A METHODOLOGY OF READING SOCIAL THEORY: A CASE STUDY OF MARX, ABUNDANCE AND SCARCITY.
Item
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Title
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A METHODOLOGY OF READING SOCIAL THEORY: A CASE STUDY OF MARX, ABUNDANCE AND SCARCITY.
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Identifier
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AAI8222995
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identifier
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8222995
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Creator
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SPIEGELMAN, ROBERT ALAN.
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Contributor
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George Fischer
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Date
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1982
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology, Theory and Methods
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Abstract
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The oil crisis, the population explosion, the arms race, the work of Max Weber, Paul Lazarsfeld, Samuel Beckett, Claude Levi-Strauss, the Club of Rome, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and romantic love songs--they all have a common thread, a thorough-going presumption of scarcity. This thesis suggests that much of social theory, discourse and practice is based on a self-fulfilling prophesy that scarcity is inevitable, that the world is best apprehended by its invariant limits. Such thinkers as Marx suggest another orientation--that social theory can apprehend the world in terms of the possibility of open-ended, qualitative, abundant development. This thesis argues that a social thought given to abundance is not only possible but urgent.;The thesis offers access to such post-scarcity discourse through a method of "emancipatory animated reading." This developmental strategy for reading is displayed in an account of Nobel-laureate Ilya Prigogine and his reinterpretation of entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, for us the quintessential expression of scarcity in natural science. Our category for articulating an ongoing mode of qualitative development is the "object-in-birth," derived frm Prigogine's version of entropy--here, "negentropy"--and extended to sociological analysis. We suggest that negentropy is a ground on which social and natural sciences might converge towards a more comprehensive, multi-dimensional version of social and historical development than that which currently prevails.;In Part Two, we read Marx's methodological writings. Abundance in Marx is not a Utopian state of being to be achieved in a distant future. Rather, Marx made an abundant, present activity out of his critical methodology, reading both Hegelian Idealism and Political Economy strategically to recover abundant possibilities suppressed in both. We view key categories in Marx's theorizing--production and mode of production--as neither humanistic nor economistic; as historically-specific, but not reducible to the limits of any single historical epoch. These categories incorporate human needs and social relationships as so many possible dimensions of post-scarcity development. Finally, we suggest that a hitherto neglected Marxian category, mode of cooperation, invites further exploration as the locus and ground for such abundant human development.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Sociology
