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Sociological Knowledge of the Other: Wolff’s “Surrender and Catch” Methodology

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Abstract

From a sociological perspective the “surrender and catch” expression derives, of course, from the experiential and existential basis of Wolff’s epistemology and hermeneutics.“Surrender” is connected with phenomenology, and Husserl’s (as well as Schütz’s) writings, besides Scheler’s idea of a “relatively natural world view”.“Surrender and catch” is also a “sociology of understanding” a definition which recuperates the German verstehende Soziologie though it makes a distinction between “surrender” and “surrender to”. It is not just a theory, it is a methodology too, in order to understand the otherness.Wolff was a multi-facetted scholar and this affected his conceptualizations. Furthermore, his surrender is something one experiences existentially in a number of fields, from the nature of empirical research to the art of theoretical reflection, from politics to poetry, from philosophy to history to sociology.It must also be pointed out that surrender and catch are a form of protest against the status quo.

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Notes

  1. It is a pity that George Ritzer’s Encyclopedia of Sociology (2007), published by Blackwell, Oxford in eleven volumes, does not contain any reference to Kurt H. Wolff’s sociology and, in particular, to the “surrender and catch” approach. Was this too innovative for the science, or too dangerous (and deviant) for the traditional, classical sociology of quantification?

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  1. Department of Education, University of Rome 3, Rome, Italy

    Roberto Cipriani

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Cipriani, R. Sociological Knowledge of the Other: Wolff’s “Surrender and Catch” Methodology. Am Soc 48, 67–85 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-016-9329-6

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