The Cryptonormative Swamp

摘要: How should sociology engage with normative questions? This itself is a normative question, one basic to the character and aims of the discipline, and so perennial. 1 It is welcome to see it raised anew by Abbott (2018) in the pages of this journal. Abbott describes the different kinds of normative orientations that populate sociology, and he also criticises them. He suggests that the discipline is laden with unreflective and implicit normative commitments and a creeping (and mostly facile) politicization. He proposes that this situation could be rectified were normative inquiry afforded a central place within sociology. Such inquiry might take two forms: the Bcanonical^ and the Blegalistic^. My purpose here is not to assess Abbott’s position, since I largely support it. Rather I consider the questions of means and feasibility. Abbott’s argument, as he puts it, has strong implications for the discipline and weak implications for …