[Contested knowledge: social theory in the postmodern era]

Steven Seidman, Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994., 361 pp.

Seidman portrays the development of social theory as wavering between hope and disillusionment. The Enlightenment spawned the "dream of reason," the promise that scientific knowledge would lead to social progress. Although less sanguine than the "Enlighteners" in connecting reason to progress, Comte spun the grand vision of sociology as a science of society which would anchor social reform. No less visionary than Comte, Marx invested high hope in the role of scientific knowledge in the future of society and its radical transformation. Marx and Comte were equally oblivious of the tensions between the moral and scientific sides of their respective visions of social change. Seidman finds it ironic that Marx deluded himself that his ideas of society were merely the "revelation of scientific reason."

Durkheim and Weber, no less than Comte and Marx, were children of the Enlightenment and "captives of modernity." According to Seidman, Durkheim's mistake was to believe that a scientific sociology could produce universal truths about social facts and support objective moral judgments. In a similar vein Weber advocated value neutrality under the illusion that social science could be shielded from conflictual engagement.

The grand visions of social science culminating in the classical sociologies of Durkheim and Weber, based as they were on untenable distinctions between science and morality, turn out to have been chimerical. Social scientific knowledge cannot, Seidman believes, be purified of perspective and interest. Disinterested social knowledge has turned out to be a serious if not fatal illusion of modern social science.

Talcott Parsons, who dominated the first post - classical generation of American sociological theory, was committed to the autonomy of theory in the quest for universal knowledge....