LA TROBE UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE/CHARLES UNIVERSITY, PRAGUE

should not be taken to imply an exclusive focus on individual actors. A concluding

paragraph refers to ‘institutions and actors as causal intermediaries’ (p. 26).

A Durkheimian connection is thus retained, with the proviso that the social

world – in its cooperative as well as its conflict-ridden guises – is to be deciphered

as a web of actions, permeated by the cultural web of meanings.

To sum up the most salient points, this part of the strong program assumes a

smooth progress from interpretation – or understanding – to explanation. The

hermeneutical horizon is, as we have seen, defined in very broad cultural terms,

without any concessions to psychological reductionism. But the interpretation

of culture is, in the final instance, only a prelude to the causal explanation that

is supposed to complete the program. As for the meaning of that final step, the

demand for causal clarity is not qualified by any reference to the contested status

of the concept of causality. The debate between the nomological conception of

causality, commonly known as Humean, and those who defend the idea of causal

powers is, if anything, more open now than it may have seemed in a recent phase.

References to direct influence ‘on the ground’ would seem to indicate some

sympathy for the latter view, but the question is not raised. Nor is it clear how

the new emphasis on culture in the explanation of human action would affect

or integrate the models based on motivation, intentionality and practical reasoning.

In short, key questions remain not just unanswered, but unasked.

The following thoughts on civilizational themes will certainly not attempt to

answer these questions; they are merely intended to suggest ways of broadening

the frame of reference, and thus to underscore connections that are less visible

within the standard framework of cultural sociology. A brief glance at Lévi-

Strauss and later uses of his model may be the best way to set the course for these

reflections. Although Alexander and Smith credit him with providing a powerful

key to the autonomy of culture, there is no doubt that he understood his own

project in a very different way: his goal was to demonstrate the primacy and

omnipresence of the rational unconscious. This was, if we follow his autobiographical indications, a new variant of the ‘geological’ model in the human

sciences (i.e. the proposal to explain manifest realities through the uncovering of

more deep-seated ones), exemplified by Marxian and Freudian ideas, and at the

same time an attempt to displace these two dominant versions (it might also be

described as a self-transcending perfection of the hermeneutics of suspicion). The

very phenomenon of meaning was to be reduced to a surface effect of combinations

operating at a level where the question of meaning could not only be posed,

and be ultimately reducible to elementary rules of the rational unconscious. On

the other hand, the very effort to generalize this reductionistic strategy across the

multiple domains of the human sciences led Lévi-Strauss to construct units and

patterns of a more complex kind and with troubling implications for the original

model. The ‘mythemes’ that figure in his comparative analyses of mythology are

meaning-laden units and relate to each other as such. On that level, his example

could be followed by scholars who did not necessarily accept his background

assumptions about the rational unconscious. One particularly productive case of

structural analysis without structuralist dogmas is not mentioned by Alexander