ABSTRACT
Two types of questions can be asked of any theory: what is its explanatory power and what is its appeal? We wish to remove ourselves from that comfortable school of thought which believes that theories compete with each other in some scholarly limbo, heuristic facility being the only test of survival. We need to explain why certain theories, despite their manifest inability to come to terms with their subject-matter, survive—and indeed, as in the case of positivism, flourish. In the last chapter we criticized the capacity of positivism to explain deviancy. In this chapter we will, first of all, discuss the appeal of positivism. What benefits does this manner of viewing the social universe have as an ideology for protecting the interests inherent in the status quo and distorting the information perceived by its adherents?
