The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences provides a remarkable comparative assessment of the variations of positivism and alternative epistemologies in the contemporary human sciences. Often declared obsolete, positivism is alive and well in a number of the fields; in others, its influence is significantly diminished. The essays in this collection investigate its mutations in form and degree across the social science disciplines. Looking at methodological assumptions field by field, individual essays address anthropology, area studies, economics, history, the philosophy of science,...

The revelation that the U.S. Department of Defense had hired anthropologists for its Human Terrain System project assisting its operations in Afghanistan and Iraq caused an uproar that has obscured the participation of sociologists in similar Pentagon-funded projects. As the contributors to "Sociology and Empire" show, such affiliations are not new. Sociologists have been active as advisers, theorists, and analysts of Western imperialism for more than a century.

The collection has a threefold agenda: to trace an intellectual history of sociology as it pertains to empire; to offer empirical...