Volume 25, Number 10 · June 15, 1978
The Flight from Positivism
By Quentin Skinner
The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory
by Richard J. Bernstein
University of Pennsylvania Press, 286 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Before the intellectual and political upheavals of the Sixties, many practitioners of the social disciplines had begun to convince themselves that they were well on the way to establishing a genuinely 'scientific' method for the study of social life. But since that time, as the English sociologist Anthony Giddens has remarked, it has come to be widely agreed that 'those who still wait for a Newton' of the social sciences 'are not only waiting for a train that won't arrive, they're in the wrong station altogether.' The main aim of Professor Richard J. Bernstein's survey The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory is to chart the course of this progressive disenchantment, and to ask whether it ought to be characterized as an intellectual advance or merely a failure of nerve.
Review, 3538 words
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