The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory

by Richard J. Bernstein

In this volume, Bernstein forsees and outlines the development of a social theory that is at once empirical, interpretive, and critical.

Genres: Philosophy, Sociology

286 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 1978

Reviews

[Dan Ust · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chris Sciabarra recommended this book in a reading list on Facebook. Since social theory is something he knows a great deal more than me about, naturally, I couldn't wait to read the book. And I wasn't disappointed. Bernstein's coverage of social theorists is vast and he's also well aware of controversies outside the field that touch on this. For instance? Well, he covers criticisms of Thomas Kuhn. Being interested in philosophy of science, too often I hear from people who think Kuhn is the last word on the science. (Or that he merely paved the way for Feyerabend, who is the last word on ditto.) Bernstein is well aware that Kuhn has his problems and his criticis early on -- and that the problems are serious and the criticisms aren't all reactionaries unaware of the history of science.

Anyhow, this book is from 1976, yet it feels fresh. It's definitely a book to read on the subject matter.It covers the mainstream empiricist/naturalist view, and then goes on to look at three strands of revolt against that mainstream: from Anglo-American (which might be better term Anglo-Austrian given its pedigree from Wittgenstein) analytic philosophy, from phenomenology, and from critical theory. This is a good approach given that the critics are pretty much all focusing on the same target, a target he introduces early and sympathetically to give the reader a grounding in what's under attack.

He narrows down each of these into a handful of thinkers, with the last two being narrowed to one major thinker: for phenomenology, Alfred Schutz and for critical theory, Habermas. If you know anything about social theory, they're big names and have both had much influence.

So why isn't this the perfect book on its subject? Well, there's this huge passage of time. So the work, even if it reads like a contemporary work -- some of the issues are still live and many of the controversies in philosophy overall are still percolating even if it feels contemporary, it's missing stuff like gender and feminism, postmodernism, culture theory, and post-colonialism. But that's accident of the time the book was written. An update today would no doubt have sections on all these, and relate them back to the others, as well as try to grasp, as he does, the common threads.

History aside, though, the main problem is some of the approach is abstract. He does give a few concrete details, but it would've worked out better if he took a few cases and applied each approach to them to illustrate how they worked and where they came up short. He gives enough tantalizing details so that I could get where he's going, but I'd find it very hard to figure out how to apply these to any particular examples. A problem here would be choosing examples that worked across the different frameworks, but it might be easy to choose ones that work for all and others that were more specific to each framework.

Another way to make this easier on the reader might have been tables and diagrams. Tables might work out well to shows the differences between approaches as well as to simply list out different things. For example? Well, with regard to Schutz, he mentions his basic concepts. A list rather than burying this in the text would be helpful for readers like me. Diagramming Schutz's 'world of everyday life' to show the interrelation between biography, typification, social dimensions would likewise give a better grasp. This is minor, but I'm sure teaching this stuff in class, this is what's done -- as opposed to just reading text.

[Peng · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first finished book during PhD study. It was a tough journey but I believe I am actually get stared in philosophy.

[Bernard English · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is very clearly written and covers a lot of thinkers in a reasonably short space. First published in 1976, I'm afraid some of the thinkers he covers simply are not such big names any more or probably I'm not as well-read as I should be. I thought the section entitled "The Use and Abuse of Thomas Kuhn: Truman, Almond, Wolin" was particularly instructive. Based on what Bernstein writes here, I definitely misunderstood Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And it's important to get it right since pretty much every other book refers to it. Bernstein emphasizes the imprecise use made of the classic Kuhnian term "paradigm" by social scientists which leads him to wonder "what has happened to the central Kuhnian problematic of differentiating the development of natural science from that of other disciplines."

[Viktor Krap · Rating 5 out of 5]

They sure dont write em like this anymore.