Postscript

The death of Peter Winch in 1997 gave rise to renewed attention to his work, including an excellent intellectual biography (Lyas 1999). In Commentary on Recent Developments, I offer an extended critical discussion of a recent work (Hutchinson, Read and Sharrock 2008) that passionately defends Winch's view that there could be no such thing as a science of society.

Risjord (2014), chapters 4 and 5, gives useful accounts of hermeneutic approaches, interpretive methods and theories of agency.

Balsvik (2017) offers an interesting defence of interpretive approaches to social science in the face of critiques of the authority of first-person accounts of behaviour.