ABSTRACT
Introduction: the reaction against scientism During the 1950s and 1960s, developments in the philosophy of science combined with other developments in sociology and in philosophy to erode confidence in the ambition to create an objective method notionally modelled on the quantitative natural sciences. Summarising this opposition, it has been common practice to identify it as moving emphasis from the objective to the subjective. This characterisation is accurate only to a limited degree, and in many respects is quite misleading. However, the idea that the core opposition is between those who hold a view that sociology must adopt an objective approach and those who demand a subjective one has captured many people’s
imagination. One consequence has been the move on the part of a number of currently active, more traditionally inclined sociologists-such as Bourdieu, Giddens, Alexander, Habermas and Luhman, just to mention those discussed below-to make a main part of their theoretical effort that of reconciling this opposition, taking a middle way, and arguing that society is both an objective and a subjective reality.
