Sociological Self-Images [antikvár]

1 ¦ iM INTRODUCTION IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ THIS SET OF PAPERS on sociological self-images has had a considerable impact on me. Little did I know that in requesting a set of answers to a battery of biographical questions, the results would be as close to an informal methodological guidebook as anything currently extant in the social science literature. To those who scan this introduction prior to reading the papers, my opening remarks may seem flamboyant or exaggerated. In fact, my response to the work of colleagues close to me over the past decade is one that I believe will be shared by many readers. Perhaps self-reflection is a mark of maturity, or maybe it is a mark of senility-not the decadence of a person but of a science. This is a risk each commentator must run—whether privately or publicly. I choose to think that those who have contributed to this symposium, risking as they do the disapproval of colleagues who prefer to think that personal reflections are better kept out of print, or at least out of the scientific purview of the young, have made a fundamental contribution to the subjective processes by which a science gets done. One is often tempted to assume that the rationality of the final sociological product is a consequence of the rationality of the method for realizing that product. These papers are an emphatic refutation of such mythological notions of sociological effort. But if they point up the frailty of the method, they also celebrate the complexity of the results. For sociology is not only a series of findings, but also a set of styles—often as incompatible and indigestible as the findings. Given the nature of the contributions, my editing was necessarily (and I am sure from the viewpoint of each author, gratefully) [9]