"The author does not want to confine positivism to an intellectual category but rather wants to expand the words application to include any kind of what he calls positive thinking and behavior. He speaks, for instance, of the reification and materialization of the positive mind in the artifacts of contemporary technological civilization. Cars, computers, skyscrapers, etc., which have been built using scientific knowledge, are the embodiments of the positive mind. The span of the project, from philosophy to material culture, shows how ambitious the book is. It begins with a definition of positivism, moves to the narration of particular expressions of positivism in the history of thought, from Hume to Logical Positivism, considers positivism in juxtaposition to other philosophical schools and traditions (e.g., Marxism, pragmatism, critical theory, critical rationalism, analytic philosophy, historical philosophy of science, Nietzsche and Heidegger, postmodern authors) and concludes with the influence of the positive mind on cultural phenomena such as law, science, art, politics, religion and everyday life. The most original part of the book is the part devoted to the impact of positivism on its critics and rivals. The book addresses a general audience and is informative and quite thorough in that respect". * Metascience * "The fundamental virtue of Nekraass work is his clear realization that positivism is far more influential than all disavowals would make it seem. Indeed, as Nekraas rightly argues, positivism silently continues to color research programs and theories across the social sciences and humanities. What Nekraas dubs the 'positive mind' (or the philosophical attitude of positivism) is still far more relevant and influential than many would like to admit. Nekraas is at his best lucidly reconstructing numerous philosophies within the larger stream of the positivist tradition and drawing interesting distinctions between the many varieties of positivism (including socially progressive nineteenthcentury forms versus more logically technical forms in the twentieth). He also is admirably aware of the fact that positivism has always been a deeply political movement, with strong ambitions to either radically change or substantively reform major features of human social and ethical life by enthroning the sciences as authoritative." * Review of Politics *
