Who needs social theory nowadays?
Except for few scholars, probably none of us think that social theory is a necessary
ingredient of our daily lives. Through an excessive specialization, sociology
in general, and social theory is particular, lost their initial meaning, as ‘means
of promoting social progress’ (Seidman:1).

Much of the current sociological
theory simply does not speak a broad public language; the conversation and
concerns of this disciplinary culture render their ideas either inaccessible to
a general public or irrelevant to the ways in which the moral and political
issues of the day are discussed in everyday life (Seidman:2).

This is why Contested Knowledge
is intended to be not only a manual for students of sociology, but also a
manifest toward a more public sociology. For many of the authors presented, Seidman
emphasized on the ‘public’ part of his/her work, how these theories integrated
into a larger historical picture, and how they shaped the social world. Comte,
Durkheim or Marx did not mean to be only the writers of those, sometime boring
and incomprehensible theories, they wanted to build a better society and hoped
that their work would make a difference in the real world.

How can sociologist make a
difference? We all have a, more or less, coherent picture, of the social world
we live in, but this image of the world is biased by our own experience. The
founders of the social theory believed they would be able to picture an
objective image of the world, and that would be a good base for future social
improvement:

The ideas of social sciences are
said to mirror the world in contrast to the ideas of ordinary folk which mirror
their individual interests and personal experience (Seidman:3).    

            However, sociologist or not, nobody can be
perfectly objective. All of us are human and have values, preferences and
prejudices, and our world images will be always influenced by what we are. The
contemporary social theory gave up constructing a perfectly objective world
image, and focused more on showing how our prejudices play a role in the way we
construct the social world.

The dominant knowledges in
American public culture were criticized as reflecting the standpoint and
interests of White Europeans, men, and heterosexuals. Black nationalists,
feminists, gay liberationists, and lesbian feminists produced new social
perspectives: Afrocentrism, feminism, lesbian and gay or queer theory (Seidman:208).

            As in physics, where movement needs a standpoint
to be acknowledged, many of the contemporary social theorists argue that social
knowledge is possible only as ‘situated knowledge’, it requires an standpoint:

We never know the world apart from
our standpoint; who we are matters in terms of what we can say or know about
the world (Seidman: 278)…our social ideas are always perspectival; we must
give up the idea of a total, comprehensive type of knowledge. Social truths are
always one-sided, both revealing and obscuring the social reality. If we
approach knowledge as situated, we should also be attentive to the ways that
knowledge shapes our behavior and social life. Knowledge is not only about
representing reality but about making and constructing reality (Seidman: 279).

            From Comte to Said, covering more than 200 years
of social theory, Contested Knowledge is a text which gives a new life
to old theories and integrates the contemporary social theory into the larger
picture of the social world. 

© 2004 Cristina Bradatan

Cristina Bradatan is a Ph.D.
candidate within the Department of Sociology, Pennsylvania State University.
Her interests include family, psychoanalysis and population studies.

Categories: Philosophical