Primary and Secondary Thinking in Social Theory

Abstract

The development of social theory is introduced as a dialectic between primary and secondary thinking. Secondary thinking views the social and cultural world in determinate, positive, rational terms; primary thinking recognizes the indeterminate, negative and irrational as forever immanent in human action. Max Weber's work illustrates the dynamic interaction between the two forms of thinking, which are further developed with ideas from religion, the philosophy of pragmatism and the psychoanalysis of artistic imagination. The primary-secondary dialectic is then applied to a reanalysis of early sociological studies of mass society, which is reinterpreted as social mass. The primary nature of mass is revealed as an ever-present absence, which, like Weber's idea of `meaningless infinity', resists all secondary attempts to express it in clear, determinate, positive forms. The primary-secondary interaction is further illustrated through the technologies of the modern mass media and the `consumption' of space and time implied by globalization.