Marion Fourcade The Politics of Method and Its Agentic , Performative , and Ontological Others

The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences is an extraordinary book. It is extraordinary for the sheer amount of intellectual ground covered in the individual chapters and for its significance. By historicizing and provincializing each human science in turn, The Politics of Method opens the door to a true reflexivity, which is the necessary condition for what Michael Burawoy (2005: 511) calls ‘‘critical’’ consciousness in his conclusion to the volume. But The Politics of Method is also extraordinary for the theoretical ambition of its editor, who seeks to subsume the entire epistemological trajectory of the postwar American human sciences under a single interpretation. This was no small task: the book is over 600 pages long, and, like many edited volumes, it is also very eclectic—full of tensions, divergent perspectives, and (sometimes) somewhat contradictory substantive claims.1 Like the pieces of a kaleidoscope, each chapter has a unique character yet combines with the other chapters in multiple and intersecting ways to form different images and configurations, all of which offer a particular perspective on what is sociologically important about the epistemology of the human sciences. Ultimately, what we may call the ‘‘Steinmetz thesis’’—the argument that positivism has found a fertile ground in the postwar American social sciences (with the notable exception of anthropology) for reasons that have to do with the particular mode of regulation of the American economy—is just one plausible way, among many, to articulate a very disparate set of case studies. The strength of George Steinmetz’s thesis is to offer a unitary perspective for this volume. Its weakness, however, is to gloss over the real differ-