Raymond BOUDON, 2. The Poverty of Relativism, Oxford, The Bardwell Press, 2005, , 2005

Raymond BOUDON

Oxford, The Bardwell Press, 2005

A timely and critical evaluation of a dominant trend in modern social science, evident in a range of intellectual movements from structuralism to post-modernism and social constructionism.
Raymond Boudon shows how the pervasive spread of relativism in social thought threatens intellectual life by corroding the concept of objectivity, leading to a social and political nihilism in which even the knowledge generated by science itself is seen as no more than a belief system. With an incisive analysis that uses a wide range of illustrative examples from the social organisation of science to the question of what constitutes a work of art, Raymond Boudon examines the consequences of relativism across a number of issues that are key to the future of sociology and the social sciences.

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