Networks
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)
In an article first published in July 1968 in New Left Review, Perry Anderson gave an analysis of a critical weakness of British intellectual culture. His diagnosis is remarkable and surprising. One of the key problems, Anderson argued, was that Britain has failed to make any contribution to the classical sociological tradition; moreover, this failure was indicative of a wider failure to be European and to be modern. Sociology, he suggested, was one of the great achievements of the ‘European bourgeoisie at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’. By contrast, British intellectual culture was marked by a lack: ‘why did Britain never produce either a Weber, a Durkheim, a Pareto or a Lenin, a Lukács, a Gramsci?’1
Today, while one could point out many weaknesses in British intellectual culture, few would argue that the lack of an indigenous sociological tradition is one of them. But whatever its strengths and weaknesses, something like Anderson’s analysis was certainly influential. From the 1970s onwards, social theory developed rapidly in British universities. Anthony Giddens, who had published a textbook on Marx, Weber and Durkheim,2 can be taken as indicative of this trend and was, for a time, a leading light. What was taken to be traditional British empiricism was rejected, and British social scientists read and reread the European sociological canon they should have been reading all along, rather than through the mediation of its American interpreters. Social theory rapidly became something of a meta-discipline, effecting a radical transformation of not only sociology but also English, in the form of the emerging interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. The political influence of social theory arguably reached its height in 1997 when Giddens himself proposed the Third Way as the project of New Labour. New Labour, in Giddens’s work, became a neo-Durkheimian project of moral renewal.3
But what was the new British social theory? How did it come to relate to ‘French social thought’? And why would the idea of the network come to be significant for its further transformation?
Notes
1. Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review 50, July/August 1968, p. 10.
2. Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971.
3. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998.
