The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others (Politics, History, and Culture)

George Steinmetz is the editor of this volume. It is not clear why Michael Burawoy's name comes first. That is misleading. This is an excellent set of readings. The title says it all. At one time a "Positivistic" version of social science was the leading contender for paradigmatic hegemony, although there were other approaches even then. The Symbolic Interactionist, Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analysis points of view and research paradigms were already in place. But after the late 1960s there was a significant challenge to Positivism in sociology, although not necessarily at the same time in psychology and hardly at all in economics. The notion of "Political Economy" made a comeback in social sciences. The attempt to be like the physical and natural sciences had been greatly amplified in the U.S. because of the situation post WWII and the funding that was made available to Ivy League universities that had not really engaged in a lot of top notch research before WWII. Foundation money flowed into the premier universities and they became "research universities" in ways they had not all been before. Minniesota, Wisconsin, Stanford and Berkeley also benefited greatly from the Post War boom in funding for natural sciences, biological and physical. The social sciences did not receive as much money, but it was much more than most social science disciplines were used to getting. (The only exception was rural sociology, which had benefited from the 1862 and even 1890s land grant situation.) The chapters of this book are not all in complete agreement, but the overall thesis is quite well presented. There are, however, many versions of "Positivism." Indeed, it is not inappropriate to speak of Positivisms. Neo-classical economics now has some heterodox opposition and Neo-Marxian economics is not dead. Critical Realism had a significant influence in Neo-Marxian circles. Postmodernist literary analysis influenced social science theory. Much of psychology remains fixated on sophisticated summary measures of correlation. Geography has physical geography, which is very Positivistic. Physical anthropolology (including Forensic anthropology) is also still Positivistic for the most part. Cliometrics has faded. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the philosophy of social science, the philosophy of natural-physical science, and the history of ideas. It is especially strong on sociology, although some of the many strands of sociology are not fully represented. One key idea persented here is that the Logic of Method (capital "M" Methodology) needs to be carefully considered in terms of the politics of networks of scholars and researchers pushing a specific epistemology. The idea of "methodological individualism" has become a way of eliding the ontological questions raised by David Emile Durkheim about society as a reality sui generis.