Durkheim the truffle-hunting pig, question begging, and – yes – “fuck nuance”

There’s a very good paper (with a click-bait headline – “Fuck Nuance”) about theory building, abstraction etc. Here’s a link to a pdf.

And there’s a section in it (lots of it is eminently quotable) about Emile Durkheim, the French guy who can claim to be the father of sociology.

“Indifferent to fairly representing his interlocutors, and notorious for begging the question (Lukes 1992:31–2), Durkheim theorized like a pig for most of his career, bluntly snuffling through philosophy and anthropology to emerge covered in dirt but with a few truffle-like ideas that he relentlessly pushed because they were so empirically productive.” (Healy, 2017:125)