Postmodernism and Sociology, and the Case of Bourdieu

Sociologist Fabio Rojas at Indiana University at Bloomington writes:

As a frequent reader of your blog, I was quite interested to read your postmodernism entry. I agree fully with your assessment. I am a sociologist and post-modernism plays a fairly small role in contemporary sociology. I teach a wide range of courses, from intro soc to graduate level courses in social organization, and I have only once taught post-modern theory. If you read the major journals, post-modernism is completely absent as a topic, or in citations, except when post-modernists address specific empirical topics. For example, research on prisons might cite Foucault. As you noted, only the self-labeled “theoretical” journals will publish articles on deconstruction, Foucault, Lyotard and other post-modern topics.

There is one important subtlety that most people get wrong. People often mistakenly label “difficult French or German writers” as “post-modern.” If we stick to your definition, post-modernism as a specific sort of skepticism, then a lot of difficult European social theorists are the opposite of post-modern. Bourdieu comes to mind. He believes there is an objective social reality and he also believes he has a concrete theory of how social reality works. Not skeptical at all. In fact, a number of empirically minded sociologists have tried to statistically test a number of predictions associated with Bourdieu’s theory.   But when lazy journalists talk about post-modernism in the universities, he, and others, are mistakenly labeled as post-modern.