ABSTRACT
Our answer to this question begins by recalling where we have come from. In the first two editions of Perspectives in Sociology, we made some play with the nature of sociology as a bunch of perspectives, which-pace those sociologists with synthesising tendencies-apparently cannot be reconciled. In them we proposed that there was no way of determining a sure path for arriving at sociological knowledge; there was unlikely to be, just over the horizon, a new approach, paradigm or perspective to rescue us from the intellectual difficulties involved in a sociological theorising that can give us a better understanding of our social world. This sober message might have seemed bad enough, yet, as all of us know, things can always be worse. And there, in the third edition, perspicuous readers might have discerned ‘a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand’. This ‘cloud’ took the form of critical theory and poststructuralism. In these, we had our first intimations that discussions of hard (positivist) or soft science, e.g. symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, might all be parcelled up into one bag and unceremoniously dumped. For, to change the metaphor, the mice were nibbling away at the foundations of all the perspectives, indeed at the whole enterprise of sociological theory. These foundations are reason and logic. By re-reading some of the bastions of sociological theory-especially Marx-and drawing on Freud and, particularly, Nietzsche, old thinking was deconstructed and the history of thought was reinvented. A major outcome was to reject the reality of traditional conceptions of the accessibility of ‘a world out there’, resulting in a view that we have all become prisoners of language, making the pursuit of social science, hard or soft, seem an increasingly absurd undertaking.
