Two main criteria have guided the selection and presentation of the material for this text-book. Firstly, there is the claim that sociology is a science. Throughout, the emphasis has been on presenting sociological perspectives rather than conveying a mass of factual information. Science is essentially analytical. And sociology, if it is to justify its claim to be a science, must be more than simply 'political arithmetic', counting heads and providing demographic data for governments. Secondly, science, like other intellectual activities, can be exciting. The emphasis throughout is on the...

John Carroll contends that since 1918 sociology has distinguished itself by making society appear as dull as it is at its worst. Using barbaric jargon, legalistic syntax and vacuous statistical tables, and driven by an obsession with the humdrum, it has exhibited some of the worst traits of the culture it should have been laying bare. Sceptical Sociology examines where sociology went wrong, and what ought to be done to transform it into a worthwhile enterprise. In a series of studies of contemporary Western society, the author puts into practice the principles of a 'sceptical sociology'....

How has reason, believed since the Enlightenment to be the ally of freedom in the search for a better, more humanly satisfying world, been reduced to a technical rationality that has actually impoverished the bases of human freedom? What might be the options and obligations for sociologists who wish to restore reason to its proper status? Working within the tradition of C. Wright Mills and Jurgen Habermas, Frank Hearn sets out to answer these questions. He surveys the treatment of the relation between reason and freedom in both the classical tradition (especially the writings of Saint-Simon,...

This study, by a sociologist, provides the most rigorous and comprehensive review to appear so far of R. D. Laing's work and theoretical development. Martin Howarth-Williams considers that Laing's insights into such controversial issues as the divided self and the politics of the family are of an importance that transcends their basis in clinical psychiatry and that they have a special significance for sociology. Using the Progressive/Regressive Method of Jean-Paul Sartre, the author illuminates the internal coherence of Laing's aims through the various stages of his work and shows how his...

The concepts of rationality that are used by social scientists in the formation of hypotheses, models and explanations are explored in this collection of original papers by a number of distinguished philosophers and social scientists. The aim of the book is to display the variety of the concepts used, to show the different roles they play in theories of very different kinds over a wide range of disciplines, including economics, sociology, psychology, political science and anthropology, and to assess the explanatory and predictive power that a theory can draw from such concepts.

To paraphrase Marx, sociologists have only interpreted science; the point is to improve it. The Rational and the Social attempts both. It begins by sketching recent sociological approaches to science, notably the strong programme - Bloor's 'science of science' and Barnes's 'finitism' - and that of the 'anthropologists in the lab', Collins and Latour and Woolgar. The author argues that although sociological accounts are valuable in many respects, when morals are drawn about the structure and epistemology of science, they are badly flawed. In rejecting the sociological theory of science, it is...

This is a work of social theory and philosophy which seeks to make the constitution of social theory a 'social' activity. It is essentially a collaborative text, by five authors, committed to a re-awakening of some of the forgotten dimensions of social theorizing. The collaborative work was originally occasioned by an attempt to analyse the notion of social stratification and its treatment in the sociological tradition. The authors' main concern here is with the nature of social theorizing, and in particular the 'difference' between Self and Other, being and beings, Language and Speech. The...

Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin have emerged as figures of great importance in the current debates about modernity. The central and privileged place of the philosophical problem of modernity has been threatened by the possibility advanced by Jean-Francois Lyotard that modernity as a project is over and the new concern is the postmodern. The work of Adorno and Benjamin is the background against which the problems of modernity and postmodernity are addressed in this volume.

Roger Holme's work in social and industrial psychology is widely respected. The theme of this first collection of his essays is the relationship of the individual with the formal, value-laden group on the one hand and the scientifically known and the philosophically asserted on the other. Roger Holmes looks at the connexions between these two important relationships and considers them in terms of the interaction between the nature of society and the nature of the knowable. The areas covered include the derivation of social classes, the nature of morale and the emergence of the professions and...