Description
Book SynopsisSociology as a Human Science is a set of foundational, wide-ranging and updated essays from Isaac Ariail Reed. Gathered together for the first time with a new introduction, they articulate a distinct perspective on concept and method in social science. Reed writes about realism and positivism, postmodernism and empiricism, mechanisms and causality, and power and history, developing thereby an understanding of the key debates out of which 21st-century sociology has developed. Carefully considering all manner of arguments in metatheory and epistemology and moving towards a program of interpretive explanation focused on culture and power, Reed places sociology at the center of debates about knowledge production across the humanities and social sciences. His reconstructive approach, positioned “after the posts” (poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism) provides a way for interpretive sociology to provide analytically sound, theoretically extensive, and empirically rich understandings of social life.
Table of ContentsChapter 1. Introduction – Sociology as a Human Science: An Unfinished Revolution
Part I: Theory and Explanation in Contemporary Social Science: A Critical Appraisal
Introduction to Part I: The “Realism” Dispute in Sociology, 1998-2018
Chapter 2. Epistemology Contextualized: Social Scientific Knowledge in a Post-Positivist Era
Chapter 3. Justifying Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation
Part II: Mechanisms and the Transition to Causal Pluralism
Introduction to Part II: What is a Mechanism, Anyway?
Chapter 4. Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology (with Daniel Hirschman)
Chapter 5. Ratio via machina: Three Standards of Mechanistic Explanation in Sociology (with Natalie B. Aviles)
Chapter 6. Meaning and Modularity: The Multivalence of “Mechanism” in Sociological Explanation (with Carly R. Knight)
Part III: Apologia for Interpretation
Introduction to Part III: Theory and Interpretive Explanation
Chapter 7. Theorizing and the Unsettlement of Communities of Inquiry in the Social Sciences (with Mayer Zald)
Chapter 8. What is Interpretive Explanation in Sociohistorical Analysis?
