1

Is society a thing apart? Ontological

assumptions of the anti-sociological discourse

Josep Maria Bech
University of Barcelona


ABSTRACT
This paper intends to prove that present-day social and historical thought questions in manifold
ways the actual existence of society and that each of these ontological commitments is ancillary to a
particular epistemic viewpoint. In that respect, several varieties of anti-sociological discourse can be
discerned either within social science or fostered by cultural and historical doctrines. Their shared
purpose has been to dismiss the ontological soundness of terms like society or the social (they
merely designate reified totalities and thus are ontologically void), but they pose the problem of
locating the common ground of their ontological skepticism. To tackle it we have surveyed the
multiple strands of the current anti-sociological discourse, independently of their origin (inside or
outside sociology), their focus (culturalist or historiographic), their procedural tool (mentalism or
textualism), their favored topology (privacy or publicness), their source of efficiency (agentic or
structural), and their actual scope (micro or macro). Our scrutiny reveals that, whereas all surveyed
doctrines put in doubt the ontological consistency of the term society, their particular ontological
concern tends to recede in favor of a prevailing epistemic commitment.

1. The chief commitments of the anti-sociological discourse. An overview
Though the term anti-sociology was coined by Helmut Schelsky in 1959, this event was
only the academic recognition of a persistent and widespread anti-sociological discourse
that had been developing both within and outside sociology and which is still effective in
our days. During more than a century, indeed, this challenging way of thinking has been
steering the course of social thought.
In general terms, the denomination anti-sociology designates a broad-gauged critical
standpoint that has attained a high degree of visibility in our time, as the current cries of
the death of the social attest. This rise has been deftly summarized by Peter Wagner by
pointing out that sociology had its heyday during the 1950s and 1960s, [when] hardly any
text on sociological epistemology could be found that did notimplicitly or explicitlyinsist
on the principled superiority of sociological knowledge. By the 1990s, it had become
2
common to criticize the lack of distinction between sociological and other knowledge of the
social world []. At the same time, the very existence of social structures, and to an ever
greater extent their determining impact on human action, is doubted.
1

The designation social structures, in other words, might be ontologically void according to
a widespread contemporary viewpoint. To elucidate the protracted rise of this ontological
agnosticism in regard of the social, we will focus our attention on the episodes in the
history of social and cultural thought that form a long-standing anti-sociological discourse.
Its contentions have sprung both from within the ranks of sociology and from outsider
thinkers. As Klaus Lichtblau
2
observes, the attempts to criticize sociology have been
supported by quite different motives, and it matters little whether these criticisms have
been raised by the very practitioners of that discipline or by outside observers. What has
been at stake, Lichtblau adds, is whether this critical attitude implies a basic dismissal of
modern sociology as an independent science or, on the contrary, it is an attempt to set up
and vindicate a truly alternative brand of sociology. Most importantly, the controversies
that have plagued the history of sociology, whether emerging from inside the discipline or
generated by an exogenous source, have been fought first and foremost over issues of social
ontology and related aspects of sociological research.
Whereas the anti-sociological discourse that has developed within the discipline of sociology
(or, at least, its disciplinary margins) has been flowing steadily and has focused on
stabilized issues, the derogatory claims fostered by extra-sociological ways of thinking
underwent a dramatic adjustment. At the start it consisted chiefly in criticisms responding
to previous disapprovals from sociologys ranks, of which the historian Charles Seignobos
attacks, discussed below, against the sociologist Franois Simiand were a notorious
instance. Yet these reactive beginnings soon gave way to a progressive acquisition of
autonomy. Without prior provocations, an exogenous anti-sociological discourse has
increasingly belittled the aims, the contentions and the procedures of social sciences. Above
all, however, it has put in doubt the very reality of its subject-matter.
3


1
Peter Wagner, Sociology and contingency: historicizing epistemology. Social Science Information
34/2 (1995), pp. 161 and 193.
2
Klaus Lichtblau, Soziologie und Anti-Soziologie um 1900, in: Soziologie und Anti-Soziologie. Ein
Diskurs und seine Rekonstruktion, ed. by P.-U. Merz-Benz and G. Wagner. Konstanz 2001: UVK, p.
17.
3
Another crucial difference between the intra- and extra-sociologically originated discourses is that
whereas agency was for the former a target among others, a great deal of the latter has increasingly
3
The endogenous anti-sociology, in its turn, insisted on the necessity of disbelieving the
ontological pertinence of sociology. Since its beginnings, this discipline accepted that a
constitutive element of the social sciences is the controversy over their aims and
procedures.
4
In its inception, the reductionist tendencies of mainstream sociology were the
chief ontological tenet of anti-sociology. Reductionism was then viewed as a menace whose
outcome would be the de-humanization of the world. As a reaction, most sociologists
maintained that social facts are not soulless, rule-bound phenomena, explainable only by
means of other social facts. Nor are human beings, in their opinion, role-bearing puppets
governed by social norms and determined by external constraints.
In earlier times this restrictive standpoint within sociology was assumed unreflectively.
(Outside the discipline, paradoxically, sociological reduction was often culturally explained
and criticized. For instance, Ernst Robert Curtius interpreted this prospect of alleged de-
humanization as surrender before European nihilism in his polemics with Karl
Mannheim.
5
) Yet this ingrained anti-sociological animus was so pervasive that it singles
out sociology as possibly the only science having faced a rigorous, institutionalized, long-
term process of self-scrutiny. Its prevailing aims, as a result, were steadily challenged and
this lack of inner consistency drastically redirected the course of the discipline. This in-built
process of self-doubt affecting mainstream sociology, according to Peter Wagner, ensued
from a professional impairment that was due to many causes. Foremost among them are
the imposition of an alien perspective, disregard for the knowledge of the observed, over-
concern with rigor, operationalization and coherence at the expense of insight into the
contexts of action and into the meaning with which actors endow their situations.
6

2. The established views of the anti-sociological discourse

2.1 The term society is ontologically a flatus vocis because it merely designates a
reified totality

seen agency as a prevailing untruth. In overview, the gain in autonomy of the anti-sociological
discourse has paralleled its increasing dismissal of agency.
4
Harald Homan, Widergnger. Zur Aufklrung der Anti-Soziologie am Beispiel Friedrich
Tenbrucks, in: Soziologie und Anti-Soziologie. Ein Diskurs und seine Rekonstruktion, op. cit., p. 61.
5
Ernst Robert Curtius, Soziologie - und ihre Grenzen, in: Der Streit um die Wissenssoziologie, ed.
by V. Meja and N. Stehr. Frankfurt/M. 1982: Suhrkamp.
6
In his commentary to Charles Lindblooms book Inquiry and Change (New Haven 1990: Yale Univ.
Press), appeared on p. 148 of: Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity. London 1994: Routledge.
4
Max Weber and Gabriel Tarde are the two outstanding proto-anti-sociologists. Either by
doubting that society constitutes an underlying structural reality or by criticizing the
notion of ontologically finished social wholes, they surmised that society, as a contemporary
has put it, is merely the sum total of the multiple and diverse relationships between
subjectivities through which meaning arises.
7

According to Max Weber, indeed, social relationships are always modes of action. For
instance, he described communal and associative social relationships, respectively, by
means of the action-connoting terms of Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung. In
accordance with his rejection of organic, holistic, reified conceptions of society, Weber
developed an ideal-type of Sittlichkeit or morality to which society was ancillary. It
entailed an ontologically-enfeebled model of society which saw in it a mere symbol of
consensus. Weber held that individuals usually make a choice to act according to a moral
(sittlich) code, and insofar society was in his view nothing beyond a moral idea guiding the
conduct of life.
8
To prevent any misunderstanding in this respect, Turner and Factor admit
that Weber does not, at least directly, attempt the heroic task of reducing Sitten to choice.
But they warn that at least for the specific cases Weber has in mind, to say that one
chooses to obey or treat political or legal orders as valid, or chooses the ideals one serves, is
not inherently paradoxical.
9

Present-day anti-sociology, by contrast, has a quite different core concern. Its main plight is
how to continue thinking in sociological terms in a historical time allegedly marked by the
end [or: the death] of the social, a portmanteau formula that alludes to societys thorny
ontological consistency. The holders of this criticism agree with Peter Wagner in believing
that the social amounts to the particular perspective developed by sociology in order to
mark its difference as an alternative to carving out a specific realm of social life. In so
doing, according to Wagner sociology focused on sociality as a characteristic of human
beings and, as a consequence of such sociality, on the emergence of a set of social relations
between human beings, also called society.
10


7
Gareth Steadman Jones, The Determinist Fix, History Workshop Journal 42 (1996), p. 28.
8
Vid. Liam Stone, Max Weber and the moral idea of society, Journal of Classical Sociology 10/2
(2010), pp. 123-136.
9
Stephen P. Turner and Regis A. Factor, Max Weber. The Lawyer as Social Thinker. London 1994:
Routledge, pp. 79-80.
10
Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation. Cambridge 2008: Polity, p. 183.
5
(Besides, the formula of the end [or: the death] of the social also laments the
disappearance of the normative questions that an ontologically assured concept of society
would pose. Its straightforward sociological meaning, accordingly, should be distinguished
from its more non-political connotations. It is significant, in this respect, that in the 1990s
Nikolas Rose theorized the death of the social
11
choosing as subject-matter the erosion of
the social logic that buttressed Western welfare states for much of the 20
th
century in the
interest of new arrangements and procedures. According to Rose, indeed, the social is no
longer a key zone, target and objective of strategies of government.
12
)
We have already alluded to the pioneer work of Gabriel Tarde as a significant strand of
proto-anti-sociology. One of its crucial traits was the stress put on the remarkable degree
of variation among and within social processes and the persistent contingency of all social
outcomes. In so doing, Tarde presented an alternative to basic Durkheimian premises. In
particular he challenged the belief on the existence of a social species which is supposed to
transcend the contingency of history and provide an ontologically robust foundation for the
social sciences. Besides, Tarde rejected as well the strong sociological conception of the
social. He understood it as the assumed transcendental dimension that is laid out by
sociology in order to think along universal premises. This transcendental dimension is
ontologically troubling because it starts off, in Tardes view, the presumed necessity and
universality of social science. In other words, it originate s the dismissal of heterogeneity
and contingency that is quite customary within sociology.
In more recent times, Nikolas Rose has significantly contributed to clarifying the death of
the social. He has concluded that the social does not represent an eternal existential
sphere of human sociality. On the contrary, Rose contends, its sets the terms for the way
in which human intellectual, political and moral authorities, in certain places and contexts,
thought about and acted upon their collective experience. On the one hand, sociology and
all the social sciences would play their part in stabilizing the social as a domain sui
generis. On the other hand, however, political forces would now articulate their demand
upon the State in the name of the social.
13
It is important, therefore, to move from the
assumption of an ontologically objective society to the description of how the category of
the social was formed. In fact, the announcements of this death of the social have been

11
Nikolas Rose, The Death of the Social?. Economy and Society 25/3 (1996), pp. 327-356.
12
Ibid., p. 327.
13
Ibid., p. 329. Italics in original.
6
lately so widespread that the social has only dared to come out in the moral domains of
community and civil society.
14

It should be mentioned, besides, that the denunciation of the allegedly un-scientific
character of sociology has also been a recurrent motif in the anti-sociological discourse. It
has been often claimed, indeed, that sociology cannot become a knowledge worthy of that
name and thus it must renounce its scientific aspirations, embracing socio-political
essayism or post-modern skepticism and nihilism.
15
The ensuing attempts to reformulate
the social paradigm imply the abandonment of both object and subject as the basic
components of society. Their use as analytical concepts, in other words, is seen as no longer
valid, and a focus on what might be called constitutive categories of the social is proposed
instead.
Gabriel Tarde was also a precursor of this accusation of un-scientificness, sprung out of
sociologys own ranks. His defense of a radical anti-sociologism within social theory had the
idea of a pure sociology as its main motif.
16
It was grounded on the belief that the
relation of cause to effect, in fact, is not the only element which properly constitutes
scientific knowledge. The condition for a future-oriented sociology, according to Tarde, is to
succeed in substituting true repetitions, oppositions and harmonies for false ones, as all
the other sciences have done before it.
17

In a nutshell, Tarde rejected Durkheims social holism and his search for social laws. He
attempted instead focusing on elements of social interaction ontologically more basic than
acting individuals. His innovative perception hinted at a radical disassembling of the social
into sub- and supra-individual constructions. Bruno Latour has recently emphasized this
originality by pointing out to the two main arguments that Tarde introduced into social
theory: a) the nature and society divide is irrelevant for understanding the world of

14
A suggestive genealogy of this death process is offered by: Jacques Donzelot, Linvention du
social. Essay sur le dclin des passions politiques. Paris 1984: Fayard.
15
See in this respect: Giovanni Busino, Critique du savoir sociologique. Paris 1993: PUF, and Wolf
Lepenies, Die drei Kulturen. Soziologie zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaft. Munich 1985: Hanser.
16
Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de limitation. tude sociologique. Paris 1993: Kim, reprint of the edition:
Paris 1911: Alcan, p. 6.
17
Gabriel Tarde, Les lois sociales. Esquisse dune sociologie. Paris 1898: Alcan, pp. 10 and 11.
Downloadable from: http://bibliotheque.uqac.uquebec.ca/index.htm
7
human interactions; b) the micro/macro distinction stifles any attempt at understanding
how society is being generated.
18

2.2 The term society is ontologically a flatus vocis because all sociologies are
prone to be agency-blind
The history of sociology is interwoven with an array of self-denying attitudes.
19
While this
one-hundred-year-old tradition of criticism regarding sociology, which is a part of sociology
itself
20
is a rarity among human disciplines, it is worth remarking that a number of these
anti-sociological challenges wanted to rescue agency
21
from sociological reductionism. In
their view, human beings independence from society
22
was a capital issue
23
and so the
dispute over agency became a staple feature of mainstream anti-sociological discourse. At a
given moment some upholders of agency seceded from sociology and declared themselves
anti-sociologists, contending that human agency is to be retrieved and preserved, as Alan
Dawe puts it, in the face of sociologys obsolete and imperious scientific pretension, which
cuts us off from the world in which we are also members.
24
They argued instead that social
science must elucidate how human action creates, reproduces and transforms the social
structures and institutions that, in turn, shape the possibilities available to subsequent
agents.
25


18
Bruno Latour, Gabriel Tarde and the end of the Social, in: The Social in Question. New Bearings
in History and the Social Sciences, ed. by P. Joyce. London 2002: Routledge, p. 117.
19
A detailed account can be found in: Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Anti-Sociology - A Conservative View
on Social Sciences. History of Sociology 5/2 (1985), pp. 45-60.
20
Rehberg, Anti-Sociology, op. cit., p. 53.
21
In the present context, agency must be conceived in the established terms, according to which an
agent is a locus of decision and action, and the action, in one way or another, follows from the actors
decisions.
22
Helmut Schelsky, Ortsbestimmung der Deutschen Soziologie. Dsseldorf 1959: Diederichs, p. 117.
23
One of the most recurring anti-sociologist arguments admits that sociology was a legitimate
science of a class-bound society typical of the 19th century, but also contends that the manifold
improvements of society in the 20
th
century has made social science redundant. The locus classicus of
this argument is: Helmut Schelsky, Ortsbestimmung der Deutschen Soziologie. Dsseldorf 1959:
Diederichs. An alternative position was Tenbrucks assertion that society developed thanks to the
dissolution of originally autonomous units: free cities, status groups, feudal authorities, old
universities, guilds, etc.
24
Alan Dawe, Theories of Social Action, in: A History of Sociological Analysis, ed. by T. B.
Bottomore and R. Nisbert. London 1979: Heinemann, p. 409.
25
Classical anti-sociology, in sum, wanted to preserve (or recover) the modernity of sociology one
way or another, thereby understanding, in Peter Wagners expression, that sociology was modern
in the sense that it accepted the assumptions and outcomes of the revolutions: there was an
autonomy of human action that could not be subjected to imposed laws. (Cf. Wagner, Modernity as
Experience and Interpretation, op. cit., p. 183.)
8
Most anti-sociologists, however, suspected that in mainstream sociology the balance of this
dynamics (the interplay of agency and structure, choice and constraint, freedom and fate)
tilts in favor of structure and constraint. In this respect, both Friedrich Tenbruck and
Helmut Schelsky contended that sociology contrives an impoverishment of the social by
eliminating free choice. To understand the ontological dimension of such impoverishment,
and thus to gauge the ontological purport of the anti-sociological discourse, it seems
worthwhile to pit Schelskys position, outwardly uninterested in ontological issues, against
Tenbrucks far more ontologically-involved point of view.
To begin with, Helmut Schelsky took an externalist stance and insisted on gaining a
standpoint in a horizon of meaning placed outside sociology.
26
His anti-sociological
program was both a rejection of a sociology that had forsaken its enlightening vocation, and
a personal commitment (one of his last works was titled Back glances of an anti-sociologist
[Rckblicke eines Anti-Soziologen]) to a specific blueprint for the future of the discipline.
27

Above all, he feared that sociology might become a key science of the 20
th
century. In his
view, a sociology able to control social change would shape the self-conception of a huge
amount of people. Norms relative to social conditions would then replace all rules of
personal ethic and foster a view of people as mere products of their social environment. The
ultimate meaning of individual action would then be solely understood through the prism of
social norms.
Friedrich Tenbruck, on the contrary, adopted an internalist point of view, far more attuned
to the ontological tenets of anti-sociology. His peculiar brand of cultural sociology, inspired
by Max Weber and occasionally presented as an alternative to Schelskys trademarked
anti-sociology, suggested a self-reflective dive in the historical and cultural dimensions of

26
Schelsky, Ortsbestimmung der Deutschen Soziologie, op. cit., p. 98.
27
Anti-sociology can also be read along the lines established by Peter Wagner. In his book Modernity
as Experience and Interpretation (Cambridge 2008: Polity) he argues that in the late 19
th
century
intellectual, political and institutional configuration, the ground was certainly prepared for an
interpretation of the contemporary social world that distanced itself from the prevailing national
culture. The proponents of the emerging sociology, indeed, in many cases found abroad the
resources to develop their views. Consequently, says Wagner, sociology could either develop as a
counter-discourse to the prevailing one in each national culture [] or these borrowings could have
proliferated to such an extent that a truly international discourse of sociology emerged.
Nevertheless, no fully international discourse emerged [and] instead we see intellectual struggles
over the interpretation of the contemporary social situation. Wagner concludes by pointing out to
the similar lines along which we can read the opposition to sociology that arose in many
countries. The protesters, in his view, were simultaneously making a case for a national tradition,
their own, and against an opponent whose nation-transcending potential they well recognizedand
feared. (Ibid., pp. 180-182)
9
society. In fact, Tenbruck extended the tendency to place sociology in a general historic-
political context that had been started by Treitschke, Weber and Simmel. He contended
that sociology had somehow created and formed
28
the very society it purports to
investigate. Social theories, in a word, co-determine the very reality they attempt to possess
intellectually. Their universalistic aim of general statements, true for all societies,
29

according to Tenbruck could only yield an inhumane outcome. Sociology dissolves human
beings in data, factors, traits, indicators, functions, roles, behavior patterns so that there
is no place left for the person. Therefore, notions such as responsibility, offence,
obligation, duty, freedom, will and value standards either are left aside or shrunk into
jargon.
30

3. The growth of anti-sociological discourse and its steady attainment of
autonomy
An early instance of anti-sociological discourse sprang out of the historians disparagement
of Durkheimian sociology and the ensuing counter-attacks, a debate where Charles
Seignobos polemic with Franois Simiand occupied center stage. As is well known,
disciplinary competition in early 20
th
century France fostered the attacks of historical
researchers against the then budding social sciences. mile Durkheims sociology, in
particular, had been programmatically criticizing the historians procedures as presentist,
individualist, nomophobic, and hence un-rigorous, antiscientific and inadequate. By
contrast, he advocated positivist targets and a conception of theory that explained human
demeanor in its totality. This antagonism started off a celebrated debate that confronted
Simiand, a disciple of Durkheim, with Seignobos, a well-established professor of modern
history. In Simiands view, historians are subservient of a superficial chronology, dependent
on the ideology of the origin, too much bound to a political approach to events, and
committed to an individualism that ignores collective attitudes or shared determining
factors. The historianss riposte by way of Seignoboss arguments contended that the social
sciences could not be objective, lacked any comprehensiveness in regard to human behavior,
and suffered from the poverty of quantitative approaches. They denied, in sum, that
sociology could be of any help to historiography. This debate prefigured the anti-sociological
discourse as it has been practiced decades-long from outside sociology.

28
Friedrich Tenbruck, Der Neue Turm zu Babel. Rheinischer Merkur of March 14, 1980, p. 23.
29
Friedrich Tenbruck, Die unbewltigten Sozialwissenschaften oder Die Abschaffung des Menschen.
Graz 1984: Styria, p. 180.
30
Ibid., p. 38.
10
Seen from a more ontology-sensitive horizon of thought, however, anti-sociology means
that society is an empty designation or, in other words, that this term just names a
pseudo-reality. The consequences of this ontological restriction are quite dire for sociology,
because doubting the reality ascribed to society involves in fact the rejection of social
science in toto. This wide-embracing standpoint, precisely, has led Volker Kruse to see
anti-sociology as the primary dismissal, affectually and/or rationally grounded, of
sociology as science, its subject-matter, its methodology, and its cognitive ideal.
31
In
particular, the wholesale rejection of sociologys subject matter amounts to seeing in
society an epiphenomenal, in-no-way-substantial pseudo-reality that must rely on
something else for its very existence. Indeed an inchoate anti-sociology is already at work
when society is seen as dependent and derivative. Then, of course, the very relevance of
social contexts to all kinds of explanations is called into question.
Such questioning becomes aggravated when the formerly hegemonic society-centered
modes of explanation face drastic revisionist currents that assign autonomy and
constitutive authority to culture, language, institutions, or the state. Set in this wider
prospect, therefore, the term anti-sociology registers the process that has been labeled
the dissolution of the social.
32
The alternative procedure, however, which consists in
reifying society into the ontologically-warranted ground of social science explanations,
according to most authors has become (in Charles Tillys words) the chief Pernicious
Postulate of the 20
th
century social thought. Anti-sociology, in a few words, also endorses
Tillys condemnation of, in his view, the capital offense committed by sociology: the
postulate that society is a thing apart.
33

Is society a thing apart, indeed? Max Weber notoriously said that whenever the light of
cultural problems moves on new concepts will need to be built for that evolving world. One
century ago he suggested that objectivity in the social sciences is possible as far as there
is a relatively stable social world and, alongside it, a relatively common interpretation of
that world.
34
Since the times of classical anti-sociological theory, admittedly, the light of

31
Volker Kruse, Max Weber, der Antisoziologe, in: Soziologie und Anti-Soziologie. Ein Diskurs und
seine Rekonstruktion, op. cit., p. 38. (Our stress, JMB)
32
See Scott Lash and John Urry, The Dissolution of the Social, in: Sociological Theory in
Transition, ed. by M. Wardell and S. Turner. Winchester, Mass. 1986: Allen & Unwin, pp. 95-109.
33
Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York 1984: Russell Sage
Foundation, p. 11.
34
In Webers wake, precisely, it has been argued (vid. Wagner in the chapter 9 of Modernity as
Experience and Interpretation, op. cit.) that the history of sociology is a history of varieties of
interpretations of modernity. The expectations of anti-sociology, in his view, arise from the relative
11
cultural problems has indeed moved on. In consequence, the anti-sociological attitude
originated within sociology has given way to a heterogeneous array of theories dismissing
the very subject-matter of sociology which, for the most part, arise in extra-sociological
domains.
In the sections that follow we shall prove that the ontological assumptions of the anti-
sociological discourse are heavily dependent from one of the two separate branches,
respectively of culturalist and historiographical bent, in which its revisionist thrust splits.
Our guiding conviction in this task is that only a meta-theoretical overview may aid us to
understand the ontological doubts regarding society, for we agree with Jeffrey Alexander
and Jason Masts claim that meta-theories are indispensable as an orienting device, for
they think out problems in a general manner and, in so doing, provide more specific,
explanatory thinking. They are quite right, in our view, in stating that the challenge is to
move downward on the scientific continuum, from the presuppositions of meta-theory to the
models and empirical generalizations upon which explanation depends.
35

4. The ontological assumptions of the anti-sociological discourse:
the culturalist viewpoint

4.1 High modern cultural theories buttress the anti-sociological discourse
Redefining the social as the cultural has been a decisive trait of the anti-sociological
discourse in several theoretical sectors during the past decades. The origins of this
ontological revisionism are quite clear-cut. In the wake of the historicist tradition, enemy of
both mechanisms (anti-nomothetism) and organicisms (anti-developmentalism), the
classical anti-sociological argument fought the adoption by sociology of natural sciences
metaphors and methods. By contrast, the main anti-sociological argument of present time
highlights the difficulty of transiting from the un-meaningful, not-intentional social reality,
to meaning-lead, understandable action. The ontological consequences of this precautionary
attitude are quite at hand. It distrusts the naturalism-inspired probing into a social reality
that might exist beyond or underneath culture. In this sense, the proponents of the

consolidation of organized modernity between 1890 and 1960, which led to a separation of sociology
as an academic discipline from philosophical and historical concerns.
35
Jeffrey C. Alexander and Jason L. Mast, Introduction, in: Social Performance: Symbolic Action,
Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. by J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen and J. L. Mast. Cambridge 2006:
CUP, p. 3.
12
cultural turn have often used the concept of discursive practice to discredit and challenge
the legitimacy of social research.
Social theory, as a result, has in part metamorphosed into cultural theory. From this new
vantage point, the orderliness of the social world appears to be the upshot of symbolic
structures. There is a tendency to understand the social as an exclusive result of
individual-transcending symbolic orders like languages or discourses. After the cultural
turn, as Andreas Reckwitz puts it, the social or material functions as the supplement, as
an element added to something already complete in itself: to culture.
36
The anti-
sociological standpoint of the culturalist mindset, incidentally, has found in the historian
Roger Chartier a skillful supporter. In his view, mainstream sociology furnishes an
inadequate account of social arrangements because it does not register the distance of any
social practice from the cultural model that generates it. Chartier claims that the
differentiated appropriation of pre-existent cultural models (which means the same
goods, the same ideas and the same gestures) gives rise to the homologies that constitute
the social groups and to which sociology has been steadily indifferent. He stresses the
multiple ways in which a cultural model may be used and that, in his view, assist in re-
defining cultural stratifications. On this score, he claims, every dispositive of coercion and
control generates an array of tactical moves that attempt to blunt and defuse it.
37

Despite all the differences in their conceptualization, what from now on we will name high
modern cultural theories
38
ascribe to the social no independent ontological reality. They
see human actions as resulting from collective symbolic orders which themselves are in fact
the last foundation of the so-called social world and thus cannot be derived from a more
fundamental social stratum. For this high modern culturalism, in Reckwitzs words, the
social is not separate from the cultural but largely is the cultural, i.e. it is identical with
symbolic orders.
39
It is therefore not surprising that most cultural theories, according to

36
Andreas Reckwitz, The Status of the Material in Theories of Culture. Journal for the Theory of
Social Behaviour 32/2 (2002), p. 195.
37
Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Princeton 1988: Princeton
Univ. Press, p. 183. Most texts here asembled were originally published in: Roger Chartier, Lectures
et lecteurs dans la France dAncient Rgime, Paris 1987: Seuil.
38
This happy denomination and its cousin high modern culturalism denote the doctrines that
attempt to understand the social as an exclusive outcome of symbolic orders (languages, discourses,
texts and the like) which transcend the individual human being and operate behind his or her
back. They have been suggested by Andreas Reckwitz in: Toward a Theory of Social Practices, A
Development in Cultural Theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory 5/2 (2002), pp. 243-263.
39
Andreas Reckwitz, The Status of the Material in Theories of Culture, op. cit., p. 203. Yet in
other places this author mellows this drastic appraisal and moves away from maintaining that
13
this author, contrive to transform the theoretical field and the ways of thinking in the
human sciences. After all, they aim at undermining the current assumptions, imposed by
the social sciences, about a pre-discursive level. This is the level of the pre-cultural, not-
meaningful, formal, structural, material, or linked to an universal rationality, whether it
emerges in the subject or actor, or in language, reason, power, economy, technology, human
nature or social differentiation.
40
Since culture actually displaces society in cultural
theorizing, it is fitting to conclude that this anti-sociological thrust ensures in fact the
ontological disappearance of the social.
41

4.2 High modern cultural theories re-locate the social
High modern cultural theorizing claims that there are no social properties or entities
different from cultural properties or entities. All social features, in a word, can be reduced
to cultural traits.
42
The defenders of culturalism understand this reduction as being either
conceptual or scientific. They view their theories as conceptually reductive when they
claim that converting the usual descriptions of social entities and events into cultural
descriptions entails a gain in accuracy without any loss of meaning. They deem their
doctrines scientifically reductive when they avoid affirming that social and cultural
phenomena correlate and maintain instead that a social fact is nothing more than a
cultural event.
43
The obvious ground for this reductive confidence has been the successes of

cultural theorizing redefines the social as the cultural. Indeed, he merely affirms on occasion that
in cultural theories social order appears embedded in collective cognitive and symbolic structures,
in a shared knowledge which enables a socially shared way of ascribing meaning to the world. Cf.
Reckwitz, Toward a Theory of Social Practices, op. cit., p. 246.
40
Andreas Reckwitz, Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien. Zur Entwicklung eines
Theorieprograms, 2nd ed. Gttingen 2008: Velbrck, p. 705.
41
It is a remarkable paradox, however, that some currents of classical sociology came closer to
overcoming the deficiencies denounced by the cultural turn than most of its upholders when they
conceded that language is relatively autonomous in respect to the social reality it purports to
represent, while claiming that human agency mediates this connection.
42
In fact, high modern culturalists consider that the expression is reducible to, when applied to
the social world, amounts to is causally produced by and hence comes to is explained by.
43
In general, however, culturalist reductionism seems to contradict the current philosophical
understanding of reduction, which applies when a new theory appears to be doing all the explicative
work that in former times another theory carried out, albeit at a less elemental level. This was the
case, for instance, when statistical mechanics managed to make intelligible Boyles law of the gases.
Mainstream reductionism, indeed, from an ontological point of view is a deflationary procedure
(which of course culturalist reductionism is not), since at bottom attempts to turn away from specific
phenomena , at first sight essential in fulfilling the truth conditions of a given statement, in favor of
other, more basic phenomena. For instance, the surmise that biological facts do not exist as such, led
to reducing biology to chemistry, and a similar derogatory conviction concerning chemical facts
contrived the reduction of chemistry to physics.
14
reduction in the physical and natural sciences. Reduction has been there equally
triumphant whether as eliminative reduction (the reduced notions no longer sustain any
real meaning, as instanced by witches and phlogiston) or as retentive reduction (the
meaning of the reduced entities has been preserved somehow, as it happened, for instance,
with temperature and genes). This means, in a few words, that reduction not necessarily
amounts to ontological elimination.
This ambiguous result demands that we closely inspect the competing modalities of
reduction that form the backbone of present-day anti-sociological discourse. As it is
customary in the domain of the hard sciences, when exploring the reductive procedures of
high modern cultural theory we must distinguish between eliminative and retentive
reduction. From the viewpoint of eliminative reduction, culturalist concepts like symbolic
or cognitive orders (discourse, language, text, etc.) render ontologically vacuous all
sociological notions, which accordingly must be expelled from our vocabulary. When we
speak of class, institution or role, for instance, we are not talking about anything
ontologically real. As a consequence, we should drop all kinds of sociological vocabulary,
replacing them by culture-related concepts. (Our social vocabulary should thus be pruned
in the same way as notions like witches, electromagnetic ether, the planet Vulcan or the
Martian channels were expelled in earlier times from our everyday or scientific
vocabularies.
44
) According to retentive reduction, on the contrary, we may continue using
sociological concepts on the condition that we understand them as mere discourse. This
moderate reductionism is deftly exemplified by Geoff Eley and Keith Nields defense of
classical sociological analysis. Granting the compatibility of the concept of class with
prevailing discursive references, they affirm that class discursively understood is a better
starting point for the study of class formation than the classical ones of economics and
social structure. It should be borne in mind that, according to these authors, class
emerged historically as a set of discursive claims about the social world.
45


44
The anti-sociological discourse adopts this eliminative reductivism in the wake of dominant
theories of the past that we now despise as false. For instance: the crystalline spheres of antique
and medieval astronomy; the humoral theory in medicine; the theory of the effluvia to explain
static electricity; the catastrophist geology to explain the Deluge; the caloric to explain
temperature variations; the physiological vital forces; circular inertia; or spontaneous generation.
Likewise, doctrines like alchemy or astrology do not deserve now any credit (their core concepts
resist being reduced to those of established sciences) and thus most people agree that they must be
eliminated.
45
Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, Farewell to the Working Class?, International Labor and Working-
Class History 57 (2000), pp. 18 and 19. Italics in the original.
15
4.3 The ontological locus of the social in cultural theories
The major problem that high modern cultural theories have to face is setting up the place
of the social in terms of symbolic and cognitive structures. No wonder, therefore, if as a
consequence the social appears re-allocated in quite unexpected places or loci. The main
re-assignments contrived by cultural theories
46
are as follows: 1) According to culturalist
mentalism (objectivist variety), the social is in the human mind, for mentalisms have
given up the notion of agents in different ways. Mind or (pre)consciousness, therefore,
replaces the role of the social agent. Mentalist objectivism rests upon the dualism between
outward acts of behavior and mind as an internal self-producing array of schemes. 2)
Culturalist mentalism (subjectivist variety) locates the social in the intentional acts of
consciousness. In mentalist subjectivism, action results from consciousness and agents are
ultimately intentional consciousnesses. In both cases, there is a problematic link between
mind and action. 3) For culturalist textualism, on the contrary, the social is outside the
mind. It dwells in chains of signs, symbols, discourse or simply texts. Textualism presents
the agent as a specific cultural definition in discourse, as a discursive location of the subject
or a simplifying inner-discursive ascription of social episodes to individual producers. 4) In
its turn, intersubjectivism places the social in interactions, particularly those cast in
ordinary language. The idea of an agent comes nearest to the classical (norm-oriented)
theory of action, though in a linguistically enlightened version: agents are but interacting
communicators. The foremost notion is that there are agents who in an assemblage of
interactions follow pragmatic and semantic rules. 5) Practice theory locates the social is in
a series of nexuses of doings and sayings (Theodor Schatzki dixit) appearing at different
places and times and carried out by different bodies/minds. Social practices performed by
agents inhabit primarily the social world. Agents, as it were, consist in the execution of
practices, which includes both bodily and mental routines. As carriers of a practice, they are
neither autonomous nor judgmental dopes who conform to norms. On the contrary, they
understand the world and themselves, and employ skilled and motivated knowledge. 6)
Finally, according to actor-network theory the social dwells in a relational reality situated
between human and material, non-human actors, all of them relationally constituted. As it
is well-known, this doctrine does not distinguish a priori between humans (quasi-subjects)
and others (quasi-objects).

46
The culture-theoretical cartography set out by Reckwitz in Die Transformation der
Kulturtheorien, op. cit. inspires the following systematization of cultural theories.
16
Let us examine in some detail these re-allocations of the social by the high modern
cultural theories which form the culturalist branch of the anti-sociological discourse.
Objectivist mentalism as anti-sociology. Structuralism, applied to the social sciences by
Claude Lvi-Strauss in paradigmatic way, is the branch of contemporary cultural theory
that pre-eminently re-defines the social as the cultural. This mutation is so deep that it
rules out an ontologically deeper social level from which symbolic orders could be derived.
In Lvi-Strauss words, social phenomena cannot be analytically isolated.
47
He claims that
the place of symbolic orders is within the collective unconscious and, in consequence, the
horizon of the social is identical with the horizon of collective mental qualities. To decipher
culture we must contrast the conscious and the unconscious dimension of phenomena.
However, this opposition lacks symmetry and balance; whereas the conscious dimension
acts as a static buffer for a multiplicity of unconscious elements, these express the dynamic
character and also the inner cohesion of cultural systems.
48
Systems of signs are thus
mental structures according to Lvi-Strauss. Since these classificatory schemes determine
what can ever become an object within language and action, culture remains the true
enigmatic problem of the human sciences.
49
Lvi-Strauss affirms, in short, that there is a
continuous link between the natural and the cultural orders and that in consequence
society is a term devoid of ontological reference.
The real momentum of Lvi-Strauss structuralist program is that it placed ethnology at
the centre of the human sciences, thereby reversing its traditional position of subordination
to sociology. It is so far-reaching, indeed, that his proposal of a perspectival revolution
would transform the very parameters of sociological theory.
50
The force of his claim, to be
sure, should not be downplayed, since at bottom he maintains that social phenomena are
not analytically identifiable and that culture remains the truly enigmatic problem of the
human sciences.
51

Discursive textualism as anti-sociology. Whereas for the theorist of agency the unintended
consequences of action appear as a quandary, for Michel Foucault, whose earlier work has

47
Claude Lvi-Strauss, Lanthropologie devant lhistoire. Annales 15 (1960), p. 630.
48
Ibid., p. 637.
49
Ibid., p. 630.
50
Christopher Johnson, Anthropology and sociology: from Mauss to Lvi-Strauss. Modern and
Contemporary France 5/4 (1997), p. 430.
51
Angelo Torre, Antropologia sociale e ricerca storica, in: La storiografia contemporanea. Indirizzi
e problemi, ed. by P. Rossi, Milan 1987: Saggiatore, p. 211.
17
been predominantly interpreted as discursive textualism,
52
this issue becomes a non-
problem. He tackles it in terms of a relationship of non-correspondence between discourses,
decisive for the formation of social reality and their historical effects. In his own words, we
may live in a world of programs, but the world does not follow a program. In general
terms, however, Foucault did not deny the possibility of explaining discursive practices by
social determinations. In essence he contends that practices have a logic of their own whose
source is not some universal feature of minds but the organization of institutional practices
themselves. He was not inclined to study this issue, though he conceded that it posed a
difficulty connected
53
to his own preoccupations. Historians conceive society as the
general horizon of their analysis [whereas] my general theme is not society but the
discourse of the true and the false.
54
Though in all Foucaults writings the relationship
between discursive and non-discursive events is ultimately central, in Barry Smarts
pointed commentary to Foucaults anti-sociological leanings, this author also concedes that
there has been a shift away from the systems of constraints interior to the human sciences
(the discursive level) to a concentration upon the relations of power that made the human
sciences at once possible and necessary (the non-discursive level).
55

Foucaults crucial view on this topic is that the subject matter of sociology, since
Durkheims times, is the social as constraint, an entity he sees akin to the disciplinary,
i.e. the system of compulsions that results in coercion. In the disciplinary society, he claims,
power does not take the visible form of hierarchy and sovereignty, as happened until the
18
th
century. Thereafter, power operated through the habits instilled in social groups and
took on the everyday form of the norm. As Foucault puts it, it conceals itself as power and
gives itself out as society. In his view, therefore, society is the system of disciplinings. The
ontologically real subject matter of sociology (society, social structure, social relationships),
while emerging as given, is actually the product of relations and strategies of power. Not
only is sociology, in a word, an upshot of the disciplinary system, but in addition it has a
say in the system of power and knowledge relations that suppress and subjugate.

52
Viewing Foucault as discursive textualist is of course a controversial tenet, and the opposite
arguments by Philipp Sarasin, especially in his Michel Foucault zur Einfhrung (Hamburg 2010:
Junius) are quiet convincing. Still, it is a common practice to tilt in favor of discourse the ever-
delicate balance, always noticeable in his work, between the logic of practices that define categories
and re-define properties, malfunctions or even potentials, and the source of these logics, which he
locates on the very organization of institutional practices.
53
Michel Foucault, Limpossible prison, ed. by M. Perrot, Paris 1980: Seuil, p. 29.
54
Ibid., p. 55
55
Barry Smart, Foucault, Sociology and the Problem of Human Agency. Theory and Society 11/2
(1982), p. 129.
18
Symbolic textualism as anti-sociology. Another variety of cultural theory that re-locates
the social in the cultural and therefore insists that symbolic orders cannot be deduced
from a social stratum ontologically more profound, is the approach that may plausibly be
called symbolic textualism. Clifford Geertzs account of culture as text represents an
eminent instance of this mindset. He criticizes all attempts to situate symbolic orders in
mental structures and, instead, localizes them on a public horizon of extra-mental
symbols.
56
Beyond doubt, indeed, Geertz has demonstrated more clearly than anyone
before that social action should be considered as embedded in an implicit cultural text.
57

In Geertzs anthropological thick descriptions, social order appears as a mere outcome of
sign systems. Both material entities and events such as Balinese cockfights or funerals are
seen as products of symbolic orders. Their only reality consists in being objects of
knowledge that obtain their cultural relevance from their symbolic value. They stand for,
so to say, phenomena as diverse as social conflicts or religious rituals. Geertzs sternly
dismissal of sociology, therefore, should not come as a surprise. Social reality, in his view,
cannot be accounted for as an ontologically autonomous whole. It can only be conceived as
the assembly of meanings generated by its members. Therefore, since institutional order
springs from cultural order, the anthropologists main task should be to elucidate how
intentions and actions become transformed in culture. For Geertz culture was pervasive,
ineffable and irreduciblethe point of origin of social life.
58
A culture, according to Geertz,
is the peculiar way by which the elements of a given context confer order to the mental
world of people and in so doing institute the meanings that guide their actions.
Practice theory as anti-sociology. Sociology has persistently scrutinized the pre-experiential
ground of cultural representations, believing that one of its primary tasks was to explore
this material base underlying culture. Several pre-cultural entities have been suggested
in order to fulfill this role, chiefly among them social differentiation, productive forces, or
social institutions. In all cases, however, the base/superstructure dichotomy has been
preserved. High modern cultural theories reject this approach and instead scrutinize the
cultural constitution of the surmised social bases. In consequence, culturalism appears
diametrically opposed to the more physicalist style of explanation favored by the social
sciences.

56
For many interpreters of Foucault, his archeology of knowledge represents a prominent variety
of cultural semanticism because it holds that social order, after all, results from sign systems.
57
Philip Smith, The Balinese Cockfight Decoded. Cultural Sociology 2/2 (2008), p. 181.
58
Ibid., p. 181.
19
Nevertheless, in the last decade of the 20
th
century the notion of materiality made an
unexpected appearance in cultural theory. In a first step, the focus of theoretical interest
shifted from cognitive constructivism and textual structures of meaning to social practices.
This reorientation gave rise to the theories of practice, whose anti-sociological implications
will be explored in the subsequent paragraphs. A further move extended to objects and
artifacts this interest for the embodied materiality of practices. As a result, the material
dimension of culture expanded dramatically. If at the outset it seemed to dwell in the
practical demeanor of human bodies, thereafter it was located in culture-soaked but utterly
material artifacts. This has been the origin of an important support of the anti-sociological
discourse, viz. the actor-network theory, as we shall prove below.
For practice theory, above all, social reality amounts to nothing more than nexuses and
sequences of social practices. The symbolic orders which preside over cultural theory, in
this view, turn out to be forms of practical understanding whose very reason dtre is
precisely to organize practices. Every social practice has cultural or discursive conditions
of existence; social practices, in so far as they depend on meaning for their operations and
effects, take place within discourse, are discursive.
59
Practice has dire anti-sociological
undertones because it is conceived as a repetitive bodily activity, held together byand
expressinga socially standardized way of understanding and knowing. In Theodor
Schatzkis words, a practice is a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of
doings and sayings,
60
organized by a social understanding of these doings and sayings
themselves.
61

The main dessert of practice theories is that they are consistent with many sociological
claims without succumbing to relativism. Their basic insight, according to Andreas
Reckwitz, is that both social order and individuality [] result from practices.
62
This
author defines practice with unsurpassable limpidity: A practice is a routinised type of

59
Stuart Hall, The Centrality of Culture, Media and Cultural Regulation, ed. by K. A. Thopmson,
London 1997: Sage, p. 226.
60
Theodor Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social.
Cambridge 1996: CUP, p. 211.
61
The notion of practice means, at bottom, the skillful shaping or molding of the same normative
codes that according to alternative accounts can only be repeatedly acquiesced and obeyed. This
claim implies, therefore, that a basic ingredient of action originates outside it. After all, practice
consists in making an action pertinent by linking it with a specifically legitimizing instance. This
approach allows an insight in the way rules originate in actions. A decisive constituent of any action,
in effect, are the hints and clues it sends to the same context that ultimately decides upon the very
meaning of the action.
62
Reckwitz, Toward a theory of social practices, op. cit., pp. 245-246.
20
behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily
activities, forms of mental activities, things and their use, a background knowledge in the
form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge.
63
It is
important to note, though, that the recurrence of these bodily behaviors presupposes that
they are the outcome of subjective ascriptions of meaning performed by actors. One basic
apercu of practice theory is this analytical distinction between collective patterns and
subjective attributions of meaning.
Practice theory insists on seeing social practices as bodily and mental routines. Thus,
mental activities appear socially routinized whereas the individual domain amounts to
the unique crossing of different mental and bodily routines both in one mind/body and in
the interpretative approach to this constellation of crossings. In a nutshell: a practice is a
routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things
are described and the world is understood. To say that practices are social practices is
indeed a tautology: A practice is social, as it is a type of behaving and understanding that
appears at different locales and at different points of time and is carried out by different
body/minds.
64
This view indicates that practices are coordinated entities but also require
performance in order to exist at all. Therefore, if a performance presupposes a practice,
practice presupposes performances as well.
65

Practice theory, in conclusion, patently belongs to the anti-sociological discourse. By linking
the collective representations to interiorized schemata
66
and not to concretely observed,
specific demeanors, as the historian Angelo Torre observes, the relationship between
schemata and reality does not lose its habitual character, authentically and unavoidably

63
Ibid., p. 249.
64
Ibid., p. 250.
65
In Reckwitzs words, a practice represents a pattern which can be filled out by a multitude of
single and often unique actions reproducing the practice [.] The single individualas a bodily and
mental agentthen acts as the carrier (Trger) of a practiceand, in fact, of many different
practices which need not be coordinated with one another. Thus, she or he is not only a carrier of
patterns of bodily behavior, but also of certain routinized ways of understanding, knowing how and
desiring. These conventionalized mental activities of understanding, knowing how and desiring are
necessary elements and qualities of a practice in which the single individual participates, not
qualities of the individual. Ibid., pp. 249-50.
66
Sherry Ortner has clarified this point. In her opinion, practice theory seeks to explain the
relationship(s) that obtain between human action, on the one hand, and some global entity which we
may call the system, on the other. [] Society and history are not simply sums of ad hoc responses
and adaptations to particular stimuli, but are governed by organizational and evaluative schemes. It
is these (embodied, of course, within institutional, symbolic, and material forms) that constitute the
system. Sherry B. Ortner, Theory in Anthroplogy since the Sixties. Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 26/1 (1984), p. 148.
21
normative, since perceptions generate strategies and practices that prevail upon the social
actors. Thus, social reality is viewed as a fractured place (sede di lacerazioni), whose
generative processes, however, are deemed irrelevant.
67
Seeing society as a fractured
place is doubtless a fitting way of describing its ontological deficit.
Actor-network theory as anti-sociology. As is well known, the actor-network approach has
been developed within the sociology of science. It emerged from the surmise that
sociological accounts have neglected the material or natural elements that buttress the
practical supremacy of science. The anti-sociological stance of the actor-network approach
of Bruno Latour et alii
68
defends a relational ontology that does not make a priori
distinctions between humans and others, or between transcendental reality and
construction, and hence re-distributes agency among human and non-human actors. The
only admissible social reality, accordingly, is the constructed world between human and
material agency. Human agents and others are respectively quasi-subjects and quasi-
objects, and there is no split between them. This doctrine distances itself, as a
consequence, from both social constructionism and humanist sociology. The issues they
attempt to explain in terms of human actors, according to the actor-network theory,
demand the collaboration with non-humans.
This approach defends a radically relational ontology. A set of relations to other entities
gives to any object its properties as well as its ontological status. Not only the human actors
but also all entities are relationally constituted. The attributes of all things (including their
capacity to act) are relational attributes. In particular, the human species is neither a
hard transcendent reality nor a soft social construction, because in a relational grid
social actors do not face social structures as open projects confronting coercive structures.
The main problem posed by the actor-network approach, however, is to ground sociology
upon the interaction of all relevant entities in social settings, not just between human
subjects. It seems difficult, at first sight, to insist on a resemblance between humans and
non-humans without a philosophical groundwork evocative of the all-embracing systems of
the past and contrary to the differentiating strands of thought that currently prevail. The

67
Angelo Torre, Percorsi della pratica 1966-1995, in: Quaderni storici 90 (1995), p. 811. This
statement arises from a commentary on Roger Chartiers Les usages de limprim, Paris 1992 :
Fayard.
68
Cfr. from Bruno Latour: Science in Action, Cambridge MA 1987: Harvard Univ. Press, and
Pandoras Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge MA 1999: Harvard Univ.
Press. Also from Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific
Facts, Beverly Hills, CA 1979: Sage.
22
actor-network approach admits that its gains in cognitive reliability are at the cost of
banning sociological purchase. If even relationally constructed agency cannot be limited to
social actors alone, and the relations among them depend on the agency of non-social
actors, then sociological accounts are groundless. Their elucidations are intrinsically
incomplete if non-human actors are crucial for human relations. Relationally-constituted,
hybrid actors produce both society and nature, and for that reason society cannot be an
ontologically sound reality.
Sociologists used to consider social structure as the initial condition that allowed further
explanatory work. In the actor-network approach structural accounts are discouraged
because the characteristically structural concept of network appears ubiquitously at the
end of the scrutiny but never at the beginning. It supplies the foundation for a sociological
account that, paradoxically, it cannot perform, for it envisages all actions as processes upon
relations that are also effected by relations. In other words, social reality cannot exclusively
develop from grid connections. If there is nothing but networks, then structures are but an
intertwining of confined interactions, and social reality, as a result, viewed from an
ontological viewpoint appears a mere fantasy.
5. The ontological assumptions of the anti-sociological discourse:
the historiographical viewpoint
Revisionist social history as anti-sociology. The culturalist upheaval that took place in
many human disciplines, by the mid-1980s made itself fiercely felt in historiography. At
that time, in effect, the preeminence was shifting away from social history to the various
forms of cultural history.
69
New subject matters that social historians had not researched
were then opened up and the usual borrowing from the social sciences was redirected
towards anthropology and literary theory. In the eloquent words of Geoff Eley: Most
important of all, social explanation and social causality lost their hold in the imagination.
Historians became ever more skeptical about the answers social analysis seemed able to

69
A note of caution is here in order. According to some authors, the cultural turn that occurred
around 1980 and which in the historiographic domain replaced social history by a new cultural
history, surreptitiously took over the organizing gestures of the approach it aimed at supplanting.
(Richard Biernacki, Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History, in: Beyond the Cultural
Turn, ed. by V. E. Bonnell and L. Hunt. Berkeley 1999: Univ. of California Press, p. 63) A concealed
continuity, therefore, may have linked the two allegedly opposed mindsets, social and cultural. The
dramatic cultural turn in historiography, to sum up, may have rested on an unacknowledged
permanence.
23
deliver. Materialist explanations based on social structure now seemed to oversimplify the
complexities of human action.
70

Yet at first sight no discipline is more akin to history than is sociology. Historys assiduous
leanings from sociological theories and concepts attest this overt affinity. In its many forms,
social history seems to be the strongest ally sociology could ever dream. For that reason,
social historians have persisted in their indifference towards the exceptional, the singular
or the specific, the mounting tide of micro and cultural history notwithstanding. They carry
on, in the words of Jrgen Kocka, convictions and practices not shared by all historians
because they are not primarily interested in single biographies and specific events, but
rather in collective phenomena.
71

However, a revisionist brand of social history has been giving signs of antipathy to social
explanations. Among other historians, Michael Seidman has sketched a key instance of this
renewed variety of social history. In his opinion, what is needed is a history of individuals
and their interactionsa mode of social historythat does not presuppose the existence of
society, or at least not the existence of a social order that is coherent, stable and binding on
each of its supposed members.
72
The ontological implications of this statement appears less
startling if we accept that there is an as yet unanswered, because so far virtually un-posed,
theoretical question about how much coherence we need, want or actually can have.
73
Such
courageous proposal demands a name, according to Seidman: we might call this mode of
history antisocial.
74
He specifies this enigmatic label in the following terms: Individuals
act within the constraints of society, but society is likewise constrained by individuals
antisocial acts. Calling those acts antisocial suggests that they are less idealist than
materialist.
75

Macro-structural historiography as anti-sociology. Against the historiographic tradition
that focused on agents and events and primed political action and decision, the defenders of
macro-structural historiography have often expressed anti-sociological leanings. More

70
Geoff Eley, On Your Marx: From cultural History to the History of society, in: The Politics of
Method in the Human Sciences, ed. by G. Steinmetz. Durham 2005: Duke Univ. Press, p. 503.
71
Jrgen Kocka, Losses, Gains and Opportunities: Social History Today. Journal of Social History
37/1 (2003), p. 26.
72
Michael Seidman, Social History and Antisocial History. Common Knowledge 13/1 (2007), p. 45.
Our italics (JMB).
73
Ibid., p. 43.
74
Ibid., p. 45. Italics in original.
75
Ibid., p. 49.
24
specifically, the trajectory of macro-structural history in its dominant, French variety
reveals the anti-sociological proclivities of large-scale historiographical approaches. The
tradition of the Annales-school is illustrative of this aspect. At the beginning, to be sure, its
founders Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre maintained that their historiographical program
agreed with Durkheims sociology because both approaches fought a common foe, viz. the
erudite historiography that avoided generalizing attitudes because it was obsessed with
singularity. However, since the mid-1930s the historians of the Annales periodically
demarcated themselves from sociology.
76

Indeed the collective identity of the Annales School resulted in fact from continuously
adjusted anti-sociological values. This protracted process of drawing boundaries against
sociology reached their most significant peaks in the Braudelian phase of the School and in
the 1980s. The initial qualms appeared by 1933 when Febvre accused sociology of lacking
historical depth and temporal perspective. The anti-sociological highest point, however,
was attained in the 1950s when Fernand Braudel perceived in the social sciences a forceful
rejection of history. He reacted to this presumed hostility by arguing that the historians
view of causal links does not coincide with the corresponding sociological account. He held,
moreover, that historys preference for singularities clashes with sociologys persistent
generalizations, and above all that [sociologys] time is not our time, it is less tyrannical
and more concrete, and besides it is never the heart of their problems and their
reflections.
77

This anti-sociological belligerence by the Annales historians revived in the 1990s.
78
They
argued that the opposition between history and sociology had been persistent along the 20
th

century because it was at bottom structural and hence insurmountable. Sociologys
abstractions were deemed incompatible with historys empirical monographism. Both
disciplines were in fact incommensurable and thus interdisciplinarity appeared a pure
dream. The theoricism, nomothetism and invariant-seeking procedures of mainstream

76
The anti-sociological leanings of the Annalists are specified in: Jrme Lamy and Arnaud Saint-
Martin, La frontire comme enjeu: les Annales et la sociologie. Revue de synthse 131 (2010), pp.
99-127.
77
Fernand Braudel, Histoire et science sociale, in : crits sur lhistoire. Paris 1969: Flammarion, p.
75.
78
A text written by Jacques Revel triggered it: Histoire et sciences sociales: les paradigmes des
Annales. Annales. conomies, socits, civilisations, num. 6 of 1979, pp. 1360-1376, and it reached
its peak with the article of Grard Noirel Pour une approche subjectiviste du social. Annales.
conomies, socits, civilisations, num. 6 of 1989, pp. 1435-1459.
25
sociology, in conclusion, could not be matched with the cumulative and idiographic mindset
of the historian.
This overall position of the Annales-school notwithstanding, some discordant voices have
insisted on the close affinity between macro-history and sociology. For instance, Paul Veyne
has seen in sociology a faithful ally: There are historical events but no historical
explanations. As it happens with many disciplines, history works by dint of another science,
viz. sociology. In this same way, there are astronomic phenomena but no astronomical
explanations, if I am not mistaken, since the explanation of astronomical facts is always
physical. Still, an astronomy course is not a physics course.
79
Less strikingly, other
historians have downgraded to disciplinary issue
80
the differences between history and
sociology. In contrast, however, most French sociologists tend to see the arguable
differences between the two approaches as an intellectual deceit fostered by professional
scuffles.
81
In so doing, they openly endorse Durkheims tenet that historians never serve
better their cause as when they go beyond their usual point of view and focus in the
general issues raised by the particular facts they observe.
82

Micro-structural historiography as anti-sociology. Micro-historians decry the kind of social
history that draws inspiration from the traditional methodology of the social sciences. They
believe that sociologists, in George Iggers words, have made generalizations that do not
hold up when tested against the concrete reality of the small-scale life they claim to
explain.
83
Large-scale social studies, according to the defenders of micro-historical
research, are ontologically erratic because they distort the reality on the individual level. To
prevent this mutilation, micro-historians reduce the scale of observation well below current
sociological approaches. They focus on small social units and the way people act their lives
within them.
84


79
Paul Veyne, Linventaire des diffrences. Paris 1976 : Seuil, p. 8.
80
Jean-Michel Berthelot, Histoire et sociologie : une affaire de discipline. Recherches Sociologiques
29/3 (1998), pp. 23-43.
81
See for instance: Jean-Claude Passeron, Le Raisonnement sociologique. Paris 2006 : Albin Michel.
82
mile Durkheim, Prface to LAnne sociologique 1 (1887), p. iii.
83
George G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the
Postmodern Challenge. Hanover 1997: Wesleyan.
84
Micro-history, incidentally, has also forwarded an enlightening account of practice. In micro-
historians view, practices are project-oriented behaviors set by available resources (material and/or
symbolic), always limited by biased information, able to shape norms while being shaped by them,
rooted in collective horizons though clearly subjective, and often ambiguous and self-contradictory.
26
Micro-historians argue that narrowing the scale of observation reveals the sprawling
relationships within each micro-social setting. This restriction, in their view, also gives
away the distortions produced by larger sociological approaches and the normativity
imposed by their research methods. The contradictions of these normative systems are a
major focus of interest for micro-historians. In a blatant anti-sociological way, they value in
particular the untied and untidy reality of collective life. Accordingly, they concentrate on
its fragmented, deviating and inconsistent features.
Bent on analyzing and re-describing social reality from a proximal viewpoint, micro-
historians had to reformulate basic sociological categories, chiefly that of society itself, and
alongside it those of class, partnership, kinship or market as well. At close range all social
processes betray a blend of unstable perceptions, shortsighted rationalizations and
provisional truces in a never-ending conflict. As a consequence, the adequate analytical
concepts, and contrary to the established sociological tradition, must be steadily re-
elaborated and made more intricate. These continuously evolving concepts have to match
both the manifold allegiances of the concrete individuals and the ephemeral unity bestowed
by the lived coherence of their motives.
6. Conclusion. Ontology is ancillary to epistemology in contemporary
anti-sociological discourse
Our meta-theoretical survey has yielded a clear outcome: the multiple strands of the
current anti-sociological discourse, independently of their origin (inside or outside
sociology), their focus (culturalist or historiographic), their procedural tool (mentalism or
textualism), their favored topology (privacy or publicness), their source of efficiency (agentic
or structural), and their actual scope (micro or macro), all put in doubt the ontological
consistency of the term society. Our scrutiny has revealed that, whereas all surveyed
doctrines put in doubt the ontological consistency of the term society, their particular
ontological concern always recedes in favor of a prevailing epistemic commitment.
The arguments brought to buttress this overriding ontological indifference are of course
manifold, and even in some cases interfere with each other. But their coincidence at a
deeper level proves that the fundamental ontological assumptions of current social
theorizing have not surpassed the ontological agnosticism claimed by Max Weber a century
ago. For Weber notoriously defended a form of knowledge not bound to any previous
ontology. In his view, according to an outstanding commentator, Catherine Colliot-
Thlne, the methodological constraints are determined by the cognitive aims, so that the
27
ontology (that is, the identification of the entities to which a reality not reducible to any
other is assigned) results from those aims and in no way is their cause.
85

The cultural and historiographic theories we have examined confirm the Weberian
contention that there is a specific ontology for each discipline. The tenet common to all
doctrines surveyed above, indeed, is the precedence of their respective epistemic concern
over their explicit ontological qualms. Moreover, as Weber clearly saw, subordinating
ontology to epistemology implies a principled plurality of possible ontologies. This
plurality, though, endorses in fact an all-embracing epistemic upper hand, for according to
Weber, again in Colliot-Thlnes words, the validity [of each ontology] can only be
measured through its adjustment to the demands of intelligibility posed by the problems
that form the corresponding discipline.
86

As another Weberian commentator
87
has put it, Webers interest was to define the
ontological tension found in modern culture. The cultural and historiographical theories
surveyed above and which form, as we have seen, the backbone of the prevailing anti-
sociological discourse, in its turn are bent to confront this ontological tension in
accordance with their respective cognitive project. We have been able to prove, in other
words, that present-day social and historical thought questions in manifold ways the actual
existence of society, and that each of these ontological commitments, on the other hand, is
ancillary to a particular epistemic viewpoint.

85
Catherine Colliot-Thlne, tudes wbriennes. Rationalits, histories, droits. Paris 2001: PUF, p.
162.
86
Loc. cit.
87
Andrew M. Koch, The Ontological Assumptons of Max Webers Methodology. Texas Journal of
Political Studies 17:1 (Winter 1994-95), p. 19.