Introduction The contemporary study of society is fired by our quest for scientific truth. The very spirit of our age is tangible evidence ...

"Empirical Marxism" comprises a number of Marxists from the nineteenth century to the present who have tried to formulate an alternative to the orthodox materialism and determinism which would be more open to verification through empirical science. This interest connects such otherwise diverse thinkers as the empirio-critics, Eduard Bernstein, the Austro-Marxists, Galvano Della Volpe, and Lucio Colletti. In different ways, all of these attempted but failed to resolve the tension between revolutionary theory based on a priori premises and empiricist methodology (...) responsive to factual research. (shrink)

This study, originally published in 1977, focuses on a critical examination of the life-work of Alfred Schutz, the most important and influential ‘father’ of several recent schools of empirical social research. The author shows why Shutz and his followers fail in their attempts to ‘humanize’ empirical social science. The problems they encounter, he argues, are due to their attempt to achieve a methodological synthesis of self-determining subjectivity and empirical criteria of validation, based on Schutz’s heuristic adoption of relevant ideas from (...) Weber and Husserl. This is, in effect, an artificial union of subjectivity and objectivity – their ‘dual vision’ – that satisfies neither phenomenological nor naturalist perspectives. Dr Gorman suggests that the radical implications of phenomenology must lead to a consistent, socially-conscious method of inquiry, and, in a final chapter, he re-defines the methodological implications of phenomenology with the aid of existential and Marxist categories. (shrink)

This study, originally published in 1977, focuses on a critical examination of the life-work of Alfred Schutz, the most important and influential ‘father’ of several recent schools of empirical social research. The author shows why Shutz and his followers fail in their attempts to ‘humanize’ empirical social science. The problems they encounter, he argues, are due to their attempt to achieve a methodological synthesis of self-determining subjectivity and empirical criteria of validation, based on Schutz’s heuristic adoption of relevant ideas from (...) Weber and Husserl. This is, in effect, an artificial union of subjectivity and objectivity – their ‘dual vision’ – that satisfies neither phenomenological nor naturalist perspectives. Dr Gorman suggests that the radical implications of phenomenology must lead to a consistent, socially-conscious method of inquiry, and, in a final chapter, he re-defines the methodological implications of phenomenology with the aid of existential and Marxist categories. (shrink)