Objectivity can be effectively described as striving for detachment -a capacity to achieve some distance from one's own spontaneous perceptions and convictions, to experimentally adopt perspectives that do not come naturally. Novick's treatment of objectivity satisfies the requirements of objectivity, while on a rhetorical level he rejects the notion as unrealistic. Detachment enables an intellectual, specifically an historian, to operate with self-reflexivity and simultaneously socializes him or her. The ultimate power in a community of detached intellectuals striving for objectivity is (...) a powerful argument. Under Novick's notion of objectivity, the conflict for historians between scholarly integrity and political alliance is unresolvable. Removing neutrality from the definition of objectivity resolves this conflict, enabling historians to strive for detachment and fairness, not disengagement from life. Postmodern disclaimers, such as Novick's on the futility of objectivity, fail, through being overly dismissive, to help us establish criteria for evaluating individual historical accounts. Having objectivity as a goal enables us to establish those criteria. (shrink)

Emphasis on autonomy of texts presupposes that there are perennial concepts. But researchers' expectations may turn history into mythology of ideas; researchers forget that an agent cannot be described as doing something he could not understand as a description, and that thinking may be inconsistent. They will never uncover voluntary oblique strategies and by treating ideas as units will confuse sentences with statements. On the other hand, a contextual approach to the meaning of texts dismisses ideas as unimportant effects. Neither (...) method shows how what was said was meant is crucial for understanding. There are no perennial problems; philosophers of different times do not speak directly to us. But history of ideas helps us recognize the contingency of many of our beliefs. (shrink)

Liberalism sanctifies the values chosen by the sovereign individual. This tends to rule out criticisms of an individual's “preference” for one value over another by, ironically, establishing a deterministic view of the self that protects the self's desires from scrutiny. Similarly, rational choice approaches to social theory begin with previously determined individual preferences and focus on the means by which they are pursued, concentrating on the results rather than the sources of people's values.A striking new attempt to go behind the (...) liberal and rational‐choice starting point in order to understand political preferences is found in Aaron Wildavsky's Cultural Theory. Yet Cultural Theory does not facilitate the criticism of preferences, because its understanding of them is fundamentally liberal. Even while rejecting methodological individualism, Cultural Theory's monocausally social theory of preference formation retains in a new guise the liberal preservation of preferences from criticism by reestablishing a deterministic view of the formation of values, leading it to share with liberalism an a historical view of their origins. (shrink)

The late Maurice Mandelbaum was one of the most consistent and determined defenders of philosophical and social realism and of what he called "methodological institutionalism." This can be seen as containing a theory of human agency and a theory of how the social world comes to be institutionally structured, or what can be called a "structurist" theory. Mandelbaurn has argued for the irreducibility of social concepts and the necessity of scientific social laws for social and historical explanation. Purpose and Necessity (...) in Social Theory and the totality of Mandelbaum's work support the contention that in the task of developing substantive social explanations three basic issues are equally important: the problem of social reality and truth, the problem of social causation, and the problem of social change. Mandelbaum's concepts of behavior and institutions - their relative autonomy, symbiosis, and historicity -together provide the basis for a sociological structurism. Moreover, he provides powerful philosophical support from within the analytical tradition for a social theory that rejects atomism and empiricism and embraces the historical nature of society as both a real structure and an ongoing structuring process. (shrink)

Social science can achieve falsifiable theory, but only if dependencies of regularities upon milieu and context are explicitly considered. Achieving falsifiable, general theory depends upon finding a set of relationships which is in fact relatively independent of context, and specifying the boundary conditions or domain of applicability to models. Contemporary sociologists such as Herbert Blalock and George Hornans believe theory is possible without recourse to history, but Raymond Aron and especially Max Weber suggest how and why history and theory are (...) interdependent. Weber's image of the historical as inexhaustible concrete adds the insight that whenever theorists find a determined, lawful causal sequence, they will have to understand the situation at the start of the sequence as a set of rich, historical givens. Metatheoretical philosophy of explanation in social science best addresses the problem of infinite residue and bridges the gap between disciplines. (shrink)