ABSTRACT
Althusser’s influence on Castells’s reformulation of urban sociology was both epistemological and theoretical. We saw in the preceding chapter that the epistemological inheritance that provided the basis for Castells’s critique of previous theories must be rejected on the grounds that no epistemology can be self-evident and self-justifying. We also saw that Castells himself was in any case never fully committed to this epistemology and that, as his work developed, so the separation between his and Althusser’s method became increasingly explicit. The consequence of this is that the philosophical foundation of his work is now far from clear (for example, the notion of establishing a correspondence between ‘chains of observation’ and ‘chains of theory’ begs many familiar questions), and that his early critique of urban sociology as ideological has been undermined.
