Why the 1970s Mattered

In the three decades after the Second World War, anglophone sociology operated, to a first approximation, under a pair of paradigms that dominated its textbooks and leading journals: a structural-functionalism associated with Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton on the one hand, and a critical-Marxist tradition reinvigorated by the Frankfurt School and by the political economy of the New Left on the other. By the late 1970s both had lost their confidence. The purpose of this topic is to trace what replaced them, with particular attention to the two most-cited social theorists of the late twentieth century — Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault — and to the broader transformation of sociological theory that their reception made visible.

The decline of structural-functionalism was already underway by the mid-1960s. Parsons's ambition to construct a general action-systems theory capable of integrating personality, culture, social system, and behavioral organism into a single conceptual architecture looked, by the end of that decade, increasingly remote from the concerns of a discipline confronting civil rights, Vietnam, feminism, and urban unrest. The functionalist vocabulary of equilibrium, integration, and adaptation sat uneasily with analyses of conflict, domination, and rapid change. Critical readings — from C. Wright Mills's attack on grand theory to conflict-theoretic alternatives proposed by Dahrendorf and Coser — accumulated faster than functionalism's defenders could respond (Calhoun 1995, pp. 1-10).

Orthodox Marxism faced a separate crisis. The political failure of 1968, the stagnation of Soviet-bloc societies, and the difficulty of sustaining the base-superstructure model in the face of mid-century cultural complexity produced a generation of scholars searching for more supple frameworks. Western Marxism — Althusser, Poulantzas, the Frankfurt theorists, Gramsci in translation — offered one route; another was an opening to continental thought more broadly, including phenomenology, structuralism, and post-structuralism, which anglophone sociologists began to read in significant numbers for the first time in the 1970s and 1980s.

The generational effects of 1968 matter here not as a political event settled in its own terms but as the biographical background of the cohort that would write the next generation of sociological theory. Bourdieu and Foucault themselves belong to the cohort that came of age under the Algerian war, May 1968, and the crisis of French Communism; their anglophone readers a decade later came of age in the shadow of civil rights, Vietnam, and second-wave feminism. Identity-based scholarship — feminism first, followed by critical race theory and later queer theory — emerged during this period as both a critique of mainstream sociology's exclusions and a generative theoretical program in its own right. These traditions are developed more fully in Modules 11 and 12. Here it is enough to note that they were part of the same broad transformation.

What replaced paradigm dominance was not a new paradigm but a condition of theoretical pluralism: several productive theoretical programs operating in parallel, with no single framework functioning as a master synthesis. Bourdieu and Foucault did not create this pluralism — it had multiple sources — but they became its most visible anchors. Citation data from the closing decades of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first consistently place Bourdieu and Foucault among the two or three most-cited authors in the social sciences as a whole, with Foucault the single most-cited author across the humanities and social sciences in several large bibliometric analyses (Calhoun 1995, pp. 11-14). That ranking is a symptom as much as a cause: it registers a discipline that had found new interlocutors without settling on a new orthodoxy. The remainder of this topic examines who Bourdieu and Foucault were, what each contributed, and what the broader post-1970 landscape looks like around them.