Abstract: This article reviews significant contributions of German-language sociology to international debates about the nature and future of contemporary society from the four basic perspectives of modern Western sociological theories of society: functional differentiation, capitalism, inequalities, and culture. Special attention is paid to the diagnosis of today’s and potential future problem areas of society, in particular problems of societal integration and individual life chances.
Keywords: Society, modern society, Western society, functional differentiation, social inequality, culture of modernity, capitalism, societal integration, life chance
License: OpenAccess. © 2021 Uwe Schimank, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110627275-032.
Source: Soziologie – Sociology in the German-Speaking World. Special Issue Soziologische Revue 2020. Edited by:
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Society
Uwe Schimank
1 Introduction
What have been significant contributions of German-language sociology to international debates about the nature and future of contemporary society? And what might have been such contributions had they been written and published in English so that interested colleagues all over the world would have had a chance to read and discuss them? Taking these questions as my point of departure, I will direct attention to a selection of theoretically ambitious pieces of work from German-language sociology. I will only incidentally address the genre of diagnoses of our time, which often end in oversimplified one-sided speculations that lack theoretical precision. I will also not consider works from historical sociology since this field of study is not very well developed in German-speaking sociology.
From the sociological classics until today, sociology has elaborated four basic perspectives on modern Western societies, each highlighting a different essential feature: functional differentiation, capitalism, inequality, and culture (Schimank, 2013). Each of these perspectives consists of a considerable spectrum of theoretical options, which show enough similarity, however, to be treated as one. I will examine each of these perspectives and highlight important studies from German-language sociology since the millennium while paying special attention to the diagnosis of today’s and potential future problem areas of society, in particular problems of societal integration and of individual life chances (Schimank and Volkmann, 2019).
2 Functional Differentiation
Theories of social differentiation have the longest tradition as a genuine sociological perspective on modern society. Theorists in this vein range from Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel to Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann, including those, such as Karl Marx and Max Weber, who did not explicitly employ the “differentiation” terminology (Schimank, 1996; 2015). Since the 1950s, differentiation theory has often been equated with systems theory, either of the Parsonsian or later of the Luhmannian variety. But this is misleading because there have also been actor-theoretical variants based on Weber or on other kinds of action theories. Even so, in international debates the demise of Parsonsian systems theory, beginning in the 1970s, nearly marked the end of differentiation theory as an important perspective on modern society. “Neo-functionalist” attempts to fuse Parsons with action theory (Alexander and Colomy, 1990) did not attract much attention; only recently has Seth Abrutyn (2009; 2016) made another attempt to propagate a renewed structural-functionalist approach to societal differentiation. In German sociology, by contrast, the Luhmannian tradition of thinking about modernity in terms of a functionally differentiated societal order is still very much alive―whether in line with his systems-theoretical approach or in opposing action-theoretical approaches. Here we have a unique selling point of German-language sociology.
Theories of societal differentiation picture Western modernity as the emergence of about a dozen sub-systems or “value spheres” (Weber, 1919: 27–28) of society such as politics, education, science, intimate relations, or journalism, each of which produces a distinct, functionally specific contribution to the reproduction of society as the social setting for individual human beings’ conduct of life (Schimank, 2013: 37–75). German-language sociology has discussed in detail over the past twenty years Niklas Luhmann’s (1997) outstanding but highly controversial systems-theoretical conceptualization of functional differentiation as autopoietically operating sub-systemic communication chains. Among the most important recent topics inspired by Luhmann’s ideas, two shall be mentioned. First, the exclusion of larger parts of the population from the various services delivered by sub-systems such as the economy, health care, education, the legal system, and the social welfare provision through the political system has become an issue―in particular, the cumulative exclusion of citizens from more and more societal spheres, usually starting with unemployment or serious health problems (Stichweh, 2005; Farzin, 2006). A second issue has been the global extension of ever more societal sub-systems. This is the result of a long historical process that has picked up speed since the 19th century and has finally entered into public awareness with the globalization push in recent decades; today, we can no longer deny the existence of very strong global interdependencies (Weiß, GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSNATIONALIZATION, this volume). In the Luhmannian tradition, this fact is interpreted as the emergence of a “world society” (Stichweh, 2000).
Both issues are related with regard to the question raised by Luhmann (1997: 632) himself as to whether functional differentiation is really the constitutive form of modern world society or if only its highly developed Western regions are functionally differentiated whereas the rest of the world, especially the Global South, is primarily structured along the lines of inclusion and exclusion (Holzer, 2007; Holzinger, 2017). In other words, one could suspect that the blessings of functional differentiation are just a “luxury” enjoyed by some of the most affluent parts of the world that will be denied to all others forever. It is surely not by accident that this realization of exclusion in the Global South, with all its human misery, has been an important impetus for proposing a “critical systems theory” (Amstutz and Fischer-Lescano, 2013; Scherr, 2015) that takes a normative stand against these and other social problems from the standpoint of human rights and emancipation―a moralizing intervention into politics that Luhmann himself certainly would have rejected as not being the business proper of social science, as he did in his famous debate with Jürgen Habermas in the 1970s (Füllsack, 2010).
Luhmann’s views still dominate the German debates on differentiation theory. There is a lively discussion among his followers, accompanied by comments on other theoretical approaches, notably by André Kieserling (2004) and Armin Nassehi (2006). The Luhmannian tradition has engaged in a few attempts to understand the contemporary challenges of modern society. Recently, Nassehi (2018) interpreted the growth of right-wing populism in many countries from this perspective―a somewhat unusual approach to this phenomenon, which is ordinarily treated as originating from capitalism, growing inequalities, and cultural tensions. Furthermore, Dirk Baecker (2018) has taken up Luhmann’s notion that societal evolution from its earliest beginnings has always been driven by radical innovations of communication technologies and puts forward the idea that the “digital revolution” over the last thirty years is about to generate a “society 4.0,” following the three former types of society characterized, in turn, by segmentary, stratificatory, and functional differentiation, which were shaped by oral, written, and printed communication, respectively.
In a parallel effort, and often inspired by critical reflection on the Luhmannian tradition, German-language sociology has elaborated alternative conceptions of functional differentiation. To begin with, Thomas Schwinn (2001) has continued the Weberian legacy, following Wolfgang Schluchter’s (1979) close reading of Weber but relating it much more to current debates on theories of society. Like Schluchter, Schwinn articulates a strict Weberian position against Luhmann’s system theory.¹ He (Schwinn, 1998; 2004; 2007; 2019) relates differentiation theory to the three other perspectives on modern society (i.e., capitalism, inequalities, and culture). In so doing, he pays most attention to the connection between social inequality and the differentiation of “value spheres” while treating the connection with cultural ideas and with capitalism more like a taken-for-granted ingredient. What is lacking in his highly reflective theory-building is the application of theoretical concepts to an analysis of contemporary societal problems. Schwinn’s (2006; 2009) involvement in the “multiple modernities” debate is typical: a careful discussion of conceptual questions without mentioning that urgent problems of growing cultural conflicts are lurking behind them―conflicts that his sophisticated concepts could easily address without recourse to simplifications such as Samuel Huntington’s (1996) “clash of civilizations.”
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(1) Inherent to this position is to eliminate the term “society” altogether. This is reflected in the title of Schwinn’s 2001 book Differenzierung ohne Gesellschaft (Differentiation without Society). To avoid suggesting an overall “self-active” unity by employing the notion of society, Schwinn prefers to speak of an ensemble of “value spheres.” Also see Schwinn (2011) on “strong” and “weak” concepts of society.
Joachim Renn (2006; 2010) devotes his attention to another key topic of differentiation theory. How is system integration in modern society achieved even though each of its sub-systems, as Luhmann states, does not understand the language of the others? For example, politics is all about power,whereas science is all about truth. But both sub-systems intersect with one another: political decisions are based more and more on scientific advice and legitimation, and science, to maintain its autonomy, needs financing by the state to avoid becoming dependent upon the economy. Therefore, both sub-systems are tied to each other in complicated relations of translation: without giving up the worldview of the sub-system to which they belong, actors must be able to understand the concerns of other sub-systems and to integrate them into their own. This requires more than what Luhmann refers to as the mutual observation of structurally coupled but self-referentially closed systems. Drawing on a pragmatist theory of action, Renn explicates the various kinds and patterns of systems integration as translations that can never be more than workable approximations; and this is not a limitation but a functional requirement because being able to completely understand the original intentions of actors from a different sub-system would imply that the boundary between both systems had vanished, which would amount to nothing less than an elimination of functional differentiation. Although Renn shows how demanding and difficult this balance between understanding and distancing is, this integration work between different societal spheres is usually accomplished without much friction. Despite some fears that were articulated in the 18th and 19th centuries, modern society did not collapse as a consequence of institutionalizing a “polytheism” of “value spheres” (Weber, 1919: 27–28) that are in conflict with each other. Instead, problems of system integration have been handled without triggering serious crises between, for example, politics and science or religion and the legal sphere―with one exception that I will deal with in the next section under the heading of “capitalism.”
Another original approach to functional differentiation has been proposed by Gesa Lindemann (2018). Her main thesis is that the functional―she speaks of “horizontal”― differentiation of modernity involves inherent dynamics of “chronic selfendangerment,” in particular powerful forces of politicization or economization. Keeping such dynamics from destroying society as a whole calls for a plurality of social movements that serve as counterforces that supply modern society with what Lindemann calls a “structurally required critique.” A major drawback of this arrangement, however, to which Lindemann draws special attention, is that not only state power but also social movements must inevitably resort to violence in these struggles over the shaping of “horizontal” differentiation. Thus, societal order and progress, specifically with regard to establishing human rights and extending them to all human beings and the wider range of areas to which those rights apply (e.g., the right to housing, a basic income, sustainable environmental conditions), again and again rests on bloodshed; and this will remain so in the future.
Still other contributions to an actor-based theory of functional differentiation can be found in German-language sociology that use variants of rational choice (Esser, 2000: 64–79; Kroneberg, 2011), actor-centered institutionalism (Schimank, 2005; 2006), or Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields (Nassehi and Nollmann, 2004; Bongaerts, 2008) as their theoretical foundations (for an overview, see Schwinn et al., 2011). What characterizes debates in German-speaking countries on the functional differentiation of modernity is highly refined theoretical arguments combined with a pluralism of systems- and actor-theoretical approaches, which are involved in lively discussions with each other. However, these theoretical strengths come with a neglect of empirical work, which is very unfortunate because the rich repertoire of theoretical concepts could offer manifold heuristic devices for interesting empirical studies―be it qualitative case studies (see Zahner, 2006, as an exemplary analysis of a transformation of the arts sphere) or standardized representative studies (see Burzan et al., 2008, on the inclusion of the population in the various societal spheres).
3 Capitalism
I now turn to a second theoretical perspective that, to the present day, has been perceived as the main opponent to differentiation theory. Functional differentiation according to Parsons and Luhmann proposes a view of modernity that aims to correct what they claim to be a one-sided Marxist insistence on the predominance of economic concerns throughout society. When the heyday of “neo-Marxism” came to an end in German-language sociology, as elsewhere, in the late 1970s, “capitalism” became almost a “non-word” in theoretical reflections on contemporary society, and Luhmann’s verdict that Marxism with its perception of the economy as the dominant societal sphere was part of an antiquated “old-European” tradition of social thinking prevailed for more than twenty years.
However, since the turn of the millennium, a return to thinking about contemporary society in terms of capitalism can be observed worldwide and within Germanlanguage sociology as well. It is one discussion thread of “new economic sociology” (Maurer, ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY, this volume). On the one hand, the renewed interest in the capitalist nature of modernity has revived more or less orthodox Marxist views. From a theoretical point of view, however, this is the less interesting side of the coin because it is the less innovative one. Klaus Dörre (2011; 2012)―to mention just one very inspiring author―applies, in an undogmatic theoretical approach, traditional Marxist concepts such as Rosa Luxemburg’s “Landnahme”² to contemporary empirical phenomena. With regard to an empirical understanding of the present situation, such studies are quite useful, but they are not meant to open up really new theoretical perspectives on capitalism.The same is true of Stephan Lessenich’s (2016) diagnosis of Western modernity as societies of “externalization” whose internal social and systems integration depends critically on the Global South as a cheap supplier of rawmaterials and labor and a place for disposing of ecological risks. This is certainly truer today than it ever was and needs to be carefully studied as an important empirical phenomenon. But the theoretical scenarios to do so were already introduced by Wladimir Ilyich Lenin and Luxemburg about a hundred years ago.
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(2) Literally translated this would be “land grabbing”―land grabbing in the metaphorical sense of subordinating not only the whole globe but also ever more aspects of the conduct of life to capitalist imperatives.
Three theoretically more innovative views that depart from narrow Marxist premises shall be mentioned here. To begin with, Jens Beckert (2016) suggests a profound new interpretation of the essence of capitalism by investigating its temporal regime. Capitalism rests on a future-oriented kind of action: entrepreneurs and investors who take risks for the opportunity to reap profits and consumers who daydream of a better life, whereby these consumer dreams are the moving targets of entrepreneurial risk-taking. How do economic actors cope with the unresolvable uncertainties of the future in general and under capitalist conditions in particular? Beckert approaches the basic practices within capitalist economy (loans, investments, innovations, and consumption among others) from this temporal perspective and argues that the deeply disquieting potential of their inherent uncertainties can only be handled, and never completely, by resorting to“fictional expectations”―imaginations of future states of the world ranging from individual and small-scale expectations about the benefits of a new car to collective large-scale expectations such as five-year prospects of the financial market or economic theories such as Keynesianism. Only in this way, by hiding from themselves the high risks they are taking day by day, can economic actors―whether investors or consumers―endure their situation and function as carriers of the capitalist societal order and drivers of its dynamics. In the final end, capitalism rests on self-delusion and runs into crises not only for the reasons many others have already pointed out before; the much more profound crisis of capitalism comes about whenever the actors realize this self-delusion as such and have to face the abyss of uncertainty.
In a more historical perspective, Christoph Deutschmann (2008; 2009) offers answers to the questions of how capitalism, for more than two hundred years up to the present day, has produced a magnitude of economic growth previously unheard of, and what the future of this “growth miracle” might be. He proposes a sociological reading of Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of entrepreneurs as “creative destroyers”―with certain similarities to Beckert’s temporal analysis of economic risk-taking―and sees this basic mechanism of capitalist growth embedded in a rich context of economic, political, legal, scientific, technical, educational, and other factors, including gender arrangements and cultural determinants such as Weber’s Protestant ethic. This is a much broader horizon than we are provided with by the internationally very prominent “varieties of capitalism” perspective (Hall and Soskice, 2001). Deutschmann’s theoretical model leads him to a quite skeptical outlook on the future prospects of capitalist society. In his opinion, the middle classes in particular have largely lost their entrepreneurial spirit―and opportunities to live up to it as well―as a logical consequence of the last sixty years of capitalist dynamics. Thus, capitalism―at least in the Western countries―has deprived itself of its major driving force.
From a political-economy perspective, Wolfgang Streeck (2013) analyses―in a shorter time frame but with a similar conclusion―the “delayed crisis of democratic capitalism” in Western Europe and North America since the 1970s. The “forced marriage” of capitalism with democracy in the “golden age” between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s, when economic prospects were good and stable, union power was strong, and the welfare state was generous, has since been dissolved by the capital side. This has mainly been a consequence of capital’s increased exit options in a globalized and financialized economy, resulting in a loss of job security for many employees and the welfare state piling up debts despite reductions in benefits and services, thereby morphing into a “consolidation state” whose main interest must be geared toward still finding buyers for government bonds on the international financial market to avoid state bankruptcy. In the course of this development, the various strategies to maintain the solvency of the state without losing democratic legitimacy, especially from the middle classes, have been exhausted, which has led Streeck to diagnose a deepening societal crisis that has long since begun.
For quite some time now, Beckert has been one of the internationally leading proponents of “new economic sociology.” Streeck is an internationally highly visible political economist who is strongly involved in political debates. His contributions, like Deutschmann’s, are good examples of the kind of historical sociology related to a debate that was prominently advanced some years ago in the international social science scene by Immanuel Wallerstein et al. (2013) in a book that raised the question Does Capitalism Have a Future? Thus, the perspective on modernity as a capitalist society has benefited significantly from German-language sociology and could benefit even more, as with regard to differentiation theory, if more work were published in or translated into English.
4 Culture
A third perspective on modernity directs our attention to its cultural features. Ever since Weber identified the Protestant ethic as the source of capitalist entrepreneurship, sociologists have traced modernity’s origin and dynamics to cultural determinants. In the last few decades, the social sciences have witnessed a “cultural turn” that has further reinforced this focus on cultural factors (Reckwitz, 2000) and entailed an enormous proliferation of cultural aspects that have come into view, leading to a virtual explosion in the understandings of what culture means and how it works. Interestingly, this has not resulted in the revival of an “idealistic” interpretation of modernity that neglects “material” factors such as capitalism or inequalities; on the contrary, many cultural approaches seek to combine their cultural perspective with one of the two other perspectives that emphasize capitalism or inequalities. Some-times this boils down to simplistic “materialist” causation in which culture is little more than a derivation of economic interests; in other cases, culture is conceptualized as a causal factor in its own right that is interrelated with “material” factors.
Here, I am only interested in the society-wide manifestations and dynamics of culture (for a more general overview: Karstein/Wohlrab-Sahr, CULTURE, this volume). Prominent proponents of the cultural perspective share a view of downward causation from culture to individual life chances and the individual conduct of life. The most comprehensive account of modern culture as a force shaping subjectivity has been given by Andreas Reckwitz (2006; 2012; 2017) in an impressive series of studies, starting from the “bourgeois subject” of the late 18th century to sketching the contemporary “aesthetic-economic double subject” and its future prospects.With regard to recent developments, Reckwitz combines diagnoses of the “entrepreneurial self” (Bröckling, 2007) that claim a strong capitalist determination of the formation of subjectivity in modernity with studies that insist on a desire for “self-realization” and post-materialist value changes.Today’s capitalism indeed performs the conjuring trick of instrumentalizing anti-capitalist sentiments as an affirmative force of “creative destruction” as has already been shown by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2005). However, it can be asked whether this subjugation really is the whole story or whether there are subversive individual or collective potentials. Sometimes the cultural perspective tends to neglect what “resistance studies” depict as the other side of the coin (Courpasson and Vallas, 2016).
Despite capitalism’s surprising ability to integrate opposing forces, there is a limit to its willingness to communicate. According to Reckwitz (2017) as well as Cornelia Koppetsch (2019), a new cleavage has emerged between the “new” academic and the “old” non-academic middle classes, with the former being “cosmopolitan” and individualistic proponents of a “good opening” (Klapp, 1978) of national societies toward globalizing forces against their “bad closing” in the form of ethnocentrism and conformism, whereas the latter stick to a “good closing” against a “bad opening” of an unlimited “multiculturalism” and an economic and social-policy race to the bottom. At this point, questions of the conduct of life raise issues of social integration and direct our attention toward destructive cultural conflicts. The very similar approaches of Reckwitz and Koppetsch combine the cultural perspective not only with theories of capitalism but also with findings on social inequalities and, in this way, offer a revealing explanation of recent right-wing populism in Western Europe and North America.
Hartmut Rosa (2006) adds a different but complementary view that points to another problematic dynamic of modern culture. Like Beckert, he focuses on the temporal culture of modernity, which he sees as characterized by an ongoing acceleration of action in all societal spheres, driven by technological, economic, and political forces. From the individual conduct of life through organizational service production by firms, universities, hospitals, or churches to political decision-making, everything is accelerating ever faster, with ever shorter deadlines attached to all issues. This acceleration is the temporal manifestation of a dynamics of increase―rising aspirations as well as expectations―that can be observed in all societal spheres. For actors, these dynamics turn out to be temporal, social, and informational complexities of action, particularly in regard to decision-making. Scarcity of time―at the center of Rosa’s attention―is often accompanied by conflicts or mutual uncertainties of expectations and by incomplete information or information overload so that actors cannot engage in long-term planning but must fall back on “muddling through,” improvisation, and waiting for better times (Schimank, 2019).
In addition to this “bounded rationality” of action, individuals have another problem with growing societal complexity. Rosa (2016) diagnoses that more and more individuals in contemporary society suffer from a loss of resonance:The world around them does not respond to them―at least not in a manner that they experience as a meaningful confirmation of their identity. Instead, alienation from societal spheres and organizations as well as the roles one has to play is growing as is alienation from nature and intimate partners―the two major sources of identity confirmation that have been emphasized since the Romantic period. On the one hand, this is just another version of an old topos of cultural criticism that has been around since the late 18th century. On the other, Rosa presents evidence that today’s situation involves new aspects―for example, the “always on” mentality in the use of new media, which denies people the refuges that they once had.
I will leave it at that with these prominent contributions. Both Reckwitz and Rosa exemplify a tendency within the cultural perspective to assume “cultural depth” (Lizardo, 2016: 112–115): a deep shaping of peoples’ mindsets by cultural forces. In the extreme case, culture is understood as an inescapable mental prison, as language is in Whorfian linguistics. This inclination is often reinforced by an empirical approach via discourse analysis. But a discourse, such as the one vividly presented in Bröckling et al.’s “glossary of the present” (2004) only displays hegemonic ways of thinking; whether this “talk” (Brunsson, 1989) actually shapes and represents “action” is an empirical question. Hence, without denying the power of cultural socialization, I would argue that an understanding of culture as a“toolkit” that actors make use of in their own―sometimes quite creative―ways (Swidler, 1986) might be analytically appropriate to shift the balance towards individual agency, in accordance with a number of recent approaches within the “cultural turn.”
5 Inequalities
The fourth perspective on modernity, often associated first and foremost with sociology, depicts modern society as a constellation of relative better-offs and worse-offs with regard to income, educational credentials, social capital, and social prestige. Pertinent discussions within German-language sociology on empirical facts and theoretical approaches are documented in the contributions by Gunnar Otte, Mara Boehle, Katharina Kunißen (SOCIAL INEQUALITIES―EMPIRICAL FOCUS), and Thomas Schwinn (SOCIAL INEQUALITIES―THEORETICAL FOCUS) in this volume. I will therefore add only three brief comments here.
The first is a strong reminder of the “political sociology of social inequalities” advocated in the early 1990s by Reinhard Kreckel (1992) and later reiterated by Eva Barlösius (2004). This call for providing more than mere descriptions of changing social inequalities did not strike much of a chord in German-language sociology. But without studies of the political struggles over social inequalities,we fail to understand their nature and process dynamics. One approach to a causal reconstruction of process dynamics is to uncover underlying social mechanisms. Inspired by the works of Charles Tilly and Göran Therborn, among others, Martin Diewald and Thomas Faist (2011) proposed a mechanism-based conceptualization of social inequalities, which has, however, remained an abstract plea that has yet to be translated into empirical research.
Second, when contemplating social inequality, an argument can be made that we must go beyond national inequalities and consider their global dimension (Weiß, GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSNATIONALIZATION, this volume). Among Germanspeaking sociologists, Manuela Boatca (2015) and Anja Weiß (2017) have embarked in this direction, but much work remains to be done. As with regard to the systemstheoretical concept of a functionally differentiated “world society,” a question for further reflection is whether the global perspective should replace the “national container model” of society or whether both of these spatial scales merit analytical attention because some aspects of inequalities can or even must still be studied at the national level, whereas others require one to focus on the global level, and still others can only be comprehended appropriately by a combination of both.
Third, as mentioned above, the perspective on social inequality has to be combined with elements from theories of capitalism on the one hand and from theories of the culture of modernity on the other to draw a more accurate picture of current “entangled” inequalities, one that must include right-wing populism as an important contemporary phenomenon (Schimank, 2018). The general increase in income and standards of living during the “golden age” from the 1950s until the mid-1970s pushed economic inequalities to the background, making room for inequalities resulting from “spoiled identities” (Goffman, 1963) to move to the forefront since the late 1960s, beginning with the gender issue and soon other issues such as ethnicity, sexual or religious orientation, or disabilities. The associated value shift towards “post-materialism” (Inglehart, 1977) propelled all these culturally coded inequalities to the top of the agenda of “identity politics.” Today, however, economic inequalities have returned in the wake of globalized capitalism while the continued preoccupation with the aforementioned cultural inequalities strongly competes for public and political attention. Furthermore, many manifestations of “identity politics” are not just about respect for diverse ways of life but are blended with opposition to economic discrimination. As a result, we are confronted with complex entanglements of economic and cultural inequalities.
6 Conclusion
To summarize my brief inspection of the four basic perspectives onmodern society, all of them have indeed profited from the work of German-speaking authors. Germans-peaking scholars, including myself, should make stronger efforts to introduce their ideas into international debates. This is not to say that we should abstain from publishing and discussing theory in the German language. But what are perceived to be substantial new insights should be translated into English without delay so that they can be shared and critically assessed by the global sociological community. Sometimes the ensuing international debates might show that such contributions are not quite as original as they seem within the horizon of German-language sociology; but in many cases, it will turn out that sociological theory in general and theories of society in particular are major strengths of German-language sociology.
Besides this proposal to internationalize, I would like to formulate three more aims for future work on theories of society. The first is to increase efforts to construct an analytical framework that integrates all four perspectives into a unified model of modern society. As I noted at several points above, such work has already begun: at the interface of differentiation theory and theories of social inequality (Schimank, 1998; see also Schwinn, SOCIAL INEQUALITIES―THEORETICAL FOCUS, this volume); in the reconstruction of theories of capitalism as an integral part of differentiation theory (Schimank, 2009; 2015a); in attempts to use a combination of theories of inequality, capitalism, functional differentiation, and the culture of modernity to understand today’s entangled inequalities at the Western national as well as the global level (Münch, 2009; 2011); and finally in a recent discussion among Germanspeaking sociologists about a proposal of mine that all four perspectives should be combined to provide us with a richer and more sophisticated framework than each of the perspectives could offer on its own (Schimank, 2015b; 2016). This discussion will be continued, and many further reflections and applications to empirical phenomena will be needed until it can be decided whether and to what extent the proposed model works successfully.
Second, a parallel attempt should be made to strengthen the connections between theories of society and historical sociology. Despite a few notable exceptions, historical sociology is rather weakly established within German-language sociology so that the first step must be a more open-minded reception of studies from this field by those working on theories of modern society. Both perspectives―precisely because they have opposite analytical starting points―can profit considerably from each other by making the tension between them productive.What the four general perspectives on modern society can learn from historical sociology is the manifold aspects of concrete historical formations of certain national societies and the global relations between them. The models of functional differentiation, capitalism, the culture of modernity, and modern social inequalities are deliberately very abstract and, as a consequence, neglect most features of concrete societies. Historical sociology can inform the application of these models to specific societies; moreover, it can show the limits beyond which the models no longer help but skew our understanding of empirical phenomena. Conversely, general theories of modern society can be used by historical sociology as heuristic devices that shed interesting and fruitful light on their empirical cases. Even if the general models were refuted as inadequate in the end, they would have served their purpose as initial points of reference with which to engage in an inspiring debate.
Finally, mention must be made of a recently much-debated limitation of most theories of society devised by sociology in general and German-language sociology in particular. These are theoretical perspectives whose “contexts of discovery” were and still are Western societies―mostly the four countries Germany, France, Great Britain, and, dominating attention more and more, the United States. If we bear in mind basic insights from the sociology of knowledge, it would be miraculous if these origins had not shaped these perspectives to some extent. This implies that their applicability, especially to non-Western parts of the world, might well be limited (Holzinger, 2017); in the extreme case, these perspectives could be totally misconceived and produce fatal misunderstandings of societies in the Global South in particular (Gerharz/Rescher, GLOBAL SOUTH, this volume). In addition to this potential cognitive bias, these perspectives might also contain an ideological bias that makes the West a role model for the “rest,” as modernization theory did during the “golden age” and a few authors indeed still do today. Post-colonial studies, among others, have highlighted these two quite probable weaknesses of our theories of modern society. Against these “Eurocentric” perspectives―a term alluding to their 19th-century origin―post-colonial studies have put “provincializing Europe” on the agenda (Chakrabarty, 2000; Conrad et al., 2013). This debate has just started in German-language sociology (Boatca, 2015; Gutierrez Rodriguez et al., 2016; Holzinger, 2019). It is surely a necessary reminder of the need for critical self-reflection in Western sociology, although the consequences to be drawn from it are not yet clear. The problem with post-colonial studies is that so far they have articulated a very plausible general program of investigation but have not yet delivered many specific demonstrations of in which respects and to what extent certain key concepts of Western sociological thought and Western theories of society display bias. Lacking such demonstrations, we still do not know whether these concepts can be repaired or modified or whether they have to be substituted by new ones―and if so, how “neutral” these new ones can possibly be. It might turn out that we will not find – at least not in the near future―a sociological vocabulary that does justice to social facts all over the globe. In this case,we may have to deal with a number of vocabularies―perhaps one for each of the “multiple modernities”―and must manage to translate them into the vocabulary of the other if we seek to engage in any productive sociological exchange.
These are big problems on the way towards a global theory of modern society. With regard to the theoretical perspectives discussed in this article, we are on the safe side if we limit their use to Western societies until we have further clarified whether and to what extent they can be applied to other contexts.
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