Introduction

Abstract

What passes for social theory in contemporary writings is an absorption with the nature of, or, more usually, the possibility of social science. The implications of most writings are that, precisely because human beings are free and creative, social science is a limited and descriptive undertaking accounting for human action ex post facto, Taylor, for example, writes:

human science is largely ex post understanding … in natural science … events are said to be predicted from the theory with exactly the same ease with which one explains past events and by exactly the same process. In human science this will never be the case. [1971:p. 50]