Methodological Misconceptions in the Social Sciences

This book offers a systematic view of social analysis that will advance the communication of results between different academic disciplines. It overcomes misunderstandings that are due to the use of an unstructured variety of methodological traditions in the analysis of complex socioeconomic and political processes. The book focuses on the special features of human society: humans as subjects, non-repetitiveness and irreversibility of social actions and the peculiar relations between necessity and possibility in human action. It defines methodological criteria, procedures and rules that enable researchers to select and classify realistic hypotheses to derive general principles and basic organizational features. It then applies these criteria in critical reviews of major theories and interpretations of society and history, offering clarifications and alternative proposals with regard to crucial aspects of anthropological, political, juridical, sociological and religious thought.

• Anthropoogy and Primitive Civilizations
• Command-Power and the Birth of State-Power
• Contemporary Social Teaching
• Ethics and Religious Thought
• Evolution of Human Societies
• Foundations of Law
• Foundations of Political and Sociological Thought
• Freedom and Responsibility
• Inequalities and Social Justice
• Interpretation of Social and Historic Processes
• Meditations on Ethics
• Method and Social Development
• Method of Social Thought
• Methodological Approach for Social Sciences
• Methodological Misconceptions
• Objections of Juridical Positivism
• Political Theory and Action
• Power in Primitive Societies
• Prediction in the Social Sciences
• Rationality, Relativism and Social Evolution
• Roots of Civilizations
• Social and Historical Developments
• Study of Contemporary Societies
• Understanding of Function and Conclict

• Former ISAE Director of Research, Rome, Italy

  Angelo Fusari

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