Book Review: Book Review

Abstract

died in 1995 at the age of 48 from ovarian cancer. Her death was a tragic loss to philosophy and social theory, but she left behind a powerful legacy of scholarship, including outstanding works on the Holocaust, postmodernism, and the thought of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno. But it was her finest work, Hegel Contra Sociology, which Verso re-published in June of 2009 as part of their 'Radical Thinkers Series.' This book reveals Rose as one of the most significant social philosophers of the last century, developing in the course of its pages an ingenious critique of sociology, using an optimized Hegel restored from any neo-Kantian dilution. She clarifies here the philosophical foundations and contradictions of sociology for the sake of a more comprehensive and critical understanding of society, which she understands as only possible through a renewal of Hegelianism. Her work should be read as one of the most sophisticated examples of the tradition of Hegelian-Marxism, ranking close to Gramsci's own criticisms of the ideology of sociology in his Prison Notebooks. It is a critique of what she called the 'antinomies of sociological reason,' or the opposition within sociological discourse between two types of Kantian reason: theoretical and practical.Hegel Contra Sociology is divided into 7 chapters, and together they form the book's tripartite structure, with part one addressing the philosophical roots of modern sociology as advanced by Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, and parts two and three committed to a thorough-going exegesis of Hegel, a Hegel Rose considers to be in opposition to neo-Kantianism and some currents within Western Marxism. But it is Rose's opening salvo, the first chapter critiquing 'sociological reason' that is of most concern for us. Rose in this chapter traces the genealogy of modern sociology as a further continuation of Kant and Fichte's philosophy into the social sciences. She analyzes the theoretical foundations of both the Marburg and Heidelberg schools of Neo-Kantianism, with the Marburg school focusing on the transcendental and self-positing validity of the social sciences, and the Heidelberg school on the primacy of values as establishing validity. These two schools made possible the philosophical presuppositions for Durkheim and Weber, whom Rose subjects to a thoroughgoing Hegelian criticism. According to Rose, Durkheim's Marburg influenced sociology could not justify itself in terms of the protocols of validity it posited for moral and social facts. Social facts themselves became their own justification, but it is that positivistic justification Rose put in question. Hence one perceives a reifying trend in Durkheim's method, of naturalizing or 'norming the facts.'Weber's methodology is plagued by the opposite problem of postulating objectivity as an active valuation. It is not theoretical reason, but practical reason that makes possible theory. Validity is determined by value, and thus what is legitimate and illegitimate in social sciences becomes a Book Reviews Critical Sociology...