steinmetz, epistemological unconscious

(111-118): "methodological positivism"

1. ontological assumptions about nature of social reality--empiricism, which is claim that there is no difference between essence and phenomenon. cause and effect at the level of events.
   
2. epistemological precepts concerning way in which facts can be known--positivism, presupposing the invariance of empirical relationships;
   
3. scientistic-naturalist belief in unity of natural and social sciences--militating against recognition of concept-, time-, and space-dependence of social structures and practices (embodied by idea that you consider social facts as 'things')
   
4. assumptions concerning social science methodology-quantitative methods,e tc.

(117, 136, 152): danger of collapsing into particularism, in his call for concept-, time-, and space-dependence ('Hindu categories') and the call to bring back 'meaning' into science/analysis. on p. 136, he speaks of a rejection of multiple causal mechanisms...

(118): absurdity of ASR example

(120, 140): American sociology as epistemically unsettled until 1945 (question of how you measure this--it can be entirely self-confirming, unless you ask this). on p.140 he is being very definite with his periodization--surely this degree of correspondence is ambitious, at the very least.

(124): need to make epochal distinctions within capitalist modernity -- fine, but why 'discrete', epochal distinctions of the sort posited by regulation theory?

(127): why positivism after WWII? association of anti-science irrationalism with Nazism and totalitarianism

(128-131): important--but really, it was because:

1. the sense that economic crises were over--the economy was stable [but this is not the same thing as a sense of economic stasis; or at least, it need not be--this said, to me it is the most plausible of his points]
2. homogenization of consumer-citizens (so no need to think about the specificity of individual consumers, everyone was 'the same')
3. synchronization of scale of activities within the nation-state [this is more difficult--how is the argument about equality across the nation-space borne out? and what is the alleged mechanism: active State intervention in pursuit of this goal? ]

(132): collapse triggered by disappearance of "social regularities" (this is not direct--'methodological positivism' is not displaced, but its hegemony becomes progressively more uncertain). here he lists different challenges, though this is hardly very interesting.

(137): 'domestication' as too simple a notion

(140): anti-systemic movements, Vietnam war, etc., all had effects. the collapse of "patterned regularities" [but here you're starting to assert that you were no longer working with capitalism, for a time, almost. anyway, worth unpacking. too cryptic with his claims. substantiate, for me, the argument that development was more uneven, etc. here's relying on a 'common sense' to make a commonsense-style conclusion]

(145): critique of path-dependence, via a critique of normal/deviant paths. [but this is going too far]

(156): why did post-Fordism do the opposite to economics? surely there's something else to be unpacked.

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1. Major issue with regulation periodization. Why discrete? Isn't the 'rise and fall' of regulated epochs just a proxy of class struggle; otherwise the claims seem exceedingly mystical. In other words, the transition/turn is , rather then explained