Critical Realism, History, and Philosophy in the Social Sciences

Timothy Rutzou is Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Yale University, USA with a PhD in philosophy from University College London, UK. His work focuses on science and technology, the sociology of knowledge, continental philosophy, and the philosophy of science and social science.George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, USA. He is a social theorist and a historical sociologist of states, empires, and social science and the author of The Devil's Handwriting and Regulating the Social.

• Introduction: Crisis!? What Crisis!? On Social Theory and Reflexivity; Timothy RutzouChapter 1. After Positivism: Critical Realism and Historical Sociology; Philip S. Gorski Chapter 2. Uses of Value Judgments in Science: A General Argument, with Lessons from a Case Study of Feminist Research on Divorce; Elizabeth Anderson Chapter 3. Principles of Reconstructive Social Theory; Frédéric Vandenberghe Chapter 4. Conjunctures and Assemblages: Approaches to Multicausal Explanation in the Human Sciences; Claire Laurier DecoteauChapter 5. “Strange Bedfellows? Ontology and Queer Theory”; Timothy Rutzou

Contributed by researchers from the US and Brazil, the six essays in this volume are based on papers given at a symposium on the "History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences," held at the U. of Michigan and a symposium on "Values and Flourishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences Conference 2017," at Yale U., examining critical realism, history, philosophy, and the social sciences. They discuss the place of theory in sociology; the epistemological crisis within comparative-historical sociology and how critical realism can be used to answer the questions that initiated the crisis; the need for value commitments in social science; principles of reconstructive social theory; causation in the context of assemblage theories; and the relationship between queer theory and ontology.