Of all the oppositions that artificially divide social science, the most fundamental, and the most ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism. The very fact that this division constantly reappears in virtually the same form would suffice to indicate that the modes of knowledge which it distinguishes are equally indispensable to a science of the social world that cannot be reduced either to a social phenomenology or to a social physics. To move beyond the antagonism between these two modes of knowledge, while preserving the gains from each of them (including what is produced by self-interested lucidity about the opposing position), it is necessary to make explicit the presuppositions that they have in common as theoretical modes of knowledge, both equally opposed to the practical mode of knowledge which is the basis of ordinary experience of the social world. This presupposes a critical objectification of the epistemological and social conditions that make possible both a reflexive return to the subjective experience of the world and also the objectification of the objective conditions of that experience.
Pierre Bourdieu, opening to ‘Critique of Theoretical Reason’ in The Logic of Practice (via
robert-brydie)
(Source: thepovertyoftheory, via fyeahsociology)
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