The Actor in the Social Sciences

A Reply to Hans Joas Immanuel Wallerstein

Yale University

If one stands next to the trees, they are all remarkably particular. The observer tends to emphasize the nuances of their shapes and their beauties. But from further away, when one regards the whole forest, the trees group into a more limited number of varieties. By concentrating on the details, one can miss the larger picture, and more importantly the politics, of the knowledge debate. In this article, Hans Joas seems to me to be making three points: one, it is not true that the social sciences have been largely nomothetic in orientation. This is what he calls the shortcoming of the diagnosis of Open the Social Sciences. Two, and perhaps less important, the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, have always been a locus of diversity and theoretical debate. Three, what is for Joas the most important point, any agenda for the future of social science must be based on an action-theoretical perspective. I have never argued that the social sciences have been exclusively nomothetic in orientation. I have argued that the social sciences were deeply divided between an idiographic and a nomothetic approach, and that three of the social sciences economics, political science and sociology were for the most part and for most of their history dominated by the nomothetic camp. To read Joas, one would think that this debate was some obscure German phenomenon of yesteryear. I clearly remember hearing this debate all my scholarly life, hearing it in the US, in Europe and in the rest of the world. I still hear it today. Joas cites a long list of intellectual movements that have been resistant to being nomothetic, or Newtonian. He can only do this by using an extremely restrictive denition of nomothetic. For me, if one believes that there exist theories or generalizations about human behavior, whether middle-range or not, that are true over time and space, one is being nomothetic. If one believes that the primary concern of social science is to demonstrate and state such generalizations, one is being nomothetic. If
International Sociology September 2004 Vol 19(3): 315319 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) DOI: 10.1177/0268580904045343

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International Sociology Vol. 19 No. 3 one believes that behavior is determined, such that if x, then y, one is being nomothetic. And if one believes that the best way to arrive at such generalizations is by approximating controlled experiments, one is being nomothetic. My experience is that most sociologists (overwhelmingly in the period 194570 and still in very large numbers after that) subscribed to these views, and regarded alternative views as non-scientic. Of course, by putting it this way, I erase all sorts of divisions between multiple theoretical approaches. I am narrowing in on only one the fundamental epistemological presuppositions. I concur with almost everything that Joas says about particular viewpoints. But these remarks do not speak to the essential issues. The story we tried to tell in Open the Social Sciences was that of the social sciences as a whole and as a concept, and to tell that story within the larger story of the structures of knowledge as they have evolved over the last four centuries. What stands out in that larger story are two things. The rst is the socalled divorce between philosophy and science, which was consummated in the period that ran from 1750 to 1850. The divorce was wrenching, divisive and often quite bitter. The two parties became quite antagonistic. The more extreme participants in the debate were openly denigratory of the other side. What was at stake was not merely fundamental epistemological questions, but prestige and inuence in the larger society. If the divorce was consummated and institutionalized in the period 17501850, the battle for prestige and inuence was intense in the following century. Science rose higher and higher in public esteem (and nancial support), and yes, as Joas indicates, it reached an apogee in the period 194570. The second thing that stands out in this larger story is the slow emergence of something called the social sciences in the period 18501970 not quite as the third culture suggested by Lepenies but rather as the inbetween terrain within which philosophy and science primarily carried out their struggle for dominance, and wherein social scientists showed remarkably little epistemological autonomy or originality. It is this latter story that we tried to encapsulate in speaking of the nomotheticidiographic rift. To be sure, that exact language may have been primarily used by a few German analysts at the end of the 19th century, but the battle (under one name or another) was by no means limited to that narrow location. And to be sure, there were all sorts of people who found the antinomy simplied, simplistic, unfruitful and basically incorrect. But however many they were and however correct we may now regard their arguments, their cautions and their emphases, politically they simply did not carry the day. As the social sciences became departmentalized, that is, disciplined, the battle continued inside each discipline, of course. But overall, the 316

Wallerstein The Actor in the Social Sciences disciplines in their majority chose sides, and therefore tended to be primarily either nomothetic or idiographic. The scientization of the social science disciplines became quite decisive in the 194570 period, science acquiring a large following even within the previously more idiographic social science disciplines. And yes, since 1970, there has been a reaction, and an opening up of the debate, which is still, however, very far from resolution. The second point that Joas makes the chronic moaning and groaning of sociologists about the lack of collective coherence of the discipline is intruded to argue that the revolt against the two-culture divide is nothing new. It is no doubt an interesting sociological phenomenon that sociologists in particular have this self-image of collective incoherence. But this self-image masks the reality of greater coherence, at least in the past, than they perceived. It is after all a good polemical ploy to start out by accusing the discipline of incoherence, and then proposing ones impeccable solution to it. Personally, I do not then call for synthesis but rather for unthinking the epistemological underpinnings of this incoherence. Finally, we come to the essential point the case for an action-theoretical viewpoint. I have to admit that, as long as Ive been a sociologist, Ive always had some difculty understanding exactly what this is. Persons as different as Lazarsfeld and Touraine have argued for it, extensively and persuasively. The problem I have always had is to understand what isnt an action-theoretical viewpoint. I have always had the feeling that the arguments are either those of the proponents of agency ghting against what they see as the proponents of dehumanized structure (Touraine) or those who want to make psychological tendencies central to sociological analysis (Lazarsfeld). Perhaps Im wrong. I believe that the antinomy of agency and structure is one more antinomy that leads to endless debates that I suspect are largely futile. I believe that all of social science is historical or action-theoretical and of course all empirical description, whether self-described as historical or action-oriented is structured, constrained and limited in its autonomy. Thus for me, any concept of structure necessarily includes agency, in the same way that Christian theology has always combined a belief in the omnipotence of God with the free will of humans. And autonomous agency seems to me, in the end, to assume a reied and non-determined personality structure which is simply not plausible. I prefer to discuss the issue in terms of the conditions under which and the moments at which a structure can effectively constrain the individuals and groups which are contained within it. These conditions vary over time. I believe that only when the structure is in crisis does the element of free will become a meaningful variable. 317

International Sociology Vol. 19 No. 3 In placing his bets on an action-theoretical perspective, Joas is following a long social science tradition. Most social scientists, indeed most people thinking about social realities, have always felt uncomfortable at the thought of emphasizing only one end of this antinomy. And yet, the organizational consequences of the philosophyscience divorce placed enormous de facto pressure on social scientists to do just this choose sides. The issue is not whether we now wish to wiggle in the middle, but exactly how we can do this plausibly and in a manner that will carry the day. This then brings me to the problems I nd in the agenda Joas offers us. His agenda is largely institutional: what topics we should study, how the institutionalized disciplines should relate to each other, how we should approach the idea of the social construction of reality, how we should study multiple modernities. Nowhere in this agenda is what I see as the major intellectual, moral and political issue facing the world, and therefore facing world social science the fact that our existing world-system is in deep trouble, and that the world is going through a murky and chaotic transition to an alternative world-system or systems. To attend to this intellectually, we need to overcome the concept of the two cultures and stop worrying about our institutional niches and turf. To attend to this morally, we need to begin to use proactively the concept of substantive rationality (Rationalitt materiel). And once we have done this, each can draw the political conclusions he or she thinks appropriate. Sociologists are not going to solve this by themselves, whether they enter into dialogue with each other or not. There is a larger need for reconciliation, the reconstruction of a singular epistemology for all knowledge, not just for sociology. This is an effort in which physicists and art historians must be full partners alongside the social scientists, if we are to get anywhere. And the politics of the situation is that, while a signicant group in all sectors of the structures of knowledge seem to be willing to put their shoulders to the wheel of this effort, they are still politically a minority. We could discuss why their numbers have been growing in the last 30 years, why their numbers have not grown more than they have, and how transformations in the political economy of the world-system are affecting the likelihood of a new epistemological reconciliation in the structures of knowledge. But if we are to be relevant to this debate, we must look beyond the trees to the larger forest, the efforts to overcome the still very powerful concept of the two cultures in the university and scholarly arenas, and that amid the chaotic bifurcation that the modern world-system as an historical system is undergoing. In particular, I see three urgent questions on my agenda: (1) clarication of the historical choices before us as the modern world-system passes through its anarchic period of disintegration; 318

Wallerstein The Actor in the Social Sciences (2) developing a language that will permit us to dissolve the categories of the political, the economic and the sociocultural into the unied kinds of action in which actors in the real world engage; (3) nding the right balance in our role as intellectuals in pursuing analytic truth, moral choice and political wisdom to enable us to move from here to where we want to go. None of these tasks is easy, and all of them require keeping our eyes rmly on the larger picture.

Biographical Note: Immanuel Wallerstein is Senior Research Scholar at Yale University. He was president of the International Sociological Association, 19948, and presided the international Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, 19935. Address: Department of Sociology, Yale University, PO Box 208625, New Haven, CT 06520-8265, USA. [email: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu]

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