Realism, teleology, and action

pp. 107-123

in: Stephen P. Turner, The search for a methodology of social science, Berlin, Springer, 1986

Abstract

Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method does not begin with a dialogue with fashionable peers, nor, indeed, are Durkheim's philosophical peers seriously addressed in the text. He signals his aims by the striking assertion that methodology has been neglected in sociology. His audience might have thought of Spencer's The Study of Sociology, by then itself two decades old, as a methodology book. Durkheim pointed out, properly, that it was not, and suggested that to find a methodological work of importance one must go back to Mill and Comte. In 1895, when the Rules appeared, almost thirty years had passed since the end of Mill's productive scholarship, forty since the end of Comte's and Quetelet's.