Google's NGram Viewer is a really amazing new tool for researchers in literature and the humanities (link, link, link). What is perhaps not quite so evident is the power it may have for people interested in the evolution of the social science disciplines. Basically the concept is a simple one. The Google Book project has now scanned …
Weber in America
Lawrence Scaff offered a fascinating preview of his forthcoming book, Max Weber in America, at a sociology seminar in Ann Arbor this week. Scaff has written extensively on Weber in the past, and this current research is particularly intriguing and stimulating. The book offers a careful reconstruction of Weber's visit to the United States in 1904, …
Merton’s sociological imagination
Robert Merton began life as Meyer Schkolnick, son of impoverished Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, and he became one of the most influential American sociologists of his generation. He is most often associated with a couple of phrases that came to embody common knowledge in the social sciences -- "theories of the middle range," …
Fresh thinking about government
The eminent neo-Confucian scholar Tu Weiming argues for the importance of bracketing our Western-centric ideas about society, progress, and justice when we think about our global futures. (Here is an interesting article by Tu titled "Mutual Learning as an Agenda for Social Development"; link.) So for a moment let us put aside the familiar rhetoric …
Goffman’s programme
Erving Goffman has had wide influence on American and French sociology, and I find his work highly interesting. But it is hard to characterize, because it doesn't fit easily into the standard categories of sociological research and theory. It studies individuals, but it is not individualist. And it is evidence-based, but it is not empiricist. …
Gabriel Tarde’s rediscovery
Gabriel Tarde was an important rival to Emile Durkheim on the scene of French sociology in the 1880s and 1890s. Durkheim essentially won the field, however, and Tarde's reputation diminished for a century. Durkheim's social holism and a search for social laws prevailed, and the sociology of individuals and the methodology of contingency that Tarde …
Marx’s relevance as a social scientist
What was Karl Marx's enduring contribution to the social sciences? Does he deserve the status of being one of the founders of sociology, along with Durkheim and Weber? Did he put forward substantive hypotheses about the workings of the modern world that continue to illuminate our social world? Is there anything important for sociologists, political …
Ideal types, values, and selectivity
image: cover of Max Weber, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages I've never really understood why the exposition of one of Max Weber's most important methodological ideas, his theory of ideal types, occurs in the context of an essay that is primarily about the role of values in the social sciences. This is …
Feyerabend as artisanal scientist
I've generally found Paul Feyerabend's position on science to be a bit too extreme. Here is one provocative statement in the analytical index of Against Method: Thus science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the any forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not …
The German debate over method
A prior post described a major debate around 1900 in the French academic world over the terms of exchange among history, geography, and sociology. The debate also involved disagreements among France's academic elites over the structure of the future French university system. This was sometimes referred to as the "new Sorbonne" debate, and it had …
Understanding Society 