The End of Sociological Theory: The Postmodern Hope

Sociological theory has gone astray. It has lost most of its and intellectual importance; it is disengaged from the conflicts and public debates that have nourished it in the past; it has turned inward and is largely self-referential. Sociological theory today is produced and consumed almost exclusively by sociological theorists.1 Its and intellectual insularity accounts for the almost permanent sense of crisis and malaise that surrounds contemporary sociological theory. This distressing condition originates, in part, from its central project: the quest for foundations and for a totalizing theory of society.2 To revitalize sociological theory requires that we renounce scientism-that is, the increasingly absurd claim to speak the Truth, to be an epistemically privileged discourse. We must relinquish our quest for foundations or the search for the one correct or grounded set of premises, conceptual strategy, and explanation. Sociological theory will be revitalized if and when it becomes social theory. My critique of sociological theory and advocacy of theory as a narrative with a moral intent will be advanced from the standpoint of postmodernism.3 Anticipating the end of sociological theory entails renouncing the millennial hopes that have been at the center of modernist sociological theory.4 Postmodernism carries no promise of liberation-of a society free of domination. Postmodernism gives up the modernist idol of human emancipation in favor of deconstructing false closure, prying open present and future possibilities, detecting fluidity and porousness in forms of life where hegemonic discourses posit closure and a frozen order. The hope of a great transformation is replaced by the more modest aspiration of a relentless defense of immediate, local pleasures and struggles for justice. Postmodernism offers the possibility of a analysis that takes seriously the history of cruelty and constraint in Western modernity without surrendering to the retreat from criticalness that characterizes much current conservative and liberal thought.