ABSTRACT
Jeffrey Alexander (1987) has vigorously defended the centrality of the classics in the social sciences in opposition to a more “natural science” optic regarding the progress of a scientific discipline. It is part of the training of sociologists to internalize the classics (Alexander 1987: 20) as much as they internalize the methods and rules of evidence required to established empirical facts, which are the “stuff” of the natural sciences. The classics, thus, provide frames for finding, sensing, mapping the major dimensions of the social order (wrong 1994).
