A social or a literary theory can be classified as a kind or type or genre of theory in that each type uses a particular way of theorizing whatever its subject matter or particular hypothesis. Theorizing is therefore akin to the premise of literature, which can be broken down to its tone, which are the conventions whereby individual works are recognized as tragedy, comedy, melodrama and so on, and also their textures, whereby works are recognized for the sets of assumptions that make them distinct worlds. But whereby there is a limited catalog of tones or genres, there are any number of textures, and literary and social theories are akin to tone in that there is also a limited catalog of them, a great number of theories fitting into a particular type.
One major gambit for social theory, for example, is what might be called evolutionary or genetic in that simple organisms evolve into more complex or differentiated mechanisms, as one celled organisms evolve into fish and cattle and people. The survival of those most highly adapted is true not only for Darwin and for the Social Darwinists that were influenced by Darwin. It also includes what seems to be the very different theorists inspired as well as written by Durkheim, whose view it was that groups evolve from normative communities to mutually interdependent organic solidarities. This type also includes Parsons’ functionalism whereby societies become complex enough so that they are able to meet the elementary social needs in more sophisticated and therefore adaptable ways while still guided by the basic atomic unit of a community just as human beings remain based on the atomic unit of the cell One advantage of looking at theoretical types is that a more accurate assessment of a theory takes place by comparing the types. Robert Merton, for example, is categorized with Parsons when it is more accurate to see him as a descendant of the now neglected William Graham Sumner, who is thought of as a Social Darwinist when he is more accurately understood as a Pragmatist, sharing with Merton the idea that social life has unintentional social consequences and that dysfunctional social features will atrophy.
I should reiterate that the catalog of strategic theoretical strategies is probably limited and certainly not invented by every theorist because thinkers fall back on models which seem both inevitable or the only way to do theory rather than to just invent a new one. Natural law theory, for example, is a way of doing things that covers a wide variety of theories but I do not know anyone who has extended the ontological argument of St. Anselm, insightful and deep as it is, to be used as a way to apply to social phenomena.
I reminded myself to ruminate on a long held view about types of theorizing when I read my friend Dave Konstan’s recent book “The Origin of Sin”. Konstan’s thesis is that the terms referred to in particular in the New Testament refer to sin as concern the disbelief and betrayal of allegiance to and belief in Jesus and so require those particular processes of repentance and conversion, and so are distinctive of Christianity and not to be associated with those other matters that can be found in different cultures, such as evil or wickedness, Christianity itself characterized by this peculiar belief and consequence, something that has been very influential in the history not only of religion but of social life. Konstan uses philology and scholarship to trace down the distinctiveness of the meaning of sin as a disbelief in the sacred nature of Jesus but is particularly agile and insightful in examining texts that are long familiar in a new and careful way. In particular, I think, is his discussion of the time when his friends bring a paralytic into a crowded room and Jesus cures him not because he has done some transgression himself but because his friends have confidence concerning Jesus’ power, that the distinguishing characteristic from which all can follow, whether to remit ailments or ordinary sins. Confidence in Jesus Is everything, and that se[arates Christianity from other religions.
Now apply Konstan’s hypothesis to my theory of theoretical types. First of all, Konstan’s thesis is what I would consider minimalist, by which I mean that there is an attempt to isolate the most basic and obvious feature of the set of concepts that are associated with a religion (or any other set of beliefs, such as an ideology or a form of social studies) so that the distinctiveness of the whole system is evident from that apparently self evident insight, as that can be summed up in a phrase. In similar fashion, the ideas that have been generated for two hundred and fifty years by economic science has rested on the basic process of supply and demand playing out because of scarcity, something that would not apply if we were ever to arrive at an economic world where there was no end of abundance, and so trade and even money could be replaced, as Marx thought would happen, if the granaries were ever filled with abundance and people left to set all their lives at leisure. You don’t need Christianity if there is no longer a need for sin. That means that so much of Christianity is superfluous to its core. Sexual irregularities, for example, are very important to the history of the Christian Church, but they are a marginal issue , a matter of weakness or falliability, or a sign of depravity, next to the central depravity Konstan posits, which is that people are disloyal to Jesus as the savior rather than to some other of His teachings.
This breathtaking reduction and recentering of an intellectual movement to a different core which catches it better than previously described is there in other texts. I, for one, suggest that the Old Testament can be more accurately and radically described as shedding itself of the apparatus of angels and other supernatural figures, these few and far between, what with Noah building an ark rather than having been given one by the gods, or Moses dealing with the rather minor burning bush, who might be noticed anywhere, and so hardly significant except for what is said there, and saving up a genuine for the separation of the Red Sea, which was really needed so as to avoid for disaster for the Israealites, and clearly visible to the people there, and a miracle done only once alone and therefore very special.
One of the great works of literary theory, Erich Auerbach’s “Odysseus’s Scar”, is minimalist. It shifts from a focus on the gods or fate or obligation, the usual themes in “the Odyssey”, and centers on something that might seem existential and therefore available everywhere, where the time and so not descriptive of a situation, but instead describes how time is differently experienced different great literatures. In Homer, time is simultaneous while in the Torah, time is sequential and that makes all the difference. When time is simultaneous, people jump around in time, all of it available in memory, and so Odysseus’ nurse recognizes a scar of his from when he got the wound when he was a child and so available to him. That means that present events are colored by all the things that have come before and that the field in which people are placed in life is rich with events and places, with stage settings, such as homes and caves and seas. They are a stage on which a life is played. That is different from the Torah where people are preoccupied with motivation, something invisible and always concerned with before and after and always mysterious, so a reader has to infer what is happening to people, why Noah built an ark because he had an inspiration or a vision or an inner voice that told him to, or why Jacob’s children had become so cruel as to insist on killing off the people who had embraced Dinah as a wife rather than as a concubine. The former view gives life filled with its colors and settings and its past and maybe its future, but the latter gives people personal determination and, maybe, an invisible and determative God. Quite a lot for Auerbach is able to infer in and from just a few pages.
Remember that not all literary theories are minimalist. Northrope Frye offers a catalog of genres which is rich with a number of insights or hypotheses including, for example, that the novel is a later addition to the genres that have been available, most of them, since antiquity. It is just a different way of theorizing rather than inferior or sup[erior to the minimalist one which makes so incisive the shift from a circumstantial matter to seem a central one and obvious one it is contemplated, so deep as to be no longer unavoidable but rather indispensable. Frank Kermode was a minimalist but R. J. Leavis and Lionel Trilling were not, less about identifying core insights than elaborating the warp and weave of the social placement of a work of literature.
Nor are only literary theories subject to the strategy of minimalism.The same can be done with social theory. My favorite minimalist is Thomas Jefferson who presents the tail end of the social contract theorists from Hobbes, who thought the social contract that constructed organized society or political leadership, was implicit, while Locke thought it readily happens, people reconstructing a social contract readily enough when it is disrupted, to Rousseau, who imagined a satisfactory social contract as coming about in the future, by shunting aside the usual concern with how to construct the social contract, and considers instead as the focus of activities what a social contract is supposed to accomplish, which is to recognize and legislate what are to be considered inalienable rights, which mean properties the absence of which make life not fully realizable, everyone, and not just a king or a rich man, capable of being heroic in his or her adventure so as to fulfill the pursuit of happiness, whether to write poetry or engage in statecraft or to fashion beautiful silver artifacts or to farm your acres. Well or badly, Jeremy Bentham was also minimalist in shifting concern from morality or obligation to pleasure, something previously thought the opposition of morality and instead the prime good of things, the inevitable motivator, whether or not Utilitarians were ever able to solve the problem of how to measure comparable units of pleasure and whether satisfaction can be thought a pleasure at all in that it is mental, a contemplation, rather than a tactile like excitation.
Now consider another species of theoretical types in addition to the type of minimalism. There is a strategy Konstan employs in order to arrive at his conclusions. He says that the particular term which is found in the New Testament cannot be found in any other language and culture. But that is a particular circumstance that might overdetermined the situation and the hypothesis might be true even if there were some terms similar to it in other cultures or languages. Perhaps there was some far away tribe or an allied term that could be distinguished from it but where the New Testament identification of the concept and the word showed how powerful and determinative for the history of religion that ensued. The argument offered by Konstan would not be necessary, just a spectacular proof of it.
I think of the proof or demonstration offered is a version of what I consider the Weber Gambit so as to honor this kind of argument which Max Weber offered in his historical works of religious history where he argued that Protestantism and only Protestantism offered a rational religion in that all the others were enmeshed in superstition and tradition while protestantism alone presented people as goal oriented, people using their resources so as to maximize their gain and so the basis for an entrepreneurial spirit after the re;gious versions of it are shunted aside. Weber demonstrates, by his lights, and using what was then the level of scholarship, that the religions of india and China and Ancient Judaism were so cluttered with obedience and custom that rationality could not be purified or break through and so the association between religion founded rationality and capitalism as a way of life was established. But what if Ancient Judaism could be halfway towards being rational/ Would it have no effect or only moderating effects? And what if some very different configuration evolved to create a functional alternative for the creation of rationality, which is what Robert Bellah argued in “Tokugawa Religion” where he argued that the functional equivalent of entrepreneurship was created in Japan because of the warrior class and that led to the rapid industrialization of Japan in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century.
A similar problem arises when considering whether Great Britain is the cradle of modern democracy. Its constitutional parliamentary system was the basis for American democracy and also the democratic systems in the British Commonwealth as well as in India and other previously undemocratic countries such as Germany or Japan or South Korea, they eventually becoming democratic because of having been under American auspices and so are British nations second removed, while Hispanic nations have not become democratic except some of them quite recently, such as in Spain itself, and Arab nations not at all, nor is it so in China or Russia. And yet British democracy developed at about the same time as the Dutch, and many African nations that had been colonized by Great Britain lapsed into authoritarian regimes, and that does not mean that the British do not have a genius for democracy even if France didn’t come to democracy until the Third Republic. So the Weber Gambit works even if capitalism was not the exclusive consequence of Protestantism and sin might be the exclusive domain of Christianity even if one might find the idea of sin peppered around other cultures and languages, making Christianity only its prevalent version, however powerful the connection there is between Christianity and the idea that religion is based on not betraying loyalty to a religion’s central figure,making that figure a savior rather than an everyday charismatic or wise man..
I would be remiss if I did not point out there were other strategic theoretical gambits other than the arcane and problematic one invented by Weber. Here are two of general applicability and quite distinct from Weber and one another. Marx posited a theory where history is motivated by a conflict between social classes and Marx was willing to discover a new class even if not the traditional ones of lord, peasant, and bourgeoisie. He discovered the functionary class in 1870 so as to explain how government was stifling social progress, and there are any number of groups, such as gender or race, tht complicate social life by each of them. being a kind of class. My favorite version is Barrington Moore Jr.’s “Lord and Peasant and the Making of the Modern World”, which views the key development in the modern world as whether the peasantry had been abolished before industrialization, a failure of that providing the basis for totalitarian regimes when there was a coalition between peasants and other groups which could collectively withstand or overcome democracy, as when cotton and wheat might have coalesced against iron and allowed the Confederacy to prosper or when iron and wheat combined to allow Germany to become retrograde. The point isn’t that social and literary theory aren’t complicated, but that there are strands of them that are woven and rewoven in distinctive ways.