ABSTRACT
At the heart of Blumer’s metatheoretical and methodological work is the question of the relationship between the methods employed by the natural and those appropriate to the social sciences. Of course, the idea of a science of human social life has a long history, going back beyond the point in history when the concept of science began to be distinguished from philosophy.1 With the striking developments in physical science in the seventeenth century, the proposal that the same methods be applied to the study of human social life gained ground. Then and later there were also reactions against the encroachment of the new science on areas that had hitherto been the domain of theology, philosophy and the humanities. By the nineteenth century, as a result both of further rapid progress in the natural sciences (not just in physics but also in chemistry, physiology, and biology) (Knight 1986) and of the growing influence of the Romantic reaction against Enlightenment thought, the question of the relationship between the social and natural sciences reached crisis-point.
