1. Barry Barnes and David Bloor, "Relativism, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge, in Rationality and Relativism , ed. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 21-47.

2. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 61.

3. Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991),

4. Herbert W. Simons, ed., The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Donald McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald McCloskey, eds., The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

5. Albert Hunter, "Introduction: Rhetoric in Research, Networks of Knowledge, in The Rhetoric of Social Research, Understood and Believed , ed. Albert Hunter (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 3.

6. Richard Harvey Brown, Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

7. Walter L. Wallace, Principles of Scientific Sociology (New York: Aldine, 1983), 4, 5.

8. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works , vol. 1: Introduction to the Human Sciences , ed. Rudolf A. Makkereel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 55-72.

9. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 23, 246.

10. Richard Rorty, Philosophical Papers , vol. 1: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 79.

11. Ibid., 40.

12. Ibid., 45.

13. Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology , trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

14. Bruce Mazlish, A New Science: The Breakdown of Connections and the Birth of Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 24.

15. Besides the writings of Durkheim cited throughout this book, see Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification , trans. Rodney Needham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963; originally published in 1903).

16. David Frisby, Sociological Impressionism (London: Heinemann, 1981). See also Donald N. Levine, "Simmel as a Resource for Sociological Metatheory," Sociological Theory 2 (Fall 1989): 161-73.

17. Robert Bierstedt, "Introduction," in Florian Znaniecki, On Humanistic Sociology: Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 1-34, quoted at 16.

18. The first effort to insist that the "value-free" Weber was the incorrect one is Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890-1920 , trans. Michael Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Many recent books bring out Weber's relationship to literary themes, especially Harvey Goldman, Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Lawrence A. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and Alan Sica, Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

19. This point is made forcefully by Donald N. Levine, The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

20. Robert K. Merton, Sociological Ambivalence (New York: Free Press, 1976).

21. Robert K. Merton, On Theoretical Sociology: Five Essays, Old and New (New York: Free Press, 1967), 28.

22. Ibid., 1-37.

23. I have explored these differences at much greater length in "Books Versus Articles: Two Ways of Publishing Sociology," Sociological Forum 5 (September 1990): 477-89.

24. Kai Erikson, "On Sociological Prose," in Hunter, The Rhetoric of Social Research , 26.

25. Anthony Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 158. Rorty disagrees; see Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth , 97.

26. On this point, see Donald W. Fiske and Richard Shweder, eds., Metatheory in Social Science: Pluralisms and Subjectivities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

27. Wallace, Principles of Scientific Sociology , 477-93.

28. Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 24, 26, 47.

29. The argument that fifteen or so species have an advanced form of protoculture comes from Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 2-5.

30. The reference, as every social scientist knows, is to Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3-30.

31. On the role of interpretation in social science, see Paul Ra- soft

binow and William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

32. One exception is the school generally labeled "new social realist," whose assumptions are close to, but not the same as, my own. See Roy Bashkar, A Realist Theory of Science (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978); Rom Harré and Paul Secord, The Explanation of Human Behavior (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972); and Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method .

33. Howard S. Becker et al., Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).

34. Jack Katz, Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

35. Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

36. For Gans's description of his own career, see Herbert J. Gans, "Relativism, Equality, and Popular Culture," in Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists , ed. Bennett M. Berger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 432-51.

37. Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962).

38. Herbert Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967).

39. Herbert J. Gans, Middle American Individualism: Political Participation and Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

40. Gans, The Urban Villagers , 349-50.

41. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Grove Press, 1959).

42. James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), 932-46.

43. Ibid., 506.

44. Ibid., 504.

45. Herbert J. Gans, "They Drew the Line," New York Times Book Review , 31 March 1985, 26.

46. Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 109, 119, 177.

47. Judith Stacey, Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 5.

48. Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-modernism and the Social Sci- soft

ences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 42.

49. For some recent treatments, which themselves demonstrate the tension between sociology and post-modernism, see Eviatar Zerubavel, The Fine Line: Boundaries and Distinctions in Everyday Life (New York: Free Press, 1991); Judith Gerson and Kathy Peiss, "Boundaries, Negotiations and Consciousness: Reconceptualizing Gender Relations," Social Problems 32 (April 1985): 317-31; and Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier, eds., Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality (Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1992).

50. An interesting effort along these lines is Martha Minow, Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).

51. I have elaborated the themes of this paragraph at greater length in "Democracy Versus Sociology: Boundaries and Their Political Consequences," in Lamont and Fournier, Cultivating Differences , 309-25.

52. Arthur Vidich and Stanford Lyman, American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of Religion and Their Directions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985).

53. For an argument to the effect that such methods of publication constitute "quality control" standards for the profession, and that such standards are breaking down, see Hubert M. Blalock, "The Real and Unrealized Contributions of Quantitative Sociology," American Sociological Review 54 (June 1989): 447-60.

54. I have written about these dangers at greater length in "Sociology as a Vocation," American Sociologist 21 (Summer 1990): 136-48.

55. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism , 191.

56. For interesting accounts of the hostile reception of sociology on the part of German and French officials, see Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, " 'Anti-Sociology': A Conservative View on Social Sciences," The History of Sociology 5 (Spring 1985): 45-60; and Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work: A Critical Study (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 100-108.

57. On the relationship between sociology and socialism, see Tom Bottomore, Sociology and Socialism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984).

58. An effort to reexamine the founding texts of sociology for future purposes is Buford Rhea, ed., The Future of the Sociological Classics (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1981).

59. Thomas J. Scheff, Microsociology: Discourse, Emotion, and Social Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 151.