Temporalność i rozumienie zjawisk społecznych. Koncepcja Roberta M. MacIvera

Robert Morrison MacIver, the successor of Franklin H. Giddings at Columbia University, was a leading opponent of positivism (George Lundberg), empiricism (William Ogburn) and anti-theoretical praxism (Robert Lynd) in sociology. MacIver developed sociological theorizing according to Weber's tradition. The text was focused around the questions of temporality taken up by MacIver: 1) the question of a separate qualitative time; 2) the question of different temporal varieties of existence in the social-cultural area; 3) temporality of social action. MacIver, unnoticed by today's symbolic interactionists, tried to find implications of George H. Mead's work about time for analysis of action as dynamic transformation of the present. In MacIver's theorizing a unity of meaningful or symbolic and temporal aspects of social phenomena is obvious. MacIver's criticism of the methodology of social research focused on analysis of variables was in agreement with criticism of scientific mechanism offered by Bergson. He studied temporal varieties of existence of events, processes and cultural objects, and especially the various ways of entering time through society, history and culture. MacIver made temporality of action the basic and key problem. He should be considered a symbolic interactionist, like Florian Znaniecki and Pitirim Sorokin.