Sociology as a Human Science

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.

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.