Isaac Ariail Reed is Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of Political and Social Thought and Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in Charlottesville, Virginia. His work began with studies of the Salem Witch Trials and hermeneutic sociology, expanded into a study of interpretation and explanation in the human sciences, and then to the sociology of power and transitions to modernity. He has written about the Whiskey Rebellion, Bacon’s Rebellion, the French Revolution, the Cold War, science fiction, the idea of the human sciences, and the intellectual history of political and social theory. At the core of his work are three ideas: (1) transitions to modernity transformed social and political life; (2) signification is a source of immense variation in history and society, because it is a fundamental component of action, motivation, and performance; and (3) social structure may be usefully conceptualized as hierarchical networks of agency relations. He graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics and Sociology & Anthropology from Swarthmore College in 2000. In 2007, he earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. He is the author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences (2011), Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies (2020), and Sociology as a Human Science: Essays on Interpretation and Causal Pluralism (2023), and the co-editor of Social Theory Now (2017) and The New Pragmatist Sociology: Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy (2022).
PUBLICATIONS
Newest Works
“The View from Outer Space: Science Fiction and Political Fantasy in the Cold War United States,” Social Science History. 10 Oct. 2024.
“Space Travel and the Cold War Fantastic: Robert Sheckley’s Science Fiction Worlds.” The Hedgehog Review. 2024.
Forthcoming: “Patriarchal Patrimonialism: Authority, Gender, and Max Weber’s Political Sociology,” pp. 296-324 in Joshua Derman and Peter Gordon, Max Weber at 100: Legacies and Prospects. New York: Oxford University Press, (with Julia Adams), 2025.
Forthcoming: “Theorizing Agency Relations: On the origins and development of Rector-Actor-Other theory in sociology.” New Directions in Relational Sociology, Volume One: Relations all the Way Up, edited by Frederic Vandenberghe and Christian Papilloud. Palgrave-MacMillan. [Extended Version].
Forthcoming: “Power, Radical Alterity, and Authority in Historical Sociology” Rebecca Emigh and David McCourt, editors, Oxford Handbook of Comparative Historical Sociology. Oxford University Press.
Authored Books
Sociology as a Human Science: Essays on Interpretation and Causal Pluralism. Palgrave-MacMillan. 2023
Power in Modernity: Agency relations and the creative destruction of the King’s Two Bodies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2020.
Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Translation: Interpretation und Sozialtheorie (tr. Ursel Schäfer, introduction by Thomas Hoebel) Hamburger Edition. 2022
Edited Books
Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship, editors. The New Pragmatist Sociology: Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy. Columbia University Press. 2022.
Claudio Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed, editors. Social Theory Now. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Translation: La Teoría Social, Ahora: Nuevas Corrientes, Nuevas Discusiones. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores.
Isaac Ariail Reed and Jeffrey C. Alexander, editors. Meaning and Method: The Cultural Approach to Sociology. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2009.
Isaac Ariail Reed and Jeffrey C. Alexander, editors. Culture, Society, and Democracy: The Interpretive Approach. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007.
Articles & Book Chapters
“Social Theory and Overinterpretation.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory. Published online first, 1-25. 2023.
“Modernity and the Politics of Newness: Unraveling New Time in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966 to 1968.” Sociological Theory 4(3): 229-254. 2023.
“Gnosticism in Modernity, or Why History Refuses to End” The Hedgehog Review 24 (3) (With Michael Weinman) 2022.
“Pragmatist Sociology: Histories and Possibilities,” in The New Pragmatist Sociology, edited by Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship. (With Neil Gross and Christopher Winship.) 2022.
“Pragmatist Comparative-Historical Sociology,” in The New Pragmatist Sociology, edited by Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship. Columbia University Press. (With Paul Lichterman.) 2022.
“代理关系、异他与“国王的两个身体” (“Agency, Alterity, and the ‘King’s Two Bodies’”) Tsinghua Sociological Review No. 16: 1-16. 2021.
“Hermeneutics and Performance in Social Theories of Power” Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, edited by Seth Abrutyn and Omar Lizardo. Springer. (With Abigail Cary Moore and Vasfiye Betül Torpak) 2021.
“Meaning and Modularity: The Multivalence of ‘Mechanism’” in Sociological Explanation.” Sociological Theory. 37 (3): 234-256, 29 Aug. (With Carly Knight) 2019.
“Violence and its Interpretations: Towards a Semiotic Theory of State Power.” Journal of Political Power 12 (2): 177-199 (With Abigail Cary Moore). 2019.
“Performative State-formation in the Early American Republic.” American Sociological Review. 84 (2): 334-367, 1 March 2019.
“Rationality/Rationalization,” in The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon, edited by Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta. New York: Cambridge University Press. (With Abigail Cary Moore) 2019.
“Agency, Power, Modernity: A Manifesto for Social Theory.” European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 6(1): 6-50, 20. (With Michael Weinman) Aug. 2018.
“Power and the French Revolution: Toward a Sociology of Sovereignty” Historická Sociologie 10 (1): 45-70. 2018.
“Jefferson’s Two Bodies: Interpretations of a Statue at the University of Virginia,” pp. 64-84 in #Charlottesville: Before and Beyond, edited by Christophere Howard-Woods, Maryam Omidi, and Colin Laidley. New York: Public Seminar Books. 2018.
“Chains of Power and Their Representation.” Sociological Theory 35 (2): 87-117. 26 Jun. 2017.
“Ethnography, Theory, and Sociology as a Human Science.” Ethnography 18(1): 107-129. 2017.
“Ratio via Machina: Three Standards of Mechanistic Explanation in Sociology.” Sociological Methods and Research 46(4): 715-738. (With Natalie B. Aviles) 2017.
“Introduction: Social Theory Now,” in Social Theory Now, edited by Claudio Benzecry, Monika Krause and Isaac Ariail Reed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (With Claudio Benzecry and Monika Krause) 2017.
“On the very idea of cultural sociology,” in Social Theory Now, edited by Claudio Benzecry, Monika Krause and Isaac Ariail Reed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2017.
“Between Structural Breakdown and Crisis Action: Interpretation in the Whiskey Rebellion and the Salem Witch Trials.” Critical Historical Studies. 3(1): 27-64, 2016.
“What is Interpretive Explanation in Sociohistorical Analysis?” pp. 42-67 in Inheriting Gadamer: New Directions in Philosophical Hermeneutics, edited by Georgia Warnke. Edinburgh University Press. 2016.
“Deep Culture in Action: Resignification, Synecdoche, and Metanarrative in the Moral Panic of the Salem Witch Trials.” Theory and Society, 44(1): 65-94, 15 Jan. 2015.
“Theory and Contrastive Explanation in Ethnography.” Sociological Methods and Research 44(4): 585-635 (with Paul Lichterman). 2015.
“Formation Stories and Causality in Sociology” Sociological Theory 32(4): 259-282. (With Daniel Hirschman) 2014.
“The Unsettlement of Communities of Inquiry,” in Theorizing in the Social Sciences, edited by Richard Swedberg, Stanford University Press. (With Mayer N. Zald) 2014.
“Power: Relational, Discursive, and Performative Dimensions” Sociological Theory. 31(3): 193-218. 2013.
“Charismatic Performance: A study of Bacon’s Rebellion.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 1 (2): 1-35, 2013.
“Cultural Sociology as a Post-positivist Research Program,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, edited by Jeffrey Alexander, Philip Smith, and Ron Jacobs. New York: Oxford University Press. 2012.
“Culture in the Transitions to Modernity: Seven Pillars of a New Research Agenda” Theory and Society 40: 247-272. (With Julia Adams) 2011.
“Hermeneutics and Sociology: Deepening the Interpretive Perspective,” in New Directions in Sociology: Essays on Theory and Methodology in the 21st Century, edited by Michael DeCesare and Ieva Zake. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers. (With Benjamin Lamb-Books). 2011.
“Epistemology Contextualized: Social-Scientific Knowledge in a Postpositivist Era” Sociological Theory 28 (1): 20-39. 2010.
“Social Science as Reading and Performance: A Cultural-Sociological Understanding of Epistemology” European Journal of Social Theory 12(1): 21-41. (With Jeffrey Alexander) 2009.
“Culture as Object and Approach in Sociology,” in Meaning and Method: The Cultural Approach to Sociology, edited by Isaac Reed and Jeffrey Alexander. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. 2009.
“Maximal Interpretation in Clifford Geertz and the Strong Program in Cultural Sociology: Towards a New Epistemology” Cultural Sociology 2(2): 187-200. 2008.
Reprinted: pp. 65-77 in Jeffrey C. Alexander, Philip Smith, and Matthew Norton, eds. Interpreting Clifford Geertz: Cultural Investigations in the Social Sciences. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. 2011.
“Justifying Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation,” Sociological Theory. 26 (2): 101-129. 2008.
“Cultural Sociology,” in The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, edited by Bryan Turner. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. (With Jeffrey Alexander) 2008.
“Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft.” Cultural Sociology 1 (2), July: 209-234. 2007.
Translated: “El sentido de Salem: cultura, genero y la persecucion puritan de la brujeria,” pp. 45-82 in Claudio Benzecry, editor, Hacia una nueva sociologia cultural. Mapas, dramas y practicas. Buenos Aires: Universidad de Qulimes. 2012.
“Cultural Sociology and the Democratic Imperative,” Culture, Society, and Democracy, edited by Isaac Reed and Jeffrey Alexander. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. 2007.
“Social Dramas, Shipwrecks, and Cockfights: Conflict and Complicity in Social Performance,” in Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, edited by Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason Mast. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006.
“Culture,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology, ed. Bryan S. Turner. (With Jeffrey Alexander). 2006.
“Positivism,” in The Social Science Encyclopedia, edited by Adam Kuper and Jessica Kuper. Routledge. (With Jeffrey Alexander) 2004.
Invited Essays, Scholarly Commentaries, & Reviews
Forthcoming: “Does an Aesthetic Sociology need a Theory of the Sign?” [comment on Helmut Staubmann’s Sociology in a New Key] The American Sociologist.
“The Volatility of Sacred Signs: A Response to Omar Lizardo,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. 2022.
“Power in Modernity: A Discussion among Mark Haugaard, Clarissa Hayward, and Jonathan G. Heaney of Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies, by Isaac Ariail Reed, with a reply by Isaac Reed.” Journal of Political Power 14(3): 520-545. 2021.
“Debating the Dimensions: Amy Allen, Rainer Forst, and Isaac Ariail Reed in dialogue-review of The Four Dimensions of Power by Mark Haugaard.” 14(3): 493-519. 2021.
“Order, Delegation, and Exclusion in the Negative Space of Political Modernity: A Reply to My Critics.” Cultural Sociology, pp. 1-10. 2021.
“Resisting the Revenge of the Romantic Hegel: A Reply to Werner Binder’s Essay on Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, pp. 1-25. 2021.
“Coda: Crossing Companies, Theory of Agency and Early Modern European Empire,” Journal of World History 31 (3): 477-497. (With Julia Adams) 2020.
“Sigmund Freud and Social Theory Manqué: A note on the publication of Howard Kaye’s Freud as a Social and Cultural Theorist,” Society 57: 281-286. 2020.
“The King’s Two Bodies and the Crisis of Liberal Modernity.” The Hedgehog Review. 21 (3): 56-78. 2019.
“Agency, action, and projects: A response to Risto Heiskala.” European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 6 (3): 365-371 (with Vasfiye Toprak and Michael Wienman). 2019.
“Book Review: Michael Hecter, Alien Rule.” Contemporary Sociology. 45 (4): 451-453. 2016.
“Counting, interpreting, and their potential interrelation in the human sciences” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. 3(3): 353-364. 2015.
“Interpretive Explanation and its Discontents: Author’s Reply to Commentaries” Czech Sociological Review 51(3): 532-545. 2015.
“Can There be a Bourdieusian Theory of Crisis? On historical change and social theory,” History and Theory, 54 (2): 269-276, 2015.
“Book Review: Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade.” American Journal of Sociology. 121, no. 3 (November 2015): 962-965. 2015.
“When Acceleration Negates Progress: Review Essay on Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity” Contemporary Sociology 43 (6): 820-823. 2014.
“Hartmut Rosa’s Project for Critical Theory.” Thesis Eleven, 133 (1): 122-129. Revised 2016.
“Science, Democracy and Sociology in the 21st Century: Response to Cruickshank’s ‘Anti-authority’” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. 2(12): 40-45. 2013.
“Science, Democracy and the Sociology of Power” in Democratic Problem-Solving: Dialogues in Social Epistemology edited by Justin Cruickshank and Raphael Sassower. Routledge. Revised 2017.
“Book Review: Uta Gerhardt, The Social Thought of Talcott Parsons.” Contemporary Sociology. 43(1). 2013. 2014.
“Theoretical labors necessary for a global sociology: Critique of Raewyn Connell’s Southern Theory” Political Power and Social Theory. Volume 25: 157-171. 2013.
“Comment On Swedberg: On the Politics and Culture of Theorizing-as-Abduction” Sociologica n. 2: 1-6. 2012.
“Analytical Sociology: Appreciation and Ambivalence” Sociologica, n.1: 1-8. 2012.
“Modernity and social knowledge reconsidered: On John R. Hall’s Apocalypse” Qualitative Sociology 33 (4): 575-581. 2010.
“Book Review: Ari Adut, On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art.” American Journal of Sociology. 115 (4): 1325-1328. 2010.
“Book Review: John Frauley and Frank Pearce, editors, Critical Realism and the Social Sciences: Heterodox Elaborations.” Contemporary Sociology. 38 (2): 194-196. 2009.
“Social Theory, Post-post-positivism, and the Question of Interpretation” International Sociology 23 (5): 665-675. 2008.
“Structural Hermeneutics and the Possibility of a Cultural Science” Yale Journal of Sociology 3 (Fall): 105-111. 2003.
“Book Review: Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters.” Theory and Society. 31 (6): 785-94. 2002.