ONE SOCIOLOGY OR MANY: SOME ISSUES IN RADICAL SOCIOLOGY.

This article proposes to raise for discussion several fundamental issues in sociological study and to suggest a point of view. The aim is to suggest that at least some radicals in sociology have gone astray on certain anti-sociological and methodological matters. There has been in the past decade an intellectually defensive effort on the part of radicals to justify one or several radical sociologies by adopting the counter-positions to those verbally espoused by orthodox or establishment sociologists in matters relative to the philosophy of social science or methodology. Several themes can be identified: objectivity, value-commitments, criticism, relevance, paradigms, and purposes. A popular argument of non-objectivists is that of various relativist positions: linguistic, cultural and in terms of the sociology of knowledge. The common element in all these positions is that they show correlations between reports of facts and the prior linguistic, cultural or social characteristics of those reporting. A further consideration comes from recent humanist writers often associating their positions with phenomenology. They begin from the subjective experience of freedom and choice, and argue that these experiences remain unaccounted for in an objectivist, causal analysis.