Stephen Turner

This Timely volume represents an attempt by leading practitioners in the field to think reflexively about the present state of social theory and its historical analogues, and to consider new directions opposed to the "classical" social theorists, as well as new uses of the classics. Social Theory and Sociology begins to address a problem that is salient for students as well as academics, namely, why and how does the legacy of social theory matter? What is the value of what we are learning? No attempt is made to dodge these tough questions and some very different answers are provided. Ranging from classic figures such ad Marx top the new theoritical approaches deriving from science and tehnology studies, this book represernts a multivoiced, radically diverse consideration of what "theroy" is all about now, at the end of the century.

Mark Bevir raises the question of how genealogy, understood as a technique-based radical historicism, and the notion of the contingency of ideas, ground “critique.” His problem is to avoid the relativism of radical historicism in a way that allows for “critique” without appealing to non-radical historicist absolutisms of the kind that ground the notion of false consciousness. He does so by appealing to the notion of motivated irrationality, which he claims avoids the problem of relativism and the problems of “false consciousness.” The genealogies of Nietzsche and Foucault, however, do not ground “critique.” The relevant normative judgments, of nobility in Nietzsche, for example, are presupposed

Review of: A History of Sociological Research Methods in America, 1920-1960, by Jennifer Platt. One might expect a history of research methods in sociology during the 40 years this book examines to deal with such questions as the conceptual preconditions for the statistical techniques employed during the period, the changes in statistical practice, the failure of the effort to measure attitudes in a dramatically more precise way, the failure of the many hopes and expectations of methodologists, for the creation of a true science, and so forth. Some of these issues do peep out from the text now and then. But Platt's central concern is quite different. Despite the title, the book is not concerned with the development of techniques. It is instead a highly polemical attack on various previous writers and certain conventional historical opinions about this period.

The analytic philosophy form of the problem of collective intentionality originated with the claim that individual statements of the form “I intend x” cannot add up to a “we intend x” statement. Analytic philosophers from Wilfrid Sellars on have pursued a strategy that construes these sentences as individual tellings of statements whose form is collective. The point of the strategy is to avoid the problematic idea of a real collective subject. This approach creates unusual epistemic problems. Although“telling” of collective intentions is parallel to the expression of individual intention, one can be deceived about them. I suggest that none of the supposed evidence could solve the problem of deception, because there is no fact of the relevant kind to be deceived about. I also argue that this strategy is unnecessary. Statements like Joe Namath’s “guarantee” of victory in the Superbowl are model non-collective statements which are interchangeable with many supposed collective statements. Yet, no novel mode of “telling” and nothing epistemically anomalous is required by this statement. The statement is merely an individual statement conditional on a variety of facts, which happen to include facts about other people, whose only commitments are epistemic. Sellars’s problem structure is then itself critiqued to suggest that it confuses a grammatical problem with a factual-theoretical problem about the reality of collectivities and the cognitive character of intention attributions, and further confuses collective intentionality with a problem about the nature of morality.

Max Weber is indubitably one of the very greatest figures in the history of the social sciences, the source of seminal concepts like 'the Protestant Ethic', 'charisma' and the idea of historical processes of 'rationalization'. But, like his great forebears Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Weber's work always resists easy categorisation. Prominent as a founding father of sociology, Weber has been a major influence in the study of ancient history, religion, economics, law and, more recently, cultural studies. This Cambridge Companion provides an authoritative introduction to the major facets of his thought, including several which have hitherto been neglected. A distinguished international team of contributors examines some of the major controversies that have erupted over Weber's specialized work, and shows how the issues have developed since he wrote. The articles demonstrate Weber's impact on a variety of research areas.

We come to the finding of the sociology of scientific knowledge that all rationality is local, dependent on local customs and practices, shaped by the contingencies of history. Either this claim or that of the rational choice program is wrong. One way out of this conflict would be to accept the irreconcilability of the various concepts of rationality, to reject Boudon's and Bourricaud's conclusion that these usages have a common core, and to make rationality an "empirical problem." Yet this strategy involves difficulties as well. To separate "analytically" the elements or aspects of rationality and then to "discover" empirical causal relations between them seems akin to spinning gold from straw.