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This article lists books received for review consideration by this journal including "The New Social Theory Reader" edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman, "Sketch for a Self-Analysis" by Pierre Bourdieu, and "The Politics of the Past in Argentine Working-Class Neighborhoods" by Lindsay Dubois.

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.)

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss the special issue of the journal on the topic of social theory and aging in a globalized world.

The article presents the author's comments on the research paper "Positivism's Twilight?," by Bernd Baldus. The author says that the most serious problems with Baldus's paper stem from the ambiguous and misleading nature of his discussion of what positivism is and in what sense that term can those whom he attacks be considered positivists. Sociologist Abraham Kaplan and others have noted, that positivism is an evolving philosophy of science, and like any evolving entity it has been characterized by elements of continuity, innovation, and extinction. The heart of the philosophy and the one element that has persisted unaltered from early period is the belief that scientific knowledge must be based on tested by and grounded in sensory experience, directly or indirectly. Further, intuition, logical reasoning, moral imperatives and divine revelation cannot substitute for this. Baldus seems not to appreciate the degree to which the shift from determinism to probabilism has been led by proponents of positivism as they sought to improve the fit between theory and data. Or, to be a bit more precise, he seems not to appreciate the extent to which the advocacy of probabilism has a reflected commitment to core elements of positivism rather than their abandonment.

The paper discusses Habermas' concept of refeudalization and the public debate over genetically modified (GM) foods in Canada. An initiative of the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Committee is evaluated according to Habermas' ideal-typical public sphere criteria. The author examines the ways in which political and economic conditions under a globalized system hamper prospects for rational-critical public debate, specifically with regard to the GM foods industry, and argues that international competition and economic pressures have caused the Canadian government to promote contradictory policies.

The article presents the author's response to comments on his research paper "Positivism's Twilight?," by Gerhard Lenski. The author says that Lenski fails to appreciate that the very definition of positivism he advances is at the root of the problems which positivist sociology faces. He lists three elements that, according to him, define positivism including that scientific data must be grounded in sensory experience, scientific statements about the world must be formulated as testable and falsifiable hypotheses and there must be a frequent interaction between theory and research. The first of these, the problem of what constitutes sense data, has plagued positivism from the start. More important, Lenski reverses the order of the remaining two defining criteria of positivism in a way, which is typical of the methodology-driven positivism that gradually replaced the original theory-dominated conception of positivist research. Theory-dominated positivism demanded far more than the frequent interaction between theory and research, which Lenski considers sufficient.

This paper raises doubts about the traditional justification of the autonomy of the sociological object in terms of the "discovery" of "society" as demarcated from the state. Against the tendency to homogenize social theory from an overly "Anglosaxon" or liberal image of its early history, it offers a triadic, "knowledge-geographical" tableau of interpretations of the social object-and-project, which aligns it more closely with political ideology, resisting any clear-cut delineations in state vs. society terms. In the threepartite space of emerging social science, the French and German-Italian branches stuck significantly closer to the political and staatswissenschaftliche tradition than the Anglosaxon branch, and exemplified not so much a rupture with as an innovatory continuation of "Aristotelian" political philosophy, extending and generalizing its scope of analysis from state sovereignty towards a more inclusive theory of the generation and distribution of social power. This approach introduces a new specification of the unity and diversity of the sociological object-and-project, which may be re-described as that of knowledgeable organization: an appelation which at once defines the classical promise and the classical hubris of the sociological tradition in its three intellectual-geographical zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article looks at the sociology of religion theorized by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his book "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life," which is the focus of the current special issue. It outlines and analyzes the main ideas developed in the book, including religion as an inherently social phenomenon, totemism in Australia as an instance of the origins of religion, the sacred-profane distinction, morality, the meaning of ritual, and collective consciousness.

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.)

A critical examination of Alberto Melucci's new social movement theory shows an operative assumption about the ultimate referentiality of society in his theory. Melucci assumes society as the unique, rational ground that renders society a reservoir of all meanings and conflicts. The actor's pregiven social position is assumed to predispose him or her with the ability to enter into certain conflicts. To show Melucci's operative assumption, three major theses in his theory are examined: (1)transition to the postindustrial society. (2) the new middle class radicalism, (3) identity as "latent" and `visible." It is argued that Melucci's notion of society has its roots in his parochial, institutional conception of politics that disregards the hegemonic formation of society and the political character of every social phenomenon and practice. This critique leads to an invitation to a sociology that treats new social movements as loci of the political re-institution of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that in the 1950's Western social sciences were dominated by an orthodox consensus formed around a broad theory of industrial society. One of the key dimensions of this theory was that class conflict had become normatively regulated in the West and that the major ideological struggles characteristic of the transition from traditional agrarian to modem industrial societies had essentially disappeared. Most notably, the emphasis on normative consensus and the focus on the mechanisms of the liberal state presented a view of a world where, to paraphrase the title of sociologist Daniel Bell's classic book from the period, ideology had ended. But the political polarization and radicalization of the 1960's problematized the assumptions of the orthodox consensus and led to a widespread rediscovery of the concept of ideology. In this article, the author wants to outline the main theoretical arguments of the new critique of ideology and examine the ways in which recent critical movements appear to have rendered the concept of ideology obsolete. He evaluates the strengths and limitations of the new critique. While recent movements in social theory have made important contributions and offered much-needed correctives to Marxian theories of ideology, the author argues that it is premature to write off the Marxian perspective entirely.

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 author enter this most recent round of the debate over the status of sociological theory as a philosopher of science who practices social epistemology which is the normative wing of the emerging interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS). STS can offer a distinctive slant on this debate by functioning as a reflexive sociology of science. Social epistemology then focuses the characteristic findings of STS into a self-imposed normative challenge. Positivists want sociological theory to look like Newtonian mechanics, with the most disparate phenomena explained by the fewest principles and some well-specified boundary conditions. Most positivists, especially positivist Gerhard Lenski, believe that the Newtonian turn would be a discipline, strengthening move precisely because it would put sociology on a more secure scientific footing. A positivistically unified social science would call into question the need for a distinct science of sociology. Positivist Joseph M. Bryant himself realizes as much, and consequently he casts himself as protecting sociology from scientific incursions, or, as he gingerly puts it, "the analytic procedures of alien disciplines." A unified social science would probably undermine the autonomy of sociology by showing that the explanatory concepts on which sociologists have traditionally drawn apply only to a limited range of phenomena, corresponding ever so neatly with sociologists' favorite topics of empirical inquiry.

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.)

Sociologist Karl Mannheim's A Sociological Theory of Culture and Its Knowability, from which the text published in the September 1980 issue of The Canadian Journal of Sociology has been taken, is the later of two early essays, which, nearly sixty years after their composition, will be published in Germany and in Great Britain and the United States. This is a long overdue event since On the Distinctive Character of Cultural-Sociological Knowledge and A Sociological Theory of Culture have value beyond their interest as documents for a representative intellectual biography and can still help, not only with the understanding of Mannheim's project but also with contemporary reflection on sociological interpretation. The text presented here consists of most of the first of two parts of A Sociological Theory of Culture, which is entitled On the Sociological Determination of Methodology. It breaks off at the point where Mannheim begins to deal with sociologist Karl Marx and dialectical thought. The essay as a whole is intended by Mannheim, as he explains in his preface, as a contribution to the sociology of thinking. The article presented here is meant to be a contribution to the historical-sociological.