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Informationen zum Autor George Steinmetz is Professor of Sociology and German Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany and The Devil’s Handwriting: Ethnographic Discourse and “Native Policy” in the German Overseas Empire (Southwest Africa, Samoa, and Quingdao/China) (forthcoming) and the editor of State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn. Klappentext 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, political science and political theory, and sociology. Essayists trace disciplinary developments through the long twentieth century, focusing on the decades since World War II. Contributors explore and contrast some of the major alternatives to positivist epistemologies, including Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, narrative theory, and actor-network theory. Almost all the essays are written by well-known practitioners of the fields discussed. Some essayists approach positivism and anti-positivism via close readings of texts influential in their respective disciplines. Some engage in ethnographies of the present-day human sciences; others are more historical in method. All of them critique contemporary social scientific practice. Together, they trace a trajectory of thought and method running from the past through the present and pointing toward possible futures.Contributors. Andrew Abbott, Daniel Breslau, Michael Burawoy, Andrew Collier , Michael Dutton, Geoff Eley, Anthony Elliott, Stephen Engelmann, Sandra Harding, Emily Hauptmann, Webb Keane, Tony Lawson, Sophia Mihic, Philip Mirowski, Timothy Mitchell, William H. Sewell Jr., Margaret R. Somers, George Steinmetz, Elizabeth Wingrove Zusammenfassung Collection of new essays on the past! present! and future of positivism in the various social sciences Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Positivism and Its Others in the Social Sciences / George Steinmetz 1 Part One. Positivism and Nonpositivism in Twentieth-Century Social Science Anthropology Estrangement, Intimacy, and the Objects of Anthropology / Webb Keane 59 Area Studies/Asian Studies The Trick of Words: Asian Studies, Translation, and the Problems of Knowledge / Michael Dutton 89 Economics Economists and the Economy in the Twentieth Century / Timothy Mitchell 126 Economics/Philosophy of Science How Positivism Made a Pact with the Postwar Social Sciences in the United States / Philip Mirowski 142 History The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History, or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian / William H. Sewell Jr. 173 Political Science/Political Theory Defining “Theory” in Postwar Political Science / Emily Hauptmann 207 Sociology and Economics Beware Trojan Horses Bearing Social Capital: How Privatization Turned Solidarity into a Bowling Team / Margaret R. Somers 233 Sociology Scientific Authority and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The Plausibility of Positivism in U. S. Sociology since 1945 / George Steinmetz 275 Part Two. Alternatives to Positivism in the Human Sciences Philosophy and Critical Realism Critical Realism / Andrew Collier 327 Philosophy and Standpoint Theory Negotiating with a Positivist Legacy: New Social Justice Movements and a Standpoint Politics of Metho...
