Boy Talk: Social Theory and Its Discontents

Abstract

Heine Andersen and Lars Bo Kaspersen (eds.) 2000. Classical and Modern Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 524 pp. (0-6312-1288-4)

Zygmunt Bauman 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 228 pp. (0-7456-2410-3)

Gary Browning, Abigail Halcli and Frank Webster (eds.) 1999. Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present. London: Sage, 502 pp. (0-7619-5926-2)

Gerard Delanty 2000. Modernity and Postmodernity. London: Sage, 194 pp. (0-7619-5904-1)

Roberta Garner (ed.) 2000. Social Theory: Continuity and Confrontation. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 592 pp. (1-5511-1235-3)

Trevor Noble 2000. Social Theory and Social Change. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 260 pp. (0-3339-1239-X)

There seems something oddly old-fashioned about assessing the contemporaneity of a critical text by the number of women writers that it recognises – but then there are times when only the bluntest of tools will do. I reached this conclusion while searching for a suitable core text for a social theory module. I had two key concerns: to find texts that offered thoughtful accounts of the different ways of theorising the relationship between modernity and postmodernity; and to find texts that would represent the full diversity of social theory. The second has not proved easy, and reading the most recent surveys of the field, one could be forgiven for thinking that gender played a negligible role in the functioning of contemporary society. Supposedly comprehensive surveys of the field, such as Callinicos's Social Theory: A Historical Introduction, manage to nod to such quaintly unreadable figures as Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer, without giving over a single page to feminism, and offer indexes that run on forever without mentioning the work of a single woman writer. What, then, is a good way forward for students?