An extended historical and philosophical argument, this book will be a valuable text for all students of the philosophy of the social sciences. It discusses the

Any serious attempt to explain social life has to come to terms with sociology's positivist legacy. It is a heritage on the one hand from the seventeenth-centur

A social science which has become so remote from the society which pays for its upkeep is ultimately doomed, threatened less by repression than by intellectual

Theorizing in sociology has increasingly become a self-generating and self-fulfilling activity, as sociologists absorb theory as an isolated and formalist part

The concept of industrial society plays a dominant role in the social sciences. The ‘Great Divide’ between pre-industrial and industrial societies is common