| This study is concerned with desirable and realizable alternatives to prevailing patterns of social life, as such alternatives are seen by social scientists. Early attempts, such as the Marxian, at overcoming the confrontation between reality and imaginative utopias relied partly on the concept of an alternative society. Once this reliance has been shown, it proves useful to detect flaws in the original model and to look at more recent contributions of social theory. Yet sociological knowledge of alternatives is rarely explicit. In order to discover such knowledge, I have found it fruitful to analyze the concepts of truth, power, and alternatives as presented in the five main currents of modern German sociology. The exposition of these concepts is seldom made clear. The first task here is precisely to put them into a concentrated monographic form. The five currents are (1) interpretive and existential sociology, (2) historical materialism, or Marxism, (3) empirical social research, (4) figurational sociology, and (5) functionalism. Their major representatives arrived at the conclusion that the problem of alternatives is a major one for contemporary society and therefore for contemporary sociology. Their individual contributions to this enterprise are rather slim, but they can be gleaned by a certain combination of these theories. The discussion of alternatives need not rely on the value judgments of scientists who say what ought to be; instead it must rely on the validity of the theories used. Chances for alternatives are conditioned by the interplay of the subjective meaning of actions and the change of emotional, moral, and cognitive "schemes of relevance" through "total experiences"; the development of the productive means and the realization of interests by powerful groups; knowledge of means-end relationships and probable side effects; the internalization of past and present external constraints and corresponding development of behavior, interests, and the degree and kind of future external constraints and self-control; the ascertainment of functional alternatives, projection of structural principles and media of communication from one system to another, and the corresponding adaptation of these systems. Two examples clarify the application of different theories for the construction of alternatives. |
