Winch’s Idea at sixty-five: Its point and implications for the prospects of sociology

Abstract

This article demonstrates the underappreciated import and potential of Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, a classic work published 65 years ago. Its aim is not simply to correct misunderstandings of Winch but to rehabilitate the text as indispensable for understanding past and present woes and cementing the future of sociological endeavour. I reconstruct and defend the claims put forth by Winch and then explicitly draw out their implications, which demonstrate the incoherence of the predominant disciplinary self-image that sees sociology as having a method and/or critical thinking prerogative. This problematic self-conception is jeopardizing the coherence and wider relevance of sociology and is responsible for its perennial difficulties in articulating a mode of discourse that can be seen as cogent by the public. A defensible alternative sees sociology as a second-order study of practices that is premised on a conceptually accurate relation to those practices and on answerability to the criteria and abilities of understanding, description, explanation and criticism they afford. This conception can support the reconfiguration of existing forms of sociological inquiry as well as the development of new ones.