معرفی مقالاتی در خصوص «بحران در نظریه و علم اجتماعی»

Critical Theory and the Crisis of Social Theory
Author(s): Douglas Kellner
Source: Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 33, No. 1, Critical Theory (Spring, 1990), pp. 11-33


CRITICAL THEORY AND THE CRISIS OF SOCIAL THEORY

DOUGLAS KELLNER
University of Texas

ABSTRACT: In this article I argue that the critical theory developed by the so-called Frankfurt School provides both a model for radical social theory and important perspectives on contemporary society. I provide some historical background on the origins of critical theory and then explicate the method and project through a close reading of key methodological texts by Horkheimer. I then examine the substantive contributions to contemporary social theory in the critical theory tradition and argue that they constituted the cutting edge of radical social theory from the 1940s through the 1960s. Yet critical theory failed to develop as social theory thereafter, focusing instead on philosophy and cultural critique. It has been postmodern theory which has attempted to articulate the current trends and new social conditions in contemporary society. Consequently, if critical theory is to once again become the avant-garde of social theory, it must be reconstructed in the present age in the light of the postmodern critique and theory. I conclude by indicating some reasons why I believe that a reconstructed critical theory can indeed restore the tradition to the forefront of contemporary social theory and thus call for a revitalization of the tradition.

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Sociology: After the Linguistic and Multicultural Turns
Author(s): Paget Henry
Source: Sociological Forum, Vol. 10, No. 4, Special Issue: African Americans and Sociology: A Critical Analysis (Dec., 1995), pp. 633-652

Sociology: After the Linguistic and Multicultural Turns
Paget Henry

ABSTRACT: This paper offers an analysis of the continuing crisis in sociology that is different from those that have appeared in the literature. In contrast to the ideological and technical readings, it suggests that the origins of the crisis are to be found in the hermeneutic challenge that has resulted from the linguistic and multicultural turn. Both of these developments have given rise to new discourses within the academy that are competing with subfields such as the sociology of the arts and race/ethnic relations. The nature and impact of this new competition is examined in greater detail through the case of the sociology of race. The analysis reveals that these competitive challenges are hermeneutic in nature and not primarily technical or ideological. The paper concludes with some suggestions for crisis resolution.


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A World-System Perspective on the Social Sciences
Author(s): Immanuel Wallerstein
Source: The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 3, Special Issue. History and Sociology (Sep., 1976), pp. 343-352
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political Science

A world-system perspective on the social sciences
Immanuel Wallerstein

It is in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth that the organizational structures of the sciences of man which we use today became fixed. In I800 the categories (or 'disciplines') which today are standard - history, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science-did not for the most part exist as concepts, and certainly were not the basis of sharply differentiated groups of teachers and researchers. The some- what tortuous process by which certain combinations of concerns and concepts took particular forms resulted in major 'methodological' debates, which we sometimes still hear about under the rubric, 'philosophy of history'. Among the debates, one of the most influential was that between so-called nomothetic and idiographic knowledge, between the possibility and impossibility of generalizations about human behaviour, between the universalizers and the particularizers.

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