Bringing Theodicy Back In: Suffering and the Sociology of Meaning

• In Event: 193 - Regular Session. Sociology of Culture

Abstract

In many regards, the reconstituted cultural sociology that has emerged since about 1980 has posed a radical rejoinder to sociological orthodoxies, emphasizing the cognitive, conceptual, and symbolic rather than the material or rational. Yet this new cultural sociology has generally worked within conventional epistemological frames to make its play for disciplinary power and legitimacy—namely, by stressing culture’s role in social explanation, its status as an independent variable. In the process, culture scholars have drawn centrally on Max Weber’s influential arguments about the causal power of ideas and the constitutive role of ideal interests. Alongside these arguments, however, Weber also articulated—most clearly in his writings on theodicy—a profound philosophical anthropology, an existential claim about the fundamental nature of meaning-making. In this paper, we underscore the special relationship Weber identified between culture and suffering, and synthesize the disparate work Weber’s insights on suffering have inspired. Our main purpose, however, is not to reconstruct Weber’s original argument, but to show how the line of thought his writings on theodicy inspired can underwrite an expanded vision for contemporary cultural sociology, one that does not measure the contribution of cultural sociology exclusively on the basis of its contribution to causal explanation.

Authors

• Christina Simko, University of Pittsburgh

• Jeffrey Olick, University of Virginia