Mad Hazard
A Life in Social Theory
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- Description
- Contents
- Reviews
- About
Mad Hazard is a memoir of the career and life of Stephen Turner, chronicling a life in social theory. Showcasing how Turner’s later work on expertise, tacit knowledge, cognitive science, leadership, and liberal democracy developed out of his early interests, this volume describes the institutional and personal constraints and pressures, as well as the personal relationships, that facilitated and shaped an academic career.
From Turner’s childhood in the racially violent South Side of Chicago, the development of his interests in social theory, through to his education in the shadow of the war in Vietnam and a period of social and personal turmoil, this biographical work shows us not only the development of academic thinking, but the evolution of an academic career. The rebellion within sociology against the hegemonic Merton-Parsons conception of sociology and the methodological orthodoxies of the time leads through to a discussion of the philosophy of science and social science, and from there to a reassessment of the inherited view of the classics, to science studies, and to political and international relations theory – the comprehensive nature of Mad Hazard means the reader can truly understand how Turner’s academic journey evolved.
Revealing an academic career not dependent on prestige and academic power, but also not untouched by hierarchy and academic politics, Mad Hazard is appealing for readers interested in the field of social theory, and beyond that, those interested in the evolution of intellectual life in the present university.
Foreword; Harry F. Dahms and Robert J. Antonio
- Chapter 1. Meet the Family
- Chapter 2. Born into Chicago: Participant Observer in a time of Racial Succession
- Chapter 3. Miami: The Quest for Normalcy at the Edge of Change
- Chapter 4. Four Colleges in Fifteen Months: Higher Learning in the Sixties
- Chapter 5. Tulane and New Orleans: Sociology as an Identity
- Chapter 6. Semi-Graduate Student: Becoming a Theorist in a Time of Troubles
- Chapter 7. Florida Forever: Surviving in a Discipline in Crisis
- Chapter 8. Refugee from the War in Sociology: Conflict and Contention in Seventies Sociology and the Alternative of Philosophy of Social Science
- Chapter 9. Reconstructing the Philosophical Thought of Durkheim and Weber and the Turn to Science Studies
- Chapter 10. Graduate Research Professor and Divorce: Professional Crisis and the Turn to History of Sociology
- Chapter 11. New Love and the Return to Philosophy: Living Beyond Disciplines in a Disciplinary World
- Chapter 12. The Social Theory of Practices: Understanding Practices Naturalistically
- Chapter 13. Pyrrhic Victories and a Family: Leaving the Sociology of the Nineties
- Chapter 14. The Nineties, Postmodernism, Normativity and Other Controversies: Practices Between Cognitive Science and Ethics
- Chapter 15. Strange Encounters in the History of Sociology and in Archives: Learning from Archives and the Politics of Collection
- Chapter 16. Causal Models Again: Understanding Statistical Causality and its Problems
- Chapter 17. Cognitive Science: The Mutual Implications of the Cognitive Revolution and Sociology
- Chapter 18. Cleaning Up: Reconciling Normativity, Collective Intentionality, and the Brain
- Chapter 19. Politics and Law: Kelsen, Weber, and the Defense of Democracy
- Epilogue: Luck and the Future of Academic Thought
Anyone who is to some degree familiar with the sociological world will find something to relate to in the book, densely packed with names of academic figures institutions and associations […] the book also has its value for social scientists at an early career stage as a detailed overview of the discipline’s landscape in its rather hectic dynamics: it shows honestly what one is to expect on the path of sociology accepted as a calling.
Stephen Turner is Distinguished University Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida, US, where he is also director of the Center for Social and Political Thought.