Book Review : Theoretical Logic in Sociology, Volume 4: The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons. By Jeffrey C. Alexander. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Pp. xxv + 530. $39.50
Abstract
Book ReviewTheoretical Logic in Sociology, Volume 4: The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons. By Jeffrey C. Alexander. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Pp. xxv + 530. $39.50 SAGE Publications, Inc.1985DOI: 10.1177/004839318501500408 Stephen P.Turner University of Notre Dame and University of South Florida In reviewing volume 1 of this work, * I commented that the project as a whole was an attempt by American sociological theory to regain the intellectual primacy it had lost to writers such as Giddens and Habermas. A sociologist more familiar than I with the Lebenswelt in which Alexander works remarked to me that this was less a motivation for Alexander himself than the desire to restore the status of theory in American sociology. 'Theorists' in American sociology nowadays are largely ignored and the interests of their departmental colleagues increasingly focus on problems that can be formulated and solved within the ambit of computer-based statistical techniques, which arise not so much from the traditional theoretical ambitions of the discipline as from specific policy concerns or from such topoi as sexism and inequality. (Such concerns are treated not as the intellectual products of problematic ideological and theoretical heritages, but as conventionalized evils in