Christopher Powell

Radical Relationism: A Proposal

Different relational sociologists have different phenomena in mind when they use the word “relation.” For some, relations are concrete network ties between individuals or groups, while for others relations are something more abstract, such as relative positions in a field. For some authors relations are the elementary unit of analysis for all sociology, while for others relations are one type of emergent social structure among others. In this chapter, I present the rudiments of a radically relational sociological epistemology, based on but extrapolating beyond relational elements in the works of Norbert Elias, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Harold Garfinkel, Dorothy Smith, David Bloor, and Bruno Latour. By “radically relational” I mean an epistemology that contains no residual dualist elements and therefore treats all social phenomena, including individuals themselves, as constituted through relations.1 This epistemology assumes naturalism and monist materialism but adopts an agnostic stance toward realism. It also applies reflexively to itself. In keeping with this agnosticism, I present the key points of this framework as guidelines for epistemic practice rather than as statements about what it is.

How Epistemology Matters: Five Reflexive Critiques of Public Sociology

This article analyses Michael Burawoy’s vision of public sociology in light of five distinct ‘epistemic strategies’, each of which generates substantially different expectations regarding the challenges and opportunities facing public sociologists. The five epistemic strategies range along a spectrum from methodological individualism at one end to holism at the other. Between these two poles, considerations of the social relativity of scientific knowledge arise. Constructionist theories highlight the performative dilemma entailed when science reveals itself to be one narrative among others. Hierarchical theories such as Marxism suggest that public sociology is torn by the irreconcilable contradiction between hegemony and counter-hegemony. Heterarchical theories address both of these two problems together. Heterarchy suggests that science’s claim to universality may interfere with public sociology’s social-transformative aspirations. However, the dynamic complexity of ‘public’ social struggles generates opportunities to rethink the place of difference in the production of scientific knowledge.

Four Concepts of Morality

This chapter maps out four influential positions in the sociology of morality taken by Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, and Marx. These authors’ differing substantive claims about morality are understood in terms of their differing epistemic strategies, fundamental conceptual assumptions that frame sociological inquiry. Epistemic strategies, most often divided simply into holism and methodological individualism, are here classified according to Kontopoulos’s five-part scheme based on the extent to which the theory in question invokes emergent phenomena, features of social life irreducible to individual action. Weber’s methodological individualism frames a subjectivist account of personal values. Simmel’s compositionist epistemology, which proposes institutions and relations irreducible to individual action, grants morality a limited objectivity that develops historically through the growth in scale of social groups. Durkheim’s holist epistemology frames a moralizing sociology in which moral questions have scientific answers, derivable from knowledge of the objective mechanisms of social integration and solidarity. The hierarchical epistemology of Marx’s thought is centered on a view of society as a strongly emergent but self-contradictory system of relations; complete moral integration is seen as impossible within a class society, so that the answers to normative questions vary by one’s location in class relations. Each of these four classical theories relativizes morality, but in different ways and with differing effects. In the fifth epistemic strategy, heterarchy or tangled-systems theory, sociology is reflexively implicated in the social relations it studies. The implications of heterarchical reflexivity for the sociology of morality are sketched briefly at the conclusion of this chapter.

Contradiction and Interdependency: The Sociologies of Karl Marx and Norbert Elias

Synthesizing ideas from two authors as similar and as different as Marx and Elias is a tricky and dangerous undertaking. Each of them proposed not only specific explanatory claims about the workings of social phenomena but also methodological approaches for generating explanations, epistemological standards for evaluating explanations, and ontological concepts for defining the phenomena to be explained. Each articulated these claims in a body of work that has been institutionalized as paradigmatic for a network of researchers. As Kuhn (1996) pointed out, explanatory claims made under the auspices of different scientific paradigms are not only different but incommensurate. For this reason, even simple comparisons between two paradigms can be problematic.

Revitalizing the Ethnosphere: Global Society, Ethnodiversity, and the Stakes of Cultural Genocide

This paper uses the concepts of ethnosphere and ethnodiversity to frame the stakes of cultural genocide in the context of the emerging global society. We are in an era of rapid global ethnodiversity loss. Global ethnodiversity is important because different cultures produce different solutions to the subjective and objective problems of human society, and because cultures have an intrinsic value. Rapid ethnodiversity loss is a byproduct of the expansion of the modern world-system, and Lemkin’s invention of the concept of genocide can be understood as a dialectical reaction to this tendency. The current phase of globalization creates pressures towards global monoculture, but movements towards polyculture can be observed. Genocide scholars have an interest in three underdeveloped lines of inquiry: measuring ethnodiversity loss; constructing valid measures of the vitality and life or death of cultures; and developing techniques for resolving social differences without the need for cultural