Getting Sociology Right

Neil J. Smelser is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University from 1952 to 1954. At twenty-four, he coauthored Economy and Society with Talcott Parsons. He earned his PhD in sociology from Harvard in 1958 and was a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows. From 1994 to 2001, he directed the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

• Introduction Part I Early Searching 1. The Optimum Scope of Sociology (1969) 2. Sociology and the Other Social Sciences (1967) 3. Some Personal Thoughts on the Pursuit of Sociological Problems (1969) Part II Later Explorations 4. Biography, the Structure of Explanation, and the Evaluation of Research in Sociology (1980) 5. External Influences on Sociology (1990) 6. Sociology's Next Decades: Centrifugality, Conflict, Accommodation (1990) 7. Sociology as Science, Humanism, and Art (1994) 8. Problematics in the Internationalization of Social Science Knowledge (1991) 9. Social Sciences and Social Problems: The Next Century (1995) 10. The Questionable Logic of "Mistakes" in the Dynamics of Knowledge Growth in the Social Sciences (2005) Part III Some Recent Reflections 11. Looking Back at Twenty-Five Years of Sociology and the Annual Review of Sociology (1999) 12. Sociological and Interdisciplinary Adventures: A Personal Odyssey (2) Afterword Index