Barbara Hanson - What Holism Can Do for Social Theory

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What Holism Can Do for Social Theory

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

58 Sustainability and Security within Liberal Societies

Learning to Live with the Future

Edited by Stephen Gough and Andrew Stables

59 The Mythological State and its Empire

David Grant

60 Globalizing Dissent

Essays on Arundhati Roy

Edited by Ranjan Ghosh &

Antonia Navarro-Tejero

61 The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault

Mark G.E. Kelly

62 Democratic Legitimacy

Fabienne Peter

63 Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political World

Edited by Ranjan Ghosh

64 Perspectives on Gramsci

Politics, Culture and Social Theory

Edited by Joseph Francese

65 Enlightenment Political Thought and Non-Western Societies

Sultans and Savages

Frederick G. Whelan

66 Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Social Democracy

Thin Communitarian Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Education

Mark Olssen

67 Oppositional Discourses and Democracies

Edited by Michael Huspek

68 The Contemporary Goffman

Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen

69 Hemingway on Politics and Rebellion

Edited by Lauretta Conklin Frederking

70 Social Theory in Contemporary Asia

Ann Brooks

71 Governmentality

Current Issues and Future Challenges

Edited by Ulrich Brckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke

72 Gender, Emotions and Labour MarketsAsian and Western Perspectives

Ann Brooks and Theresa Devasahayam

73 Alienation and the Carnivalization of Society

Edited by Jerome Braun and Lauren Langman

74 The Post-Colonial State in the Era of Capitalist Globalization

Historical, Political and Theoretical Approaches to State Formation

Tariq Amin-Khan

75 The Psychology and Politics of the Collective

Groups, Crowds and Mass Identifications

Edited by Ruth Parkin-Gounelas

76 Environmental Solidarity

How Religions Can Sustain Sustainability

Pablo Martnez de Anguita

77 Comedy and the Public Sphere

The Rebirth of Theatre as Comedy and the Genealogy of the Modern Public Arena

Arpad Szakolczai

78 Culture, Class, and Critical Theory

Between Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School

David Gartman

79 Environmental Apocalypse in Science and Art

Designing Nightmares

Sergio Fava

80 Conspicuous and Inconspicuous Discriminations in Everyday Life

Victor N. Shaw

81 Understanding the Tacit

Stephen P. Turner

82 The Politics of Expertise

Stephen P. Turner

83 Globalized Knowledge Flows and Chinese Social Theory

Xiaoying Qi

84 Reconstructing Social Justice

Lauretta Conklin Frederking

85 The Dialectics of Inquiry Across the Historical Social Sciences

David Baronov

86 How Groups Matter

Challenges of Toleration in Pluralistic Societies

Edited by Gideon Calder, Magali Bessone and Federico Zuolo

87 The Politics of Rationality

Reason through Occidental History

Charles P. Webel

88 Gramsci, Materialism, and Philosophy

Esteve Morera

89 Emotions and Social Change

Historical and Sociological Perspectives

Edited by David Lemmings and Ann Brooks

90 John Rawls and the History of Political Thought

The Rousseauvian and Hegelian Heritage of Justice as Fairness

Jeffrey Bercuson

91 What Holism Can Do for Social Theory

Barbara Hanson

First published 2014
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2014 Barbara Hanson

The right of Barbara Hanson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hanson, Barbara Gail

What holism can do for social theory / by Barbara Hanson.

pages cm. (Routledge studies in social and political thought ; 91)

1. Social sciencesResearchEuropeHistory. 2. Positivism.

3. Holism. I. Title.

H62.5.E8H36 2014
300.1dc23
2014003814

ISBN: 978-0-415-74390-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-81333-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To Norman W. Bell, a scholars scholar

Contents

I am grateful to Gail McCabe for support, copy editing the book proposal, and suggesting the title.

1
Where Have We Been? Where Might We Go?

One of the classic questions of epistemology is this: How do we know what we believe we know? (Watzlawick 1984b). This question leads to several more about the nature of the physical, human, and social. If there is such a thing as reality? If so, what is it likesingular, physical, spiritual, conceptual? Does it matter? What can humans know about it?

Questioning, contemplation, and analysis of these issues provide ideas and practices that can be examined in terms of how the process of scholarship works and what this means for scholarship. I have come to think of this as facticity focus. Facticity is a process of creating or constructing facts. In such a process, how we see shapes what we see. This means looking at what is taken as true, legitimate, important, or useful in a given historical context and why it matters. How becomes as important as what. There is a parallel in the art world. In performance or installation there is a focus on the fact of art as a question of what occurred (Eldridge 2003). In this way what happened or was done comes to attention.

In this vein I focus on two questions: How do we do what we do? How have we come to do what we do? I argue that this is important because the hows of doing lead to the whats of seeing. This turns the classical question of epistemology above into: How do we do what we believe we know? Belief or legitimacy of knowledge becomes a question of practice. Thus, it is worth looking at how we do things in order to better understand what we do.

I take up this question as an expansion of the issue to reflect on what has come into attention in social theorizing in terms of the politics of inequality and practice, and growing interest across various world knowledges in holistic epistemology. There are three pillars to my theoretical grounding constructivism, redress of inequalities, and holism. My focus is on the construction and management of scholarly practices from the mid-1900s to the present. I use the epistemological insights of these times to look at historical roots and iterations of so-called European or classical thinking. I see this as a way for scholars to hold themselves accountable to their own practices. To do this is to consciously question our own practices regarding concepts like Europe, European, Euro, West, Western the same way we have questioned these practices as our topics of interest.

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