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Ultimate referentiality
Radical phenomenology and the new
interpretative sociology
In this article, I shall draw on the thoughts that I initially and briefly
outlined in earlier works,1 albeit with limited exploration of their rami-
fications for sociology. Equipped with a radical phenomenological gaze,
this article enables a critical inquiry about a certain interpretative impulse
that propelled much of sociological theories and methods ever since the
inception of sociology. Due to spatial limitations, the arguments below
are presented with painful abstraction and generalizations, which render
this article only an invitation. My guiding/critical concept will be ulti-
mate referentiality. I will argue that for much of its history, exceptions
aside, sociology has been guided by the operative assumption about the
2 Responses to foundationalism
3 Ultimate referentiality
PSC
Notes
1 See: Peyman Vahabzadeh, A Critique of Ultimate Referentiality in the Social
Movement Theory of Alberto Melucci, Canadian Journal of Sociology
26(4) (December 2001): 61133; Peyman Vahabzadeh, Articulated Experi-
ences: Toward A Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Move-
ments (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), ch. 7; Peyman
Vahabzadeh, Technological Liberalism and the Anarchic Actor, in Ian Angus
(ed.), Anarcho-Modernism: Toward A New Critical Theory (Vancouver:
Talon Books, 2001), pp. 34150.
2 Ren Descartes, Key Philosophical Writings, ed. E. Chvez-Arvizo (Hert-
fordshire: Wordsworth, 1997), p. 134.
3 ibid., p. 149.
4 ibid., p. 153.
5 See Auguste Comte, Social Statics and Social Dynamics: The Theory of
Order and the Theory of Progress (Albuquerque, NM: American Classical
College Press, 1984).
6 Auguste Comte, The Positive Study of Social Phenomena (Albuquerque,
NM: American Classical College Press, 1984), p. 88.