Fritz Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 is a key source on the content and social location of German academic and intellectual culture in a crucial period of its development, 1870-1933. The book appeared in German in 1967, and it presents a detailed intellectual and institutional history of the …
Marc Bloch and the French social sciences
Marc Bloch was one of the twentieth century's most important and pathbreaking historians. Several features of his work are particularly important: his attention to the specifics of medieval economic institutions, his interest in historically specific customs and practices, and his interest in uncovering the social and technical characteristics of medieval agriculture. He helped to define …
Continue reading "Marc Bloch and the French social sciences"
Was Durkheim a professional sociologist?
At some point in the history of sociology there was a transition from the founding non-professional genius to the professional disciplinary researcher. Marx and Tocqueville certainly fall in the former category; Robert Merton, Mayer Zald, and Neil Smelser fall clearly in the latter. By some time in the mid-twentieth century sociology had become "professionalized." What …
If Marx had been born in Shanghai
Is Marx's vision still relevant in the twenty-first century world? At bottom, Marx's biggest ideas were "critique," "exploitation," "alienation," "ideology," and "class." He also constructed a fairly specific theory of capitalism and capitalist development -- a theory that has historical pluses and minuses -- and a theory of socialism that can be understood along more …
Neo-positivist philosophy of social science
The 1960s witnessed the development of a second generation of analytic philosophy of science inspired broadly by logical positivism and the Vienna Circle (post, post). The "received view" of the 1950s and 1960s, as expressed by philosophers such as Carl Hempel, Ernest Nagel, and Israel Scheffler (and others pictured above), presented a view of scientific …
Continue reading "Neo-positivist philosophy of social science"
Neurath on sociology
Otto Neurath was one of the central figures in the Vienna Circle in the 1930s and 1940s. And he was the most important figure in the group to consider the social sciences within the "unified sciences" of the twentieth century. As noted in an earlier post, the Vienna Circle set the stage for a powerful …
The Vienna Circle on interdisciplinary science
Image: in place of a network map of the contributors to the Vienna Circle One of the central projects of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s was an ambitious one: to create an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science that would demonstrate the crucial unity of all the empirical sciences -- including sociology and …
Continue reading "The Vienna Circle on interdisciplinary science"
History of sociology as sociology
I find the history of various approaches to sociology to be an interesting subject. When we look at the history of the Chicago School of sociology or the positivist-quantitative paradigm of the American 1950s and 1960s, we see a very particular set of intellectual problems and theories; we see personalities and universities; and we see …
Agrarian history — the Weber edition
One of Max Weber's early areas of research was what might be called "macro agrarian history". This was a field of research that Weber himself largely invented. He undertook to document and explain the large patterns of economic development in the ancient world, including especially the social systems surrounding farming and animal husbandry. Weber's cases …
Sociological knowledge
Is it possible to say anything useful and general about the subject matter and scope of sociology? Could we say, for example, that sociology is the discipline that uses empirical methods to arrive at hypotheses and theories about major social groups, social processes, and social patterns? Or does a definition like this suffer from both …
Understanding Society 