Social theories are both assertions and stories, which might seem contradictory, but always both, and therefore raise the question of whether they are different things.
A story is a narration of events whereby the concluding episodes reflect on the opening episodes even if only to suggest times change or don’t change, as in “The Cherry Orchard”. A genre is a kind or type of story and so includes farce, tragedy and sitcom.And generic types are not limited to art and literature.The same is true of social theories, which claim as well to be true but can be sorted into types each having their own ironic strategies and provide more or less pleasurable trajectories,
A major division in social theories is whether they are esoteric or exoteric and that makes social theory to have at least these two genres.. An esoteric theory is one in which its dynamics show why most people will not be aware of how the dynamics work and so there is irony in knowing what of social life is hidden and what is revealed.. Marxism is an esoteric theory in that the exploitation of the workers by the capitalists should be as plain as daybutthatdoesn’t happen because religion, patriotism and ethnic division which are longstanding social forces are mobilized by governments and other allies of capitalism to shroud what is really going on. Religion is an opiate of the people just as are the consumer society and the facade of free speech in that the opinions of individuals mean little in that mass financial interests lure the electorate to choose between candidates all dependent on their capitalist benefactors, The working class get crumbs from the wealthy class and feel proud of having paid off their thirty year mortgages while the rich decide how large a yacht to build or what charity to sponsor to make themselves feel better. Real decision making is behind the scenes in Hyde Park or Mer A Lago among their cronies.
Freudianism is also an esoteric theory. Most people are unaware of their own personal dynamics because they hide what they fear, which is the power of their father and the attractiveness of their mother, Freud thus explaining men, having famously asked the question of what women want. So only a very few people can emerge out of their ignorance and come to terms with the underground lives of their natures.
Christianity is an esoteric theory of social life, which means everything that impacts on the way we all live. Christianity is esoteric because the overwhelming numbers are shrouded from the real dynamics of the way social life works not because of a conspiracy whereby some few people manage the strings and are therefore the populace is left in the dark but because there are systematic and all but inevitable forces and structures that accomplish that, even if, as in Christianity, most of a population is nominally Christian. People suffer from Original Sin, which means that they are not easily open to being compassionate or otherwise to have entered a condition whereby people can deal with moral advantage to themselves and one another. It takes the arrival of Jesus to lift that shroud and think with moral clarity. Moreover. people in ordinary life do not appreciate that that transformed life will free them. They see the poor as weak while not realizing that the poor will inherit the world either literally in a social revolution or in the afterlife, which would be the real life of humanity for forever. People live in the pettiness of the everyday rather than the life of the spiritual.
The reason it is so difficult to appreciate the real reality of a revolutionized or a supernatural life is because the vision is vouchsafed by faith rather than reason and faith is a very hard taskmaster. It requires suspending reason or at least fantasizing a desired situation that does not presently obtain and is contrary to what practical reason would offer. Therefore, faith is always subject to doubt even to many of those who ascribe to a formula of words about the doctrines of Christianity. Faith always has to be buttressed by communal adherence and also to rhetorical slights of hand so that, for example, the Son of God is coterminous with God the Father even though by definition an essential element of being a father is that he precedes his son. So we are playing with metaphors rather than exact statements, but in the auspices of faith, that will do. and most people will bother to straighten out the logic and feel comfortable with the conclusions of faith regardless of their patent logic. And so even the believer remains shrouded from reality because they engage in words which only, reversing what St. Anselm said, only a fool can say in his heart that there is a God and most Christian people fool themselves about such though not other issues.
The nineteenth century was filled with esoteric theories, something well worth wondering why. Even Darwinism was a theory buried the sands of fossils and requiring discovery that is powerful enough to undermine the illusions from Christianity that kept people from seeing that evolution was remorseless and purposeless and rid of humanity, all of us living in a warm shelter while most of creation was occupied only by perydactyls. That was a cold world, absent of self-consciousness and no wonder that people would recoil from it, preferring the warm hearth of civilization..
The alternative kind of social theory was endoteric, which meant that the real world was perfectly accessible even if it required scientists and other smart people to see what was in front of that and so science has to grapple with not merely being a clerisy that promotes its own mambo jumbo but can be trusted to be able to be as verifiable as when any observant early modern seaman knew that the world was round because ships sunk behind the horizon. Reason has its difficulties but it does provide verifiable results. The great age of exoteric theories was the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, those indebted to the scientific revolution. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and later Hume were able to see what was right in front of them: that, in their order, human identity was self evident, that there were regularity in the emotions, that the world was what it seemed to be, and that people want to be and think of themselves as being nice, Hume once unenshrouded from Christianity.
The Christian philosophers from St. Anselm, who was an Augustinian, through the Scholastics, were endoteric in that clever people could untangle sentences to be true statements in that the sentences incorporated metaphysical truths, there being inevitable inferences to be drawn between the subjects and their predicates and so each were fiery banners before them, as when Aquinas said God existed because he was the best because it is better to be existent than nonexistent, which is to put aside the linguistic unentanglement that existence is not a situation that is morally or existentially comparative. You either are or are not, which still confounds those who insist that God created the universe so that it could exist when it could just as well never have existed at all and we could have been rid of all of it, a great hollowness.
It was a giant but understandable step to evolve from regarding sentences as real even if the universe never voiced it, as the Abrahamic visionaries said, to thinking that formulas, such as F=MA and such constants as the ratio of a circle to a radius, are real, the background or structure for existence, though the non-repeating decimals in mathematical constants suggests that the numbers themselves are nominal rather than the numbers themselves being real.
The seventeenth century thinkers were endoteric because a perception that was turned into words by some clever person was regarded as self evident which means self confirming which means requiring no proof not because it was based on faith but because it was so obvious, such a clear matter of experience as to be including different words for the same thing even though sentences were just descriptions of a reality that did not have words tied to it. People invented sentences rather than discovered them. Descartes says “I think, therefore I am” is to say thinking implies being but really means the same thing in that to think is to have consciousness and being is consciousness if you think about it even though the two words seem to apply to different things, The seventeenth century thinkers were following Euclid in his metaphysics as well as his exposition in that he picked objects to describe like triangles and circles which did not exist in nature but could be brought in as ringers because they could yield to accurate and coordinated descriptions. That was true of Spinoza whose various derivations are based on accurate observations of how emotions get altered into being different emotions and so there is no need for the term ethics to mean anything other than the way people behave.
The ideological world is now divided between what I would call right wing and left wing Hobbesians, which means conservatives and liberals. Right wing Hobbesians accentuate the insight and idea that force is what saves people from social anarchy. People are terrified of personal safety and so surrender to authority so as to secure their personal safety from marauders and arbitrary danger to life and limb. People groove on the need of the sovereign to be harsh so as to assure civility. The hangman is the best guarantee of peace. Everyone is on edge because chaos is always near. Left wing Hobbesianism concerns what happens next, which is what is allowed when the basic social compact which trades security from obedience. If peace is secure and enforceable, then ot is possible to arrange contracts, which are legally enforceable promises. That allows two things: a general social contract that can provide a constitution which can be amended or replaced when people find the ;last one to be obsolete, and in that case, Hobbes has been corrected to become Locke, new social compacts readily available because anarchy will not take place during the interim between general social compacts. That primary social contract can also allow its own modification whereby the government itself is capable of limiting itself and so securing civil liberties for its own population and so sovereignty need not be harsh but provide a sense and actuality of freedom, the population the masters of government rather than its servants. Second of all, there can be particular contracts that are economic matters and so allow the extension of entrepreneurialism and prosperity and so fosters that second feature of the modern world.
A second story to be told about social theories is whether they are continuous or arrive at a final point. A theory exemplified by Habbakuk the Old Testament prophet, is that there are endless wars. There is no respite, a very gloomy view of human experience, Social Darwinism abstracts that into a principle. There is a dog eat dog relationship whereby animals, racial groups and nations are in permanent conflict though some think that the rationalization of competing corporations can lead to a stable situation, as when Rockefeller rationalized the oil industry by monopolizing it so that prices are stable. But there is also a new industry that has to go through its struggles for dominance, as is presently the case with mega movie giant corporations or competing AI corporations. The process doesn’t end; it just moves on.
The best way to understand Christianity as a conflicted social movement is not as a division between Catholic supernaturalism and Protestant internal transformation but as the difference between whether Christians are more concerned with history as continuous and history as arriving as an end state. The continuous view is that for the long run people may become gradually more decent by Jesus providing a moral example to all of us but that is steady work that lies ahead to the very far future before mankind will be improved enough to be worthy of Jesus. On the other hand, believers can dwell on the consideration of the end of the story, which is when there will be a Second Coming when Jesus arrives and the world is changed into its final state. Such believers focus on what the afterlife will be like and what the final days told of in Revelations will be like. The Gospels provide both accounts. The Messiah will arrive again during the time of those still alive but another way to read Jesus is as over the long haul transforming the population into being better people. It seems that less educated Christians are more likely to engage in supernatural intervention to bring things to an end while the more educated prefer the slow ascent of moral enlightenment.
A third story about social theory, which means a sequence of events where the concluding episodes reflect back on what has changed from the initial events, is more problematic, which means that it is not clear if these are distinctive stories or if they are part of the same story.. That is so about sociological and psychological theories. Are they different kinds of independent theories or a single more extended one which just has more steps? One argument is that sociological theory is independent of psychological theory in that people make decisions on the basis of circumstances rather than independently developed inclinations. There is no mediation between people and their circumstances other than their inherent treason, which is universal. People may not be able to name the forces to which people decide what they decide to do but have a sense of that happening. That perception is in the modern era as old as Hobbes. People knew they had to relinquish sovereignty to a power so as to protect themselves from anarchy even if they did not know that what was happening was in fact a social contract. Similarly, people know, as explicitly said by both Aristotle and Simmel, that cosmopolitan people are found in cities. The varieties of people intersecting with one another creates a different social landscape than if peo[ple live in a reasonably similar social life. They will have different preoccupations, one of which is that people in cities will be entrepreneurial. This perception is as old as the legend of the Tower of Babel.
Even sociologists who follow Durkheim and Parsons in thinking that people follow internalized norms are also dealing with a rationally based theory, A norm is a present and perhaps momentary condition in a society where people feel it incumbent to follow that norm, suchasan attractive political candidate, oran adversion of eating pork or dancing, because to do so is embarrassing or shameful or punishable. So people know the norms as facts of their lives and adjust accordingly, even if norms arise or change or have reasons for themselves are quizzical. That is just the way it works. Parsons said early on that there had to be a mediating value that motivates people, but he abandoned that to his differentiation theory, relying on the customs of roles as explaining why people did what they did. But Parsons still hoped fora grand integrative theory whereby psychological and sociological theories would become a grand field theory.
A psychological theory, on the other hand, insists that there are motives inherent or developed in the psyche which overwhelm or merely guide and influence merely rational considerations. You are subservient to authority not just because it makes sense but also because you are afraid of your father. You look to God because of a craving for authority, which is an irrational though perfectly ”natural” inclination. Moreover, there are internal rules or customs whereby emotions are transferred into other emotions. So being stifled can lead to rage if other certain elements are introduced. Obviously, Freud is a proponent of the psychological approach as are the neo-Freudians like Eric Erikson who emphasized that the ego developed independently as an aspect of the psyche and so each person, like Luther with regard to anal retention and Gandhi with coming to peace with his heritage, form their own characters, as also do the rest of us, each life an elaborate woven blanket of our influences, each of us trying to become whole, which is what everyone wants to do. Less poetic or, I might say more superficial motives can be found as the great psychological trigger such as a desire to achieve power or manage anxiety or social approval for its own sake.
But the ability to distinguish between sociological and psychological theories does not mean that tey are not necessarily incommensurate. Consider the history, which is a narrative that tries to give a true account of people and events worth remembering even if some of what is included do not fit very well into a well made story, as when Shakespeare includes a story about Joan of Arc in his history of Henry VI that is not related to the rest of the play but was a notable feature during events of the time it covered. What is worth noting about histories, to treat them as evidence, is that historians mix psychological and sociological explanations within the same tapestry, which suggests that an accurate tapestry has the two kinds of explanation intersect even though historians rarely stipulate their explanations as such, preferring to allow the reader to draw that out of the narrative and the historian not necessarily aware of the explanations he invokes so as to make the narrative coherent, just using whatever makes sense as plausibly drawn inferences about how the sequence of events are connected. Thucydides treats political negotiation as rational while the state of Athens is a cultural and psychological moment. David Hume, in his “History of England”, mixes the personal predilections of kings and statesmen with their calculations in presenting the true history of the beheading of a king. Macauley treats culture as an entwined mood through which individual actions proceed, and so on..
But social theory is different from history, which is a form of literature, in that it provides a narrative to keep it moving, to complete a story, and is judged as persuasive or not, though claiming that this is a true narrative. Social theory pretends to be relinquishing narrative. Its claim is that it offers propositions or sentences, if one prefers, that are individually true and supported by evidence, and so not merely persuasive but conclusive. Is the announced statement of how a process or structure or a matter of description true or not? Either the capitalists run the world or don’t they? It isn’t enough to say that it is appealing to think or speculate or build a narrative based on that imagery and dynamic. Noticing that the architecture of a theory turns out to have a literary structure, as is the case in the examples cited, is an afterthought, an exploration into the motivations of how theorists fall perhaps inevitably into what is one or another of its generic types even though humanists may claim that theory is nothing else than the exposition of its own narratives.
The way a theorist earns his or her stripes is to provide intersecting descriptions using the same concepts and propositions again and again so that the propositions can be said to predict or more accurately replicate behavior and also because the concepts and propositions are so well articulated to one another so as to create a system of considerable general power, just as is the case in classical physics where force and power and other quantities can be turned into definitions where only one or another term has to be added or withdrawn. So social science is considered scientific even if its elaboration of formulas, as in Parsons, is verbal rather than mathematical. The division between literature and history on the one hand and social theory on the other is insurmountable. A historian will ask why social contract theory is true but a social scientist has to insist that it can be reduced to verifiable propositions. Is it true that people will in fact subject themselves to a sovereign so as primarily to get peace or is it that cultural forces like religion or ideology can make people think there are other reasons to challenge a sovereign?
In sum, there are sentences, which are declarations of fact, and there are stories, which are descriptions of events where the outcome reflects on the origin. These are fundamental forms of linguistic usage. It is difficult to say which preceded the other. What is the difference between a pygmy declaring that a stick can kill a giraffe by jabbing a stick into its belly and the meat can be used for food, or saying that hunters went to find and kill giraffes and then brought the meat back to their camp? The difference may be metaphysical in that they are metaphysical in that they refer to two different states of being but have the same content. And yet that is a great divide between science and humanism that continues to create confusion among thinkers who are concerned with such matters. Here is a paradox. If you say “All assertions are generic”, is that not an assertion beyond genres? Only in case a paradox is a genre and in that case sentences are genres and all genres are subject to assertions. How is it possible for included things to be in one of the included things?