Is sociology best understood as simply chipping away at our ignorance about society, or does it have broader roles and responsibilities? If so, to what-or perhaps to whom-are these responsibilities? Installing humanity as its epistemological and normative start and endpoint, this book shows how humanism recasts sociology as an activity that does not merely do things, or effect things, but is also self-consciously for something.

Rather than resurrecting problematic classical conceptions of humanism, the book instead constructs its arguments on pragmatic...