Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of reflexivity in modern social inquiry in general and in sociology in particular. This problem is inherited from Weber's very conception of sociology, is transformed by phenomenology and ethnomethodology, deepened by the linguistic turn of hermeneutics and Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and has been the central concern of the work of Alan Blum and Peter McHugh. The issues and spectres raised by reflexivity are methodological arbitrariness, the need to take responsibility for one's own talk (and the cultural assumptions embedded in talk) and, finally, the deep fear of nihilism – the sense that with regard to inquiry (along with everything else in the world) nothing matters. As such, reflexivity raises the most fundamental issue that can be raised for modern social inquiry. Through an oriented interpretation of the work of Blum and McHugh and other contemporary social theorists (particularly Gadamer and Arendt), this paper works through what a dialectical engagement with these issues look like.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arendt, Hannah. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, Hannah. (1978). The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Berger, Peter. (1963). Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. New York: Anchor Books.
Berger, Peter, Berger, Brigitte and Kellner, Hansfried. (1974). The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. New York: Vintage Books.
Berger, Peter and Kellner, Hansfried. (1964). Marriage and the Construction of Reality. Diogenes46: 1–25.
Blum, Alan. (1971). Theorizing. In Jack Douglas (Ed.), Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Blum, Alan. (1974). Theorizing. London: Heinemann.
Blum, Alan. (1986). The General Economy of Theorizing: An Outline of the Phenomenology of Enquiry in Response to Readings and Refutations of Self-Reflection in the Arts and Sciences. In Max Van Manen (Ed.), Self Reflection in the Human Sciences, pp. 48–85. Edmonton: Lifeworld Editions.
Blum, Alan. (1991). The Melancholy Life World of the University. Dianoia. 2(1): 16–42.
Blum, Alan. (1994). The Ethical Face of Commonplace Malice: Convolutions of the Divided Subject. Studies in Symbolic Interaction 14: 24-4.
Blum, Alan. (1996). Fear and Panic: On the Phenomenology of Desperation. The Sociological Quarterly 37(4): 674–698.
Blum, Alan. (2001). Voice and its Appropriation: The Ventriloquist and the Dummy. Poiesis: A Journal of the Arts and Communication 3: 114–125.
Blum, Alan and McHugh, Peter. (1978). The Risk of Theorizing and the Problem of the Good of Place: A Reformulation of Canadian Nationalism. Canadian Journal of Sociology 3(3): 321–347.
Blum, Alan and McHugh, Peter. (1984). Self-Reflection in the Arts and Sciences. New Jersey: Humanities Press.
Blumer, Herbert. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliff, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Bonner, Kieran. (1997/9). A Great Place to Raise Kids: Interpretation, Science, and the Urban-Rural Debate. Montreal· London: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Bonner, Kieran. (1999). Power and Parenting: A Hermeneutic of the Human Condition. London: Macmillan/New York: St. Martin's Press.
Bonner, Kieran M. (1994). Hermeneutics and Symbolic Interactionism: The Problem of Solipsism. Human Studies17: 225–249.
Bonner, Kieran M. (1998). Reflexivity, Sociology and the Rural-Urban Distinction in Marx, Tonnies and Weber. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 32.2 (May): 165–189.
Brown, M. (1988). A Radical Re-collection of Sociology: Self-Reflection in the Arts and Sciences. In Max Van Manen (Ed.), Self Reflection in the Human Sciences, pp. 24–40. Edmonton: Lifeworld Edition.
Camus, Albert. (1942). The Outsider. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books.
Dallmayr, Fred. (1988). Praxis and Reflection. In Max Van Manen (Ed.), Self Reflection in the Human Sciences, pp. 1–15. Edmonton: Lifeworld Editions.
Dallmayr, Fred R. and McCarthy, Thomas A. (Eds.) (1977). Understanding and Social Inquiry. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Rabinow, Paul. (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Sussex: The Harvester Press.
Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1975). Truth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1986). The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. (Trans. P.C. Smith). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1992). In D. Misgeld and G. Nicholson (Eds.), Hans-George Gadamer on Education, Poetry and History: Applied Hermeneutics. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Garfinkel, Harold. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giddens, Anthony. (1976). New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretive Sociologies. New York: Basic Books.
Giddens, Anthony. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in Late Modern Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Giddens, Anthony, Held Davend, Hubert, Don, Seymour, Debbie and John Thompson. (1994). The Polity Reader in Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Grant, George. (1969). Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America. Toronto: House of Anansi.
Habermas, Jurgen. (1988). On the Logic of the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Heidegger, Martin. (1962). Being and Time. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Heidegger, Martin. (1967). What is a Thing? Chicago: Henry Regency Company.
Heidegger, Martin. (1971). Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper Colophon Books.
Jary, D. and Jary, J. (1995). Collins Dictionary of Sociology:Second Edition.>Glasgow: HarperCollins.
Kant, J. 1933. Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan Press.
Lash, Scott. (1994). Replies and Critiques. In Beck, Giddens, and Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lather, Patti. (1991). Getting Smart: Doing Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/In the Postmodern. New York: Routledge.
Littlejohn, Stephen. (1989). Theories of Human Communication. Belmont: Wadsworth.
McHugh, Peter. (1993). Making Fragmentation, and the End of Endurance. Dianoia 3(1): 41–51.
McHugh, Peter. (1996). Insomnia and the (t)error of Lost Foundation in Postmodernism. Human Studies4(19): 17–42.
McHugh, Peter, Raffel, Stanley, Foss, Daniel and Blum, Alan. (1974). On the Beginning of Social Inquiry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Palmer, Richard. (1969). Hermeneutics. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Ritzer, George. (1996). Modern Sociological Theory (4th Ed.). McGraw-Hill: New York.
Roche, Maurice. (1988). Some Problems about ‘self-Reflection’ in Social Theory. In Max Van Manen (Ed.), Self Reflection in the Human Sciences, pp. 16–23. Edmonton: Lifeworld Editions.
Rosen, Stanley. (1969). Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Schutz, Alfred. (1962). (1972 edition). The Problem of Social Reality. Collected papers 1. The Hague: Martins Nijhoff Publishers.
Schutz, Alfred. (1967). The Phenomenology of the Social World. (Trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert). Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
Schutz, Alfred. (1977). Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences. In F. Dallmayr and T. McCarthy (Eds.), Understanding and Social Inquiry. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Scott, Joan W. (1990). Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism. In M. Hirsch & E. F. Keller (Eds.), Conflicts in Feminism. New York: Routledge.
Sharrock, Wes and Anderson, Bob. (1986). The Ethnomethodologists. New York: Tavistock Publications.
Smith, Dorothy. (1987). The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Stanley, Liz. (Ed.) (1990). Feminist Praxis: Research, Theory and Epistemology in Feminist Sociology. London: Routledge.
Taylor, Charles. (1991). The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, Ontario: Anansi.
Wallace, Ruth A. and Wolf, Alison. (1991). Contemporary Sociological Theory: Continuing the Classical Tradition. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Weber, Max. (1946). Science as a Vocation. In Gerth & Mills (Eds.), Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. 292 KIERAN BONNER
Weber, Max. (1947). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press.
Weber, Max. (1958). The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Wolff, Kurt. (1988). From Beginning to Irony. In Max Van Manen (Ed.), Self Reflection in the Human Sciences, pp. 41–47. Edmonton: Lifeworld Editions.
Wittgenstein. Ludwig. (1958). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bonner, K.M. Reflexivity and Interpretive Sociology: The Case of Analysis and the Problem of Nihilism. Human Studies 24, 267–292 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1012214826614
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1012214826614