Preface

Summary

Social and political theory presents an ongoing problem of conceptualisation. In the attempt to bring intellectual order and comprehension to the grand kaleidoscope of human behaviour, it is essential either to categorise or to abstract. By the very nature, however, of the processes of categorisation and abstraction, there is an unavoidable tendency to move, by degrees, away from the existential flesh and blood reality of humans in action towards concepts about their action. Of necessity these concepts are theoretical and ideological. They are intellectual modes of comprehension. Frequently, they are lenses through which behaviour is examined, rather than the behaviour itself perceived in new forms. As the concepts concerning behaviour become more abstract, or borrow by analogy from other fields of ‘scientific’ research, so the actions under study become less the flesh and blood humans and increasingly the reified ideas of the researchers themselves. This intellectual procedure is elegant, exciting and often insightful – but, by its very nature, it risks distance from human reality.

The natural, intellectual dynamic of removal away from existential reality is compounded by the scarcity of generally agreed psychological and social – psychological theories which can facilitate – by way of being clear methodological tools – the researchers in remaining in contact with their living, breathing subjects.