To those who first encountered British sociology in the early Seventies, as I did, the discipline seemed infinitely more exciting than its counterpart across the Atlantic. Perhaps exhausted by the unravelling of the Parsonian system, American sociology had retreated from the pursuit of social theory toward the perfection of quantitative technique and the practice of microsociology. Each had its uses, but neither seemed to take up the challenge that the classical sociologists, like Marx, Weber and Durkheim, had posed for the field: namely, to describe the relations that held societies together and to explain the processes whereby these might continue or change.

LRB 28 June 1990 | PDF Download