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January 2015 Vol. 52 No. 5


Temple University Press


The following review appeared in the January 2015 issue of CHOICE. The review is for your internal use only. Please review our Permission and Reprints Guidelines or email permissions@ala-choice.org.

Social & Behavioral Sciences
Sociology

52-2837
H61
2014-3998 CIP
Brown, Michael E. The concept of the social in uniting the humanities and social sciences. Temple, 2014. 528p bibl index afp ISBN 9781439910153, $64.50; ISBN 9781439910177 ebook, $64.50.

The argument advanced in this book is that the social is a fundamental, irreducible given that should be the central object of inquiry in the social sciences and humanities.  Brown (Northeastern) makes this case in what he surely views as a major corrective to these broad scholarly fields.  He has read widely, and one senses a project that was a long time in coming.  Reading the book is like trying to put together a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.  The chapters are supposed to be decipherable in order to know where to place them and, in the end, they ought to be interconnected to form a whole picture.  Unfortunately, neither is the case here.  The chapters prove to be difficult to make sense of, in no small part because one never knows the theorists who are targets of Brown’s criticism.  He cites many, with an eclectic group serving as touchstones, including Rousseau, Sartre, and Searle.  On the other hand, numerous prominent theorists are missing altogether.  There is something ironic about a book on the social that is a monologue rather than part of a conversation.

--P. Kivisto, Augustana College (IL)

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