When the social sciences entered the stage in late 19th and...

When the social sciences entered the stage in late 19th and early 20th centuries their relevance in terms of scientificity was measured by their compliance to the established norms in the disciplines of natural sciences such as physics, biology, chemistry, and so on and so forth.

The reign of quantification and the inherent disability of humanities and social sciences to succumb to total demand of quantification put them under incessant suspicion by naturalistic-oriented authors who ruled out the possibility of scientification of humanities unless they turn humanities into natural scientific fashions.

Of course there were thinkers who opposed these conformist pressures but the mainstream social scientists took up the challenge of turning humanities into science of man , science of society , and behavioral approaches in psychology and discourses on mental and spiritual dimensions of human leben. In other words, reductionism was justified both on philosophical grounds and institutional demands in all academic discourses by all parties in West and East.

However what is of significance for us in this context is how in Iran science was received by thinkers who happened to be outside the modern academic institutions such as Tehran University or centers for sociological researches. In other words, how a social thinker such as Allama Jafari looked at science, the scientific enterprise and more importantly conceptualized the sociological enterprise while not being a sociologist in the disciplinary meaning of the term.

Schools of Sociology Within the discipline of sociology we have various paradigms and schools. For instance, we can speak of Marxist sociology versus academic sociology or positivistic sociology versus post-positivistic sociology and interpretative sociology versus legislative sociology.

However these distinctions are not exhaustive and still we can categorize sociological orientations in a different fashion by classifying theories based on their respective traditions such as ‘Conservatism’, ‘Liberalism’, ‘Socialism’, ‘Libertarianism’, ‘Anarchism’, ‘Communitarianism’, ‘Islamism’, and so on and so forth. Again this manner of categorization could not be taken as the sole form of classifying sociological orientations.

For instance, we can talk about theories based on their ontological characters such as positivism versus transcendentalism or on metatheoretical basis such as collectivism versus individualism or primordialism.