Politics of Method in the Human Sciences

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.

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Positivism and Its Others in the Social Sciences / George Steinmetz 1Part One. Positivism and Nonpositivism in Twentieth-Century Social Science Anthropology Estrangement, Intimacy, and the Objects of Anthropology / Webb Keane 59Area Studies/Asian Studies The Trick of Words: Asian Studies, Translation, and the Problems of Knowledge / Michael Dutton 89Economics Economists and the Economy in the Twentieth Century / Timothy Mitchell 126Economics/Philosophy of Science How Positivism Made a Pact with the Postwar Social Sciences in the United States / Philip Mirowski 142History The Political Unconscious of Social and Cultural History, or, Confessions of a Former Quantitative Historian / William H. Sewell Jr. 173Political Science/Political Theory Defining “Theory” in Postwar Political Science / Emily Hauptmann 207Sociology and Economics Beware Trojan Horses Bearing Social Capital: How Privatization Turned Solidarity into a Bowling Team / Margaret R. Somers 233Sociology Scientific Authority and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The Plausibility of Positivism in U. S. Sociology since 1945 / George Steinmetz 275Part Two. Alternatives to Positivism in the Human Sciences Philosophy and Critical Realism Critical Realism / Andrew Collier 327Philosophy and Standpoint Theory Negotiating with a Positivist Legacy: New Social Justice Movements and a Standpoint Politics of Method / Sandra Harding 346Economics and Critical Realism A Perspective on Modern Economics / Tony Lawson 366Process and Temporality in Sociology The Idea of Outcome in U. S. Sociology / Andrew Abbott 393Psychoanalysis as Critique Psychoanalysis and the Theory of the Subject / Anthony Elliott 427Sociology of Science The Real and the Imaginary in Economic Methodology / Daniel Breslau 451Making Sense In and Of Political Science Facts, Values, and “Real” Numbers / Sophia Mihic, Stephen G. Engelmann, and Elizabeth Rose Wingrove 470Being Undisciplined On Your Marx: From Cultural History to the History of Society / Geoff Eley 496Conclusion: Provincializing the Social Sciences / Michael Burawoy 508References 527Contributors 583Index 587Citation Index 607

“By contrasting the diverse trajectories and strategies of positivist method within each discipline, The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences develops a comparative perspective which has been lacking in virtually all prior treatments of positivism in social science. The contrasts in the form and prestige that positivist method assumed in each discipline are striking.”-Craig Calhoun, President of the Social Science Research Council “George Steinmetz and his colleagues present provocative perspectives on the politics of knowledge in the human sciences. Magisterial overviews jostle with unsettling manifestos in this comprehensive and challenging collection. The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences is a necessary prolegomenon to any future epistemological debate.” -John Lie, Class of 1959 Professor and Dean of International and Area Studies, University of California, Berkeley