‘Social integration and System integration’

Abstract

As I stressed at the start, the main impetus behind this book was to see whether using Lockwood's distinction between ‘social’ and ‘system’ integration was as fruitful in the cultural realm as it had proved to be in the structural domain. The final task is to argue that conceptualizing them in the same way does open up the possibility of a unified theory capable of dealing with their interplay and thus of theorizing about morphostasis/morphogenesis at the societal level. This may strike readers as rather similar to Habermas's enterprise over the last ten years when he too works to the same end by also employing a distinction between ‘social and system integration’, namely that between the ‘Lifeworld’ and the ‘System’. The similarity is enhanced by the fact that the delineation of these two domains in his more recent work marks a distinct shift away from the elisionism implicit in the earlier notion of ‘knowledge-constitutive-interests’ and from the associated culturalist bias of Knowledge and Human Interests . That this is a significant turning point is underlined by the fact that it is welcomed in general terms by commentators of a realist persuasion such as Outhwaite and Layder, but is received negatively by McCarthy, Habermas's indefatigable translator, who holds the ‘system’ to be a redundant importation into what could be reductively explained by reference to action theory alone. However, Habermas has tenaciously resisted micro-reductionism, insisting instead that ‘My point of departure, then, is that the problem for theory construction of how to combine the basic concepts of systems and action theory is a genuine one ’ (emphasis added).

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