Slouching towards Babel

Abstract

All four of these books are about social theory and one would assume from the titles that they concern themselves with the same areas of intellectual endeavour, Ray perhaps more concerned with the history of social theory, and Elliott in the Reader more concerned with the contemporary scene. One would not be entirely wrong about this; however, a scholar new to the area could be forgiven for thinking that social theory is an all but incoherent enterprise in which many of its practitioners seem to have little or no contact with each other. I do not think it is as bad as that: the four books are clearly concerned with the same sort of problems but they approach them from different positions and in different ways and they provide no overall way of thinking about the approaches which can include each other, nor, more disturbingly, is there any obvious debate between the different positions held by the three authors (or, come to that, the thinkers represented in the Reader). This might be a temporary stage in the development of social theory or one moment on the way to a real fragmentation.