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(1957) talked about ‘social theory and social
structure’.
The level of engagement between geograph-
ers and social theorists has been highly
uneven: Marx receiving far more explicit
attention than, say, Durkheim and Weber;
or the French ‘postmodernists’ (Baudrillard,
Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault) more than,
say, the Frankfurt ‘modernists’ (Adorno,
Habermas, Horkheimer). Through Giddens
(1979), a binary distinction is sometimes
detected between the social theories on
offer, cleaving a deterministic,structural–
functionalistpole of explanation from a
voluntaristic, interpretive–hermeneuticpole
of understanding, and this distinction has been
usefully mapped into critical accounts of
human geography’s underlying social-theoretic
allegiances (e.g. Thrift, 1983). In return, geog-
raphers have been injecting a spatial sensibility
into the heart of social theory, a project that,
while initially formulated within the latter by
Giddens (1979, 1984), has now announced
geography as a ‘player’ within social theory.
The Gregory and Urry (1985) and Benko and
Strohmayer (1997) collections indicate how far
and quickly this project developed after the late
1970s: contributions from the likes of Soja
(1989), Gregory (1994) and Massey (2005)
have also been pivotal; and many other geog-
raphers, both well-known and less-heralded,
have all worked on advancing space in social
theory (seegeographical imagination). The
founding of the journalSociety and Spacein
1983, configured as a meeting-place between
social theory, human geography and cognate
‘spatial’ disciplines, embodies how something
new, social-theoretically driven, was to become
(for many) what necessarily lies at the heart of a
human geography escaping from disciplinary
isolation.
Unsurprisingly, the pantheon of social the-
orists listed above has attracted criticism, in
part from those objecting to a too-easy eliding
of social theory with the ostensible goals
and exclusions of Enlightenment: namely, its
trumpeting of (certain visions of) progress,
reason and scientific protocols, together
with the predominantly bourgeois, white,
male identities of the thinkers involved.
Alternative, anti-Enlightenment social theo-
rists of the period are hence erased from the
history (Mestrovic, 1998), as too is the awk-
wardness that the original social theorists
often felt themselves about both the emerging
modern world and the intellectual tools
available to them. More starkly, the classed,
raced and gendered dimensions of socialtheory, embedded within a Euro-
Americanism, are now highlighted (Slater,
1992). Lemert (1993, p. 10) dissects the
issues here, linking with the ‘culture wars’
afflicting North America (and to an extent
elsewhere in thewesttoo):
There are those who insist that, whatever
has changed, America and the world can
still be unified around the original Western
ideas that Arthur Schlesinger described as
‘still a good answer – still the best
hope’ ... Schlesinger – white, male, Harvard,
liberal, intellectual, historian – is the most
persuasive of those in this camp. Against them
are others who say, ‘Enough. Whatever is
useful in these ideas, they don’t speak to me.’
Audre Lorde – black, feminist, lesbian, poet
and social theorist – put this opposing view
sharply in an often-quoted line: ‘The master’s
tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’
Between these two views, there is more than
enough controversy to go around. In large
part, the controversy is between two different
types of social theoristsandover how social
theory ought to be done.
One result has been the rise offeminist,
anti-racist and post-colonial versions of
social theory, perhaps deriving from ‘other
regions’ (Slater, 1992), alert to the fundamen-
tal structuring of the social by the criss-
crossing of unequal power relations at a range
of spatial scales and in/through a variety of
places. A further implication, resonating (if a
shade ironically) with the ‘postmodern social
theorists’, has been to challengeallversions of
social theory (old and new) by suggesting that
their claims are always too grand, totalizing,
inflexible and insensitive to the specificities of
(the ‘real’ histories and geographies of)every-
day life(cf.grand theory). Consequently,
‘social theory is often seen in contemporary
intellectual debates as an outdated form of
understanding,’ which means that, ‘[t]hough
... no one has yet announced the end of social
theory, someone is bound to get round to it
sooner or later’ (Callinicos, 1999, p. 1). In
effect, such a movehasoccurred in recent
geographical texts, with calls for ‘minor the-
ory’ (Katz, 1996) and ‘modest theory’ (Thrift,
1996), thereby leaving social theory in an odd
place, demonized but still indispensable, if
only as the ever-present horizon of what needs
to be argued against or at least around (the
spirit of Pryke, Rose and Whatmore, 2003). In
this fractured intellectual landscape, social
theory does not disappear: it is not wholly
redundant, but it does acquire a curious
character as a resource to be quarried forGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_S Final Proof page 699 1.4.2009 3:23pmSOCIAL THEORY