ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the US New Sociology of Education distinguished itself from mainstream US educational research through its critique of Positivism. It considers the relation constructed between radical critiques in the sociology of school knowledge and the works these radicals consider "mainstream" within the radical educational critique of Positivism. It reviews these relations on three levels, heuristically termed the philosophical, the political, and the sociological. The first of these three sections explores the philosophical substantive debates between radical educational research agendas and their Others. The second section, the "political", questions the politico-strategic issues of the critique of Positivism. Final section proposes a sociological analysis of the critique of Positivism as one cultural struggle within the academic field of educational research. The analogy to the critique of Positivism was further developed when more specifically applied to the field of curriculum.
