94 Book Notices

Social Theory and Modern Sociology by Anthony Giddens. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987.

One wonders if the author personally selected Joseph Stella's "Brooklyn Bridge" to be the dust-jacket illustration. The fo reground of that painting is a crystalline, kaleidoscopic series of heatless, blue and grey walkways and walls, beginning and ending nowhere. Beyond this are indistinct but perfectly recognizable images of the bridge and some tall buildings. The painting is bereft of any human figures, but in the cen te r f o r eg round a heart l ike jewel glows red and hot. The paint ing was completed in 1917.

The book is like this in almost every respect. Anthony Giddens offers us twelve essays of varying complexity and worth. They are connected primarily by a focus on issues that exploded into European social theory early in this century and became central issues in the post-World War II period, before theory entered the present, f ragmented time marked by incessant bickering over the incommensurable.

While the book addresses sociologists, pos tmodern psychologists will find much in it to be familiar. Giddens tells us the old story of the rapprochement between Anglo-American and European philosophical traditions, that structuralism and poststructuralism are dead though they contr ibuted much in their decenter ing of the subject, that Habermas' work is important but has some severe problems, that Erving Goffman is a systematic social theorist, that Alvin Gouldner ultimately dug a dry well, that E. P. Thompson ' s work on consciousness is insufficiently structural, etc. I can do none of these justice in this limited space, b u t - - a n d this is the crux of the rev iew--ne i the r does Giddens. One reason is that some of the essays are derivative, or shallow, or op.-ed, stuff. More importantly, there is no clear center to them, perhaps none to social theory.

Once social theorists believed that they had a unique calling, to explain the social world by means of one or another brand of totalistic social theory. Empiricists who turned out numerous "findings" were considered cheap and shallow, at best only providing materials for others' creative work. Now theory has collapsed. Whole areas are absolutely irrelevant to one another, and empirical researchers pay no attention to the undertaking except insofar as they need hooks for introductory sections to papers. Within theory, the game is won by s /he who has read the most other theorists, and who is prepared to offer criticisms of the greatest number of these, as Giddens does here.

Giddens would strenuously disagree with this characterizat ion, and he does predict the emergence of a new theoretical synthesis. In sections which speak most clearly to psychologists, he discusses elements that will be important toward this end: the he rmeneu t i c , verstehende t radi t ion and its critics (structural ism and poststructuralism, Garfinkel's and Goffman's "everyday life" studies), developments on the subject-object problem (following Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Chomsky, Lacan, Derida, Foucault , et al., and increased unde r s t and ing of the na ture of the unanticipated ( though Giddens curiously neglects the work of Robert Merton). The essays touch on each of these, but they only touch, and always as criticism which, by pointing away from the work of each theorist, purportedly points toward some distant and unfamiliar destination.

Douglas Lee Eckberg