History and Theory 53 (February 2014), 119-129

Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10699

INTERPRETATION AND EXPLANATION IN CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY

Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human
Sciences. By Isaac Ariail Reed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp.
194.
ABSTRACT

Continuing debates over the role of interpretation in history and social science have
recently been linked to a program to develop a cultural sociology, as distinct from a sociology of culture. Apart from a defense of the importance of culture and meaning, this effort
aims to develop a form of interpretive explanation, though not simply by following Max
Webers similar project from nearly one hundred years ago. The book under review looks
at different epistemic modes that aim to produce social knowledge, in order to show
how interpretive explanation can combine the best of all the modes. Unfortunately, the
book is beset by numerous theoretical problems, including a problematical understanding
of the relations of fact and theory, hasty criticisms of examples of the different modes, and
a reliance on metaphors that makes it impossible to do justice to the issues. The project
of what I would call a thick explanation is worthwhile, but will have to be pursued in a
more nuanced and careful way.
Keywords: interpretation, explanation, social theory, cultural sociology

Isaac Reed has written a work on interpretive explanation in history and social
science that seems intended to advance the strong program in cultural sociology of his former thesis advisor, Jeffrey Alexander.1 Alexanders strong program
changes the very name of the subject matter of what has, in sociology, nearly
always been called the sociology of culture, and which has usually been characterized by the effort to explain culture in terms of the workings of social structure and social history. One should not think that sociology of culture is wrong,
however, but only one-sided. As a Weberian ideal type, such one-sidedness
is fine, but, standing alone, it is one-dimensional, not multi-dimensional. In that
sense, Alexanders program is an exciting and important corrective to such an
approach for sociology (if not yet sufficiently within sociology), in the same way
that cultural history has been a corrective within history.
Consistent with this program, Reed proposes to build a constructive theory of
knowledge claims made by nonpositivists, by asking, how do, and how should,
theory and evidence interact? To reach this goal, he examines three epistemic
modesrealist, normative, and interpretivewhich dictate the conceptual
1. Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith, The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology, in Jeffrey
Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Alexander
expresses his debt to Reed in several articles for his own understanding of interpretive explanation
and cultural sociology and for his efforts to use works of Clifford Geertz for this program. Reed and
Alexander have also co-edited at least two books and co-authored at least one article.

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method by which theory is brought into contact with evidence, structure the
expectations about what such contact can accomplish, and provide more or less
well-formed criteria of validity that are used to evaluate the knowledge that is
thereby produced. This might suggest to the reader a resemblance to Kuhns
paradigms. But, he says, these modes do not map neatly onto substantive
research programs, or onto any particular intellectual history of social theory or
any particular account of paradigms of social research (7).
In the first mode, realism, The entities referred to by theory give order to [the
researchers] data and a causal force to her conclusions. But, its core conceptual
problem is how to reconfigure and transform the experimental scientific laboratory . . . for the science of society and history (8). Apart from criticizing theorists
of critical realism like Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer, the practitioners he
targets rather hurriedly are, first, Marx and Durkheim, criticized for believing in
social ontology or in the social as such (41), and, second, Theda Skocpol,
Barrington Moore, Jack Goldstone, Randall Collins, and Anthony Giddens. They
are all included, despite rather different work, because all depend on reference
to the nature of the social in general (50), which has led to excessive focus on
mechanisms or hidden machinery (64):
the mere fact that social life has regularity does not mean that we have to model our
understanding of social life on the sciences that have attended to the regularities of nature.
Rather, we should look for a way to integrate the core ambition of scientific realism (causal explanation) and its core insights into social life (that social life does proceed, some
of the time, with a rather frightening regularity) into a different epistemic mode. (64-65)

The second mode, normativism, brings to bear the critical force of well-articulated utopia upon the empirical world (9). Indeed, in Reeds portrait, it does
not look like a form of social science at all, because it derives from the logic
of the democratic meeting or social movement (11), and at its core, it believes
that knowledge has a politics (68). The problem is that normativism is unable
to answer the question of how this operation of critique, which is grounded in
actuality and fact, can or cannot be grounded in a more explanatorily powerful
use of theory (9). This set of claims comes in the weakest chapter in the book,
and is based, in part, on a misreading of normativisms poster child, Jrgen
Habermas. Reed quotes Habermas on the rational interpretation of norm-based
action, which is one of the four principle types of action that Habermas analyzes, along with purposive-rational, dramaturgical, and communicative action.
Habermas says that we can have a rational interpretation here by recognizing that
action based on norms always makes an implicit claim that the norms are valid or
worthy and can be justified by reasons in ones social world. Therefore, a rational
interpretation can be based on the comparison of the social validity (Geltung)
with the counter-factually-constructed validity (Gltigkeit) of a given normative
context.2 From this, Reed concludes that, for Habermas, the moral-practical
appraisal of norms of action is the process of understanding norms (71). Thus,
2. My translation, from Jrgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, vol. 1: Handlungsrationalitt und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 154-155,
translated as The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society,
transl. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 104.

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when it comes to interpretation, questions of meaning and questions of validity

cannot be strictly separated (71).3
But Habermas is not proposing to measure the validity of a normative context
in relationship to the interpreters normative standards, but in relationship to the
actual norm-based action the interpreter is hoping to interpret rationally. That
is, the issue of validity is a question that is analyzed from within the context
of the object of study by constructing a type based on comparison of the social
currency of a norm with a constructed validity claim for the same norm, and not
on comparison of the norm-based action with some external norm of ones own.
Habermass approach has been challenged on different grounds even by some
of his own close associates, but Reeds reading is a hasty generalization on the
basis of very little textual data, and this is the case with nearly all of the texts he
remarks on, no matter the mode, basing himself on narrow and selective quoting.
To Reed, Habermass theory has a clear utopian referentrational deliberation,
or . . . the ideal speech situation. . . . Thus we have a hermeneutic circle in which
the attempt to theorize the good, in the abstract, is completed by the discovery of
the good in history and society (75). This is a rather surprising criticism for Reed
to make of a philosopher, especially given that Reed will later draw on Aristotle,
who himself defends a substantive view of reason and the good, which are for
us the end [or goal] of mans nature.4 But it is not surprising that someone who
thinks the focus of social science should be on motivations of, rather than reasons for, action would be unable to find much to value in Habermass analysis of
norm-based action on the basis of giving reasons.
It is the third mode, the interpretive (10)and what is, in fact, a fourth
mode, the explanatoryto which Reed devotes most of his attention and nearly
half of his book. And here he is at his strongest. The task of interpretive research
is to move from the surface meanings easily inferred from the evidence to
the deep meanings (92). But interpretation is not enough by itself, for it does
not focus on explanations (10). Indeed, it derives not from the model of the
laboratory or the meeting, but from the logic of reading and disputing different
readings of a text (11). To go beyond this model, Reed defends interpretive
explanation to recast the interpretive way of making social knowledge claims.
Indeed, he claims, without taking account of what he calls the landscapes of
meaning (92), real explanation is out of reach, for the meaningmechanism
relation is not one of different social forces interacting, but rather one in which
meaning gives concrete form to the social forces that, in realism, are the touchstones of social explanation (105, n. 21).
For Reed, motivated actors have projects or lines of action-in-the-world that
they pursue, and to grasp the causal force of these projects, we must look at
motivations. Indeed, we need a more encompassing, inclusive concept of interiority (136). To understand what produces these human subjects with deep
3. Even before Geertz published The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973),
Habermas had entered the discussion of interpretation and explanation in history in 1967 with his On
the Logic of the Social Sciences, transl. Sherry Weber-Nicholsen and Jerry A. Stark [1967] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
4. Aristotle, Politics 1334b15-16.

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motives, we must radically historicize and contextualize motivation to produce

an understanding [of] the meanings in which [actors] motives are immersed.
This historicized dialectic contrasts emergent motives, possessed by individuals, and the meanings that make these motivations effective (152). This approach,
Reed says, will aid the investigator to reach the goals central to both normativism (critique) and realism (explanation), with a special focus on how precisely
the interpretation of meaning can contribute to the causal explanation of action
(92). Reeds interpretive explanation becomes, in effect, a fourth mode that can,
he claims, do everything the other modes do by integrating their core projects and
understandings. The question, however, is whether that can be done by maintaining that meaning and mechanism are not separate, mixed social forces,
but an inseparable form-matter complex that will prevent the determination of the
relative weight of these causes. Reed seems to be flirting with an ontology
in which meaning is omnipresent. Is this why contextualization is only done
in terms of meanings and not in terms of any social forces? But then, how can
motives emerge without already having meanings attached to them?
One has to applaud an approach that wants to push interpretive work toward
explanation, but there are numerous epistemological problems in this book,
which contains many statements whose validity, even reasonableness, would
have to be more thoroughly defended by the author, or else challenged. A first set
of problems derives from Reeds dependence on a distinction he makes between
the language game of fact (38) and the language game of social theory (20),
a distinction he does not realize derives from logical positivism. We expect evidence to function referentially or indexically when indicating what happened
(19), so its signifiers . . . express a certain content that is or was in the social
world, while in the meaning-system of theory, we expect theoretical terms to
function relationally or conceptually (20). Reed never tells us why we do not
expect theory to refer to the social world in the same concrete manner that we
expect evidence to refer. Reed admits that the telling of the facts of the matter,
in human affairs, already involves a structure of meaning and intention (16).
Nonetheless, he claims, as soon as we have established the phenomenonor . .
. thickly described itthen we ask the next question: how are we to understand
it? (17). Of course, a reader is left to wonder whether even thick description is
so easy to accomplish, given the numerous critiques of Geertz, its past master.5
Despite Reeds belief (18) that Our facts are thus a set of meanings, and our
theories are a set of meanings, he asserts without justification: To a certain
degree . . . our theories may indeed influence our use of evidence to construct the
facts. . . . But this happens less than we think (18).
The problem becomes worse when Reed claims that language games of
theory differ from language games of fact, because theories exist primarily in the heads of investigators (18). Indeed, theory is not really a referent at
5. It is surprising that Reed says one can profitably set aside, for the moment, the extended
debates about Geertzs essay, Deep Play (in The Interpretation of Cultures, 412-454), and ask
instead what actually takes place in this text (93), when it is precisely what takes place in the
text that is the subject of most of these debates! They raise the question whether Geertz has so easily
provided a reliable thick description.

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all in the concrete sense of meaningful social actions that actually happened.
Instead it only refers to other theoretical expressions and imagined societies,
social actions, and social relations whose primary existence is in researchers
heads (20-21). Few analytic philosophers, let alone postmodernists, would
accept this.6 First, how can a supposed language-game of fact be separated
from some imagined language-game of theory, somehow to be combined, as
if by magic, into explanations? The language games of social science may be
specialized, rather than ordinary, ones, but within them, fact and theory are
interwoven, interdependent, and make sense only in terms of one another. There
is no theory language separate from a fact language. We interpret discourse
always as a whole; and the interpretation of observation terms is as dependent
on the interpretation of theoretical terms as is the interpretation of the latter on
the former.7 Second, neither facts nor theories can be thought of as existing in
our heads. They are included in our languages as part of the ways that humans
within communities speak with one another and express aspects of their form of
life. Even thought is rooted in the communitys language, since there is no private language that exists in our heads. Language dwells in communication,
that is, in social interaction, and this is just as true for social theories. Languages
are shared symbol systems whose meanings and whose sentences depend not
only on the formal aspects of the language-game, but also on the uses made of
them in the context and experiences of social life that social actors seek to formulate in interaction with others. All language is in the world, residing in the
way things are said. This is equally true of scientific theories, which are always
conjoined with both methods and standards, constituting, in Kuhns sense, a
paradigm.8 There can, of course, be multiple social-science language-games,
whether complementary or contradictory, within a given social community.
But Reeds approach obscures the manner in which theoretical expressions
are in the cultural practices of communities, just as all language is, and not in
the heads of its speakers. He accepts as nothing but an assumption a divorce
between fact and theory, object and subject. These languages are not
dual but singular, and the language of social science combines both objects,
just as the language of natural science does, connecting theories with methods,
standards, and collections of data that can be continually expanded, broadening
itself through making sense of new experience, if not experiment. Indeed, even a
realist analytical philosopher and defender of science like Hilary Putnam maintains that reference is not just a matter of causal interpretations: it is a matter
of interpretation. . . . And interpretation is an essentially holistic matter.9
6. Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism: The Paul Carus Lectures (LaSalle, IL: Open Court,
1988), 20-21: Many thinkers have argued that the traditional dichotomy between the world in itself
and the concepts we use to think and talk about it must be given up. To mention only the most recent
examples, Davidson has argued that the distinction between scheme and content cannot be drawn;
Goodman has argued that the distinction between world and versions is untenable; and Quine has
defended ontological relativity.
7. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 119.
8. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. [1962] (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1970), 109.
9. Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 118. I cite
Putnam precisely as a defender of the validity of scientific explanation of causality.

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This does not at all mean that everything is language. The relation between
truth and a conceptual scheme is always that of interdependence. Just as there
is no meaningful notion of truth before, separate from, or outside a conceptual
scheme (which would be like positivism), so there is no meaningful conceptual
scheme that is separate from or independent of a set of notions of truth (which
would be like idealism). The data of social science not only is constructed, but
must be so, for it is only through the specialized languages produced, which are
constructions, that the particular problems of social scientists and historians can
be formulated, on whatever basis, and they produce for themselves usable data to
make sense of, whether we look at correlations using census data, or analyses of
village burial records, or facts collected through surveys and interviews. Reeds
simple dualism flies in the face of this interdependence, not because there is fact
without theory and certainly not because there are persuasive theories without
fact, but because language joins these things together, whatever we and our community of inquirers think the facts to be.
To construct compelling historical narratives of case, critique, and meaning
(38), Reed says, in almost Rankean fashion, first, that one must see that signs
of evidence have a ground in social actions that happened and can be reported
upon. Second, one must bring theory to bear on this web of factual signification
to resignify the evidence, and thus offer deeper knowledge of the social actions
that happened (39). Reed does not provide an argument for this, but claims that
anyone who has recently had the experience of being initiated into a group of
theoretically informed social researchers (or, even worse, into a group of social
theorists) probably has an intuitive sense of its truth (21). This kind of claim is
testimony to a failure of argument, appealing to some intuitive sense in ones
fellow initiates who are in the know: You know Im right. Indeed, he says,
lets set aside anything to be learned about language from either the early or the
late Wittgenstein, because if there is one language you cannot learn by asking .
. . can you point to what that word refers to? it is the language of social theory
(21). Theory is simply metacommentary. It proposes to rethink, reframe, and
recast facts that have already been established. Indeed, the difference between
theory and fact remains obvious (22). Of course, the obvious question to ask
is: Obvious to whom? Instead, he says: What we have developed within the
language game of social theory, then, is a plurality of abstract accounts of how
the human mind is, in one way or another, a force in the world (152). This is a
puzzling remark, first, since Reed has been claiming all along that motivations
are forcing causes only when suffused already by meaning, which is not a good
context for seeing the mind as a force. Second, this sudden invocation of the
mind as a power in the world leaves one wondering what the ontology is
of this mind and whether it is a force independent of the body or of the web
of social relationships. How can mind be this power, unless it is endowed with
powers to act?
The second set of problems emerges with Reeds notion of how the dualism
of fact and theory becomes effective in maximal interpretations (23), whose
questions cannot be answered by the evidence alone, but in which fact and
theory are subsumed under a deeper understanding once we can bring together

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theoretical signifiers with evidential ones. Fact and theory then come to
express a deeper social force (27). Reed situates his approach along a spectrum that runs from minimal to maximal interpretation, from interpretations
with few theoretical termswhere the claims tend to be less controversialto
interpretations that mix . . . theoretical and evidential signification (23).10
Maximal interpretations go beyond the facts and result not from bringing
the supposed languages of fact and theory together, but instead from bringing
theory together with minimal interpretations (24-25). The image of a spectrum
is an attempt to capture the degree of theory-ladenness of truth claims, which
he measures on the crude basis of the amount of abstract terms deployed (25,
n. 11). In some unspecified way, fact and theory come together to say something
about social reality (31). In the interpretive mode, theory comes into its own,
because the coherence of the maximal interpretation derives from the coherence
of background meanings interpreted to be surrounding the social actions . . . and
not from the coherence of the social theories. . . . [C]oherence is in the case, not
in the theorists head (103). Not only are we left to wonder how coherence in
the case is to be observed or demonstrated independent of theories, but we are
also, once again, back in someones head. Reed separates the external world
(perhaps even the body) from the internal world (perhaps even disembodied) that
is in the head, as he separates, without defending, theories and their content.
By making this separation, he claims, we see the way social meanings act as
forming, as opposed to forcing, causes (11), where social force is given form
by meaning (152), and also how forming causality is a different kind of social
causality (154). But one is compelled to ask, why do things not also work in the
other direction, with social forces in some way forming meaning? Is the realm
of meaning really so insulated? Will it be possible to determine how strong
each of these causes is in a particular case, and whether both kinds of cause are
even present? Reeds claim is left at the level of a postulate. He also affirms that
motivations and mechanisms are real (158), but ignores the fact that it is his
and others theories that make sense of the claim to what is real. Yet identifying
these things in theory is not enough to enable social explanation. For, the ontological components of the social only become concretely effective when they are
given form by systems of signification and meaning (158). This is a surprising
claim, given how much he attacks all forms of social ontology.
The theoretically pluralistic process of the interpretation of meaning must
be primary if we are to move from generalized theory to explanation, because
in social life, unlike in nature, the force of social life must have a form . . . an
interpretable meaning . . . to be effective (159). That is why we should ask how
certain motivations and certain mechanisms enact and interpret the landscapes of
meaning upon which they move, and by which they are formed (162), because
10. Putnam says: There are external facts, and we can say what they are. What we cannot say
because it makes no senseis what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices (Putnam,
The Many Faces of Realism, 33). This is not meant to imply that its all just language: We can and
should insist that some facts are there to be discovered and not legislated by us. But this is something
to be said when one has adopted a way of speaking, a language, a conceptual scheme.. . . [T]he word
fact no more has its use fixed by Reality Itself than does the word exist or the word object (36).

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an essential aspect of social life as such is its dependence upon arrangements

of meaning and representation, which themselves arrange and form the forceful
causes of social action (161). Here we are confronted not only with an unexplained form of action in which motivations and mechanisms can interpret
meaning, but also with another surprise appearance of the social as such,
which Reed claimed earlier had undermined the whole realist approach. We are
also forced to wonder whether Reed is making meaning so omnipresent that it
will be hard to imagine how to isolate it for study.
To interpret meaning we need a plurality of social theories. The end goal of
explanation can only be approached via an understanding of social causality as
both historically specific and multidimensional (162). This is an admirable goal,
one that I would call thick explanation. The question, however, is how it would
work in practice. Unfortunately, Reed produces only slogans or formulas, even
once calling them mantras (100). Our guide should be, coherence from above
and adequacy from below (116), or, better, [p]lurality in theory, unity in meaning, historicity in explanation (162). Reeds slogans are too formulaic to guide
actual practice. Indeed, by plurality in theory, he may only mean the modes of
realism, normativism, and interpretivism he has discussed. Only in a brief footnote does he even tell us where he stands in thinking about truth. I work with
a modified representationalist theory of truth, much like Helen Longinos account
of how various sorts of truth claims (including models, specific explanations,
etc.) can be understood according to a confirmist theory of truth that drops
the strictly propositional theory of truth but preserves the idea that truth claims
involve more or less correct claims about the world (50, n. 21). Whatever this
means, we get no defense or elaboration of this theory or explanation of how it
would work in practice. The goal of producing claims that are more or less correct does not seem like much of an achievement.
Reeds analytical scheme for interpretive explanation avoids certain important
tasks of history and social research, in particular, the discovery and weighing
of the various factors that caused, or might have caused, particular courses of
action or forms of meaning to be interpreted. Simply arguing for the necessity
of meaning, which, he says, inheres in everything and so seems almost impossible to isolate, is not enough, for he sounds like a Derridean for whom meaning
is always already there. We cannot just describe explanation in terms of formal
and forcing causes, or motivations, mechanisms, and meanings, believing that
these objects are somehow both independent and always present. It is not simply that form gives shape to force. Why not consider the reverse and recognize
the reciprocal influence these causes have on one another? Some way of relating
and measuring factors is needed, and not just the claim that they are co-present.
A third set of problems comes in Reeds metaphors. They include interpretive
social theorists as painters (110), as theater critics (11, n. 13, 152-153), as modern
versions of the ancient Greek theoroi (163, 167), and as travelers (171) who must
construct a mental ship (167). The use of metaphors extends to the objects
social theorists create, including landscapes of meaning (92, 110-117, 120121, 146, 155-156, 158, 170-171), and statues cast in bronze (143-415, 158), in
addition to his labels of deep, deeper, in-depth, underlying, and going

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beyond, to characterize features of his goal. These metaphors and revivals

create serious problems.
To take the most important example, landscapes of meaning, Reed maintains, come into being at particular times, but, once created, they become discursive formations with tremendous inertia and power (92). Interpretive social
research is like the painting of a landscape, where the investigator paints a
picture (110) of the hidden, depth meanings that must be brought together in
an overarching reconstruction of the meaningful landscape (115).11 Of course,
Landscapes change, and terrains can have hills, meadows, and even deserts . . .
cities, towns, and army barracks. But landscapes cannot be radically incoherent.
Neither can the hidden meanings of a case. The task, therefore, is to make the
meaningful landscape intelligible to the reader, to render its contours clearly,
and show its fault lines with care, so that the actions . . . come to make sense
(116). Indeed, the landscape of meaning forms those entities that force social life
forward (140-141), by giving motivations and mechanisms shape and color,
concreteness and character (158). Thus, landscapes of meaning . . . are for the
investigator a different (and prior) dimension along which causal arguments must
be made (156).
Just as initial reactions to this, first, one might note that Reed explains neither
how landscapes can become discursive formations, nor why one should think
that all meaningful social practices could somehow be part of discursive formations. Second, in relation to what framework does one show that these actions
make sense? Third, how does a landscape act to form entities, and why does
that not make the landscape a mechanism? Fourth, how can any dimension
be prior, when the whole metaphor of dimensions implies co-presence? Fifth,
since these landscapes of meaning are dynamic, in motion, and contested even
to the point of war, how can painting metaphors ever capture this inescapable
historical dimension? Can the metaphor of landscapes somehow lend itself to
a notion of conflict between landscapes, as Weber showed the traditional
spirit of enterprise in conflict with the spirit of modern capitalism? This last
problem shows why we cannot be bound by the static image of landscapes, which
is only a variation on the still life, which the French call, tellingly, nature morte.
The danger of this metaphor is revealed further when we ask, why can landscapes not be radically incoherent? As any glance at cubism or surrealism will
show, in practice, that is exactly what happened in twentieth-century painting,
which dissolved the stability and the parts of landscapes along with the straightforward notion of representation. Could one imagine a surreal landscape of
meaning, like those of Dali or Magritte? What would that reveal about meanings,
and how could we interpret it to serve the purpose of explanation? Or look at what
happened already in late nineteenth-century painting by Cezanne and others, who
11. As Reed notes, landscapes of meaning was also used by William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of
History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005),
174, who speaks of partially coherent landscapes of meaning, whose boundedness is only relative
and constantly shifting. Our job as cultural analysts is to discern what the shapes and consistencies
of local meanings actually are, and to determine how, why, and to what extent they hang together.
Note his wise qualifications: partially and determining extent.

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changed the whole idea of landscape, merging it into a more abstract problem of
the juxtaposition of elements of color, shape, and line in a picture. Reed seems
trapped by nineteenth-century models of conventional, coherent representation.
This notion may be reassuring, but why should we imagine that it can either render the visible or make deep meaning more visible than the landscapes of
modern painting? Reed, of course, recognizes that, for the interpreter, such landscape painting is a construction, not a simple copy, but once one accepts that,
one can no longer be confined to conventional representation. Indeed, the cover
of the book is an illustration after the landscape of Bruegels The Harvesters,
a broken landscape that shatters the picture and the basic convention. What is its
meaning as an interpretive construction? The point is that one cannot take this
metaphor at face value and think that it will do the work of showing form without more reflection. Metaphors are useful, perhaps essential, but they are also like
moving trains that you cannot leave at just any time you like.
A different problem with landscape of meaning from the point of view of
empirical history and social science is that such a metaphor should be deployed,
if ever, only after reconstructive, empirical work, not before, so that one can
determine whether the metaphor makes sense and is applicable to the problem
or case at hand, and, if so, to what extent. The distinctions and concepts must be
related in terms that allow one to specify the presence or absence of factors and
their relative weight or importance in a specific explanation or mix. Without
the means of doing this, Reeds approach is a victim of its metaphors and analytical categories, incapable of informing empirical work. Of course, landscapes of
meaning might work, for example, only for so-called traditional societies,
rather than modern ones, as Lvi-Strauss thought his forms of structuralism
worked only for cold societies and not hot ones like our own. Or the metaphor might make sense anywhere or nowhere, but this has to be established,
not simply assumed or asserted. Instead, we get a disappointing statement of
how schemas are to be evaluated: an investigator, confronted by a plurality of
abstract theoretical schemas . . . can indeed differentiate between better and worse
explanations of a certain kind of social actions (169-170). This vague and indeterminate assertion of confidence in knowing better and worse is an inadequate
standard for evaluating, interpreting, and weighing explanations. If one needed
a metaphor, a better one might be Webers metaphor of spheres, because it
goes beyond the separation of motivation, mechanism, and meaning. Webers
spheres are not simply pictures of meanings, but arrangements of concrete social
practices, regularities of action, material interests and objects, motivations, and
logics of development under (common) conditions of rationalization.
A fourth problem lies in Reeds attempt to draw on Aristotle for his notions of
forming and forcing causes. Reed says that, in one discussion of final cause
in Aristotles Metaphysics, it is clear that he is referring to actors intentions, and
thus can be interpreted (liberally, to be sure) as referring to reasons or motivations as causes (144). More than this, there is evidence, in Aristotles formal
cause, that, when considering social action, efficient causes cannot be adequately understood in their causal force without understanding the formal causes that
give them shape (145), and this is clear in his depiction of bronze casting. But,

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although Aristotle does say that formal and final cause are effectively the same,
Reed has been deceived by looking only at Aristotles examples of human action.
Aristotle applies the four causes in practice also to physical objects, motion, time,
the void, among others, as, for example in Physics II 7, and all of IV, and to the
causes of the parts of animals in De Generatione Animalium I 1. How can
final causes in such works, or even efficient causes, be linked to motivations,
or formal causes be linked to an actors conscious or unconscious, deliberate
or unplanned action? Aristotles notion of causes is part of his naturalism, not
only of his metaphysics. Indeed, he uses metaphors of growth, from potential into
actual, final form or end, which are part of an essential nature of things. Can
such a notion of causes survive without his framework, even if we ignore the
wholesale rejection of this approach in the period from Newton onward? Unfortunately, Aristotles causes are more like labels, static analytical categories, like
fixed attributes, rather than flexible and measurable objects.
Indeed, it is curious that Reed looks to the Metaphysics for help, rather than to
Aristotles concrete analyses of society, for example, in his Politics, a treatment
of social life by a human science, but where, of course, the four causes do not
appear, apart from the end, telos, or final form. Here, as elsewhere, one can
see Aristotles medical inspiration and aspiration, that is, the project to be both
empirical and normative, that is, to treat or cure, whether based on the
standard of the mean, or on the comparison of the best and worst constitutions ranked along a spectrum, along with the most practical. The irony is
that Reed has criticized Habermas for a project that is similar to Aristotles, and
he caps his shallow treatment with the following ridiculous claim as part of his
dismissal of Habermas, Derrida, and others:
one wonders . . . if this entire structureof critical and traditional theory, praxis and
scientism, pleasure and disciplinegiven to us by 68 and rearticulated in conferences
around the globe, has outlived its utility. We might even consider the possibility that
it is, at least in part, grounded on a misunderstanding of what research inspired by the
historical-hermeneutic sciences is all about. (166)

What possible reason could Reed have for making such an uninformed attack on
1968 as if it were something concrete and well-defined and somehow responsible for the views he opposes, when Habermas, Derrida, Foucault, and others
were born by 1930 and had published defining works before 1968?
If a strong program is to work, it must do better in making possible, first,
the analytical isolation of culture as a factor in social explanation, and, second,
the weighing of the multiplicity of factors that go into interpreting and explaining the structure and dynamics of human reality. It must also be based on a more
persuasive analysis of the relationship between theory and fact.
Harvey Goldman
University of California, San Diego