The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism

4. The Micro-Macro Nonproblem

4 The Micro-Macro Nonproblem T he preceding two chapters addressed Marxist critiques of critical theory. In this chapter, I engage the critique of Marxism mounted from within mainstream sociological theory. Although Jeffrey Alexander praises Marx's "brilliance," his project is to eviscerate Marxism of all political content. In this reading, I attempt to delineate crucial points of difference between Marxist critical theory and neoParsonian social theory (which disingenuously borrows certain rhetorical gestures from Marxism). Here and in the next chapter, I engage arguments against critical theory that pretend little sympathy for critical theory's emancipatory project. Even though both Alexander in this chapter and world-weary postmodernists in the next claim a cosmopolitan familiarity with Marxism, they drain Marxism of politics. The publication of the multieditored The Micro-Macro Link (Alexander et al. 1987) further entrenches the alliance ofAmerican and European sociological theorists bent on displacing Marxism once and for all from mainstream sociology (Agger 1989b). Admittedly, my fulminations against sociologized anti-Marxism are fighting words; typically, this sort of ideological polemic indicates thoughtlessness, another expression of left-wing infantilism (Jacoby 1987, 112-90). Yet there is something decidedly strange going on in this collection written by such "names" as 56 57 THE MICRO-MACRO NON PROBLEM Jeffrey Alexander, Peter Blau, Niklas Luhmann, James Coleman, Neil Smelser. As a way of introducing my discussion of the particular issues in question, let me glance at the underlying intellectual and political changes transpiring in Western sociology that largely occasion the neofunctionalist effort to unify the field under the banner of the so-called micro-macro problem and condition the attack on Marxism. Situating Neofunctionalism Politically The Parsonianization ofAmerican sociological theory is best understood in terms of a sociology of knowledge-cum-critique of cultural hegemony that situates neo-Parsonianism politically. Let me not pretend that Parsonianism has more influence than in fact it does. What goes on in mainstream American sociology is only tenuously related to the larger political world. Yet this is no reason to ignore the politics of theory. As I say repeatedly in this book, politics in late capitalism is found everywhere and nowhere (Agger 1989a); that is precisely why it is so difficult to criticize ideology in the traditional Marxist way. People like Alexander (1982, 1985) reinvent functionalism as neofunctionalism in order to restore the dominance of Parsonian theory in American sociology (Sica 1983; Turner 1985). Although Marxists do not proliferate in the American university, least of all in the midwestern-empiricist discipline of sociology , they are sufficiently abundant to offer "neofunctionalists" a target at which to aim their own self-serving critiques. Parsons, as ever, is most useful where he offers an alternative to the Hegelian Marxism that has prevailed in Europe since the 1920s, discussed systematically in chapter 13 (Lukacs 1971; Marcuse 1960). He does not provide much empirical sustenance for the number crunchers who analyze regression. Parsons functions mainly as a political signifier in contemporary American sociology, differentiating non-Marxists from Marxists. Thus, I want to understand the neo-Parsonian project as a political one. Of course, Parsons was attacked from the beginning as an advocate of "stasis," hence of stable Eisenhower-era American society; now he is even accused of fascist sympathies. His Structure of Social Action (1937) prepares the ground for his Social System (1951), in which he systematizes his structural functionalism. Parsons in effect Americanizes Weber, obliterating Weber's own Nietzschean pessimism about the fate of bureaucratic capitalist civilization-an angst he shared with numerous fin de siecle thinkers like Freud, Wittgenstein, and Simmel. As I dis- 58 THE lEFT'S RIGHT cuss in chapter 10, there are two Webers: there is the Parsonian Weber who cheerfully plotted the course of puritan capitalism, and there is the conflict-theoretic Weber who underlies all sorts of non-Marxist perspectives on class and class conflict (Lenski [1966]; Dahrendorf [1959]; Giddens [1973]; Gouldner [1970, 1976, 1980]; even-perhaps-the Habermas of The Theory of Communicative Action [1984, 1987b]). Although critical theorists, who derive their intellectual perspective from the original Frankfurt school (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse), believe that there is not much difference between these two Webers (as Marcuse [1968b] indicates in his paper on Weber), it is telling that the Weber restored by Alexander et al. is not the pessimist fundamentally ambivalent about whether capitalism is good or not. The sunny Parsonian Weber gives rise later to the pattern variables, those seamless ontological...