Abstract
In this paper, I shall develop an interpretation of a series of issues grouped around problems of contradiction and conflict in society, against the background of the elements of the theory of structuration presented in the previous papers. The method of social analysis I shall propose may be regarded as almost the obverse of functionalism; its guiding tenet is: don’t look for the functions social practices fulfil, look for the contradictions they embody!
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Notes and References
Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s dialectic’, in T. B. Bottomore, Karl Marx, Early Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) p. 198.
Marx and Engels, Selected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968) pp. 182–3.
Gary Young, ‘The fundamental contradiction of capitalist production’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 5 (1976) p. 196.
Maurice Godelier, ‘Structure and contradiction in Capital’, in Robin Blackburn, Ideology in Social Science (London: Fontana, 1972).
Op. cit., p. 367. See also van den Berghe, Rationality and Irrationality in Economics (London: New Left Books, 1972).
Jon Elster, Logic and Society, Contradictions and Possible Worlds (Chichester: Wiley, 1978).
Cf. Mao, ‘On contradiction’, Selected Works of Mao-Tse-Tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967) pp. 331ff.
For useful background discussion, see Martin Albrow, Bureaucracy (London: Pall Mall, 1970).
Herbert Marcuse, ‘Industrialism and capitalism in the work of Max Weber’, in Otto Stammer, Max Weber and Sociology Today (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971).
Marcuse, One-dimensional Man (London: Sphere, 1968).
Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
Cf. Wolfgang Mommsen, The Age of Bureaucracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).
Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (London: Tavistock, 1964).
Cf. Laurie Taylor and Stanley Cohen, Escape Attempts (London: Allen Lane, 1976).
Cf. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Knopf, 1955).
I abstract as far as possible from Althusser’s broader philosophical standpoint. For an example of the vagaries to which that standpoint can give rise, cf. the perambulations of Hirst and Hindess through their various works: Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge, 1975); Mode of Production and Social Formation (London: Macmillan, 1977);
Anthony Cutler, Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst and Athar Hussain, Marx’s ‘Capital’and Capitalism Today, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1977 and 1978).
Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Allen Lane, 1969) p. 113.
Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970) pp. 186ff.
J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1973) pp. 292–3.
For recent remarks by Althusser on this issue, see Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976) pp. 176ff.
Cf. Miriam Glucksmann, Structural Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought (London: Routledge, 1974) pp. 129ff.
Theodor Adorno, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1976).
See especially Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967).
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© 1979 Anthony Giddens
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Giddens, A. (1979). Contradiction, Power, Historical Materialism. In: Central Problems in Social Theory. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16161-4_5
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