Deconstruction and Perspective of a Great Come-back. Postmodernism and a Critical Analysis of Capitalism in Daniel Bell's Approach

Abstract

The postmodernist turn is connected with criticism of the positivist paradigm of sociology that has prevailed until now. Proposing the thesis that a fundamental social change has occurred, its supporters say that in such a situation the modernist notions used up till now in sociology have become inadequate. They postulate their radical transformation, so as to enable them to describe the emergent and dynamic reality of the postmodernist period. After rejecting the scientist standards of precision and the technical language sociology is to be included in a broad social discourse in order to support pluralism and tolerance with the help of literary means.

Daniel Bell's sociology, forming an alternative for the two competing paradigms, allows one to look at them as realisation of two opposite methodological options: presenting a full range and complexity of the phenomenon – an exact description and reductive explanation. Rejecting the limitations of the scientistic methodology Bell presents a sociology that is engaged in social change, critical of both the modernist and postmodernist postulates. The perspective of a “great come-back” to the sacred sources of culture that he outlines is a neo-conservative alternative for the postmodernist perspective of diffusion and deconstruction.