Mad Hazard

A Life in Social Theory

Stephen Turner

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781803826691
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• MAD HAZARD
• CURRENT PERSPECTIVES IN SOCIAL THEORY
• MAD HAZARD: A LIFE IN SOCIAL THEORY
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• EDITORS’ FOREWORD
• MEMOIR DISCLAIMER
• Dedication
• PREFACE
• PROLOGUE
• Meet the Family
• Born Into Chicago: Participant Observer in a Time of Racial Succession
• Miami: The Quest for Normalcy at the Edge of Change
• Four Colleges in Fifteen Months: Higher Learning in the Sixties
• Tulane and New Orleans: Sociology as an Identity
• Semigraduate Student: Becoming a Theorist in a Time of Troubles
• Florida Forever: Surviving in a Discipline in Crisis
• Refugee from the War in Sociology: Conflict and Contention in 1970S Sociology and the Alternative of Philosophy of Social S ...
• Reconstructing the Philosophical Thought of Durkheim and Weber and the Turn to Science Studies
• Graduate Research Professor and Divorce: Professional Crisis and the Turn to History of Sociology
• New Love and the Return to Philosophy: Living Beyond Disciplines in a Disciplinary World
• The Social Theory of Practices: Understanding Practices Naturalistically
• Pyrrhic Victories and a Family: Leaving the Sociology of the Nineties
• The Nineties, Postmodernism, Normativity, and Other Controversies: Practices between Cognitive Science and Ethics
• Strange Encounters in the History of Sociology and in Archives: Learning from Archives and the Politics of Collection
• Causal Models Again: Understanding Statistical Causality and Its Problems
• Cognitive Science: The Mutual Implications of the Cognitive Revolution and Sociology
• Cleaning Up: Reconciling Normativity, Collective Intentionality, and the Brain
• Politics and Law: Kelsen, Weber, and the Defense of Democracy
• Epilogue: Luck and the Future of Academic Thought
• REFERENCES
• INDEX