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Book review of: Jos Lpez, Society and its Metaphors: Language, Social Theory
and Social Structure, New York / London: Continuum, 2003, 186 pp, paperback

A review by Marius I. Benta published in: Irish Journal of Sociology, Vol. 13.1,
2004, pp. 140-141

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For the past decades, there has been a constantly growing interest for the topic of
metaphor among social scientists, above all cognitive anthropologists or
psychologists. Metaphor escaped the limited scope of linguistics and literary
criticism as scholars became aware that these were fundamental, yet taken for
granted, tools employed in everyday lifes reality constructing discourse. A book on
metaphors written by a sociologist should be of no surprise; surprising is rather
how tardy came sociologists to acknowledge the seriousness of metaphor as a eld
of study and its power as a methodological instrument for social sciences.
Signicant are the words of an Irish sociologist who confessed recently: When my
colleagues heard about my interest for the topic of metaphor, they started being
concerned about my health.

Jos Lpezs Society and its Metaphors is an excellent insight into metaphor as a
discursive strategy in the production of sociological knowledge, particularly social
theory. As such, this book deserves the highest acclaims. One can see it as part of a
wider project in which sociology is called to turn back home, that is, to
problematize its own discourse-producing practices. In Lpezs own words, this
book is an attempt to show what happens when we begin to take the languagebased nature of social theory seriously (p. 3), and such attempt is legitimate
because metaphors are essential to the conception, development, and maintenance
of scientic theories and not just linguistic ornaments (p. 11).

One inconsistency needs, however, to be noted. Society and its Metaphors is not a
book about society and its metaphors. It is not a book on the metaphorical
structure of various discourses produced by society, as most readers might
understand the title. Instead, it is a book about social theory and its metaphors,
that is, the narrative techniques employed in the production of discourses about
society. I presume (though I might be wrong) that this inconsistency between label
and content was just a marketing device decided by the publisher. In any case, the
small print (Language, Social Theory and Social Structure) attempts at rectifying
the said ambiguity.

The actual parcours followed by the Nottingham sociologist is to track down the
metaphors that make up or bring about the concept of social structure in the
theoretical systems of ve key sociologists: Durkheim, Parsons, Weber, Marx and
Althusser. We are not offered yet another book on social structure (indeed, Jos
Lpez, together with John Scott, is the author of Social Structure). Rather than
immersing in the ancient structure/agency debate, this books focus on social

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structure seems to be motivated by the need for a case studya laboratory

material to be thoroughly inspected through an intertextual anatomy.

The rst theorist investigated in Society and its Metaphors is Emile Durkheim.
Lpez examines the semantic elds and the conceptual limitations and challenges
brought by the use of organismic metaphors and the metaphors of emergence in
Durkheims operationalizations of social complexity and social structure. The
concept of social structure appears to be an outcome of the French sociologists
understanding of social life as an emergent and complexly organized sui generis
level (p. 36). In Karl Marx, the effect of social structure emerges from the
concepts of organization of labour and production, from the base/superstructure
metaphorwhich Lpez considers unsatisfactory because the two levels of social
reality cannot be clearly separatedand from the energetic metaphor of labour
inspired by the nineteenth-century hegemony of the thermodynamic paradigm.
Thought absent from Max Webers explicit research agenda, the concept of social
structure can be intertextually recognized in the writings of the German sociologist
as an effect of his radical historicity. The notion is also produced systematically
by the metaphor of rationality. In Talcott Parsons, social structure materializes
out of the metaphorical parallel with the concept of theoretical structure and from
other metaphorical resources that point out to the elds of mechanics,
thermodynamics, cybernetics, and the modern theory of communication. Finally,
Louis Althussers concept of structure and its metaphorical generators are being
explored in relation with the French Historical Epistemology and in terms of a
discursive strategy where seeing is written as the fundamental modality of
ideology (pp. 136-7).

The greatest merit of Society and its Metaphors is to have opened the path for the
systematic and rigorous study of conceptual metaphors in the textual productions
of social theory. The only lack of the book is self-reection. As readers, we cannot
refrain from asking ourselves how is it possible that a book treating the
metaphorical dimension of social theory (thus a text itself located in social theory)
can lack any meta-reexive endeavor. Metaphors of social theory is a metaphor,
too. Hence the risk to consider social theory exclusively in terms of metaphors and
to ignore conceptual innovations that are not metaphor-based or other strategies,
such as descriptive models. Put differently, Lpezs project is strongly convincing in
what concerns the power of metaphor analysis, but fragile concerning an account
of the epistemological status of the conceptual metaphor in the practice of writing
social theory.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that anyone involved in some way or another in the
study or teaching of social theory will meet Society and its Metaphors with
fascination and will nd in it an illuminating experience; because at the present
stage of the development of sociology, problematizing the transparency of
theoretical language is a strong necessity.