ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that a reconstructed humanistic sociology must abandon the search for foundational philosophical moorings characteristic of earlier expressions of its creed, and instead root itself in the only grounds available to it: pragmatic and human ones. It has tried to demonstrate how injecting a revised humanism back into sociology provides an alternative set of objectives for the discipline to those typically assumed to be its goals, and also to show how these reconceived objectives in turn reveal an alternative image of sociology's value. Finally, this book has suggested that a truly radicalised pragmatism must also involve a stronger account of the subject than is offered by most contemporary antihumanistic social theory, and this issue occupies the concern of the following section. It is in this sense that a humanistic sociology can be seen to hold crucial public value, even if it is not the kind of value that can be easily measured or neatly quantified.
