Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 Explanation and understanding -- Introduction -- The covering law model of explanation -- Clarifying "understanding" and "explanation" -- Understanding and causality -- 2 Theory, experiment and the metaphysics of Laplace -- Introduction -- What a theory is -- Realist versus instrumentalist conceptions of theoretical terms -- Post-Kuhnian grounds for establishing scientific consensus -- Experiment and the concept of closure -- Explanation and prediction are not symmetrical -- The world is not Laplacean -- 3 Explanation and understanding in the social sciences -- Introduction -- Explaining human powers -- Biology, race and disease -- Consciousness and collective intentionality -- Science and the explanation of the actions of persons -- Society -- The concept of social structure -- The double hermeneutic -- Ethnographic skepticism? -- Social science as emancipating -- Problems and objections -- 4 Agents and generative social mechanisms -- Introduction -- Social mechanisms -- Learning to labor: an example -- The structure of social mechanisms -- Abstraction, representation and realism -- Promissory notes -- Mechanisms as providing the micro-foundations of the macro -- Generalization, abduction and assessing theories of social mechanisms -- 5 Social science and history -- Introduction -- The recent past -- Modes of comparison: individualizing, universalizing and variation finding -- A taxonomy of explanation types -- A realist historical sociology -- History and sociology -- 6 Markets as social mechanisms -- Introduction -- The neo-classical model of the market -- Starting from scratch -- Defining a market -- "Free exchange" -- Voluntary exchange -- Capitalism and market economies -- Prices and money -- Neo-classical price theory.

The labor market: an example -- Market as process -- Better markets? -- Appendix A The limits of multiple regression -- Appendix B Comparison, Mill's methods and narrative -- Nominal comparison -- Ordinal comparison -- Causal narrative -- The role of comparison -- Appendix C Rational choice theory and historical sociology -- The AJS debate: realism and causality -- General theory? -- Assessing the debate -- "Theoretical realism" and "relational realism" -- The metaphysics of history -- "General laws" and mechanisms -- Appendix D The neo-classical model -- Imperfect competition -- Micro- and macro-theory -- Market efficiency according to the model -- References -- Index.