Matthias Benzer - Social Life: Contemporary Social Theory

Contemporary Social Theory

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In sociology, the idea that people live in society is widely accepted. At the same time, this idea is not always made explicit in sociological research. Social theory comprises attempts to conceptualise, analyse, understand, explain, and critically scrutinise social relations and conditions. The questions that this area of sociology has addressed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have included whether current social conditions must be considered as radically modern, postmodern, or not at all modern, where the lines of social inequality and discrimination are drawn, how relationships of power are shaping the social world, how social relations and social interaction are to be characterised, and where the potential for the transformation of society lies, to name a few. A range of social theorists, crucially, have, in their endeavours, explicitly raised and examined the problem of living in society. In other words, they have sought to investigate human life in social relations, contexts, and conditions. Social Life contains expositions, explorations, and discussions of such work in contemporary social thought. The focus of the book rests on eight socio-theoretical analyses of social life: writings by Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Zygmunt Bauman, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard. The works of these sociologists have had a tremendous impact on the sociological research of the present day. The following chapters aim to highlight, detail, and discuss the contributions and challenges of the analyses of social life put forward by these eight thinkers to sociologys ongoing quest for conceptualising and interrogating the contemporary social world.

The chapters approach the socio-theoretical ideas under discussion from two angles. Each of the social theorists in focus has developed a set of concepts, statements, and arguments for analysing and critically scrutinising contemporary social relations and conditions. The first part of every chapter concentrates on decisive elements of those conceptions of, arguments about, and inquiries into, present-day society. At no point does this amount to a summary overview either of the respective body of thought in its entirety or even of large parts of it. Instead, the first parts of the chapters identify and spotlight key components of each thinkers conception and analysis of contemporary society and explore those in detail. At issue are elements that have made particularly sustained contributions or raised particularly far-reaching challenges to sociologys project of critically examining the social world of today. For instance, an elaborate account of Foucaults thinking about power is prioritised over a summary of his major interventions from the 1960s and 1970s tout court. In a similar fashion, a detailed exposition of Baudrillards distinctions between the way in which life and death are treated in symbolic exchange relationships and the way in which they are treated in capitalist society is offered instead of an overview of his entire work on the symbolic, illusion, reality, simulation, and hyperreality.

Informed by their conceptions of social relations and conditions, each of these thinkers interpretations, examinations, and critical interrogations of the social world has, in turn, in different ways informed their investigations of particular phenomena of that world. The second part of every chapter discusses the respective theorists analyses of the ways in which the wider social contexts in focus in the first part shape, manifest themselves in, are expressed through, and receive influence from more specific phenomena. At the centre of attention here are chiefly phenomena or phenomena that resemble phenomena many people are likely to have experienced immediately, may frequently hear or read about, or are simply able to imagine independently of having been exposed to sociological research. For instance, discusses climate change as Giddens problematises it sociologically. The aim of the second part of each chapter is to elucidate ostensibly abstract theoretical ideas about prevalent social relations, contexts, and conditions by linking them to analyses of such phenomena.