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As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world's processes become

disenchanted (...) and (...) simply 'are' and 'happen' but no longer signify anything.

As a consequence, there is a growing demand that the world (...) be subjected

to an order that is significant and meaningful (Max Weber) 

 The ‘truth’ of a theory does not boil down to its reliability but also involves

the nature of its selective perspective on the world (Alvin W. Gouldner) 

Dick Houtman (Utrecht, 1963) is Professor of Cultural Sociology at the Centre for Rotterdam Cultural Sociology (CROCUS) at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is a member of the editorial boards of Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Politics and Religion, Sociologie, and Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion. With Susanne Janssen, he co-directs the research master Sociology of Culture, Media and the Arts, a joint initiative by researchers from Erasmus University’s Departments of Sociology (Faculty of Social Sciences) and Media and Arts and Culture Studies (Faculty of History and Arts).

Dick Houtman’s principal research interest is cultural change in the West since the 1960s, particularly the emergence of a new political culture in which cultural rather than class issues are central, processes of religious purification and revitalization, the Romantic quest for authenticity, and the disenchantment of science. As a cultural sociologist, he advocates a purification of sociology, aimed at exposing intellectual quests for 'true' meaning, solidly grounded beyond culture and history, as moral discourse disguised as science.

Dick Houtman considers himself neither a social theorist, nor a methodologist, but firmly believes that the cross-fertilization of theoretical ideas and empirical research provides the only feasible road to socially relevant and theoretically meaningful sociological knowledge. As to teaching in higher education, his philosophy is simple enough: students should not be made to reproduce other people’s ideas, but trained to think for themselves and conduct empirical research.

Last updated in December 2011