Historical Understanding and Ethics in Social Science

Can social scientific description capture the historically individual? Is the idea of an ethically committed social science morally defensible? This book offers a critical, historically-grounded perspective on these perennial methodological and ethical problems, in their current forms.

Autorentext

Leonidas Tsilipakos is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol, UK. He has edited and translated Winch's The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy into Greek. He is the author of Clarity and Confusion in Social Theory: Taking Concepts Seriously, also published in this series, and of **.

Inhalt

Introduction

PART I: HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING

1. Descriptive accuracy in history: The case of narrative explanations

2. Pareto decomposition and the holism of internal relations

3. Historicism and formal theory in cultural sociology: Two ways with the King's second body

PART II: ETHICS

4. The idea of an ethically committed social science

5. Social criticism, moral reasoning and the literary form

6. Normative sociology and phronetic social science in the light of practical reason

Conclusion