ABSTRACT
The very title of Giddens’s New Rules of Sociological Method, first published in 1976 and reissued in 1993, bespeaks the modernist attitude: out with the old, in with the new. The old is assumed to be deficient and obsolete while the new is assumed to be superior and progressive. Durkheim wrote the “old” rules of sociological method, and Giddens gives us the new rules. This move by Giddens is popular, and characteristic of his dismissive attitude toward the non-modern, as when he confesses in The Constitution of Society that “this book is written with a definite sociological bias, in the sense that I tend to concentrate upon material particularly relevant to modern societies” (1984:xvii). Or consider a similar comment by Giddens in The Nation-State and Violence: “It is the task of sociology, as I would formulate the role of that discipline at any rate, to seek to analyze the nature of the novel world which, in the late twentieth century, we now find ourselves” (1987:33). Elsewhere in this book, Giddens adds: “Social science, in other words, has from its early origins in the modern period been a constitutive aspect of that vast expansion of the reflexive monitoring of social reproduction that is an integral feature of the state” (ibid.: 181). And of course, these and other sentiments expressed by Giddens are in line with his remarks in the Ahmed and Shore (1995) volume, discussed in chapter 2. Presumably, for Giddens, sociology has little to offer in the way of illuminating the past, the non-modern, or the traditional. Islam, Russia, Africa, the traditional cultures in Eastern Europe-none of these figure in Giddens’s analyses. Quite apart from Giddens, these and other non-Western cultures are neglected and misunderstood by others. Yet, arguably, these are among the “hot spots” in the contemporary world. New Rules of Sociological Method is the one book by Giddens that is invoked the least by his critics as well as his sympathetic readers, but is, I contend, the most important of his works. It is a transitional book between his earlier work as an exegisist (of sorts) of classical social theory and his later work as the promulgator of structuration theory and the synthetic construction of traditions. In it, Giddens really displays the fundamental “nuts
and bolts” of his thought regarding all three of his vital, career-long concerns: the nineteenth-century origins of the social sciences, the themes that were imported into the twentieth century, and his attitude toward contemporary social theory. In the preface to this book, Giddens again betrays a modernist mind-set, as when he discloses that the themes of his study “are that social theory must incorporate a treatment of action as rationalized conduct ordered reflexively by human agents, and must grasp the significance of language as the practical medium whereby this is made possible” (1993:viii).
