Dissecting the Social

Peter Hedström is Professor of Sociology and Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. He has published numerous articles in leading academic journals and is co-author of Social Mechanisms (Cambridge, 1998) with R. Swedberg.

• 1. The analytical tradition in sociology; 2. Social mechanisms and explanatory theory; 3. Action and interaction; 4. Social interaction and social change; 5. On causal modelling; 6. Quantitative research, agent-based modelling, and theories of the social (with Yvonne Åberg); 7. Coda; References.

'… an enjoyabole and important addition to the meagre library of serious philosophy of social science. It gives pleaseure to read because it is clearly conceived and elegantly written, and because - contrary to the philosophical tradition - it is chock full of examples of current research. And Hedström's book is important because it emphasizes the thesis that to explain facts of a type is to exhibit or hypothesize the mechanisms that bring them about … Dissecting the Social is an exceptionally good work in a field characterized by fuzziness, ideological bias or remoteness from live sociology. For these resons, I hope that [the book] will become compulsory reading in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on social theory, sociological method, and the philosophy of social science.' Mario Bunge, McGill University