Sociology as a Human Science

Isaac Ariail Reed is Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of Sociology and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, USA. He is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences and Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies, and the co-editor of Social Theory Now and The New Pragmatist Sociology: Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy.

• Chapter 1. Introduction – Sociology as a Human Science: An Unfinished Revolution.- Chapter 2. Epistemology Contextualized: Social Scientific Knowledge in a Post-Positivist Era.- Chapter 3. Justifying Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation.- Chapter 4. Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology (with Daniel Hirschman).- Chapter 5. Ratio via machina: Three Standards of Mechanistic Explanation in Sociology (with Natalie B. Aviles).- Chapter 6. Meaning and Modularity: The Multivalence of “Mechanism” in Sociological Explanation (with Carly R. Knight).- Chapter 7. Theorizing and the Unsettlement of Communities of Inquiry in the Social Sciences (with Mayer Zald).- Chapter 8. What is Interpretive Explanation in Sociohistorical Analysis?.