Keywords

The Pen as a Mighty Sword

The first research strategy to address is based on Skinner’s two-volume The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. In this work, from 1978, aptly described in the article ‘The Pen Is a Mighty Sword’ (Tully 1983),Footnote 1 Skinner discusses his method for concepts’ contextual analysis, with his ‘critics’ later responding via the 1989 edited volume Meaning and Context, in addition to his own revised essays on the method in Visions of Politics (2002). For Skinner, the changes in conceptions such as ‘state’ allow a glimpse of ‘the engines of social change’ (p. 178). While this description is underpinned by the metaphor of a machine as an instrument of social change, one methodological assumption underlying his historicist approach is that concepts, language, and contexts are all bound together with social action. In that sense, ‘words are deeds’, as Ludwig Wittgenstein concluded.

In the words of James Tully (1983, 491), step 1 in the technique is ‘the collection of texts written or used in the same period, addressed to the same or similar issues and sharing a number of conventions’. In other words, by situating the concept in relation to other materials in which one can find it used, one becomes able to understand the point behind that concept’s use in the discussions in question. When one compares texts that put forth analogous ideas with shared vocabulary, it becomes possible to explore how their writer has adopted or adapted the prevailing normative conventions for use of the concept in practice. In other words, the key to studying contextual and historical meaning lies in the usage of the concept in a discourse defined by a set of rules employed by several authors in a given era.

The conceptual historian’s first task is, in other words, ‘to trace the relations between a given utterance and its wider linguistic context’ (Skinner 2002, 85), then place this utterance in its practical contexts. The context of an utterance and the functions and goals served by the concept lead the way to what Skinner called the ideological—i.e., to active manipulation of ‘the use-conventions governing the prevailing normative vocabulary’ (Tully 1983, 496). Keeping this point in mind, he depicted theorists as ‘innovative ideologists’ who wield concepts as weapons in philosophical debates. For Skinner, ‘an ideology is a language of politics’ (p. 491), not an epiphenomenal body of thought. Accordingly, the ways in which concepts are used also constitute normative practices, and ‘whenever such terms are employed, their application will always reflect a wish to impose a particular moral vision on the workings of the social world’ (Skinner 2002, 182). Through this lens, ‘society is a text’, as Brown (1987) puts it, and theory is considered political ‘in politicising theory and theorising politics’ (Grossberg 1997).

The point here is that even the most well-regarded philosophical works address problems in terms of their own age. They are firmly embedded in the existing social order in which they were born. Studying what a given concept may or may not have meant in a specific context brings in authorial intentions in relation to meaningful utterances that, while neither ‘true’ nor ‘false’, do something for an argument. Hence, not only what is meant but also ‘the intended force in which the utterance is issued’ matters; grasping this ‘historical meaning’ requires asking what the writer may ‘mean by what he or she says in a given text’, per Skinner (2002, 82, 93). When a text is reduced to its grammatical form or logical content, the meaning is no longer accessible. Similarly, emphasising only readers’ responses puts excessive weight on interpretation that reproduces the intended meaning. Accordingly, the meaning of a given concept’s use in an argument lies not in content or interpretation but in the force of an utterance that the text brings into the discourse. No utterance makes sense unless it is a locutionary act in a performance of saying something. In the vocabulary of J.L. Austin’s (1962) speech-act theory, it is not, however, that locutionary act (i.e., the expression) or its effects (the ‘perlocutionary act’) but the performative aspect (the ‘illocutionary act’) that makes a difference.

A speech act is performed in a given context, and to understand its meaning is to describe the uses of the concept. Unpacking the term ‘context’ too is in order; Skinner means the discursive space wherein the utterance ‘performs’, and he uses ‘speech act’ for the ways in which the performance takes place (2002, 113). The choice of focus between authors with their ideas and a particular concept considered in various discussions is discretionary, but the usual practice in writing about the history of concepts is to embed the concept in its temporal, spatial, and social contexts. Skinner’s way of identifying ideological conventions to survey and explain their role in discursive formation and change is possible because of minor and often forgotten or sidelined texts. Stepping away from the masterworks is required because the classics on their own are misleading guides to ideological conventions; after all, each challenges the commonplaces of its era (Tully 1983, 495). Hence, a useful strategy for understanding what is at stake in the discussions can be found in reading the classics in relation to other, ‘adjacent’ texts. Therefore, one can trace the prevailing conventions that govern the reference and speech-act potential of concepts. It is from here that we reach the crux of where some ‘historical meaning’ arises.

To make things matter, one has to use language that is limited by normative rules, conventions, and boundaries such that the ideas cohere in meaningful arguments. ‘All revolutionaries are to this extent obliged to march backwards into battle’, said Skinner (2002, 149–150). Using language to change things and their relations requires one to anchor an argument in a prevailing discursive regime, which is intersubjective and a product of historical conventions, before attempting its transformation. The idea of innovative ideologists who exploit concepts strategically in philosophical debates makes more sense when this point is borne in mind. In manipulating concepts and their meanings, innovative ideologists communicate their ideas in a way that makes sense, but they cannot change the system itself. The elements that can change are the criteria for application of a concept, which shape its sense or definition; the range of reference in which the concept may be deployed; and the limits to its possible appraisal, or its speech-act potential valued within relevant contexts (Hyvärinen 2006, 21). Within these parameters, concepts resist manipulation beyond merely the words that describe them.

One can make this case by citing a concrete example from debate surrounding institutionalisation of cultural studies, which sparked Skinner’s critique of ‘The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon’ (Skinner 1978, 2002; cf. Williams 1976/1983). Characterised in brief, the disagreement involved words versus concepts. This began with the claim that the more complex and nuanced a word is, the more likely it is to be a site of significant historical experience and debate. According to Raymond Williams (1976/1983, 87), ‘culture’ is one of the most complex words in English because of its use as a key notion in many disciplines and systems of thought. It developed from the notion of organic growth to denote cultivation and civilisation, then artistic products, collective action, and entire ways of life. Nevertheless, Skinner found that controversies arose ‘about the criteria for applying the word […] or about [for] what range of speech acts the word can be used’ (2002, 160), not about its semantics or origins as addressed in dictionaries. Second, if someone uses a term such as ‘culture’, it does not necessarily follow that the corresponding concept is an object of reflective interpretation. In addition, he argued, understanding the literal meaning of a word is not a sufficient condition for grasping the associated concept. A notion becomes a concept only when there is discussion about its uses. Third, a change in the significance of a word such as ‘culture’ could trigger a shift throughout the lexicon, which may signify a change in attitudes, perceptions, or beliefs among those who use the language in question (pp. 171–172).

This last step explains how shifts turn into conventions and in what ways they establish a new set of practices. Historians of political thought such as Skinner support revisiting generally accepted ideas about historical events and philosophical systems. From their perspective, all systems of ideas, that of cultural studies included, are intentional products of conscious speakers’ strivings to affect historical events. The applicability of Skinner’s line of attack to what Williams posited is no coincidence. They operated in similar quarters, both working at the University of Cambridge, although they came from very different backgrounds. In the conceptual-historical approach, all universal claims and perennial questions that transcend linguistic and practical contexts are ‘dogmatic’ or ‘anachronistic’; therefore, all attempts to find answers or solutions for present-day discussions by looking to the past are doomed to failure. Allegedly, such backward-looking practice serves ideological and political interests by not considering the accuracy and authenticity of each utterance that the historians scrutinise carefully. The revisionist method is criticised for reducing the political and means to a game of rhetoric, speech, and language wherein the social and material conditions of social change are beyond the bounds of discussion (see Wood 2011, 7–11; see also Femia 1981; Nederman 1985).

Conceiving of a theoretical debate in this manner puts emphasis on the metaphor of physical conflict. Doing so corresponds with our common-sense experiences from such situations: when arguing, we treat our counterparts similarly to how we would in more direct conflict with opponents. Verbal battles are fought by means of words acting as intellectual weapons to attack or defend one’s position. We prosecute the fight by means such as various tactics and rhetorical strategies (for making statements and rebuffing possible counterclaims), relying on verbal skills and empirical evidence. Consequently, ‘argument is war’, which implies a lesson that argumentation takes place in reference to a battle rather than a language-game. Rhetoricians study ways of using concepts in argumentation from this standpoint, where metaphors are a specific aspect of language.

According to cognitive linguists such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980/2003), people think and act with concepts that function metaphorically. Cognitive linguists appreciate conceptual metaphors as expressing a relationship between an ordinary notion and a more abstract concept, which constructs, establishes, or demolishes arguments with respect to conceptual metaphors such as ‘theories are buildings’ (p. 53). Our understanding of social structure and social change, in other words, is based on conceptual metaphors that provide us with ways to make sense of the social world in which we live. In this respect, the root metaphors of sociological thought are not so different from the conceptual metaphors by means of which all of us act in day-to-day life. Instead of employing common-sense conceptions and everyday understandings of the world, we need to extend our exploration of the landscape to ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills 1959/2000). The following section lays out a discussion of conceptual metaphors that sociological discussions apply for social relations to render social structure and social change more conceivable.

The Root Metaphors of Sociological Thought

Conceptual metaphors transfer abstract ideas and models from one discipline to another through an attempt to make them more concrete. According to Brown, the images painted for social structure and social change are formed from sociological thought’s root metaphors, which offer a vantage point from which to conceive of social relations in terms other than direct denotation (1977/1989, 128). In A Poetic for Sociology, Brown defines a metaphor as a device that carries a concept from one system of meanings into another (pp. 80–81), and he explains that the root metaphors in classical sociological thought are ‘society seen as an organism or as a machine, and social conduct viewed as language, the drama, or a game’ (p. 78). The conceptual metaphors delineating society are adapted from the natural and physical sciences, while those for social conduct are derived more from the arts and humanities. Usually, social scientists accord greater value to metaphors with origins in the former, deeming them more scientific than more humanities-rooted notions.Footnote 2

The combination of concepts—that is, their articulation in a metaphorical relationship with one another—is also a source for new ideas and concepts. New, ground-breaking conceptual metaphors adapted to the social sciences can transpose a system of meanings for a new standpoint or perspective from which to depict social structure and social change. Only by coming to terms with the prevailing system of meanings, however, can an illustrative metaphor become a paradigmatic model. As a point of reference, the root metaphors are like paradigms, according to Brown (p. 125). Paradigms are institutionalised as models composed of theories, methods, and images of the subject matter together structuring (an ideological) worldview of a particular scientific community, that group’s identity, or even ‘hegemony’ within their discipline (see Ritzer 1975).

Until the scientific revolution of the early modern era, it seemed rational to assume that our surroundings consist of heavenly bodies that are eternal, while life on Earth is ephemeral—temporally bounded and of a transitory nature. In other words, the heavens and the earth seemed to be two separate spheres. Aristotle’s geocentric cosmology in Physics was based on empirical insight that terrestrial objects stay put unless moved by a force, whereas the celestial bodies circle the earth, meaning that it is the centre of the world. In Metaphysics, the cause of every change that physicists could not explain was associated with the prime mover. Scientific revolution turned the mediaeval imagery of the world upside-down. According to the Newtonian imagery of the world, the whole universe follows the same laws of mathematics and mechanics, which ultimately replaced speculative reasoning that had no place in science. This knowledge was built on a rigorous scientific method that presumed objectivity, repeatability, falsifiability, and commensurability. Empiricists confined themselves to sensory-perception-based descriptions and explanations of the empirically observable world, applying an approach built on empirical data gathered via systematic observation. In the twentieth century, in turn, Einstein’s speculative theory of relativity largely superseded Newton’s conceptualisation of mechanics. In Newtonian physics, both time and space are absolute, while Einstein’s theory conceives of time as a conventional measure of electromagnetic waves that move in space at the speed of light. Hence, the two notions are relational.

For the social sciences, the classics of sociology were not detached from relational thinking (see Herranen 2022). Talcott Parsons claimed that classical sociologists had ended up relatively independent of one another in a critique of what he deemed a utilitarian conception of rational individuals freed from all restrictive rules and norms of the social system. Parsons advanced the idea of seeing the social system relationally in terms of social functions, with social action taking place for purposes of adapting, reaching goals, cultivating integration, and socialising to latent norms and values of the system. According to Parsons, the appropriate unit of sociological analysis is not the social structure but the actor—that is, the fundamental component of structured social relations. In the conception he put forth with his social theory, a social system consists not of individuals but of actors with certain systematic functions (Parsons 1951/1991).

Parsons may have considered relations in a new way, but he was far from the field’s first relational thinker, however. According to Brown, classical sociology presented the social system as a self-contained whole akin to an organism or a machine. These images, which are related to the birth of the modern nation-state, form part of the background for emergence of a ‘science of the social’ such as sociology, which is generally considered to have been established by Émile Durkheim. His seminal Suicide (1897/1951) shows that even the most individualistic act of killing oneself is, in fact, a social act that is structured socially in various ways. Instead of the individual, Durkheim gave ontological priority to the social as a response to the rise of individualism. He did not take society to be a mere aggregate of individuals as might be portrayed via statistics; he found it to consist also of corporeal and prudential human beings and their ‘collective consciousness’—the ideas, beliefs, and values that people share in each community.

In his work at the dawn of the twentieth century, Durkheim referred to the structure of the social relations in modern industrial society as an organic whole in which each part connects with other elements in ‘organic solidarity’, thus standing in contrast against a mechanical form visible in primitive societies. In penning The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim (1916/1964) was interested in the basic forms of social life (such as religion) and their complex social organisation, in addition to a systemic character that gives weight to social structure. The organisation of social life was relational for him, with the social relations being constituted internally. In his holistic approach, society is a bounded system, like an organic whole that evolves and never ceases to change. It develops as a social order ‘of its own kind’ organising the social entities in accordance with its own rules and laws. Consequently, every society is one of a kind, while the structure seems universal. The corresponding root metaphor, at the foundations of sociological thought, is the conceptual metaphor ‘society is an organism’.

The other metaphor underpinning classical sociological thought is ‘society is a machine’. In the mechanistic terms of the natural sciences, society is a machine-like organism. Thermodynamics, for instance, presents energy as being readily transferred as heat, fuelling work in a manner similar to that by which capitalists consume labour power and appropriate surplus value from workers. Among many other influences, Marx took the principles of thermodynamics as inspiration in Capital (see Rabinbach 1992). However, imagery of social structure and social change follows neither a mechanistic view nor an evolutionary approach stemming from the natural sciences. Even though the bourgeois social order in Marx’s eyes was like an inexhaustible force of nature, it was a result of the historical and material social relations of production that constitute ‘the anatomy’ of its subjects. This imagery of social change can be viewed in relation to a notion in which the economic system is conceived of in the form of appropriation of surplus value from labour, which becomes an inevitable force of a capitalist law of motion as well as the motor of the class struggle (addressed in the next chapter).

Sociologist Max Weber’s study of the social action of individuals forms the other half of the picture. This work, presented in the 1920s in his posthumously edited book Economy and Society, is still iconic, not least because of the theoretical reformulations by Parsons. He found social action, not society or the social order, to be the object of sociological interpretation; in this, his work stands out against the other classic writings in the social sciences:

Sociology (in the sense in which this highly ambiguous word is used here) is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences. We shall speak of ‘action’ insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior—be it overt or covert, omission or acquiescence. Action is ‘social’ insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course. (Weber 1922/1978, 4)

Weber outlined his sociological categories in Economy and Society to explain the action of individuals by articulating ideal types of social action. According to Weber, sociological interpretation of action is performed regarding subjective meanings that actors rather unconsciously give to their ways of acting. If the meaning of the action is oriented toward other people, it is social. Weber’s theory of action yielded a greater understanding of individuals’ social action but not of social structures, as the other classic works of sociology did.Footnote 3

He applied the ideal types as the interpretive means of ‘action theory’, wherein a social action is classed as ‘instrumentally rational’, ‘value-rational’, ‘affect-oriented’, or ‘traditional’. For example, his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1905/1930) portrays capitalism as a rational form of social action wherein a puritan work ethic and religious redemption as a reward for hard work jointly articulate with the individualistic logic of accumulating capital. This theory seems to be only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, in that it considers the social action of individuals to be an effort to grasp the Spirit (Geist) and the form of its manifestation in the conscious minds of individuals. Its sense of religiously underpinned ideology operating dialectically in the background became sociology’s dominant way of understanding the mechanisms behind all historical and social phenomena.Footnote 4

Via the root metaphors in sociological thought, social action is depicted as drama or a game as well. Common behind the latter conceptual metaphors is explicit interest in social action as a play in which people act under the rules pertaining to social interaction in day-to-day life. The drama metaphor, which ties in with the discussion of Shakespeare and theatre, gained traction, especially in social psychology. For instance, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956/1959) describes day-to-day social interaction as what occurs in a theatre, where people act in keeping with the roles assigned to them. Goffman adopted the poetic metaphor ‘social action is a drama’ from literary theoretician Kenneth Burke, for whom linguistic action is based on drama, which, in turn, is characteristic of all social relations (not least among them, class struggle). Therefore, social action as drama creates structures that both enable and constrain actors’ playing of their roles for social change.

The Social Sciences without the Social

Ever since the classics of sociology converged as an apparently coherent constellation, efforts to resolve what lies between structure and agency have driven social theoreticians’ ambitions, yet resolution remains absent. Individual-level action offers a model for methodological individualists, who take society to be an aggregate of social actions in a manner that conflates society with individuals. Sociologist Margaret Archer (1995, 33–46) has defined this approach as ‘upwards conflation’, wherein social structure is epiphenomenal in relation to action by individuals. This type of individualism builds on an individual-oriented hermeneutic understanding related to meaningful social action. The central problem for methodological individualism is a lack of social structure, which renders it unable to account for the various strata of a social formation.Footnote 5

Meanwhile, structuralists portray the structure of society as a whole, whose sui generis nature is the main object of study for social scientists. Durkheim’s Suicide, often cited in this connection, is a classic that employs a holistic approach wherein suicide rates are explained neither by the mental-health problems nor by extreme natural conditions. Rather, suicide is a social act related to social integration and moral regulation in society. If people have no sense of belonging somewhere or lack moral guidelines, they are isolated from the social system and may ultimately end their life. The opposite mode may be obtained with the same result in extreme circumstances of oppression and social coercion. For Archer, this approach entails ‘downwards conflation’, a term she used for conflating individual-level actions with the social structure in such a manner that one’s social theory depicts the structure as dictating the actions of individuals. Because structuralists focus on objectified social relations, they do not address social phenomena in the way they appear to individuals. Their work is allegedly deaf to actors’ subjective interpretation of meanings, and the action of individuals is a mere by-product of social structure.

Archer has approached the above-mentioned problem of reductionism in terms of spatially oriented metaphors such as ‘up–down’ for how corporeal human beings experience and understand the world (Lakoff and Johnson 1980/2003). From the philosophical angle of ‘critical realism’ (see Archer 1995; see also Creaven 2000; Sayer 2010), lower-strata physical phenomena such as infrastructures are relatively independent of higher-strata social phenomena. From this perspective, nature (not society) is a self-subsistent whole and is irreducible to language or culture, which are relatively independent of one another. One of the most prominent attempts to resolve the structure–agency dichotomy connected with these generalisations has been the ‘a-reductionist’ structuration theory of Anthony Giddens, in which agency and structure are situated in relation to one another because of the ‘duality of structure’ (Archer 1995, 93–94; Creaven 2000, 113–114).

Structuration theory has its parallels in the sociology of knowledge with phenomenologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1966) social constructionism, which focuses on people’s day-to-day life and their forms of knowledge. Social scientists taking this stance do not see any important difference between individuals’ everyday actions and the social structures that actors reproduce and transform when acting. Their argument is such that ‘it is through individual actions that we construct social reality itself’. In more theoretical terms, the problem with social constructionism, wherein the social structure is inseparable from the individual, is that it does not leave a ‘remainder’, a leftover or surplus, which deprives the structures and actors of their relative autonomy (Archer 1995, 101). The problem is that their autonomy relative to each other is lost.

In social constructionism, actors apply social rules and norms as they act. Hence, society is structured through social action, which it enables and constrains simultaneously (see Archer 1995, 81–89). In this type of ‘sociology of knowledge’—which Hall (1977/2007, 131–136) has criticised for idealism—social action is intersubjective, objectivises, and takes its form in the social structure among individuals who construct social reality by using language and other means of communication. Structuralism, in turn, holds to a stratified nature of the social, wherein structures such as language are a product of the interaction of historical agents from the past, which today’s living and breathing individuals reproduce in contemporary actions. Society depends on the action of individuals for this process to occur, but it pre-exists and confronts them as an order that constrains and enables their actions.

More recently, social scientists have identified an evident shift from ‘society’ and ‘the social structure’ toward ‘the community’ as a site for self-governance. In a replacement for the mechanistic rules and laws of ‘the economic’ and to afford organic solidarity within a clearly bounded nation-state, one can regard the social structure as relational by considering social conduct in the form of ‘governmentality’. In this conduct, described in Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s, in place of the state exerting power over its subjects in a return to assuring a certain safety net for the citizens, one sees individuals increasingly appropriating the techniques of their own self-governance (Foucault 1977/2004). The idea that taking risks under one’s own responsibility and managing life activities in the manner of an entrepreneur is necessary for all who wish to gain access to working life and receive social security through the markets is increasingly becoming ‘common sense’ in the politics of life (Rose 1996, 328–333, 343). Since the 1970s, social scientists have applied the word ‘neoliberal’ for the associated changes in state administration and in its managerial functions, thereby referring to privatisation of ‘the economic’ from ‘the social’.

Finally, in science and technology studies, Bruno Latour’s manner of thinking, in which the notions of society and the social are misplaced, eventually led to ‘sociology without society’ (Touraine 1998). The latter substituted for the science of the social (i.e., ‘socio-logy’) attention to ‘actors’: its actor-network theory studies entities, human or non-human, performing action that occurs in networks. Networks have no a priori spatial orientation (‘up–down’, ‘inside–outside’, ‘foreground–background’, ‘centre–margins’, etc.) (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980/2003, 15; see also Latour 1996, 371–372). Instead of being a closed system, the network in this conceptualisation is an open one comprising nodes that connect its various elements in ways that determine their material existence in a similar manner than artificial intelligence.

The idea of nodes or nodal points is common in the imagery of networks that articulate or disarticulate various elements with one another horizontally and not vertically. The view builds on relational (i.e., flat) ontology that, rather than being limited to fixed meanings found in a closed semiotic system such as language in its structuralist understanding, builds networks in which elements connect with one another both as material and as collective assemblages. Composed of the nodes themselves, networks form in the fashion of a rhizome if we follow the botanical metaphor that post-structuralists Deleuze and Guattari offer in their two-volume philosophical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972/1983; 1980/1987). The rhizome analogy describes thinking in action that is open and whose aim is to spread as widely as possible, where the constituents of a plant-like network sprout from each other.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, in addition to Latour, social scientists’ thinking can be led astray by transcendental concepts such as society and the social structure—taking these for granted sets their sights on the wrong target. In this line of critique, these concepts describe things and the relations among things rather than being subject to question and explanation as themselves. For discourse theorists, these notions are empty signifiers’ (Laclau 1996, 107): as signifiers that lack meaning while standing for totalities, they give names to things instead of having any positive existence of their own. For these scholars, society does not exist in the sense in which the authors of the classic sociological works conceived of them. Therefore, the thinking goes, society and the social structure are not the most useful or meaningful concepts. Unlike the classic authors, who emphasised either structures (as Marx and Durkheim did) or social action (as Weber did), the adversaries of classical sociology build on ‘flat ontology’.

In actor-network theory, as expressed in Latour’s work (and the writings of Michel Callon and Michel Serres), action is non-social and its ‘actants’, whether human or non-human actors, operate within spatially oriented networks that are fundamentally non-hierarchical. Again, within the networks, individual entities interconnect or intersect horizontally. With this flat ontology, in which the entities are not organised deductively as a hierarchy, no entity is privileged over the others; hence, things appear as interconnecting in process-like networks through their linkages as in discourse theory, wherein the power disperses across the field of discursivity, where it is wielded only for a moment. While its manner of questioning reveals some patterns that other ontologies may obscure, discourse theorists do display a tendency to consider discursive practices only. Similarly, ‘neo-materialists’, by building on flat ontology that grants primacy to events, do not accord weight to the stratified nature of the social.

Post-structuralists deconstruct concepts by emphasising the play of differences in the absence of any structuring whole. Neo-materialists, in turn, build on flat ontology aligned with critique of the science of the social and of the idea that society exists as a hierarchical organisation. In striving to imagine actor networks in place of the social units embraced by the classics of sociology, the neo-materialist ontology is that of a process of becoming—immanence informed by the materiality of objects that are thought of in a relational manner. Taking a speculative approach, this philosophical line of thought focuses on temporality and the materiality of flows in a manner that draws a distinction neither between nature and culture nor between any other instances, as would require jumping from one ‘level’ to another. Thus, the ontology is kept flat. Accordingly, biological conceptual metaphors such as that of the rhizome often hold sway. In this approach, the materiality of things in their mutual relations takes the form of an open network, with neither a beginning nor an end with respect to structure (any system of meanings such as language) vs. human action, which is anthropocentric from a neo-materialist standpoint.

Conclusion

Classical sociology portrayed social structure in the mantle of physics and the natural sciences and then clothed them in reference to language and culture. Today’s social scientists and cultural analysts continue to address many themes and issues in parallel with the founders of sociology, using similar conceptual metaphors. On the other hand, many aspects of contemporary images of social structure and social change stem from the conceptual-metaphor-connected shifts occurring more recently—shifts that, through new angles for looking at ourselves, have changed how we see ourselves in relation to others either as a group of people or as individual actors. Sociological classics endure because they address the structures of modern industrial society, social change, and ways of life by scrutinising the social structure and actions of individuals in addition to the theories and concepts applied to address the social concerns and issues historically specific to our age.

In both, the imagery of social structure and social change is based on core conceptual metaphors, and it is via the root metaphors that we derive both abstract theoretical models and practical empirical descriptions of social relations to take into account human life in all its complexity. These metaphors transfer meanings from one discipline to another through proposals of different theoretical means and discursive strategies for conceptualising social relations in terms of sociological imagination that guides and informs our thinking in various ways. Whereas classical sociology grounded its view of the social order in biological and mechanical conceptual metaphors and then employed root metaphors by which social action is interpreted as language, drama, or a game, a newer contender is the metaphor of a network of actors, some of them human and some not. The idea that social relations are somehow fundamental immutable entities has given way to an emphasis on historicity and contingency, an emphasis that allows room for them to be subject to social change. We can see, thus, that controversies and debates are the true kernel of every concept employed for or in connection with social structure and social change.