Classical sociological theory, from Marx to Durkheim to Weber, generally aimed to build a comprehensive explanatory framework capable of accounting for how society as a whole actually works — a "grand narrative" attempting to capture social reality's underlying structure and logic in one coherent theoretical account. Postmodern social theory, emerging in the latter half of the twentieth century, turned a sceptical eye on that entire project, questioning whether any single grand explanatory framework, including sociology's own theoretical ambitions, could genuinely capture something as fragmented, contested, and constantly shifting as society actually is.
Grand narratives claim more explanatory power than postmodernists think is warranted
A grand narrative, in this context, is a sweeping theoretical account that claims to explain a broad swath of social reality through one unified underlying logic — historical progress driven by class conflict, for instance, or social order maintained through shared collective values. Postmodern theorists, drawing partly on the work of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who explicitly characterised the postmodern condition as "incredulity toward grand narratives," argued that these sweeping theoretical frameworks inevitably smooth over genuine complexity, disagreement, and difference within society in order to sustain their own claim to comprehensive explanatory power — treating a theory's elegant, unified account as itself suspicious, precisely because real social life rarely turns out to be as coherent and singular as a grand narrative requires it to be.
Turning that scepticism back on sociology's own theoretical claims
What makes postmodern social theory distinctive within sociology specifically is that it doesn't stop at criticising other disciplines' or ideologies' grand narratives; it applies the same sceptical scrutiny to sociology's own theoretical traditions, questioning whether sociological theory itself, no matter how rigorously developed, can genuinely claim the kind of comprehensive, objective explanatory authority earlier sociological traditions had implicitly assumed it could. This produced a body of work more interested in examining how knowledge claims about society get constructed, whose perspective a given theory actually privileges, and how power operates through the categories and narratives a theory takes for granted, than in constructing yet another comprehensive theory intended to finally explain society as a coherent, unified whole — a genuinely self-reflexive turn within the discipline, aiming its own analytical tools back at sociology's foundational theoretical ambitions.
What we're still unsure about
That postmodern social theory represents a genuine, influential departure from earlier grand-narrative sociological traditions, and that Lyotard's formulation of "incredulity toward grand narratives" captures a core element of that departure, are well documented within the history of sociological and social theory. What remains genuinely, actively debated is a matter internal to the field's own ongoing self-assessment: whether postmodern theory's thoroughgoing scepticism toward grand explanatory claims leaves sociology with enough remaining theoretical and empirical footing to still make useful, generalisable claims about society at all, or whether that scepticism, taken fully seriously, undercuts sociology's own capacity to say much of anything with confidence — a tension sociological theorists continue to work through rather than one that's been definitively settled.
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