true face, represent a pretence, or hide and protect. The concept of masks enabled the social role to be seen, and for the individual to hide their true face or identity. Czech sociologist Eduard Urbánek (1968, 1979, p. 36 ff.), inspired by the theory of alienation, talked about roles and masks that hide, distort and deform the reality of interpersonal relationships. Urbánek (1979, pp. 94–96) in Roles, Masks, Characters, showed that a role could become an excuse to jettison personal responsibility for behaviour. Well-known examples could be found in statements such as: ‘Anyone who was in my place would behave in the same way’. Examples of minions of totalitarian systems or military dictatorships showed that many people do not want to admit personal guilt, and transfer all responsibility to higher social interests, official duties and their superiors, claiming only to have followed orders. In other words, responsibility for individual actions is transferred to the institutions that set the rules for the roles played.

10.5. Are We Really Free? In the 1960s, among the influential philosophical trends was existentialism, which came to attention in the last years of the World War II and reached its heyday during the 1950s. The main personality of this stream of opinion, formulating his ideas not only in the form of philosophical texts, but also novels and dramas, was Jean-Paul Sartre,4 whose work Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la 4

Being and Nothingness (L’Etre et le Néant) from the year 1943 is considered Sartre’s main philosophical work. Other representatives of existentialism included Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

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raison dialectique) (Sartre, 1960) was published at the beginning of the sixties. At that time, Sartre attracted media attention not only because of what he said (in the 1950s, he was a propagator but later a critic of the Soviet Union; leaning towards Maoism, he expressed affection for Castro’s Cuba), but also due to his love affairs. In the perspective of Sartrean existentialism, the human being had no predetermined nature or essence (existence in man precedes essence), but must choose the path of existence, making life its project and responsibility. As autonomous beings, people were ‘condemned to freedom’, but this freedom could often be an uncomfortable burden, because it may be faced under the pressure of circumstances or danger. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre expressed the opinion that Marxism – to which he tended in the post-war decades – must rediscover within itself the overlooked thought of a person defined by their projects. In 1960s sociology, the question of freedom began to resonate in a slightly different way, related to the publication of Ralf Dahrendorf’s study, Homo sociologicus. In 1958, Dahrendorf first published this material via magazine in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Socialpsychologie (Vol. 10, No. 2, 3), and then in a book form (Dahrendorf, 1964). Dahrendorf (1964, p. 14 ff.) stated that the foundations of sociological thinking contained a certain simplified idea of a person. This consisted of the idea of the human individual as exclusively controlled by social forces and unilaterally subordinated to the social order and its norms. Dahrendorf named this idea ‘homo sociologicus’, and in the contemporary context, he connected it to the concept of social roles. The main theme of Dahrendorf’s book is the theory of social roles and the consequences that its acceptance has for the view of human beings that sociology creates. The crux of the problem can be simply expressed that individuals play social roles for most of their lives, associated with social determination, coercion and pressure to conformity. If they play these as required, according to expectations, they are accepted and rewarded. On the contrary, failure to meet these expectations means punishment or penalisation by criminal sanctions (1964, p. 28 ff.). Dahrendorf questioned where there was room for human freedom, autonomy and creativity in such a world. But he left the question unanswered. The construction of homo sociologicus was, as Eduard Urbánek says, terrifying in that ‘it does not leave any room for human freedom, for the creativity or autonomy of a man; it does not take into account at all transgression from the given repertoire of required roles, in this construction a man has no other dimension than the quality of a player of required roles’ (Urbánek, 1979, p. 111). The absolute dominance of society over the individual is manifested through roles. Among other things, Dahrendorf’s work caused the concept of social role, originally of American provenance and developed mainly within its framework, to become a topic in West Germany and afterwards European sociology. Dahrendorf’s work initiated an extensive discussion on the topic of roles in German sociology in the 1960s, involving such theorists as Heinrich Popitz, René König, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, Hans Paul Bahrdt, Friedrich H. Tenbruck, Judith Janoska- Bendl, Hans Peter Dreitzel, Uta Gerhardt, Jürgen Habermas and

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Dieter Claessens (Haug, 1972, pp. 27–73; Joas, 1973). The topic naturally became the subject of discussion in the broader framework of world sociology (see, e.g. Jackson, 1972; Biddle, 1979). Although Dahrendorf’s question of where freedom lies in the world of roles was serious and at first sight unsolvable, a certain solution was suggested in the Invitation to Sociology by the American sociologist Peter L. Berger. Berger admitted that the world of social roles resembled a kind of grand Alcatraz, with human behaviour bound by social roles connected with various mechanisms of social control. However, Berger added, we are trapped in this world by our own doing (Berger, 1963, p. 121). We usually do not even realise that we are playing roles, which are usually approached automatically as something obvious. They often do not even have to be imposed on us because we accept them willingly, and sometimes even with enthusiasm, as this is convenient and brings all manner of rewards and appreciation (Urbánek, 1979, p. 114). However, Berger relativised this claim about the prison-like world of roles primarily by stating that human individuals can prove their freedom not outside this world, but paradoxically just only and merely in it. This was because he saw the coercive forces of society as not omnipotent, and that human individuals were not powerless against these forces. According to Berger (1963, p. 135 ff.) individuals can demonstrate their freedom by manipulating the roles they are supposed to play, or even by transforming them (i.e. by altering the content and expectations attached to them), by taking on – as E. Goffman outlined – the role distance attitude5 and they could even refuse to play certain roles, although this might have the gravest consequences. Thus, in Berger’s approach, freedom is understood primarily as the possibility of personal choice and, just possibly, of certain innovative and non-conforming behaviour in the world of roles. From the perspective opened by Berger’s reflections, one can conclude that Dahrendorf’s conundrum, which formed the core of his famous work, was actually somewhat artificially constructed, deliberately emphasising and absolutising one aspect of the world of social roles, namely, that roles act on individuals by pressures to which they submit. What is overlooked is that this pressure is not omnipotent, with a certain ‘space’ between the rules and requirements of the role and actual behaviour in the role, which means role playing. This allows a person to manifest as a free being. Simply expressed, the human being is not a machine or an automaton to play roles as a record is played on a gramophone; there is a lot more in role playing than the mere implementation of role regulations and

5

Goffman’s term ‘role distance’ (Goffman, 1961, pp. 106–109) can be understood, despite its various interpretations, so that it does not mean rejection of a role, but a certain way of behaving in a role (Urbanek, 1979, p. 121), by which a certain individual tries to indicate to others that his personality and identity are not reducible to one specific role which he plays due to certain circumstances, or even has to play, but that he is something that exceeds this role. Goffman understands such distance as often the only option to maintain dignity under circumstances where we are forced to play a role by power.

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rules. The concept of ‘playing a social role’ expresses realities with a much richer and more complex content than is contained in the concept of social roles itself. Discussions of the concept of social role dried up in the late 1970s, apparently mainly because notions of the human individual as a more or less passive and conformist realiser of structural requirements and functional imperatives had been replaced by an inclination towards the notion of the human actor as an autonomous, separate and independent being who makes decisions and acts based on knowledge, preferences and rationality, pursuing its own interests, intentions and goals. The commencement of this (admittedly not entirely new6) concept was expressed symbolically in the title of the book Le retour de l’acteur (The Return of the Actor) by the French sociologist Alain Touraine (1984).

6

In principle, it is actually an acting person, which Max Weber (1988) already laid down in the foundations of his sociology.

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Chapter 11

The Point is to Change the World Although a large proportion of the approaches appearing in sociology in the 1960s confirmed, in their own way, the correctness of the path taken by individual societies, likewise positively evaluating the state achieved to date, nevertheless in the images of the world presented by political reporting, journalism and social scientific research, a number of blemishes and wounds could be observed, significantly different from the positively tuned view of the decade. In Africa and Asia, the decolonisation process that had begun at the end of World War II faced many problems. Dictatorial or authoritarian regimes held power in South American countries with varying degrees of violence and brutality. In the United States, the demonstration for equal rights for African Americans reached its peak in August 1963 in The Great March on Washington, where Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech ‘I Have a Dream’ in front of the Lincoln Memorial.1 In the late 1960s, the United States witnessed protest actions against the Vietnam War, led by pacifists and hippies.2 The second wave of feminism, launched by Betty Friedan (1963) with The Feminine Mystique, became part of the broad current of critical thinking at this time. In the late 1960s, so-called radical feminism, represented especially by Kate Millet (1970) and Shulamit Firestone (1970), made itself known. While in the nineteenth century, according to radical feminism, the fundamental social contradiction was the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in the twentieth-century women’s oppression by men was the key problem. In West German society, the murder of student Benno Ohnesorg at a demonstration in West Berlin in June 1967 became the impetus for student unrest, followed by the attempted assassination of political activist Rudi Dutschke in April 1968. The May 1968 riots in France had a widespread influence, as two charismatic leaders, Daniel Bensaïd and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, arose among the students revolting against French conservative politics. Even the countries of the

1

Five years later, King was assassinated in Memphis, provoking another wave of riots. The potential represented by the American youth of that time was hinted at in a specific way, among other things, also by the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969.

2

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought, 81–86 Copyright © 2024 by JiĜí Šubrt Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-805-320231011

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Eastern Bloc encountered unrest. In 1968, the political awakening in Czechoslovakia, known as the Prague Spring, attracted the interest of the world public.

11.1. One-Dimensional Man and How to Emancipate Him The critical theory of the Frankfurt School appeared in an earlier chapter regarding its conception of late capitalism. Its origins were associated with Max Horkheimer’s tenure as direct of The Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, which means the beginning of the 1930s. It represented a group of social scientists and philosophers3 brought together by the program of critical theory (in German Kritische Theorie),4 whose principles were formulated by Horkheimer. The ultimate goal of this program was the liberation of human beings from the circumstances that enslave them. Scholars associated with the Frankfurt School, sometimes referred to as unorthodox neo-Marxism, argued that the working class had become ‘bourgeois’ and thus lost its revolutionary potential. They therefore opposed the idea of proletarian revolution, prioritising social emancipation. According to critical theory, the task of social science was not only describing and explaining reality, but also interpreting it in an evaluative way. The basis for the criteria of evaluation was the idea of the emancipation of mankind; the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. The attention of critical theory therefore focussed on what prevented the realisation of these ideals and on tendencies promising to make this realisation possible. Members of the Frankfurt School were forced to live out the World War II in exile. After the World War II, they were active in Western Europe and also America. In the post-war decades, however, critical theory tended towards the pessimistic idea that the historical process was not directed towards the realisation of emancipatory ideals, but towards a world totally controlled by alienated social forces. Among the representatives of critical theory who attracted attention in the 1960s was Erich Fromm (2002 [1955], 1974 [1956], 1964), who combined Marxian inspiration with Freudian influences. Fromm based his psychoanalytic approaches on assumptions of a sociological nature, because if Freud considered the events that took place in the individual lives of his patients to be the cause of mental disorders and illnesses, Fromm hypothesised that a number of psychological ailments were widespread due to unhealthy social conditions. He criticised alienated

3

Proponents of critical theory included, in addition to Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and others. After the World War II, their ranks were extended by Jürgen Habermas. In the last decades of the twentieth century, Ulrich Beck was influenced by critical theory. Nowadays, Axel Honneth in particular is building on this legacy. 4 The program was printed in the journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, which began publication under Horkheimer’s editorship in 1932.

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interpersonal relationships and the replacement of an authentic, active approach to life with the cult of consumption. In the late 1960s, the revolutionary interest of students was primarily attracted by the personality of Herbert Marcuse.5 After the World War II, Marcuse stayed in America (he worked at Columbia University, Harvard University and others), but he also worked as a visiting professor in Germany. There, in the mid-1960s, his book One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse, 1970 [1964]) became among the most famous works produced by the critical theorists.6 In this book, Marcuse pointed out the irrationality of contemporary Western society. He observed that science and technology, which allow humanity to exploit nature, at the same time led to an increase in the forces controlling humanity itself (Marcuse, 1970 [1964], p. 9 ff.). On the one hand, the total material and spiritual potential that contemporary society had at its disposal was greater than ever before, but on the other hand, the degree of domination of society over human individuals was significantly greater, associated with the development of new forms of unfreedom and, albeit more pleasant, at the same time more effective forms of social control (Marcuse, 1970 [1964], p. 19 ff.). The high productivity achieved had become wasteful, increasingly self-serving, and contradictory to the free development of human needs and abilities. Although this society was expanding the supply of commodities for the comforts of life, it was not leading to a lessening of the struggle that people had to wage for their material existence. The peace and stability of society were maintained by the constant threat of war, and its high productivity was destructive in its consequences. Technological progress did not lead to the liberation of the human individual. The industrial method of production made humanity a servant of the machine. Work did not allow the fulfilment of human capacities, bringing satisfaction, but had become an alienated thing. At the same time, mass consumption had brought a new way of control, because people living in material prosperity were not aware of their subordinate and unfree position, and did not desire change. The formation of artificial needs (Marcuse, 1970 [1964], p. 21 ff.) and false values, offered to and inculcated in people in consumer society at every step, contributed to oppression and social control. In Marcuse’s perspective, all essential processes were becoming primarily subordinated to the aspect of economic prosperity, while many other important aspects of life lay neglected and suppressed; economic prosperity was a goal in itself, but not a means to the all-round development of the human personality and its content. Technical rationality, manipulative control and alienation were manifested not only in production and economics, but also in politics, culture and mass communication. Comfortable, conflict-free, democratic unfreedom prevailed in

5

Iconic figures for many left-leaning young people in the West at that time were Leon Trotsky and Mao Zedong. 6 This book is followed by the study ‘Repressive Tolerance’ (Marcuse, 1970 [1965]). Marcuse’s views from the late 1960s are aptly expressed in An Essay on Liberation (Marcuse, 1969).

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developed industrial society. Even if political elections were held regularly, no substantial change could be expected, as the differences between the governments of individual political parties were not of a fundamental nature, and there was no real opposition. Cultural values had become goods and objects of trade. Mass media suggested how people should see and consider the world around them All these connections and consequences produced the one-dimensionality, the onedimensional thinking (Marcuse, 1970 [1964], pp. 26, 28 ff.) and behaviour, of a one-dimensional human being. Marcuse’s attitude towards these issues was based on two basic value assumptions. The first is that human life is worth living, so it must be viewed and shaped from this perspective. The second is that in society there are specific possibilities for improving human life, as well as ways and means to realise these possibilities (Marcuse, 1970 [1964], p. 10). Marcuse also argued that revolutionary critical theory could be right even when it appeared utopian to sober-minded people, and that this way of thinking must be cultivated even where it still had no hope of realisation. When considering alternatives,7 in his opinion it was necessary to take into account not only the economic, political, cultural and artistic dimensions of contemporary industrial society, but also biological and sexual dimensions. The task was to be rid of redundant and wasteful needs and open up space for a new sensibility and the development of new needs, where work ceases to be a necessity, becomes the free play of human abilities, and liberated erotic energy is no longer just sexuality. Marcuse (1969 [1968], pp. 54–64] eventually considered the collective subject expected to enforce such desired changes. He spoke of a new left, no longer fixed on the working class, but with followers on both poles of society. On the one hand, there would be ethnic minorities and disadvantaged classes, on the other, representatives of forward-thinking professionals, engineers, scientists, intellectuals and artists. Marcuse anticipated that there could be a radicalisation of the working class, but he feared that this would orient that class to the right, towards fascism. He considered the student opposition to be an important part of the new left; their protests at the end of the 1960s evoked in him great understanding and much sympathy.

11.2. The Prague Spring Deserving of special attention are the events of the late 1960s in the thenCzechoslovakia, culminating in 1968. Everything was foreshadowed by Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, in which the First Secretary revealed to those present the crimes of his predecessor Joseph Stalin, referred to in the ideological language of the time as Stalinist ‘blunders’ and ‘deformations’. Although Khrushchev’s revelations did not gain immediate publicity in Czechoslovakia, they had become

7

The Soviet system did not consider Marcuse a desirable alternative, on the contrary, it made him the object of its criticism (Marcuse, 1958).

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known by the early 1960s, with the result that, in 1962, as part of the fight against the so-called ‘ cult of personality’, Stalin’s immense monument in Letna, having been set up just seven years before, and supposed to stand ‘forever and ever’,8 was destroyed. Antonin Novotny was the president of Czechoslovakia in the years 1957–1968, and also First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.9 His later years were associated with a certain loosening of totalitarian power and internal social changes in the country. Among the important manifestations of these tendencies was the establishment of commissions to rehabilitate victims of the staged political trials that had taken place the previous decade.10 There was also a certain relaxation in the cultural area, felt not only in literature, the fine arts, theatre, film and music, but also in the humanities and social sciences. In June 1967, the leadership of the Communist Party was criticised for the contributions of some participants of the IV. Congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers.11 Within the ruling party, a split began to occur between the conservatives, led by Antonin Novotny, and a stream of thought convinced that the contemporary state of society required reform. Although Novotny declared in the early 1960s that ‘even our generation will live in communism’, it subsequently became clear that Czechoslovak society and its economy were in crisis, and therefore, with the consent of the ruling party, a search for a solution began. In the mid-1960s, sociology was revived in Czechoslovakia (after being abolished following the communist coup in 1948 to be replaced by Marxism–Leninism), and at the same time social science research teams were created to seek ways of social correction and reform. The economic team was headed by Ota Šik (1968), whose endeavour was to conceive economic reform that would, to a certain, albeit limited, degree, restore market institutions to a planned socialist economy. The reform of the state and political institutions was dealt with by a team whose task was to propose such democratising changes as would not lead to the denial of the principle of Communist Party leadership; this team was led by Zdenek MlynáĜ (1964). There was also a team for interdisciplinary research into the social and human contexts of scientific and technical development, led by Radovan Richta, who drew attention with his book Civilization at the Crossroads (Richta et al., 1966). There was furthermore a team for sociological research into the social structure of socialist

8

The monument took the form of a massive sculptural group made of granite blocks with an overall dimension of 15.5 m in height, 12 m in width and 22 m in length, so it had to be removed with the help of shooting and blasting that took several weeks. 9 Novotny was replaced as first secretary at the beginning of 1968 by the reformer communist Alexander Dubcek. 10 First, in 1962, the rehabilitation of convicted and executed communists began, and in the following years, commissions began to work on the rehabilitation of other victims of these processes. However, as a result of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, these rehabilitations could no longer be completed. 11 They included Milan Kundera, Pavel Kohout, Ivan Klima, Václav Havel and others.

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society, inspired by Western sociology and its stratification research (Machonin et al., 1969).12 In addition to these teams, there were a number of other scientists, intellectuals and philosophers whose activities became much more connected to international cooperation.13 With the accession of Alexander Dubcek to the post of First Secretary of the Communist Party in January 1968, there was talk of a ‘revival process’ (referred to in the Western media as ‘The Prague Spring’), the aim of which was to push through the reform program of democratic socialism,14 associated with the phrase ‘socialism with a human face’. However, this development, which raised great hopes and expectations, was ended by the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August 1968, followed by the abduction of Czechoslovak politicians associated with the revival process to Moscow, where most of them – led by Dubcek – capitulated to Brezhnev and his political clique. The revival process was terminated and in 1969, what was called normalisation began; this period lasted until November 1989. Most of the outputs of the social science research teams created during the 1960s were labelled in the era of normalisation as revisionist, anti-communist, bourgeois and hostile. All who worked in the social sciences after 1969 had to go through political checks, leading to a large number of sociologists associated with the revival process being persecuted, fired, forced to move job position, or change profession. With this, the dream of a reformed communism, different from the one born in the Soviet Union, ended for many representatives of leftist thought. Not only did the majority of Czech and Eastern European reform communists lose their faith, but also numerous Western left-wing intellectuals. And so, when transformation processes began to take place in Eastern European countries after 1989, the idea of ‘socialism with a human face’ had been completely abandoned.15

12

For more on Machonin’s research, see the Chapter 5. In the field of philosophy, the works of Karel Kosík (1963) and Milan Machovec in particular have been internationally acclaimed. Many Czech philosophers and social scientists received the works of Western Marxists at that time, were inspired by them, and held discussions with them. 14 He was accepted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in April 1968. 15 Similarly, Gorbachev’s later idea of reconstruction (perestroika) and various variants of the concept of a third way between capitalism and socialism were decisively rejected in these countries at the beginning of the post-communist transition. 13

Chapter 12

One Thing Ends, Another Begins Every statement regarding the 1960s implicitly suggests that it is possible to understand it not only as some abstract interval that arose on the basis of the decadal calendar division of time, but also as a certain period filled with a distinctive historical content that distinguishes it from the period that preceded it and the one that followed. Here then we logically encounter the problem that the dates that separate individual decades in the calendar do not usually represent any major landmark. From the perspective of historical science, therefore, temporal boundaries can become a topic of discussion.1 This applies especially to the topic we have been following in the foregoing chapters, in which a number of phenomena and problems related to the early 1960s, it is suggested, were rooted in previous decades, while even the late 1960s had no sharp boundaries (mathematicians might say that they are fuzzy). From a historical-sociological point of view, it is important that the then ongoing Cold War reached its peak in 1962 in the Caribbean crisis, following which there was a certain easing between the United States and the Soviet Union, with an impact not only on international relations, but also on development in areas of culture, science, art and lifestyle, lending the 1960s their specific character and period ‘colouring’. The end of détente was brought about by the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. In 1969, the last remnants of free speech brought about during the previous period were gradually silenced in Czechoslovakia, and so-called normalisation began, associated with the mass punishment of those associated with previous developments, or who did not approve the invasion. In the West, the student movement peaked, with storms in the spring and summer of 1968, but then began to subside. Quite a few student rebels later, during the 1970s, joined the official structures of political life and became part of the

1

Let us recall that historians solve a similar problem when it comes to centuries, and so that by talking about the long 19th century (British historian Eric Hobsbawm refers to the period from 1789 to 1914 with this term) and the short twentieth century (1914 to 1991).

The Sociological Inheritance of the 1960s: Historical Reflections on a Decade of Changing Thought, 87–94 Copyright © 2024 by JiĜí Šubrt Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited doi:10.1108/978-1-80382-805-320231012

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establishment. The Altamont Free Concert music festival is sometimes referred to as the end of the hippie era, where security guards comprising members of the Hells Angels biker gang stabbed black youth Meredith Hunter. The 1970s were different in many ways. The Iron Curtain was drawn again, and it was clear that no further rapprochement between East and West would take place (a certain reduction in tension was brought only by The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the final act of which was signed in August 1975 in Helsinki). Ideas were coming to the fore that were not nearly as fundamental and radical as in the previous decade; young people stopped giving in to utopian ideas and unrealistic hopes; what could be described as pragmatism prevailed in politics, economics, culture and lifestyle. The cultural sphere was no longer developing as stormily and dynamically as in the 1960s, and in many ways diluted what the previous decade had brought. The arrival of the 1970s came with its aesthetic and stylistic complement not only in fashion and dress, but also in how tastes shifted in mass entertainment and leisure. Among other things, this was connected with the consumerist way of life, which began to assert itself more strongly than before, but with the distinction that while the Western economy created attractive conditions for this, in the East, socialist countries, these tendencies encountered an under-supplied market, associated with shortages and unsatisfied demand for consumer goods. The great oil crisis of 1973 marked a significant moment in the development of the global economy, and at the same time a challenge. During the post-war growth, oil reserves were seen as an unlimited resource. That this was not the case came as an unexpected shock to many countries and their economies. Environmental problems were a relatively new topic at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. It was primarily the Club of Rome, a global think tank founded in the spring of 1968, that drew attention to them. With its first report, the Limits to Growth, published in 1972, it gained worldwide attention as Meadows and their associates used the Jay W. Forrester model (1971) to formulate a forecast warning of possible imminent environmental catastrophe on a global scale (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens, 1972).

12.1. A Crisis Announced The end of 1960s – a symbolic point in sociology – was represented in Alvin Gouldner’s (1970) The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. This book can be described as a critical sociology of sociology, an approach based on the interconnectedness of a critique of sociology and a critique of society. Gouldner rejected the idea of any pure, ideologically independent sociology, asserting that sociology had an ideological dimension with certain political consequences. The fundamental difference lay in whether the respective concept contributed to the suppression or, on the contrary, to the liberation of humanity. He considered attempts at sociology in accordance with the model of the value-neutral natural sciences as against human dignity.2 2

See Chapter 3.

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Gouldner’s criticism focussed primarily on the theory that dominated sociology in the 1950s and 1960s, Parsons’ structural functionalism. The crisis it pointed to was essentially a crisis of confidence in the explanatory potential of Parsons’ theory, which, as Gouldner showed, was evidenced by the fact that many adherents or those inclined to it were then abandoning and questioning it. This tendency concerned, he stated, not only American, but the entirety of Western sociology. On the general level, Gouldner evaluated Parsons’ theoretical work as an effort to give unity and order to the capitalist world in crisis (Gouldner, 1970, pp. 167–337). He saw this effort as problematic because Parsons’ approach to society was, in his view, significantly reductionist. Gouldner, as a Marxist-oriented intellectual, saw the weaknesses of this theoretical orientation mainly in its inappropriate emphasis on the value system of society and on morality, while being unable to adequately capture the importance of the economic base, and underemphasising the factor of power and strength. Gouldner also considered it characteristic of Parsons that he conceptually ignored the real, concrete contradictions and problems of American society, such as poverty, racial storms, civil protests and riots. Gouldner found Parsons’ orientation rooted in his social background and class position, and that his conservative view of society reflected his privileged status. What concerned Parsons appeared to be not the hardship of human individuals but threats to the existing culture and value integration of society. Parsons’ convoluted and difficult-to-understand style, combined with complicated terminology (already the target of criticism by C. W. Mills) was understood by Gouldner as a kind of status-symbol by which Parsons demonstrated his belonging to a higher academic hierarchy. For Gouldner, Parsons’ sociology primarily represented a kind of ideology, trying to pass off its elitist view as universally valid.

12.2. What’s Next? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it came to pass that Parsons’ structural functionalism lost its dominant position and leading role in sociology.3 At the same time, neo-positivist sociology and quantitative methodology also came under fire. Thus, during the 1970s, Western sociology really went through a certain crisis (one might even say a transformational process), associated with the search for alternatives to Parsons’ functionalist theory. As a result, certain existing but overlooked currents of sociological thought began to come to the forefront of professional interest, in particular interpretive (hermeneutic) sociology. At the same time, alongside traditional non-positivist oriented quantitative methodology, a counterbalancing qualitative methodology began to take shape.

3

Parsons’ ideas, however, have by no means disappeared without a trace. Their considerable influence can be found above all in the West German sociology, namely in the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann (1984), in Jürgen Habermas’ two-stage conception of society contained in the Theory of Communicative Action (in German Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns) (Habermas, 1981) and in the concept of social systems of Richard Münch (1984). Later to the rehabilitation of Parsons in the USA contributed Jeffrey Alexander (1983, 1988).

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A typical representative of this was Anthony Giddens and his ‘reconstructing’ of social theory through the theory of structuration, presented successively in three books: New Rules of Sociological Method (Giddens, 1976), Central Problems in Social Theory (Giddens, 1979) and The Constitution of Society (Giddens, 1984). Giddens formulated his views as a polemic against approaches that had dominated American sociology in the previous two decades, represented by T. Parsons, R. K. Merton and S. M. Lipset. Giddens calls this the orthodox consensus and characterises it with the following four features (Giddens, 1981, p. 88): 1.

2.

3. 4.

From the philosophical point of view, naturalism, postulating the unity of natural and social sciences, based on the assumption of the existence of one common reality and one common methodological canon. From the methodological point of view, functionalism, because naturalism and copying the natural sciences led to the acceptance of the functionalist method and a structurally functionalist mode of exploration. As far as social change is concerned, consensus theory was evolutionist, even if this evolutionism is to some extent overlaid by functionalism. Evolutionism brought the theory of modernisation, with the idea that industrialism represented a fundamental transformative influence on society and its social structure.

Giddens defined functionalism as a doctrine which concluded that: (a) Society or the social system has needs. (b) Identifying how we cope with these needs explains why individual social processes are as they are. He opposed this doctrine for a number of reasons. One was that the emphasis on systemic needs left functionalist authors unable to see human beings as rational, reasoning actors, largely aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it. According to Giddens (1981, p. 91), human action was not adequately understood in the functionalist theory. He criticises Parsons for ignoring the role of human actors as beings who, through their actions, produce and reproduce social institutions, and thus the entire social system. At the same time, he draws on Erving Goffman’s concept of acting human beings as qualified and knowledgeable agents who use – routinely – their knowledge to produce and reproduce social ties. Actors (agents) are gifted to understand what they are doing while they are doing it (Giddens, 1997 [1984], p. 5 ff.).4 They have the capacity for reflexivity and self-reflexivity.5

4

Giddens’ concept of action adheres to the idea of a competent, conscious actor, linked to two characteristics, knowledgeability and capability. The concept of knowledgeability (Giddens, 1997 [1984], pp. 21–22) is related to practical knowledge, the ability to reflect, the stock of knowledge and experience of individual actors. Capability, as the ability of actors to act, is linked by Giddens (1997 [1984], p. 14 ff.) to the concept of power (whoever acts automatically has a certain power). Power, defined as a relationship of autonomy and dependence between actors where actors create and reproduce the structural properties of dominance, is an integral element of all social life. 5 People monitor their actions reflexively, that is, they record, evaluate, rationalise and interpret their own actions and the actions of others. This process takes place

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The focus of Giddens’ interest, along with action, became speech and intersubjectivity in the production and reproduction of social reality. He replaced social-scientific positivism with the double hermeneutic: in his view, the approach to the social world led through the meaning frameworks, knowledge and concepts of lay actors. Social researchers, like lay actors, drew on the same stock of knowledge and draw insights from the same sources. Sociological concepts rested preliminarily on a layman’s understanding of common concepts. Only secondarily did sociology create its own meaning frames and scientific concepts, which, however, had to maintain feedback from the meaning frames of lay actors. The criticisms of functionalism led Giddens to propose replacing with what he called structuration theory. Giddens associated structuring with the duality of action and structure (or duality of structure).6 According to this, all social action consisted of social practices situated in time and space and organised in a skilled and knowledgeable manner by actors. This human knowledge or familiarity with relevant social practices was always a condition of action, but also a consequence (or product) of action. Duality meant that the structural elements (or components) of the social system were simultaneously both the means (medium) and outcome of social action (Giddens, 1981, p. 92).7 As such, social structures did not stand in opposition to individual actors, but directly entered into their actions; conversely, the actions of the actors created, reproduced and maintained these structures. Therefore, structure and action represented not some radically opposite concepts, but two dimensions of the same thing; they could not be seen as separate problems but must be analysed in mutual relationship. A significant part of Giddens’ attempt to reconstruct social theory represented a critique of Parsons’ revived sociological evolutionism. According to Giddens’ (1997 [1984], p. 263 ff.), the evolutionist standpoint postulated a similarity between biological and social evolution and explained change in such a way to apply this universally to the entire spectrum of human history. Among the inherent dangers of this, according to Giddens, were (1997 [1984], p. 239) unilinear

on three levels (Giddens 1997 [1984], p. 7), at the level of discursive consciousness (rationalisation), at the level of practical consciousness (interpretation) and under the pressure of the unconscious. According to Giddens, the unconscious has a non-negligible importance in human activity (even if the actors have a considerable stock of reflection and experience at their disposal, the conscious control of actions always has certain limits regarding unconscious motives). 6 Giddens’ theory replaces the dualism of individual and society with the duality of action and structure (Giddens, 1997 [1984], pp. 25–28) (respectively by the duality of the structure). In other words – the sharp contradiction of the dichotomy of action and structure – is overcome by the concept of duality. 7 According to Giddens, human speech is an example of both a prerequisite or means, and at the same time a result, of social action: Individual speech acts could only arise within an abstract set of speech rules, but at the same time these speech acts constantly reproduced speech as an abstract set of rules. If I utter a sentence, it is a certain manifestation of my action, which at the same time, as an unintended consequence, keeps alive (reproduces) the speech system (Müller, 1992, p. 175).

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simplification, the tendency to consider historical development as something general and binding. Giddens argued that human history did not take an evolutionary form, and it was wrong to attempt to squeeze it into one. His theory of structuration assumed that human beings make their histories with awareness, and this reflexive relationship prevented history from proceeding according to any simple causal patterns. While evolutionists might assume that more advanced societies are more complex and differentiated versions of less developed ones, for Giddens history was not a continuous rise. Giddens subscribed to Marx’s idea that people make their own history (this idea of the importance of human practice is set in the foundations of the theory of structuration), but he rejected Marx’s scheme of social development as an evolutionist simplification. With reference to Ernest Gellner, he observed that there was no world-growth story (1997 [1984], pp. 237–238), but on the contrary, contingencies and discontinuities, as portrayed in the work of British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, in which the ups and downs of more than two dozen of the world’s great civilisations are recounted. For Giddens, capitalism represented a unique social formation with numerous new, specific features not found in other types of societies. In contrast to Marx, who attributed the primacy to economic relations throughout the class history of mankind, Giddens attributed primacy to the economy only within capitalist society. He certainly did not consider capitalism to be some kind of culmination of history. The history of mankind had, for Giddens, no continuous course, nor would it end with capitalism.

12.3. The Future is Open In the early 1960s, Lewis A. Coser and Rose Laub Coser observed in Time Perspective and Social Structure that American culture was characterised by a dominant orientation towards the future. They concluded that several personality types could be identified in the American population in terms of attitudes to this: The first was represented by a conformist – institutionally approved – individualistic and active orientation. The second type was associated with a collective orientation. These could either (a) share the individualistic ideals of the culture and turn away only from individualistic modes of action (a collective active type oriented towards an individual future), or (b) create collective symbols of the future society through collective action in the present (a collective active type oriented towards the collective future and utopian time perspective). It was characteristic of the third and the fourth types that their time orientations were passive. They either ‘quietly’ awaited events to ‘happen’ (a collective and passive type with a chiliastic time perspective) or individually indulged in hedonistic behaviour (an individualistic and passive type with a hedonistic time perspective) (Coser & Coser, 1963, pp. 640–645). As for belief in progress, this was alive and shared in both East and West during the 1960s, but gradually abandoned in the last decades of the twentieth century. However, it was far from being a peripheral phenomenon accompanying the crisis of sociology at that time. Indeed, as early as the late 1960s, this issue

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was at the centre of the attention of Raymond in the work Disillusionment with Progress (Aron, 1969). Aron recalled that the founding fathers of sociology believed in progress, even if they did not always unreservedly accept it. Aron himself felt forced to admit that he did not share this belief. Despite from the 1950s onwards having promoted the concept of industrial society, he now questioned whether we could expect to see the emergence of any unified world culture or even a world state as a result of industrialisation. He believed that what would connect the individual societies together was their involvement in the global process of production and exchange, and that in addition to market relations, the universal character of technology and contemporary communication possibilities would assist this interconnection. However, there were, according to Aron, certain factors working against this homogenisation. These included uneven economic development, religious and church pluralism, ethnic and cultural differences, different ideologies, conflictcausing power structures, nationalism, and separatism. According to Aron, these and other phenomena would cause history to remain irrational, difficult to predict, and dramatic in character. Throughout the twentieth century, many social scientists – Eastern as well as Western – still shared the idea that if we knew the laws of social development, we could predict social development and, on that basis, the future towards which humanity was heading. Among those who challenged this belief was Karl R. Popper, who in The Poverty of Historicism (Popper, 1957) criticised this as a dangerous deterministic illusion (especially dominant in the Marxist way of thinking), based on the postulate of a closed future and an assumption of symmetry between the past and future. According to Popper, an essential part of any society is the knowledge of those who live in that society: how they see the world, think about it, and their knowledge and skills, and furthermore the technologies they have at their disposal. The fundamental problem lies in the inability to know what knowledge people will have in 20, 50 or 100 years, and therefore the incapacity to predict with sufficient overview and certainty what societies will look like at that time and where their development will tend. The historicism criticised by Popper assumes that the entire historical development is directed towards a certain, once and for all given, lawful (in contemporary language: ‘pre-programmed’) end. This would mean that the future, even if yet unknown, was as it were already finished and waiting to be revealed. This assumption had become (especially in the nineteenth century) the basis for the formulation of various conceptions of the philosophy of history, differing mainly on the question of whether one could expect the great ‘finale’ automatically, or whether it was necessary to ‘work somehow’ for it, either scientifically (Comte), or through the revolutionary struggle (Marx). Even by the end of the nineteenth century, however, another idea had begun to take shape. In the spiritual atmosphere of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the idea of an open future emerged, one with no pre-set scenario, no predetermined outcome. This idea, especially in the last quarter of the twentieth century, began to influence sociology as well, influencing the development of theoretical thinking such as Giddens’ theory of structuration or Luhmann’s system theory, where

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an open future meant that neither the past nor the present was clearly determined. The theory of progress was thus significantly problematised. In recent decades, people have no longer felt as much reason to look to the future with hope or expectation. A symptomatic phenomenon of the last decades has been presentism,8 the focus on the present. Our picture of the future is darkened, and the expectations it may raise are tinged with uncertainty and fear.

8 Contributing to the spread of presentist attitudes was the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as former socialist countries, having freed themselves from the one-party rule, rejected social and economic experiments associated with the notion of a third way between capitalism and socialism, but rather subscribed fully to ways proven over decades in the West. The atmosphere was reflected in Francis Fukuyama’s book (2006 (1992)) The End of History and the Last Man, where the end of history was associated with the assertion that after the victory of democratic, liberal capitalism, the world could expect nothing more than the further spread of this established social model.

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Index Abstracted empiricism, 60 Action, social action, 30–31, 38, 64–65, 72, 91–92 Adaptation, 31 Affluent Society, The, 3 Age of high mass consumption, 3 AGIL scheme, 32 Alienation, 83 American culture, 92 American neo-positivist sociology, 15 American sociology, 14–15 Anomie, 74 Archaeology of knowledge method, 28 Art of action, 63 Authoritarian regimes, 81 Background expectations, 65 Banality of evil, 76 Behaviourism, 15–16, 50 Breaching demonstrations, 65 Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR), 16 Capital (Marx), 27–28 Capitalism, 7, 33 Chain Wars, The (Aron), 7 Civil rights movement, 43 Civil society, 33 Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Dahrendorf, 1959), 47 Class(es), 35–41, 43, 47–49, 59–60, 74, 82, 84, 89, 92 Class struggle, 49 Cold War, 87 ‘Cold’ media, 54 Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, The, 33

Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, The (1999 (1973)), 8 Communication, 52 research, 26 Communist ideology, 5 Communist society, 5 Communitarianism, 10 Conflict and Defense: A General Theory (Boulding), 50 Conflicts, 43, 74 functions and dysfunctions, 44–47 management, 45 moderating, 47–49 perspectives, 49–50 Constructivism, 63–64, 69, 73 Consumer terror, 6 Consumerism, 6 Convergence theory, 8 Counterculture, 57n2–3 Creative imagination, 58 Crisis, 88–89 Critical theory of Frankfurt School, 7, 82 Cult of personality, 85 Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, The (1976), 8 Cultural sociology, 33 Cultural system, 32 Cultural values, 84 Culture, 4 Culture industry, 6 Cybernetics, 29–30 Decolonisation process, 81 Democracy, 33 Democracy and totalitarianism (Aron), 7

104

Index

Democratic revolution, 11 Depth sociology, 34 Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS), 6 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 6 Drive to maturity, 3 Duality, 91 Dysfunction, 74 Economics, 4 processes, 36 Educational revolution, 11 Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society, 8 Electronic media, 54–55 age, 55–56 Emancipatory cognitive interest, 61–62 Empirical-analytical sciences, 61 End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, The (Bell, 1988 (1960)), 8 Episteme, 28 Ethnomethodology, 64–65 Evaluation-free sociology, 23 Evaluative conception, 38 Exchange of goods and services, 27 Existentialism, 76–77 Experimentation on models, 27 structures of expectation, 64–65 Falsification, 17–18 Feedback, 52 Feminine Mystique, The, 81 Foundations of Sociology, 19 Four-function paradigm, 31 Frankfurt School, 5 French intellectuals, 7 French social sciences, 27 French sociology, 41 Function, 26, 73 Functional theory, 31 Functionalism, 29–30, 90 Functionalist explanatory models, 73

General theory of systems, 29–30 Gesellschaft und Freiheit, 47 Goal attainment, 31 Grand theory, 60 Great Schism, The (Aron), 7 Hegel’s dialectics, 7 Holism, 71 ‘Hot’ media, 54 Human and civil liberties and rights, 33 Human freedom, 71 existentialism, 76–77 life as theatre performance, 74–75 mask, 75–76 social role, 71–73 Hypodermic needle model, 53 Ideological legacy, 60 Ideologies, 8–9 Imagination, 57 Impression management, 66 Inclusion, 32 Index of Status Characteristics (ISC), 37 Individualism, 71 Inductive process, 27 Industrial revolution, 11 Industrial society, 5, 7–9 Industrialism, 9, 33 Interaction(s), 20, 31, 45, 64–67, 73 Interaction order, 66 Integration, 31 Interpretative sociology, 19n7, 73 Invariants, 26–27 Iron Curtain, 3–4, 88 Knowledge society, 8–10 L’archéologie du savoir–The Archaeology of Knowledge (2002), 28 Labour productivity, 6 Late capitalism, 6–7 Latent functions, 31

Index Latent interests, 47 Latent pattern maintenance, 31 Life as theatre performance, 74–75 Lifestyle, 4 Linear process, 2 London School of Economics (LSE), 30, 47 Lonely Crowd, The, 51 Looking-glass Self, 72 Lundberg’s theory, 19 Magic bullet theory, 53 Manipulative control, 83 Market research, 16 Marx’s analysis of capitalism, 6 Marxism, 2, 7, 77 Marxism–Leninism, 49 Marxist ideology, 7 Marxist intellectuals, 7 Marxist-Leninist sociology, 22 Mask, 75–76 Mass communication, 51 electronic media age, 55–56 in mass society, 52–53 Medium, The, 54 Mass consumption, 51 Mass culture, 51, 53 Mass entertainment, 51 Mass media, 51 Mass persuasion, 51 Mass production, 51 Mass society, 51 Medium, Medium, The, 54–55 Message exchange, 27 Metaphysics, 15–16 Methodological individualism, 20 Middle-range theories, 21 Mills’ Trilogy, 59–61 Modern, contemporary societies, 32 Modern society, 2, 5, 11 Modernisation development, 33 Modernisation theory, 10–11 Modernity, 10–11 Multi-paradigmatic science, 14 Mutual conditionality, 28

105

Nationalism, 56 Natural science, 15 Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 7 Neo-positivism, 15 Neo-positivists, 22 sociology, 15–16 New Class, The, 39 New Industrial State, The, 3 Non-evaluative sociology, 23 Normal science, 13 Normalisation, 86–87 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse), 82–84 Operationalisation, 16–17 Opium of intellectuals (Aron), 7 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 28 Paradigm, 13–14 Period of alphabet and printing press, 55 Personal Influence, 53n3 Pfade aus Utopia, 47 Phenomenological sociology, 64, 67 Phenomenology, 66 Philosophical positivism, 15 Philosophical-critical science, 61–62 Positivism, 15–16 behaviourist positions, 19–20 sociological theory, 18–19, 21 sociology modelled on natural sciences, 14–16 value neutrality, 22 Post-industrial society, 9–10 Post-structuralism, 28 Practical cognitive interest, 61 Prague Spring, 40n11, 82, 84–86 Pre-alphabetic period, 55 Pre-industrial societies, 9 Primary socialisation, 68 Primitive societies, 32 Psychoanalytic approaches, 82 Psychologism, 20 Quantitative methodology, 37

106

Index

Radical feminism, 81 Realistic conflicts, 46 Reformation, 56 Regions, 66 Revolutionary critical theory, 84 Role conflict, 74 Role distance, 78 Role entrapment, 74 Role-playing, 74 Roles, 73–74 Rostow’s model, 2–3 Scapegoating, 46 Science, 4, 13, 83 Scientific imagination, 57 Scientific laws, 15 Scientific revolution, 14 Secondary socialisation, 68 Secularisation theory, 67n5 Situationism, 75n2 Six-level status hierarchy, 40 Sociability, 34 Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (1961), 20 Social action, 38, 64, 91 Social classes, 36–38 Social conflicts, 44, 48 Social dynamics, 14 Social inequalities, 36 Social interactions, 20 Social Mobility, 36 Social order, 62, 68 Social organisation, 8 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, The, 50 Social psychology, 73 Social reality, 31, 34, 67–69 Social role, 71–74, 77–78 Social sciences, 19–20, 26 Social space, 36–37 Social stratification, 36–37 Social structure, 26, 35 Social System, The, 31 Social theory, 18, 90 Social Theory and Social Structure, 18

Socialisation, 68, 72 Societal community, 32 Societal knowing, 10 Societies, 5, 27, 68 industrial society, 7–8 knowledge society, 8–10 late capitalism, 6–7 modernisation theory, 10–11 Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Parsons), 32 Sociological constructivism, 63 constructing and maintaining social reality, 67–69 life on stage and behind scenes, 66–67 Sociological imagination, need for, 59–60 Sociological knowledge, 14 Sociological research, 15 Sociological theory, 18–21, 43 Sociological thinking, 1, 5, 71 Sociology, 1–2, 5, 14, 34–35, 61, 89, 93 from behaviourist positions, 19–20 of knowledge, 67n6 modelled on natural sciences, 14–16 of work and leisure, 40–41 Soviet sociology, 49 Soziale Klassen und Klassenkonflikt (Dahrendorf, 1957), 47 Stages of Economic Growth: A NonCommunist Manifesto, The, 2 Status, 71n1, 72 Stock of knowledge, 72 Stratification, 36–37 inequalities, 37 Structural functionalism, 19, 30, 73 Structuralism, 26–29 Structuration theory, 91 Structures, 26 Symbolic interactionism, 64, 66 Symbolic universes, 68 System of Modern Societies, The (Parsons), 32

Index

107

Systems, 25 development and change, 32–33 structures and functions, 30–32 theory, 29, 50

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 64 Unorthodox neo-Marxism, 82 Unrealistic conflict, 46

Take-off, 3 Technetronic society, 9 Technical cognitive interest, 61 Technical rationality, 83 Technology, 4, 83 Theoretical knowledge, 10 Theory of modernisation, 11 Towards a Society of Leisure (Dumazedier), 41 Traditional society, 3 Transitive societies, 32 Trust, 2–3 Typifications, 72

Value Free sociology, 22–23 Value neutrality, 22 Vienna Circle, 16–17 Violence, 48 Weberian individualism, 71 West German sociology, 6 Western sociology, 5, 21 Western type of industrial society, 8 Work, 1, 3, 6, 13, 34, 40–41, 44, 58, 83 Yankee City, The, 37