This book provides a detailed examination of what is required for a body of knowledge to be considered scientific. Cohen treats general topics like value bias, the nature of observation, and the limitations of the scientific study, but he also discusses specific topics like the elements of a theory and the necessity of restricting the scope of knowledge claims. The second edition contains substantial new material including new chapters dealing with the problems of quantitative measurement, research design, the limits of empirical research, and the methodology of cumulative research programs.

Das englischsprachige Buch zieht eine Bilanz der widersprüchlichen intellektuellen Entwicklung der Soziologie über ein halbes Jahrhundert. Die Disziplin braucht diese Aufarbeitung der eigenen Erfahrung, um mit den neuen sozialen und kognitiven Herausforderungen fertig zu werden.

Sociology, emerging in the 19th century as the study of national societies, is the intellectual product of its time, power relations and social imaginaries. As a discursive practice that was enmeshed in the meta-narratives of modernity, the discipline of sociology bears the inherent capacity to shape socially shared concepts and construct collective identities. This book examines the relationships between sociology and projects of national identity construction, and presents a critique of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, the prominent Israeli sociologist known as the "father of Israeli sociology". The book focuses on Eisenstadt’s sociology of Israel as a case of knowledge construction within an ideological system and examines the relationships between his various sociological analyses of Israeli society and the Zionist imaginary, namely the deeply entrenched political myths and historiographical narratives that constitute Israel’s hegemonic national identity. By emphasizing the interrelation between textuality, identity, and loaded language, the volume seeks to demythologize Eisenstadt’s sociology of Israel. Three major concepts in Eisenstadt’s scholarship are specifically thematized: integration, civilization, and modernities. In each of these foci, the author shows how Eisenstadt’s sociological conjectures reproduce dominant Zionist historiographical representations of the past, rationalize prevalent social hierarchies, reify the boundaries of a national collective "Self", and render legitimacy to Israel’s governing ethnocratic tendencies, underlying the premises of the Zionist settler-colonial project. Sociological Knowledge and Collective Identity will appeal to those interested in the interconnectedness of sociology and political memory, as well as in a radical postcolonial reconstruction of sociology.

This text demonstrates the link between philosophy of science and scientific practice. Durkheim's sociology is examined as more than a collection of general observations about society, since the constructed theory of the meanings and causes of social life is incorporated.