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Sociology as a Human Science is a set of foundational, wide-ranging and updated essays from Isaac Ariail Reed. Gathered together for the first time with a new introduction, they articulate a distinct perspective on concept and method in social science. Reed writes about realism and positivism, postmodernism and empiricism, mechanisms and causality, and power and history, developing thereby an understanding of the key debates out of which 21st-century sociology has developed. Carefully considering all manner of arguments in metatheory and epistemology and moving towards a program of interpretive explanation focused on culture and power, Reed places sociology at the center of debates about knowledge production across the humanities and social sciences. His reconstructive approach, positioned after the posts (poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism) provides a way for interpretive sociology to provide analytically sound, theoretically extensive, and empirically rich understandings of social life. Isaac Ariail Reed is Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of Sociology and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, USA. He is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences and Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the Kings Two Bodies, and the co-editor of Social Theory Now and The New Pragmatist Sociology: Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy.

The strong program in cultural sociology faces — and creates for sociology generally — an epistemic dilemma: does an interpretation of culture constitute an explanation of social action? The work of Clifford Geertz suggests the two are not mutually exclusive. In his empirical studies he artfully produced `maximal interpretations' that went beyond both extant theories and the immediate data given by participant observation. Maximal interpretations, I argue, claim the epistemic status of sociological explanations. Indeed, the core problems of the philosophy of social science and social theory can be reframed in terms of the difference between relatively uncontroversial `minimal interpretation' and relatively tendentious (but powerful)`maximal interpretation'.The implications of this distinction for research can be made clear by considering, as an example, what is required to explain witch hunts in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, and the Salem witch trials in particular.

Sociological explanations of the Salem witch trials, and of witch-hunts in the West more generally, have focused on economic transition, political instability, and the functional aspects of witchcraft belief. A more interpretive approach to the explanation of Salem is proposed: an analysis of the intersection of the gendered symbolization of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts and the larger tensions within Puritan culture at the close of the 17th century. A broad theoretical implication of this interpretive shift is also proposed: that a cultural-sociological approach to witch-hunting as symbolic action can bring together feminist theorizations of witch-hunting as an exercise in patriarchal power with the social history of the broad, structural causes of witchhunting in pre-modern Europe and New England.

Chapter 1. Introduction – Sociology as a Human Science: An Unfinished Revolution -- Chapter 2. Epistemology Contextualized: Social Scientific Knowledge in a Post-Positivist Era -- Chapter 3. Justifying Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation -- Chapter 4. Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology (with Daniel Hirschman) -- Chapter 5. Ratio via machina: Three Standards of Mechanistic Explanation in Sociology (with Natalie B. Aviles) -- Chapter 6. Meaning and Modularity: The Multivalence of "Mechanism" in Sociological Explanation (with Carly R. Knight) -- Chapter 7. Theorizing and the Unsettlement of Communities of Inquiry in the Social Sciences (with Mayer Zald) -- Chapter 8. What is Interpretive Explanation in Sociohistorical Analysis?.

Abstract This article traces the concept of 'civil power' in Jeffrey Alexander's book The Civil Sphere. Doing so leads to an interpretation of the work as operating in the space between the different theories and definitions of power in the work of Max Weber and Hannah Arendt. Read in this way, The Civil Sphere becomes not only a Durkheimian argument about solidarity, but also an argument about the consequential ways in which acting together and not acting together constitute a space of variation in the degree to which power and violence can reined in, in so far as they are reigned out in the making of democratic sovereignty.