Grand Theory

Grand theory, in Mills's diagnosis, is the production of abstract conceptual systems of impressive internal consistency and zero contact with the actual lives of actual people. His principal target in 1959 was Talcott Parsons's structural functionalism, whose categories and typologies achieved systematic elegance at the cost of any ability to illuminate specific historical or biographical realities. The charge was not that theory is unnecessary but that theory detached from empirical specificity performs a particular ideological function: it makes the theorist appear profound while rendering the actual social world invisible. The AI discourse reproduces grand theory in the form of civilizational-transformation narratives — intelligence as a force of nature, the river flowing for 13.8 billion years, the expansion rivaling the printing press — whose scale of abstraction systematically obscures the specific people making specific decisions with specific consequences.