{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.018670309653916212, 'fraction_numerical': 0.011839708561020037, 'mean_word_length': 4.781578947368421, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 3, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Against Durkheim and Freud: Understanding in Social Fields of Agents and Objects

T H E I S S U E O F T H E C O N C E P T U A L basis on which the social sciences understand or explain social action, and of how they ascribe reasons or causes to it, has been a classical question since the turn of the 20 century. Again and again social scientists and philosophers have sought to clarify the foundations of their approach to action and its explanation. Four historical waves were of specific importance here: the debate concerning nomothetic and ideographic approaches in the context of 1900 neo-Kantianism; the rivalry between the conception of “unified science” on the part of the Vienna Circle of logical empiricism and post-Wittgensteinian approaches to language games in the 1950s and 1960s; the debate as to the status of intentionality within analytical philosophy in the 1970s and finally the issue of the consequences of the renaissance in materialism and realism in the philosophical field. Around 1900, discussions in philosophy and in the social sciences were still closely linked, as notably exemplified by Max Weber and Georg Simmel. Since then, it seems that the debate concerning the explanation of action has more and more been narrowed down to an exclusively philosophical affair to which sociologists pay hardly any attention. However, since the 1990s there have been several attempts to close the gap between social theory and philosophy again, for instance in James Bohman’s “New Philosophy of Social Science” and in Theodore Schatzki’s “Social Practices.” It is in the context of this new linkage between social theory and philosophy that “The Explanation of Social Action” by John Levi Martin—who is professor of sociology at the University of Chicago— can be situated. Martin raises the question of what social scientists do when they “explain” action in a new way—and he does so by referring less to philosophers than to social theorists. In the course of the book it turns out that Pierre Bourdieu plays a major role in this attempt at a new foundation, but a Bourdieu to some extent read against the grain. Generally, however, Martin’s book is not primarily a book about