Book Review: Spätmoderne in der Krise. Was leistet die Gesellschaftstheorie?

With most jointly authored books the process of hammering out an agreement between the co-authors is intransparent, except perhaps to the attentive reader who might notice breaks in style or inconsistencies in the argument. Reckwitz and Rosa have chosen a different, and novel, approach: they each offer texts under their own name. The reader is not entirely left to their own devices in spotting the similarities and differences between the two authors as these are thematized in a discussion at the end – a further innovation – in which they are interviewed by the philosopher Martin Bauer. Two books, as it were, for the price of one. The basic motivation for this joint effort is set out in the Introduction. The authors note a problem of supply and demand. On the one hand, particularly since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008, there has been a demand, including among a wider public, for accounts that offer the big picture, a ‘view of the whole’ (p. 19). On the other hand, sociology has failed to meet this demand. In its absence, other disciplines have stepped in – for example, the best-selling work of economist Thomas Piketty. Since sociology in general, and social theory in particular, are uniquely placed to meet this demand, they have been failing in their duty. This failure is ascribed to two causes: (i) The pressures stemming from New Public Management (NPM) for the social sciences to emulate the natural sciences in which the gold standard is publication in A-rated peer-reviewed journals, devaluing the worth of books (a common complaint in the humanities in the German-speaking world); (ii) the lasting effects of the postmodern critique of grand narratives, which ‘plays into the hands’ of NPM (p. 18). This results in the marginalization of social theory, which in turn exacerbates the fragmentation of sociology as a discipline; the proliferation of ‘hyphenated sociologies’ (i.e. sociologies of x, y or z) (p. 17). It is this shortcoming that the authors seek to rectify. The first word goes to Andreas Reckwitz. He starts with a defence of social theory as an ‘ensemble of practices’ (p. 25) and then draws a distinction between sociological theory – that is Merton’s middle-range theory in which sociology is seen as a science of the real and theory’s role is to feed it with empirically testable hypotheses – and social theory (given in English). The latter he further breaks down into Sozialtheorie – that is a context-transcending ‘social ontology’ (e.g. the examination of the nature of the social) 1080547 JCS0010.1177/1468795X221080547Journal of Classical SociologyBook Review book-review2022