In this volume the author maintains that sociology must learn to combine the insights of both Durkheim and Marx and that it can only do so on the presuppositional ground that Weber set forth. Alexander maintains that the idealist and materialist traditions must be transformed into analytic dimensions of multidimensional and synthetic theory. This volume focusses on the writing of Talcott Parsons, the only modern thinker who can be considered a true peer of the classical founders, and examines his own profoundly ambivalent attempt to carry out this analytic transformation.

Arthur L. Stinchcombe has earned a reputation as a leading practitioner of methodology in sociology and related disciplines. Throughout his distinguished career he has championed the idea that to be an effective sociologist, one must use many methods. This incisive work introduces students to the logic of those methods. The Logic of Social Research orients students to a set of logical problems that all methods must address to study social causation. Almost all sociological theory asserts that some social conditions produce other social conditions, but the theoretical links between causes and effects are not easily supported by observation. Observations cannot directly show causation, but they can reject or support causal theories with different degrees of credibility. As a result, sociologists have created four main types of methods that Stinchcombe terms quantitative, historical, ethnographic, and experimental to support their theories. Each method has value, and each has its uses for different research purposes. Accessible and astute, The Logic of Social Research offers an image of what sociology is, what it's all about, and what the craft of the sociologist consists of.

This four volume work, originally published in the 1980s and out of print for some years, represents a major attempt to redirect the course of contemporary sociological thought. Jeffrey Alexander analyses the most general and fundamental elements of sociological thinking about action and order and their ramifications for empirical study. He insists that sociological thought need not choose between voluntary action and social constraint. The four volumes can be read independently of one another as each presents a distinctive theoretical argument in its own right. The first volume is directed at contemporary problems and controversies, not only in ‘theory’ but in the philosophy and sociology of science. The last three volumes make interpretations, confronting the individual theorists, and the secondary literature, on their own terms.

This book sets out a generative structuralist conception of general theoretical sociology; its philosophy, its problems, and its methods. The field is defined as a comprehensive research tradition with many intersecting subtraditions that share conceptual components.

The subject of this book is limited to the abstract form or "logic" of science (as applied particularly to scientific sociology). The chief aim is to compress, to simplify, and to organize into an easily understood and reasonably well-documented scheme some principal answers to questions such as: What makes a discipline "scientific" in the first place? What are theories, empirical generalizations, hypotheses, and observations; and how are they related to each other? What is meant by "the scientific method?" What roles do induction and deduction play in science? What are the places of measurement, sampling techniques, descriptive statistics, statistical inference, scale construction, tests of significance, "grand" theories, and "middle-range" theories? What parts are played by our ideas concerning logic, causality, and chance? What is the significance of the rule of parsimony? How do verbal and mathematical languages compare in expressing scientific statements? The intended use of this book goes beyond these abstract questions. The discussion presented here may serve a practical role in the sociology and history of science by providing a framework for reducing the enormous variety of scientific researches--both within a given field and across all fields--to a limited number of interrelated formal elements. Such a framework, it is hoped, may prove useful in assessing empirical relationships between the formal aspects of scientific work and its substantive social, economic, political, and historical aspects. Wallace identifies four ways of generating and testing the truth of empirical statements--"authoritarian," "mystical," "logico-rational," and "scientific," and considers each in depth. As he concludes, "In science (as in everyday life') things must be believed to be seen, as well as seen to be believed; and questions must already be answered a little, if they are to be asked at all." This is a work of synthesis that merits close attention. It provides an area for viewing theory as something more than a review of the history of any single social science discipline. Walter L. Wallace is Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Princeton University. He is also the author of Sociological Theory: An Introduction, and Principles of Scientific Sociology, available from AldineTransaction.

While social scientists and historians have been exchanging ideas for a long time, they have never developed a proper dialogue about social theory. William H. Sewell Jr. observes that on questions of theory the communication has been mostly one way: from social science to history. Logics of History argues that both history and the social sciences have something crucial to offer each other. While historians do not think of themselves as theorists, they know something social scientists do not: how to think about the temporalities of social life. On the other hand, while social scientists’ treatments of temporality are usually clumsy, their theoretical sophistication and penchant for structural accounts of social life could offer much to historians. Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History, he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.