Symbolic Classifications and “Iron Cage”: Two Perspectives in Theoretical Sociology

Abstract

The paper observes several recent approaches in the developing sphere of cultural sociology. It attempts to show that the principle of autonomy of culture, which is central for this perspective, is hard to maintain, as avoiding one particular reductionism can often lead to another one. If we do not assume this, the very explanatory power of this approach diminishes. Thus, the new Durkheimian cultural sociology, which itself is explicitly built on the principle of cultural autonomy, tends to come to a dead-end of structural reductionism or the “principle of the unity of the nature”. The idea of the modification of Durkheimian theory, called as “the morphogenetic turn” in the theory of the sacred, is proposed to avoid those dead-ends.