Social theory and overinterpretation

ABSTRACTTheory is the use of abstraction in the pursuit of understanding. In the human sciences, theory is a talmudic process of reading and conceptual dispute that carries the colligation of evidentiary signs (minimal interpretation) towards riskier, but more insightful and widely relevant, interpretations of the meanings, causes, and significance of human events (maximal interpretation). Yet, in making possible such maximal interpretations of society, politics, literature, and so forth, theory also introduces the possibility of overinterpreting evidence. Judgments that overinterpretation has occurred are made collectively within communities of inquiry. After developing Umberto Eco’s theory of overinterpretation as part of a hermeneutic-semiotic account of theory in the human sciences, this paper conducts a case study of the rise and partial fall of the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution. This reveals aspects of the process whereby patterns of maximal interpretation, carried through several academic generations, allow the development and refinement of knowledge and insight about an object of inquiry, on the one hand, and yet are subject to judgment as overinterpreted, on the other. Much more than a matter of falsification and/or the politics of intellectuals, the decline of the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution involved a complex series of judgments about the degree to which an abstract theoretical terminology could continue to produce new and deeper understandings. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the talmudic aspect of social theory has affinities with the universal human capacity for thinking.KEYWORDS: InterpretationFrench RevolutionsemioticsMarxismhermeneuticsTalmudUmberto ecosociological theory Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 The author thanks and acknowledges comments on previous drafts of this paper by Monika Krause, Michael Weinman, Berit Vannebo, Tobias Schlechtriemen, and two anonymous reviewers for Distinktion.2 One of the implications of the hermeneutic-semiotic position on theory that animates this paper is that certain traditions of thought can be both radical and a tradition, since the use of ‘tradition’ here refers to the cultivation of practices of interpretation that can connect one generation of intellectuals to the next. For the writers of the Black Atlantic as constituting a ‘non-traditional tradition,’ see Gilroy (Citation1993). For the operation of theory as traditions of interpretation that encode ambitions for modernity, see Alexander (Citation1995).3 I owe this example to Johans Sandvin, who introduced it during a seminar on sociological analysis I was leading in Bodø, Norway in 2022.4 The image of a web of theoretical texts operates, for Merton (Citation1968), to differentiate science (social and natural) from the humanities; he seeks to remove this image from the regulative picture of social science, because he regards it as a threat to the accumulation of knowledge. In this paper and in other texts, I explore the possibility that certain kinds of advances in knowledge, learning, or cumulation or enhancement, could occur, not despite, but through the web of texts that make up ‘theory.’5 Thus in a famous sequence, Rabbi Hillel was asked to summarize the Torah in the time in which the old man could remain balancing on one foot; he quoted Leviticus, ‘Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ and interpreted this as ‘That which is hateful unto you, do not do to your neighbor.’ Following this, Rabbi Akiva asserted that the most important line in Torah is ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ But Ben Azzai argued in response that the most important line is ‘This is the record of the line of Adam.’ Ben Azzai’s response is simultaneously a metadispute about how to read other parts of Torah – that is, a methodological dispute over which principles provide the basis for interpreting other principles – and a dispute about the specific command of Leviticus – namely, whether ‘love thy neighbor’ applies to how one should treat other Jews or whether it applies to how one should treat all other humans, that is ‘the line of Adam.’ See Reinhard Citation2005.6 This phenomenon is, I will hazard, very familiar to sociologists who advise dissertations that are ‘qualitative’ or interpretive in some sense of the term.7 Clifford Geertz (Citation2000) starts his classic essay on thick description with an underinterpreted story – which he says, without further interpretive work, is like a ‘note in a bottle.’8 Burke found occasion to characterize the National Assembly in this way, despairing that after the French Revolution ‘the next generation of the nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, userers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters,’ and taking comfort in the fact that, in Britain, ‘the Jews in Change Alley have not yet dared to hint their hopes of a mortgage on the revenues belonging to the see of Canterbury.’ (Burke Citation1790, 72, 156; see discussion of this issue in De Bruyn Citation2001).Additional informationNotes on contributorsIsaac Ariail ReedIsaac Ariail Reed is Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of Political and Social Thought at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Sociology as a Human Science: Essays on Interpretation and Causal Pluralism, Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King's Two Bodies, and Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences.