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17Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social ThinkerRoutledge. 1994.Heinrich Schenker: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and theorist.
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20Explaining away crime: The race narrative in American sociology and ethical theoryEuropean Journal of Social Theory 24 (3): 356-373. 2021.Rates of crime for Blacks in the United States in the post-slavery era have always been high relative to Whites. But explaining, or minimizing, this fact faces a major problem: individual excuses for bad acts point to deficiencies, in the agent, which are perhaps forgivable, such as mental deficiency or a deprived childhood, but at the price of treating the agent as less than a full member of the moral community. Collectivizing excuses risks implying group inferiority. The history of attempts to…Read more
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21The Naked State: What the Breakdown of Normality RevealsIn Gerard Delanty (ed.), Pandemics, Politics, and Society, De Gruyter. 2021.
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36Book Reviews : Theoretical Logic in Sociology, vol. 3: The Classical Attempt at Theoretical Synthesis: Max Weber. BY JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Pp. xx + 242. $25.00 (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 15 (3): 365-368. 1985.
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25Book Reviews : Theoretical Logic in Sociology, Volume 2: The Antinomies of Classical Thought: Marx and Durkheim. BY JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Pp. 564. $39.50 (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 15 (2): 211-216. 1985.
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19Durkheim as a Methodologist Part I—Realism, Teleology, and ActionPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 13 (4): 425-450. 1983.
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27Book Reviews : Theoretical Logic in Sociology, Volume 1: Positivism, Presuppositions, and Current Controversies. BY JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Pp. 234. $25.00 cloth (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 15 (1): 77-82. 1985.
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11Does Funding Produce Its Effects? The Rockefeller CaseIn T. Richardson & D. Fisher (eds.), Development of the Social Sciences in the United States and Canada, Praeger. pp. 213-226. 1999.
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33The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology: Two Volume SetSage Publications. 2018.The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology offers a comprehensive and contemporary look at this evolving field of study. The focus is on political life itself and the chapters, written by a highly-respected and international team of authors, cover the core themes which need to be understood in order to study political life from a sociological perspective, or simply to understand the political world. The two volumes are structured around five key areas: PART 1: TRADITIONS AND PERSPECTIVES PART 2: C…Read more
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26Introduction. Ghosts and the Machine: Issues of Agency, Rationality, and Scientific Methodology in Contemporary Philosophy of Social ScienceIn Stephen P. Turner & Paul Andrew Roth (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Wiley-blackwell. 2003.This chapter contains sections titled: The Origins of the Philosophy of Social Science Winch's Triad The Legitimation of “Continental” Philosophy Enter Davidson Rational Choice: The Scientization of the Intentional Philosophy of Social Science Today Notes.
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7The Continued Relevance of Weber’s Philosophy of Social ScienceEtica E Politica 7 (2): 1-20. 2005.Only a few writers have attempted to construct a comprehensive philosophy of social science, and of these Weber is the most relevant to the present. The structure of his conception places him in a close relationship to Donald Davidson. The basic reasoning of Davidson on action explanation, anomalous monism, and the impossibility of a “serious science” of psychology is paralleled in Weber. There are apparent differences with respect to their treatment of the status of the model of rational action…Read more
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26The Strength of Weak EmpathyScience in Context 25 (3): 383-399. 2012.ArgumentThis paper builds on a neglected philosophical idea,Evidenz. Max Weber used it in his discussion ofVerstehen, as the goal of understanding either action or such things as logic. It was formulated differently by Franz Brentano, but with a novel twist: thatanyonewho understood something would see the thing to be understood as self-evident, not something dependent on inference, argument, or reasoning. The only way one could take something as evident in this sense is by being able to treat o…Read more
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66Was Sellars an error theorist?Synthese 193 (7): 2053-2075. 2016.Wilfrid Sellars described the moral syllogism that supports the inference “I ought to do x” from “Everyone ought to do x” as a “syntactical disguise” which embodies a “mistake.” He nevertheless regarded this form of reasoning as constitutive of the moral point of view. Durkheim was the source of much of this reasoning, and this context illuminates Sellars’ unusual philosophical reconstruction of the moral point of view in terms of the collective intentions of an ideal community of rational membe…Read more
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88Durkheim, Sellars, and the Origins of Collective IntentionalityBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (5): 954-975. 2015.Wilfrid Sellars read and annotated Celestine Bouglé’s Evolution of Values, translated by his mother with an introduction by his father. The book expounded Émile Durkheim's account of morality and elaborated his account of origins of value in collective social life. Sellars replaced elements of this account in constructing his own conception of the relationship between the normative and community, but preserved a central one: the idea that conflicting collective and individual intentions could be…Read more
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5Sociology Responds to Fascism (edited book)Routledge. 1992.We know a lot about the sociology of fascism, but how have sociologists responded to fascism when confronted with it in their own lives? How courageous or compromising have they been? And why has this history been shrouded in silence for so long? In this major work of historical scholarship sociologists from around the world describe and evaluate the reactions of sociologists to the rise and practice of fascism.
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14Epilogue: Publics, Hybrids, Transparency, Monsters and the Changing Landscape around ScienceIn Sarah Hartley, Sujatha Raman, Alexander Smith & Brigitte Nerlich (eds.), Science and the politics of openness : Here be monsters, Manchester University Press. 2018.
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11Weber, the Chinese Legal System, and Marsh’s CritiqueComparative and Historical Sociology 14 (2). 2002.
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13Charisma and Obedience: A Risk Cognition ApproachThe Leadership Quarterly 4 (3-4): 235-256. 1993.Weber's account of charisma solved certain specific problems in the philosophy of law by using a concept from the history of church law. The concept Weber generalized from, originally formulated by R. Sohm, relied on the notion of divine inspiration; Weber's uses required a substitute causal force. The standard substitutes are culturalist, in which the power of the charismatic leader or the state comes from meeting cultural expectations for leaders, or contractual, in which leaders give follower…Read more
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29Charisma ReconsideredJournal of Classical Sociology 3 (1): 5-26Charisma is a concept with a peculiar history. It arose from theological obscurity through social science, from which it passed into popular culture. As a social science concept, its significance derives in large part from the fact that it captures a particular type of leadership. But it fits poorly with other concepts in social science, and is problematic as an explanatory concept. Even Weber himself was torn in his use of the concept between the individual type-concept and a broader use of it …Read more
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14Double Heuristics and Collective Knowledge: the Case of ExpertiseStudies in Emergent Order 5 64-85. 2012.There is a large literature on social epistemology, some of which is concerned with expert knowledge. Formal representations of the aggregation of decisions, estimates, and the like play a larger role in these discussions. Yet these discussions are neither sufficiently social nor epistemic. The assumptions minimize the role of knowledge, and often assume independence between observers. This paper presents a more naturalistic approach, which appeals to a model of epistemic gain from others, as mu…Read more
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7Weber on ActionAmerican Sociological Review 48 (4): 509-519. 1983.Weber's writings on action and the explanation of action do not present a particularly coherent view. In his earlier writings, from 1903-1907, he is under the sway of a juristic conception of cause based on the probability doctrines of von Kries, and this is reflected in his writings on action, which de-emphasize problems of interpretation and stress the analytic uses of methods of causal analysis. In the Logos essay, problems of interpretation and problems of cause and probability are discussed…Read more
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9The Concept of Face ValidityQuality and Quantity 13 (1): 85-90. 1979.The concept of “face validity”, used in the sense of the contrast between “face validity” and “construct validity”, is conventionally understood in a way which is wrong and misleading. The wrong view had relatively limited consequences for research practice per se. However, it is a serious obstacle in theoretical discussions of certain “philosophical” or “foundational” issues. In this brief note I would like to point out the logical defect in the conventional position and correct it by making th…Read more
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11Durkheim among the StatisticiansJournal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 32 (4): 354-378. 1996.
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7Blau's Theory of Differentiation: Is It Explanatory?The Sociological Quarterly 18 (1): 17-32. 1977.This paper examines Blau's recent attempt to construct a deductive theoretical explanation of structural differentiation in formal organizations. Blau claims that certain generalizations are explanatory, and cites certain philosophers in support of this claim. A closer examination of these philosophers' views shows the resemblance between these generalizations and explanatory scientific generalizations to be only superficial. They can be better understood as descriptions of patterns. These patte…Read more
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8Cause, Concepts, Measures and the Underdetermination of Theory by DataInternational Review of Sociology 1 (3): 249-271. 1987.
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