"In a time of seemingly unlimited faith in "big data" and in which any kind of thinking, let alone of the critical kind, is increasingly outsourced to AI, this is a very important book. Willer and Emanuelson encourage the reader to take a step back and contemplate the current state of "theoretical sociology". They reestablish the deep and valuable links between sociology and other theory-driven sciences and reevaluate the experimental method. This is an excellent place to start (and come back to) for any serious student of society who aspires to truly understand the topics they study."
—Jacob Dijkstra, Director of Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Groningen, The Netherlands 

This book offers a historical view to explain how social science arrived at its current state and proposes solutions to its problems. It shows that theory is the method of the sciences. First it explains how the empiricism of J. S. Mill and R. A. Fisher has blocked theory-driven research. Myths about how science works, as proposed by T. Kuhn, have added another layer of obfuscation. The widespread adoption of empiricist methods has produced the replication crisis, where many experimental findings cannot be replicated in economics, psychology, and undoubtedly sociology. Without theory, the scope of research topics has narrowed, resulting in R. Merton's fear of a balkanization of knowledge in sociology.

Having cleared the intellectual underbrush, the book then discusses how theory-driven experiments are constructed drawing on several such studies found in the literature. These examples will help the reader understand this form of experimentation. The authors envision an explanatory sociology in which experimentally grounded theory forms a ‘toolbox’ used to explain complex historical and contemporary events. Here examples are few and far between: we will need to build new ones. Taken together, this book envisions a radically changed social science, and it is vital reading for scholars across sociology, political science, economics, and social psychology.

David Willer is Scudder Professor of Sociology (Emeritus), University of South Carolina, USA. 

Pamela Emanuelson is Associate Professor of Sociology at North Dakota State University, USA.