Introduction

In the late twentieth century, many of people working in the social and historical sciences would orient the work with respect to the major alternatives offered by “grand theory.” The “grand theory” names remain “big” in the twenty-first century, but now people are more likely to define the research in terms of particular problems, specific lines of inquiry, and suitable concepts. Pragmatism as a philosophical tradition is most closely associated with the works of a small number of scholars writing in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. American pragmatists share the idea that knowledge proceeds through experience. The proponents of the sociology of critique developed their approach, and oriented their research activities, in explicit contrast to the approach taken by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.