Canadian Journal of Sociology Online May-June 2006
Review Forum is an occasional feature in which an author responds directly to issues raised by the reviewer. Its key purpose is to help thinkers clarify, augment and amend their ideas or dispel misapprehensions about them. In this our fifth feature, George Steinmetz replies to Axel van den Berg. The debate will be continued, and perhaps joined at an "Author Meets Critics" session at the August, 2006 meetings of the American Sociological Association in Montreal.
The two "overarching goals" of this sprawling collection are "to provide a mapping of the contemporary human sciences from the standpoint of their explicit and especially their implicit epistemologies" (1) and "to survey the landscape of alternatives to positivism in the human sciences" (2). The book is organized accordingly, with, apart from Steinmetz's introduction, nine contributions in Part One providing the aforementioned mapping for the disciplines of Anthropology, Asian Studies, Economics, Philosophy of Science, History, Political Science and Sociology and another nine chapters in Part Two purportedly surveying alternatives to 'positivism.'
Two things struck me while reading the first series of contributions. First, the authors hardly bother to specify what they mean, exactly, by 'positivism'. Only Steinmetz makes any serious effort to demarcate the central object of the book, first in a somewhat perfunctory formulation of a 'working definition' in the Introduction and then, more than 250 pages later, in a more sustained manner in his chapter on Sociology. The other contributors apparently know what they mean by 'positivism' and feel no need to explicate it further. Second, the authors all agree that 'positivism' is a bad thing, by virtue of its inherent complicity with the status quo, the rule of capitalism, injustice, oppression, etc. Apparently, this is so self-evident that none of them feels the need to explain why this complicity is thought to be so inherent. In short, we are firmly among what has been referred to as the "epistemological left" here.
Several of the pieces in Part One try to explain what Steinmetz repeatedly describes as "the surprising longevity of positivism" or words to that effect. He appears to be genuinely puzzled by the fact that "[d]espite repeated attempts by social theorists and researchers to drive a stake through the heart of the vampire, the disciplines continue to experience a positivistic haunting" (3). Steinmetz himself attributes the "dramatic turn toward methodological positivism" in post-WWII US sociology to its "resonance" with 'Fordism,' a combination of Keynesianism, the welfare state, collaborative industrial relations, homogeneous mass culture, and the nation-state as the taken-for-granted arena of activity. This constellation made positivism more plausible because its stability and predictability seemed to "fit the positivist expectation that social practices could be subsumed under covering laws, that is, fall into patterns that were the same everywhere and always" (296). You might expect Steinmetz to proceed from this to a confident prediction of the impending demise of positivism now that we have left this Fordist regime behind. But instead he ends on a rather cagey note, considering the unpleasant prospect of the "state, private organizations, and even social movements" indefinitely continuing "to demand social knowledge packaged in positivist formats" (312).
Somewhat incongruously, Philip Mirowski describes the rise of the notion of a "free-floating scientific community" (156), which seems to be his 'working definition' of positivism, among economists as a direct offshoot of their close association with the wartime Operations Research movement created and funded by and for the US military. More obliquely, Michael Dutton blames the applied character and bland empiricism of Oriental Studies on its subservience to policy makers and to the other social sciences. Alone among the disciplines examined here, Anthropology was never really fully in thrall to positivism at all, as Webb Keane describes it in his contribution. Instead, it has been permeated by an "underlying ethic of demonstrating some locus of human self-creation not reducible to external determinations" (84). This shared ethic has led the discipline from a culturalism that was soon found to be too constraining and determining, to a solipsistic individualist agentism that has taken it to "the verge of the incommunicable" (84). Political Science appears to have been rather less "haunted" than the others as well, according to Emily Hauptman, with both the political theory exemplified by Sheldon Wolin and the "positive", a.k.a. rational choice theory introduced by William Riker having mounted successful challenges to the ultra-empiricist behavioralism of the 1950s. The other three pieces in Part One do not directly address any positivist hauntings at all, although Somers makes a somewhat perfunctory and not entirely intelligible gesture at the very end of her long piece denouncing the concept of 'social capital' where she tries to link it to positivist 'knowledge postulates'. Timothy Mitchell's argument to the effect that Economics only invented the concept of "the economy" with Keynes' work in the 1930s sounds almost tautological and is, in any case, not clearly linked to the positivism problÈmatique. Finally, William Sewell's partly personal musings on the meteoric rise of the new social history and its even faster demise at the hands of the seemingly even more progressive 'cultural turn' is interestingly ambivalent about the quantitative social science methods adopted by the former as "one important way of pursuing the populist goal of "history from the bottom up"" (179).
Somewhat oddly, the promised multitude of alternatives to positivism in Part Two turn out to reduce to one mainly: the 'Critical Realism' of Roy Bhaskar and his devotees, to which Steinmetz himself apparently has been converted. The only other serious candidate, Sandra Harding's Standpoint Theory, turns out to be a rather more nuanced animal, something closer to a refurbished 'positivism' than a full-scale alternative. The others either never quite manage to flesh out the alternative they have in mind or are simply dealing with other matters. Mihic, Engelmann and Wingrove clearly favour Charles Taylor's "interpretivism." But their contribution never moves beyond arguing that the division of labour between normative theorists and empirical researchers in political science upholds a "fact neutrality" consisting of the refusal to entertain "the possibility that facticity is itself a proper object of theoretical solicitude" (480), which, you guessed it, is what interpretivism is all about. Anthony Elliott laments the marginalization of the creative powers of imagination and fantasy in psychoanalysis but does not deliver the 'Critique' promised in the title of his essay. Geoff Eley cautiously seconds Sewell's misgivings about too much of a cultural turn in history. Daniel Breslau rightly points out, I think, that economists tend to be rather flexible, cavalier even, in their attitude towards the empirical validity of their assumptions and results, depending on the purpose at hand, the subdiscipline and the professional prestige of the 'theorist.' Andrew Abbott, finally, is off on his own, with fascinating but not really related reflections about the significance of different time perspectives for choosing outcomes-to-be-explained in sociology. The book ends with Michael Burawoy's now familiar and somewhat grandiose plea for an invigorated public sociology to do battle with both "market tyranny and state unilateralism" (509) as "...the self-defense of social science converges with the self-defense of society, nationally and globally" (524).
What then, of critical realism as an alternative to the 'uncannily persistent' positivism? Andrew Collier, a leading proponent, provides a handy primer for the non-initiated, some of which is less helpfully repeated several times by other devotees in their chapters (Steinmetz, Lawson). Boiled down to the basics, the main tenets of critical realism come to this. Contrary to the plethora of relativisms currently de rigueur, it shares positivism's commitment to the objective existence of the things and events we observe in reality, that is, the belief that they exist independent of our observation of or knowledge about them. But unlike at least some of the more extreme versions of (logical, empirical) positivism, critical realists insist that there are also real objects that are not directly observable, in particular the causal mechanisms that we can only infer from their effects. Furthermore, critical realism categorically rejects the Humean constant conjunction model of causality that it claims is the basis for positivism's 'covering law' approach — Steinmetz in fact identifies the Humean constant conjunction model as the differentia specifica of 'positivism' (285). Since nature and society are 'open' systems, there are always a large number of causal mechanisms operating and interacting simultaneously so that there are only 'tendencies' for causes to produce certain results, rather than the certainty of constant conjunction ('whenever A then always B'). The latter only occur in laboratories and, perhaps, astronomy. Consequently, critical realism conceives of causal mechanisms as 'generative powers' that things and people have "by virtue of their inner structures, even if these powers are not exercised" (Collier, 335). This also puts human volition or reasons on a par with all other causal mechanisms in nature. Finally, since critical realism, unlike positivism, refuses to limit itself to surface phenomena, insisting on its ability to uncover the not immediately observable underlying reality, it also overcomes the Humean gap between 'is' and 'ought'. Through "explanatory critique" social science is able to correct false beliefs that "are often the means by which the oppressed are kept oppressed" (331), thereby directly implying an 'ought,' that is "valuable from the point of view of human liberation" (331), namely the need to abolish the social system producing these false beliefs.
I have to say that none of these have ever struck me as particularly devastating indictments of the conventional practices of the social science researchers I am familiar with. I don't know of anyone who still insists on a rigid phenomenalism like that of the orthodox behaviourists and early logical positivists. Similarly, I don't know of anyone who would subscribe to something as silly as the 'Humean constant conjunctions' model as described by Collier and Steinmetz, not even Hume himself. It is as if the critical realists had never heard of the ceteris paribus clause. And, in fact, as Breslau rightly points out with respect to economists, "statements of tendencies and capacities of the kind that critical realists say theories should be made of" (458) are the nuts and bolts of the bulk of conventional social science. Similarly, no one that I know of would object to intentions, reasons and volitions as effective (proximate) causes of actions. But that does not mean, as critical realists seem to think, that such intentions are a matter of 'agency' in the sense that they somehow emanate ex nihilo or sui generis, not to be subjected to the affront of further explanation. The pragmatic fact of the matter is, simply, that we tend to take reasons that make sense to us as sufficient explanations for action and only demand further causal tracing when they do not make sense (as in 'whatever caused the actor to want that?').
In short, pace Steinmetz, none of these are really matters of serious dispute between critical realism and 'positivism' or conventional social science research. It is the latter's much-maligned fact/value dichotomy that really upsets the 'epistemological left.' But on this point, too, the critical realist critique is hardly crushing. Readers of a certain vintage will readily recognize Collier's 'explanatory critique' as a fairly undiluted version of the 'false consciousness' of times now happily gone by. Leaving aside the untold horrors that have been inflicted in its name, the notion of 'false consciousness' never really had much persuasive force in the eyes of its alleged beneficiaries, for reasons that are fairly obvious. Let us assume, for instance, that we could prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the widespread belief among the poor that they have only themselves to blame for their poverty is false because the ostensibly 'meritocratic' educational system actually heavily discriminates in favour of the children of the rich — a rather more plausible example of "explanatory critique" than the case of Marx's distinction between labour and labour power used by Collier (337). What 'ought' could we logically derive from such proof? Well, for the elite profiting from the status quo it might mean that one should try to devise ways to conceal the nonmeritocratic features of the educational system more effectively. But what about the poor, now disabused of their former misconceptions? Should they send letters of protest to the editorial pages, form a political party demanding educational reform, take to the streets to protest the lack of meritocracy, reject the whole notion of meritocracy to begin with, storm the barricades to bring down the entire 'system,' or simply accept the inevitability of an unjust world with stoic resignation ? Well, it would seem to depend on what one can reasonably expect to be the outcomes of any of these lines of action, of course, and on how one evaluates those outcomes in relation to the likely sacrifices they will require. No doubt, further careful social science research can throw much light on these issues as well, but it can hardly be expected to settle them one way or another.
But this returns us to the question of the supposed intrinsic complicity of 'positivism', however defined, with in the status quo, injustice, oppression, and so forth. For this complicity is by no means self-evident to those who are not card-carrying members of the 'epistemological left.' To the contrary, there are at least some historical reasons for assuming the very opposite. The 'paradoxical' fact that most of the original Vienna Circle (Carnap, Neurath, Hempel, a.o.) were strongly committed to 'progressive' politics and even 'socialism' is noted en passant several times (Steinmetz 9-10, 26; Mirowski 154). But then, in a chilling rejoinder, Mirowski criticizes the "unfortunate tendency to think that, just because someone has self-identified as some species of socialist, that immediately absolves him or her from any accusations of reactionary political activity" (154). Again, readers of a certain vintage will readily recognize the old Leninist practice of dismissing dissidents on the left as 'objectively' serving the interests of the bourgeoisie here.
It is also clear that on the other side of the political spectrum historically certain anti-positivists have tended to play a rather more sinister role. Steinmetz notes that "[a] final factor contributing to the consolidation of positivist orthodoxy was the emotional-political landscape of the middle decades of the century, which brought certain critiques of normal positive science into disagreeable association with fascism and communism" (278-279). Harding is, characteristically, more straightforward on this rather sticky issue: "We must note here that standpoint thinking has never been the sole possession of social justice movements...Neo-Nazis and American Patriots, religious, ethnic, and land-based fundamentalisms have generated some of the most disturbing politics of recent times and justified these actions with something much like standpoint claims" although she quickly adds that their "nostalgia for a return to a predemocratic past leaves them scientifically as well as ethnically [sic] disadvantaged relative to the new social justice movements" (359).
Considering all this one might be forgiven for asking the opposite question: how on earth did the culturalist, textualist, qualitative approach, which has traditionally been associated with, if anything, elite romanticism ever come to be seen as 'progressive' politics at all? At least some of the more perceptive authors seem to realize that there may be something not quite right here. Sewell and Eley explicitly worry about the danger that the 'cultural turn' in history may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater in its wholesale rejection of the (mostly quantitative) methods and ambitions of the now old 'new social history.' Harding goes even further, warning against "science bashing" (359) and calling on "the new social justice movements" to engage "in a productive way with positivism's legacy" (349). She then proceeds to call for "more accurate sciences of nature and social relations" and "more capable research methods" as indispensable instruments for "[o]ppressed and exploited groups" in their struggle for emancipation (360, 359). Finally, as noted, Steinmetz himself darkly hints at the possibility that "even social movements" may continue to demand "social knowledge packaged in positivist formats." Why? "The reasons for this preference are complex. It may be that there is a built-in affinity between projects of societal regulation per se and positivist knowledge formats" (312). Might we possibly add "projects of societal transformation" as well here?
Several authors comment on the fact that 'positivism' is apparently so taken for granted by most mainstream social scientists as to be unconsciously accepted without need for any explicit formulation or justification, the proverbial water in which fish swim without noticing it. It occurs to me that we are witnessing something similar here. The odd fact that in a book like this so little sustained effort is made to clearly demarcate its central object — 'positivism' — and that its central underlying claim — 'positivism's' inherent complicity with the priviliged, the powers that be and the status quo — receives no serious attention at all, particularly in the face of the rather strong historical evidence to the contrary that is occasionally acknowledged, suggests to me that for the 'epistemological left' gathered here, these are the elements of an unspoken, unarticulated collective conscience. To be sure, some at least (Harding, Sewell, Eley) seem finally prepared to begin questioning this taken-for-granted neo-orthodoxy, however guardedly. Could it be that, for all the 'postpositivist' bravado, we are actually witnessing the beginning of the end for the 'cultural turn,' at least in its politically charged incarnation?
While this may be reason for cautious optimism, there is one feature of many of the contributions to this volume that I find most disheartening. These representatives of the 'epistemological left' have apparently totally failed to learn the main lesson from the past failures of Marxism. It is bad enough that utterly discredited notions like 'false consciousness' and 'objectively serving the bourgeoisie's interests' should have returned in such unabashed form in these pages. But what is worse is that while these authors would all accept that the Soviet experiment was a miserable failure, they have failed to absorb its most important lesson for the would-be world-improver: that in order to persuade people to reject their present lot and try something better you have to have a pretty clear idea of what that 'something better' might look like. Recall how Collier's notion of jumping from 'is' to 'ought' through 'explanatory critique' turned out to hinge, upon closer examination, on the assumption that the better, brighter alternative is somehow readily and obviously at hand. Similarly, Steinmetz's typically old-Marxist attempt to historicize 'positivism' by linking it to a now bygone regime of capitalist 'regulation' ends up, willy-nilly, raising the question: what's the alternative? Again, Somers hails Solidarnocz as a harbinger of the flourishing 'civil society' she envisages in lieu of the eviscerated notion of 'social capital' but then admits, somewhat sheepishly, that "[i]n retrospect, while there was unambiguous mobilization for civil and political rights, it is not at all clear what alternative economic system the anticommunist movements envisioned" (256). I wonder, is this the fault of the lack of imagination of the movement's leaders at the time? Or does some of the blame fall, perhaps, on the shoulders of those among the 'progressive' intelligentsia who have declined to take on the hard work of investigating the alternative strategies available to us and the likely outcomes, benefits and sacrifices, using the best available social scientific methods?
Axel van den Berg
Department of Sociology
McGill University
I am grateful to the editors of the CJS Online for inviting me to respond to Axel van den Berg's misleading review of The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences (hereafter: PoM). Van den Berg begins with the puzzling claim that PoM hardly bothers to specify what it means by positivism, although he acknowledges that my introductory essay and chapter on postwar US sociology and the chapters by Collier and Lawson in fact offer detailed definitions. Rather than weighing down the text with more definitions, PoM instead presents a variety of historical and ethnographic studies of the various social science disciplines in the U.S. during the past century, with an emphasis on their epistemological practices and premises. Obviously, as Raymond Williams wrote, positivism has long been a "swear-word, by which nobody is swearing," which makes it harder to track than during the middle decades of the 20th century. But as Williams also acknowledged, "the real argument is still there." This book is about that argument and the ways it has changed in the social sciences, especially since the "positivism dispute" of the 1960s.
I argue that there is a set of social-science epistemological positions whose common denominator is regularity determinism, the view that "For every event y there is an event x or set of events x1...xn such that x or x1...xn and y are regularly conjoined under some set of descriptions."[1] The simplest form of this is the "constant conjunction" or "if A, then B" statement. The book traces the ways social-science positivism has elaborated on this primordial model while retaining its commitment to regularity determinism. I disaggregate three central components of social science méthodos: (1) epistemology, or claims about knowledge; (2) ontology, or claims about the objects of social science knowledge; and (3) claims about naturalism, that is, about the exemplary quality (or absence thereof) of the natural sciences for the human sciences. (Of course these three categories overlap: epistemologies imply ontologies, naturalism makes ontological claims, and so on.) I trace the emergence of differing higher-order combinations of these three elements. The first complex I identify is "methodological positivism." This framework combines positivist epistemology with empiricist ontology and a hard-naturalist stance on method that denies the importance of cultural meaning/interpretation, historicity, and any other differences between the natural and human sciences. Methodological positivism became the dominant, that is, most noble position within sociology, psychology, and political science in the US after WWII. More recently these fields have seen a rising attraction to a reformulated méthodos that remains positivist about epistemology but is depth-realist about ontology, accepting unseen entities and processes with their causal powers.
Whether positivism is still dominant is an open question and one whose answer varies by discipline. Van den Berg's review ignores one of the book's central aims, which is to track the varying successes and failures of positivism and nonpositivism and their differing configurations in the human sciences during the 20th century, and to begin trying to account for that variability. Sociology, history, and cultural anthropology are all ostensibly concerned with the same object, but the dominant epistemologies in the three fields have varied enormously. This is puzzling for anyone who believes (as van den Berg claims to do) that sciences should bear some relationship to their object of study rather than being determined entirely by "external" or "social" forces. What explains this divergence? PoM is a first stab at answering this question.
The dominant stance on méthodos in contemporary US sociology embraces probabilistic statements about causal effects, rather than simple "if A, then B" statements, and it increasingly eschews empiricism in favor of a depth-realist ontology (although essentially empiricist statistical methods are still widespread).[2] Concerning the first point, the book notes that it was positivist philosophers themselves (Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap, Ernest Nagel, and Abraham Kaplan) who proposed loosening the "necessitarian" account of the scientific law to allow for probabilistic social "laws." The alliance between social scientists and philosophical positivists during the 1950s and 1960s is not some antipositivist Hirngespinst (deluded flight of fantasy). The participants in the 1951 Hoover Institute conference at which Reichenbach presented his defense of probabilistic method represented a who's who of postwar US social science, ranging from Margaret Mead to Edward Shils. [3]
As for the question of depth realism, several contributors to PoM recognize that currently prestigious approaches in the social sciences such as rational choice theory and the "social mechanisms" perspective reject "rigid phenomenalism." [4] Here Professor van den Berg seems to be crashing through open doors. Depth-realist positivism links some unobservable or theoretical construct to some class of empirical event by means of a lawlike generalization. This remains wedded to the ideal of regularity determination, which can be restated as follows: "For every unseen or conceptual event y there is an event x or set of events x1...xn such that x or x1...xn and y are regularly conjoined under some set of descriptions." My own position is indeed close to critical realism — and I am by no means a recent "convert" — even though the book contains a variety of alternative positions. I have argued that much sociological research already conforms to the program set out by critical realism. [5] But there are in fact, pace Van den Berg, "matters of serious dispute between critical realism" and many versions of conventional social science, and one of these concerns depth-realist positivism. Critical realism holds that general laws are ontologically unwarranted in open systems like the social. Social reality is characterized by a "rainforestlike profusion of different kinds of reality," in Andrew Collier's words (p. 336), of mechanisms that interact and meld in changing ways. Predictions are only possible, if at all, within limited time-space coordinates.
Van den Berg describes as "cagey" my unwillingness to make a "confident prediction of the impending demise of positivism now that we have left [the] Fordist regime behind." In fact this unwillingness to make epochal predictions flows from the version of ontological realism I defend here. The overdetermined openness of the social means that most predictions are chimerical. This absence of predictions "does not rule out explanations" (p. 332), however. I argue that postwar US Fordism made methodological positivism seem more plausible to social scientists as a description of their social object. These structures of plausibility allowed champions of methodological positivism inside sociology to win converts and raise their own status. Fordist social conditions have indeed largely disappeared since the 1970s, but they were just one of the mechanisms shaping the success and failure of alternative epistemologies — the one that made a specific difference in the 1950s and 1960s. (Note, incidentally, that none of this is framed in terms of "the rule of capitalism, injustice, oppression, etc." Indeed, one of the features of Fordism that makes it such an object of nostalgic longing for so many individuals and groups is that fact that injustice and the most egregious forms of oppression seemed to be giving way in that period.) Contemporary forms of societalization do not have such univocal implications for social science epistemology but, as I argue, they seem to provide support for both positivism and nonpositivism. The other mechanisms discussed by sociologists of science could continue to tilt the playing field in sociology toward some revamped version of social science positivism. Funding from private foundations and the US government, though not decisive on its own, continues to favor research that is not complicated by cultural interpretation, self-authorial reflexivity or subjectivity, concerns about historical times, or skepticism about prediction. Latourian dynamics of alliance formation and entrenched methodological habitus also play a powerful role in theory-choice. I entertain the possibility of a continual remaking of positivism and reassertion of its dominance in US sociology as well as the alternative possibility of its decline. US sociology may be moving toward an epistemological stalemate similar to the situation in the 1930s, [6] in which neither positivist nor nonpositivist positions were recognized as being more distinguished.
Critical realists are more, not less cautious than positivist policy researchers about recommending specific courses of action. This undermines Van den Berg's effort to subsume critical realism under his critique of Marxism and to align PoM with projects of "world-improvement." The oddly asynchronous ideological subtext of van den Berg's review becomes most obvious when he submits that "these authors would all accept that the Soviet experiment was a miserable failure." Given that the book is focused almost entirely on the United States this sudden voyage back in time to the lost worlds of Sovietology comes as a bit of a shock. Once we accept that the social is an open system and therefore immune to forecasting, any "old-Marxist" essentialism or totalization becomes untenable — as does most contemporary policy science. This does not mean that social-scientific knowledge cannot point to the importance of "absenting" certain social structures that produce deleterious effects. But "explanatory critique," at least as I understand it, tells us more about "what is to be lost" than about "what is to be done." On this issue, too, there are differences among the contributors.
Van den Berg implies that PoM accepts the term "epistemological left" and argues that all of the contributors belong to this camp. In fact, on the very first pages I write that
would-be non-positivists embrace a wide array of philosophical positions nowadays. An almost equally wide range of political positions is imputed to both nonpositivists and positivists as well, belying the simple heuristic that opposes an "epistemological left" to an "epistemological right." (p. 29)
Some of the hardest-hitting critics of social science positivism during its mid-20th century heyday were located firmly on the political right. Social science positivism may sometimes occlude power structures, but the same is true of nonpositivism. The lineage of conservative, even reactionary antipositivism in Germany is long and illustrious, culminating in Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. US foreign policy in the past few years has arguably been informed less by positivist social science than by Leo Strauss, a vehement critic of value-free social science and postwar political science behavioralism. Many writers have suggested that US foreign policy can best be understood as exemplifying Schmitt's militantly antipositivist decisionism. By the same token, the logical positivists were mainly leftists, some even Marxists. In more recent decades Marxists in sociology have been almost equally drawn to positivist and nonpositivist methods. As for critical realism, it has always rejected "idealism" and its latter-day instantiations. It is far from obvious which phantoms Van den Berg is boxing with, but they seem to be revenants from the 1960s debate on positivism, when antipositivism was more clearly located on the left, not the contributors to the present volume. PoM makes it clear from the start that we are dealing with a new conjuncture in which the epistemological options have changed along with their political affiliations.
Even if we equate postmodern relativism with the term "epistemological left," it must be obvious that only a small number of the contributors accept that position. Quite incoherently, van den Berg accuses the contributors of belonging both to the "epistemological left" and to the Marxist camp, whereas everyone knows that Marxists and leftists like Alan Sokal have tended to be the harshest critics of so-called postmodern relativism. [7]
Van den Berg's final act of creative distortion is his suggestion that PoM sees positivism as complicit with "the privileged, the powers that be" and that its authors describe positivism as "objectively serving the bourgeoisie's interests." Van den Berg places that latter phrase in quotation marks, implying that it is used by the book's contributors. Strangely enough, the word "bourgeoisie" (and its adjectival form) is used fewer than ten times in the entire book, and never to argue that positivist social science is objectively serving the interests of capital or to suggest a disjuncture between subjective and objective class interests. I argue that methodological positivism was associated in the postwar period (though not in the interwar years) not with "the powers that be" in society at large but in the disciplinary field of sociology. Van den Berg overlooks the basic sociological distinction between a particular social field and the overarching "field of power" (a.k.a. society as a whole). Economic capital cannot be automatically transferred to noneconomic fields, and conversely, symbolic capital is field-specific. [8]
The concerns motivating PoM are a desire for a more adequate social science — the philosophy of science critique — and a sociological analysis of the strategies pursued in scientific field — the sociology of sociology perspective.
Notes
George Steinmetz
Department of Sociology
University of Michigan
http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/politicsmethod.html
June 2006
© Canadian Journal of Sociology Online
