ABSTRACT
Without doubt, the world of sociology has been correct to greet the publication of James Coleman's Foundations of Social Theory with the kind of fanfare reserved for very special works. Offering a complete and elegant extension of rational choice theory and methods across the full range of central problems in social theory, the work does indeed mark a return to the terrain of general sociological theory: a rival to the grand foundational works of Parsons and Merton, that will undoubtedly prove just as influential and formative, in particular since it is a work that reconnects sociology directly with the current debates and methodological concerns of analytical political science, policy studies and institutional economics, thereby restoring sociology to a central place in the social sciences. In this chapter I argue that its importance may not end there. Coleman can be read in the company of other authors: that is, to borrow the words of Quentin Skinner, as a ‘grand theory’, a work that can be read as a rival to the kind of grand philosophical works dominant in European social and political thought, alongside the likes of Habermas, Rawls, Luhmann and Gadamer (Skinner, 1985:3–20). Such works offer foundational ‘systematic theories of man and society’, grounding normative political concerns and applications in the long philosophical tradition of modernity.
