Human societies are self-interpreting institutions. Historically, this hermeneutical work has fallen to priests, philosophers, and artists who were gradually usurped by scientists, lawyers, economists, and sociolo- gists. This, of course, is not an undisputed shift, although we generally accommodate to it by allowing scientists their say-so with respect to nature, while clinging to our own right to an opinion on religion, poli- tics, business, and the arts. In these areas, too, there are advocates for the dominance of scientific discourse, who seek to persuade us that laymen can at best chatter upon the nature of society. Those who favour the analogy between nature and society as the dumb material of science are therefore inconvenienced by the seemingly inextricable relation between ordinary language and social reality. Indeed, they are likely to consider those who stress the constitutively spoken nature of human society to be idealists, romantically tied to convention and con- servatism. In practice, the scientistic ambitions of sociology are well entrenched in Western societies, politicians having persuaded laymen and themselves that the complexities of modern living can only be set- tled through a trustful delegation of analysis and initiative to the techni- cal sciences. But today there is a civic tendency to question the bureau- cratic processing of everyday life. To keep pace, professional voices have risen to question the scientistic model of constructivist sociology as an expropriation of an ordinary civic competence with the sensible conduct of human affairs. To keep on top of these developments, even self-styled critical sociologists find themselves having to straddle the double claims of scientific and common-sense accounts of social life.
In this way, they hope to preserve professional face by chastising their colleagues while also instructing them in new methods of holding on to what they may have lost forever.
Something like this provides the background to Anthony Giddens’ persistent, if not repetitive, attempts to refurbish the grounds of the mutuality of common sense and sociological knowledge, or what he calls the ‘double hermeneutic’ of the social sciences.1 It is necessary to examine Giddens’ argument, because it betrays a fundamental ambiva- lence towards common-sense knowledge even where he, as a sociolo- gist, has tried to bring about a rapprochement between the moral claims of lay and expert knowledge. Giddens thereby misses a serious communicative issue in the power relations of political democracies. Since he draws heavily upon what we may call the linguistic turn in the social sciences, we should recall the basic propositions on which Giddens constructs his argument:
1 (a) Social science must treat action as rationalized conduct ordered reflexively by human agents;
(b) It must grasp the significance of language for the practical accomplishment of rational and reflexive action.
2 (a) The recognition of the linguistic accomplishment of the reflex- ivity of human conduct ought also to be introduced into the conduct of sociological research and method;
(b) Social science theories are not simply neutral ‘meaning frames’ but moral interventions in the life of the society they propose to clarify.2
In themselves these prescriptions are hardly news and, in fact, are rec- ognized in the daily practice of sociological research that is quite igno- rant of the tradition of European social theory—or at best happy to leave it on the mantelpiece, along with the bric-à-brac of early science. Nothing, then, is to be gained from elaborating upon these mnemonic devices as they stand.
It is therefore in another way that we must be concerned with the constitutively spoken (sprachlich) subject matter of sociology. The purely methodological issue is that the social sciences, while aspiring
to the practice of the natural sciences in their operations of definition and generalization, lack an analogously dumb material of reference. That is to say, while the natural sciences benefit from the indifference of natural and physical processes to scientific formulation, the social sciences are not similarly privileged in their encounters with persons and institutions. This is not simply the complaint, revelled in by British critics of the jargon of the social sciences, that the latter have yet to reach that stage of scientific maturity where their language cannot be found to be a thin disguise for common-sense expressions. While this is often the case, and might be taken to defend us against the preten- sions of the social sciences, it is not an argument we wish to use. Our purpose is not to enter a plea for the preservation of sociology but to confront the political ambivalence in its critical practice, let alone in its scientific versions. As I understand it, the seriousness of the politi- cal issues to which we are led by the communicative reflexivity of common-sense knowledge of social structure derives from the concern it holds for the public in Western democracies. Here it is the voice of the social science experts and technicians in the service of the Party, whether right or left, which threatens to erode civic competence and political responsibility.
COMMON-SENSE SOCIABILITY AS