Sociology as a Human Science: Essays on Interpretation and Causal Pluralism

Sociology as a Human Science  is a set of foundational, wide-ranging and updated essays from Isaac Ariail Reed. Gathered together for the first time with a new introduction, they articulate a distinct perspective on concept and method in social science. Reed writes about realism and positivism, postmodernism and empiricism, mechanisms and causality, and power and history, developing thereby an understanding of the key debates out of which 21st-century sociology has developed. Carefully considering all manner of arguments in metatheory and epistemology and moving towards a program of interpretive explanation focused on culture and power, Reed places sociology at the center of debates about knowledge production across the humanities and social sciences. His reconstructive approach, positioned “after the posts” (poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism) provides a way for interpretive sociology to provide analytically sound, theoretically extensive, and empirically rich understandings of social life.