How to Read the Book
To repeat: this is a book of arguments not of conclusions. It should perhaps be read as a primer in constructing arguments. Most students should find themselves intuitively sympathetic to one position or another.
If you do, you should first try to work out the reasons for and the implications of holding a particular position, and then try to argue against yourself from alternative points of view and see what happens. You should be asking questions about how these ideas apply to your particular discipline: Are some of them irrelevant to the pursuit of knowledge or understanding in your area? Are they mutually exclusive? Whatever you do, don’t stop asking questions about these ideas.As well as being a book of arguments and about arguments, it is a book which has grown out of arguments between the authors, who have taught a course together in the University of Essex sociology department for the last twenty-five years. We think that the ideas and arguments presented here have a life of their own, independently of the biographies of their authors. They can be evaluated, criticized, tested for their wider applicability, accepted, rejected, played with or developed according to the interests of the reader. On the other hand, the biographies of the authors do have a bearing on the pattern of inclusions and exclusions, emphases and omissions you will find in the book. Ideas don't drop from the sky (to quote an eminent philosopher), and it will help you to situate yourself in relation to our arguments to know something of where they came from. Both authors could be described as of the generation of the 1960s. We both started out with a strong sense of the political and moral significance of social scientific work. As philosophically informed social scientists, we were engaged through our careers with attempting to make sense of our work as would- be social scientists in a historical context which has changed enormously during that period, and in ways which have repeatedly called into question our favourite assumptions. Our initial commitments to Marxism (though on opposite sides of the debate then raging about how to understand and develop that tradition) were called into question by proliferating social movements and issues which could not be readily addressed without deep revision of basic assumptions.
Black power, gay rights and liberation, feminism in its many forms and, more recently, the green movement provided intellectual challenges with which we are still trying to grapple, with effects noticeable throughout this book. Given our different starting points in the discipline, we have addressed these challenges in rather different ways. I. C. has focused on the problematic relationship between social scientific approaches and the understanding of subjective life and personal agency. Meanwhile, T. B. has been concerned with the no less problematic relationship between the social sciences and the understanding of non-human nature - a concern prompted by both green and feminist thought. These differences in biography go a long way to explaining the differences of emphasis you will find in the different parts of the book, and also the division of labour we have adopted in the allocation of the chapters.Although we have worked together on all chapters, we should plead guilty to those parts of the book for which we carry prime responsibility: Ted Benton for Chapters 2, 3, 4, 8 and 9, Ian Craib for Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 10. We both contributed to the introduction and conclusion. All mistakes are of course the responsibility of the other author!
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More on the topic How to Read the Book:
- How to Read the Book
- I WHAT IS NOT IN THIS BOOK
- General themes of this book
- About the Book
- WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR?
- In this book, ecology is defined as the scientific study of interactions between organisms and their environment.
- The second part of this book is about the way that banks assess loan portfolios.
- The Book and Its Arguments
- PREFACE