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Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents a comment on the article "Positivism Redivivus? A Critique of Recent Uncritical Proposals for Reforming Sociological Theory (and Related Foibles)," by Joseph M. Bryant that appeared in the January 1992 issue of the "Canadian Journal of Sociology." The critics of positivism are now more prevalent than the theorists they scorn. Indeed, contrary to Bryant's comments, there is no clear revival of positivism; rather, theory today is now a mixture of commentaries on: (1) the faults of positivism and scientific sociology; (2) the ontological and epistemological problems of theorizing about human interaction and organization; (3) the offering of alternatives which take into account human agency, indeterminacy, history, context, or contingency; (4) the advocacy of critique of technology, capitalism, and assorted evils or the offering of a program and plan for doing criticism when all the philosophical issues are worked out; (5) the worship of the masters through history of ideas, name dropping and quoting, or scholarship on particular theorists; and (6) the fine-tuning of the lost art of discourse. The result is that much sociological "theory" does not seek to explain how the social world operates. Bryant's critique of positivism performs at least four of these tasks: it faults the work of positivists; it tells positivists that they have not seriously considered the epistemological and ontological issues; it proposes an alternative that encompasses (3) above; and it invokes the great masters, Karl Marx and Max Weber, to substantiate the critique against positivists.