After the Social Studies Problematic?

Suppose, for a moment, you were teaching your college students social theory—but that you were back in 1750.

Who would you want your students to have at hand to read?

We will not do the boring think of confining you to assigning solely authors who had written before 1750. Assume that the appropriate time machine is available. But, equally, we will not do the boring thing of allowing you to assign historical accounts of what in 1750 was then the future. This is an intellectual exercise: we are interested in analytical perspectives on societies and how they work.

The century after 1750 is, of course, the century of the Democratic Revolution and of the Industrial Revolution. It also contains the first stirrings of racial equality, or at least of anti-slavery. It contains the first reduction in social pressure on women to focus on reproduction and household production only. And it contains the first descents of theology: the first intrusions into this world of the apocalyptic eschatological utopianism that had been sought by prayer more than political action—the first intrusions of what my teacher Jeff Weintraub calls “the total conception of virtue”.

What five thinkers would best prepare students as of 1750 to analyze the century that was to come?

I would say:

• Karl Marx for the Industrial Revolution;
• John Stuart Mill fill for human equality, and the coming of democracy as a political phenomenon;
• Alexis de Tocqueville for democracy as a social cultural phenomenon, both the persistence and the decline of the old régimes;
• Emile Durkheim for collective effervescence; and
• Adam Smith for the market economy.

Now let’s move forward a century to 1850. Who are the best five theorists to read to prepare students for the Belle Époque and then the Age of Horrors that was to follow? In my estimation, at least, John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi are the most obvious choices to cover all of the coming of the globalized economy, the initiation of modern economic growth, and the dilemmas of political-economic management. After that, however, it gets much harder. There are many possibilities—and they all seem to me to be grossly inadequate to the task. I am tempted to go with Mill and Durkheim and Tocqueville again. But in the final analysis it seems to me that they miss too much. I choose Max Weber on modes of domination. I choose Vladimir Lenin over Karl Marx, for what one wants is for people to understand not the empyrean theories so much as the ideas that moved people to struggle, kill, and die. And I choose Hannah Arendt. All of these are very contestable, And I contest them in my own mind every day, even as I write this.

Now let us shorten our view somewhat.

Let us move ahead to 1950. And let us try to think not who would be most useful for analyzing 1950-2050 but merely for 1950-2015—for that is all that we have seen. We do know what was taught in social theory in 1950. What was taught is what I call the “Social Studies problematic”: Mill, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, with others (Freud, Foucault, Tocqueville, Smith, pick your favorite) added to that core. But that was what was taught, not what should have been taught. What should have been taught would have been theorists who would have enabled students to analyze and grapple with:

• Les Trente Glorieuses;
• The ossification and then collapse of the Soviet Empire;
• Decolonization, and the economic rise of East Asia;
• The coming of the Neoliberal Era and then of the Second Gilded Age.
• The conspicuous failure to resolve or even to balance off the dilemmas of political-economic management; and
• Equality and diversity.

Who would have been the best five to assign back in 1950, assuming that you had at your disposal then the proper time machine to pull the books off of today’s library shelves?

And then, after you have answered that question to your satisfaction, the kicker. Over at http://io9.com I see:

Robert Charles Wilson: “I’m tempted to repeat the old adage that science fiction doesn’t predict…

…it speculates. But science fiction does make one prediction that always comes true, and it’s the deep Heraclitian truth at the heart of the genre: change happens. Change is inevitable. It devours everything familiar and builds strange new structures on the quicksand of contingency. Step in the same river twice? Kid, we don’t even have that river anymore. We paved it over back when the rain stopped falling.

So what might be new and different in the next 10 years? We can start by asking what’s already beginning to feel old. And what feels old (to me) is our political and economic discourse. Here we stand, on the brink of a global climate catastrophe and embedded in an emerging oligarchy armed with a surveillance apparatus of unprecedented reach and power, discussing politics in terms Victorian philosophers would have recognized. There is a tinderbox of unmet expectations and frustrated idealism out there, and a genuinely captivating new political or economic idea—good or bad—could start a global conflagration.

How might such an idea arise? I would point at recent progress in cognitive science. We’re standing on the verge of a profound new understanding of the one subject Enlightenment philosophy could never really get a grip on: human nature. As we come to know ourselves better, we’ll begin to understand our political and social behavior differently—and, inevitably, we’ll find ways of manipulating and modifying that behavior. And how will that play out? Beats me. I’m just a science-fiction writer. But it invites some interesting speculation.

It is, I think, not 10 years but 50. But the question is very urgent: who are the five thinkers who should head social theory courses’ syllabuses today—and if those five have not yet written their books, what do their books say?