ABSTRACT
The crisis in sociological theory Anyone who has been teaching contemporary sociological theory for the last decade will agree with the following observation: it is hard to think of a more widespread and reiterated ground for criticising and indeed rejecting ‘functionalism’—British anthropological func tionalism, American sociological functionalism and the subvarieties of either-than its alleged static, timeless, ahistorical bias. It has been stated ad nauseam that functionalism ‘fails to take time seriously’. It is claimed that this failure is necessary not contingent. For inherent, deep-seated, fundamental reasons-metaphysical and methodological, cognitive and extra-cognitive (ethicopolitical, ideo logical)—functionalism is/was bound to de-emphasise and/or be unable to render theoretically intelligible becoming, process, dia chrony, history. Rather, its whole ‘spirit’ and ‘vision’ of the world, and the analytical tools it elaborated, systematically, irrevocably or pre-eminently directed its problem-interests and cognitive powers (if any) towards being, structure, order, synchrony, equilibrium states and equilibrial mechanisms. Committed to the logical and methodological priority of the ‘problem of order’, functionalism, it was claimed, could at best develop models of change within but not o f systems, and functionalists themselves sometimes conceded that a general theory of socio-cultural change was conceptually impossible so long as structural-functional analysis was mandatory. I have recapitulated these familiar strictures to bring out two assumptions of the sociological opposition of the early 1960s, which we might call the general and the special. The general assumption was that no general sociological theory is valid or complete unless and until it ‘takes time seriously’: in the stronger versions of the assumption, unless it takes becoming, process and diachrony as both ontologically and methodologically privileged, and elaborates special con
ceptually distinct types of cognitive instruments (‘dialectical’ ones, particularly) to implement this programme. In the weaker versions of the general assumption no such claims were made for the funda mental conceptual heterogeneity of diachronic models or theories. The special assumption was that the bias towards synchrony, atemporality and ahistoricity was specific and peculiar to functional ism not to sociological theory or academic sociology as such. The more optimistic holders of the special assumption asserted or implied that once we got rid of functionalism and its methodological and theoretic shackles nothing would be easier, at least in principle, than to reorient theoretic endeavour in sociology and neighbouring social sciences-particularly anthropology and political science--in the required direction, skewed towards becoming and diachrony. At any rate functionalism-at best the heuristic of socio-cultural orderwas supposed to be particularly and viciously inhibiting and crippling regarding the theorisation of socio-cultural processes. Other lines of criticism against functionalism and its distinctive metaphysical, methodological, heuristic, ideological features were advanced, but the particular line we summarised carried at least as much weight as any other and for some critics as much as all the others put together. The foregoing paragraph sums up a line of criticism which is of
more than distant historic interest in so far as functionalism ‘dies’ every year, every Autumn Term, being ritually executed for intro ductory teaching purposes, its life-cycle somewhat resembling the gods of the ancient Near East. The critique of functionalist socio logical theory is, in addition to or in conjunction with the study of the masters of classical sociology, a pedagogic necessity: the demoli tion of functionalism is almost an initiation rite of passage into sociological adulthood or at least adolescence. If functionalism did not exist-or had not existed-it would have had to be invented. Two things, however, ought to disturb this almost idyllic situation. The first and least important is the very history of functionalism. In both social anthropology and sociology-though more or less independently-functionalism moved increasingly during the 1960s in directions which should have been welcomed by its historistic critics, displaying widening and deepening concerns with timedependent history-laden, processual problems. Although most readers will immediately think of neo-evolutionism in this context, three main directions of temporalisation and historisation of late functionalism should be distinguished, of which neo-evolutionism is indeed one, but not the sole and exclusive channel for the increasing would-be ‘realism and relevance’ of functionalist sociology. These three directions may be listed in descending order of
generality. First, a number of attempts have been made to re-examine or revise structural-functional analysis as such. Some have claimed
that there is nothing in the logic of structural-functional analysis that precludes the development of ‘comparative dynamics’ of social systems beyond the simpler homeostatic, equifinal, boundarymaintaining models.1 In a less formalistic and more problemcentred way, some functionalists have dropped the restrictive assumption of invariance regarding the set ‘functional requisites of any society’ at least for heuristic purposes: a main task of socio logical analysis, then, becomes not the reciprocal matching of given or even novel structures to pre-given functions but the search for genuine functional emergents or ‘neofunctions’. Hence the designa tion of ‘genetic functionalism’2 for this brand of functionalist revisionism which also introduces the concept of ‘future system’ to overcome the chronic functionalist bias towards given systems as well as given structures and functions. Others have formulated general sociological models in which instability is generative rather than frictional, e.g. the ‘tension-management model’.3 None of these formulations has enjoyed as much notice as the neo-evolutionist partly no doubt because Parsons himself has not ventured much in this particular direction.
