sociology and the englishness of english social theory

Sociology and the Englishness of English Social TheoryAuthor(s): Krishan KumarSource: Sociological Theory, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Mar., 2001), pp. 41-64Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/223291 .

Accessed: 09/05/2014 16:15

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toSociological Theory.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 16:15:29 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=asa

http://www.jstor.org/stable/223291?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Sociology and the Englishness of English Social Theory*

KRISHAN KUMAR

University of Virginia

Although England has a rich tradition of social and political thought, sociology does notfigure strongly in this tradition. Several influential accounts-such as those by Noel Annan, Philip Abrams, and Perry Anderson-exist to explain this fact. I examine these accounts and, while largely agreeing with the explanations, question whether we should accept the authors' conclusions. In particular, we need to ask whether England was so different from other countries in this respect. Moreover, even if sociology was weak in England, does this mean that the contribution of English social theory was also weak? What alternative traditions of social thought might exist? In examining the English case, we may get some insight not just into the "peculiarities of the English" but also into the way in which the history of sociology has come to be written and into some of the assumptions underlying the nature of sociology as a discipline.

By the English way of looking at things, a tree must be known by its fruits, and

theory judged by practice. A truth has no value unless it leads to useful applications in practice ... Knowledge is necessary, not for its own sake but as a basis for action.

Hippolyte Taine ([1868-1870] 1958:248)

Among a people who consider their institutions everything they ought to be, nothing can incite thought to apply itself to social matters.

Emile Durkheim ([1915] 1960:383)

Many of the best practitioners in Britain were sociologists without knowing it. Noel Annan (1991:348)

AN OLD QUESTION: WHY NO SOCIOLOGY IN ENGLAND?

In his engaging account of the rise of sociology in nineteenth-century Europe, Wolf Lep- enies (1988) makes the familiar though essentially correct observation that while France

developed a strong sociological tradition, and Germany was well on the way to doing so until thrown off course by the Nazi experience, in England a dominant literary and mor- alistic influence severely constricted the sociological imagination. For reasons of national

history or institutional prominence, certain social science disciplines (not always so called or so regarded) continued their vigorous development. This was true above all of economics ("political economy") but also of law and jurisprudence, reflecting the importance of constitutional developments. Political theory and political philosophy, reinvigorated by a strand of English Hegelianism, also continued to thrive, though they never regained the

*This is a revised version of a paper first given in the Theory Section of the 14th World Congress of Sociology, held in Montreal, Canada, July 27-August 1, 1998. I thank all the participants at the session for their helpful comments, especially Jiri Musil, Ken Thompson, and Peter McMylor. Thanks also to the editor and three anonymous reviewers for Sociological Theory, who raised some good questions and helped to make the argument tighter and more focused. Address correspondence to: Krishan Kumar, Department of Sociology, University of Virginia, 539 Cabell Hall, P.O. Box 400766, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4766, e-mail: [email protected].

Sociological Theory 19:1 March 2001 ? American Sociological Association. 1307 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005-4701



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

heights reached in the era of Bentham and J. S. Mill, not to mention that of Hobbes and Locke. Most strikingly, and most relevant from the point of view of sociology, there was the development of anthropology, in the hands of Tylor, Maine, McLennan, Lubbock, Frazer, and ultimately-stemming from a very un-English provenance-Malinowski. But not only was anthropology closely tied, intellectually and practically, to the fact of empire. Its origins in evolutionism, and its concern with the exotic and "irrational," made it an unpromising bedfellow for sociology; and by the time Malinowski arrived on the scene anthropology was already established, institutionally and intellectually, as a separate discipline, indifferent to and for the most part condescending toward the pretensions of sociology.

Sociology cannot be said to have been wholly absent from the nineteenth-century English scene. After all was not Herbert Spencer a household name throughout Europe and indeed beyond, a fit antagonist for Durkheim, and the venerable sage to whom the Japanese turned when in the 1890s they sought Western guidance on their new constitution (Peel 1971:233)? Then there was H. T. Buckle, another thinker with a European-wide reputation, whose History of Civilization not only played, as Julien Freund says, "a determining role" in early German sociology but came upon Vilfredo Pareto "like a bolt of lightning" and appeared to him "the ne plus ultra of reasoning applied to the social sciences" (Freund 1979:150, 185 n). John Stuart Mill, admirer of Comte and Tocqueville, might also make a passable candidate as a "founding father of English sociology"-if such an idea did not sound quaint. And behind all English social thought of this time was the fertilizing influence of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment-the writings of Smith, Hume, Kames, Ferguson, and Millar that via such journals as the Edinburgh Review had become the intellectual legacy of all thinking Englishmen and -women. Here surely was the breed- ing ground for a native sociology, as could be seen by the generous borrowing from the Scottish thinkers in the works of continental European theorists such as Hegel and Marx.

And what of Edmund Burke, the British (sc. English)1 writer who had the most powerful influence on continental social thought in the nineteenth century? His stress on society as opposed to government and the state makes him one of the most promising candidates for the title of (a) founding father of English sociology. But, apart from some influence on Coleridge and certain other English conservatives, Burke's sociological thought was never firmly incorporated into the English intellectual tradition. Perhaps, as with Swift, Shaw, and Wilde, it was his very Irishness that made it difficult for native English thought to assimilate him (see, e.g., O'Brien 1982:41). Certainly, as with these other writers, he seems to have made a far deeper impact on continental than on English thought.

It is clear enough at any rate that English social theory in the nineteenth century was not bereft of ancestry-indeed few other countries could boast of one so rich or fertile. It is equally clear that the old charge is true: England did not produce sociological thinkers comparable to those of France, Germany, the United States, or even Italy or Russia. There is no English Marx, Weber, Simmel, Comte, Tocqueville, Durkheim, or Pareto-not even a Gurevitch or Sorokin. The nearest thing to these is Herbert Spencer, and great as Spen- cer's achievement was, it left no legacy and gave rise to no tradition that could be developed. Indeed for many would-be English social scientists it was precisely Spencer's thinking-his evolutionism and his individualism-that together with the weight of his

'This essay is mainly concerned with English social thought. But one has to acknowledge the frequent and familiar annexation by the English of thinkers hailing from the rest of the United Kingdom-Burke and Hume being prime examples. That the rest of the world has commonly endorsed this practice, rendering British "English," only compounds the problem. While this can matter very much in certain contexts-for instance, on the question of the national identities of the different parts of the United Kingdom-I do not think this otherwise indefensible procedure particularly affects the present discussion. The writers discussed-for example, Noel Annan-move blithely between "English" and "British" without apparently feeling that it matters, and in this case I think they are right.

42



SOCIOLOGY AND THE ENGLISHNESS OF ENGLISH SOCIAL THEORY

prestige led them away from sociology altogether, toward other fields. The sociology that was constructed-piecemeal, fragmented, narrowly empirical-lacked any unifying or systematic theory, precisely the element that Spencer had provided almost too well. In that sense "modern British sociology was built, more than anything else, as a defense against Spencer" (Abrams 1968:67; cf. Peel 1971:224-38)-a tragic loss of opportunity. After his death-indeed for a considerable time before it-Spencer was forgotten in England with a completeness that in the light of his European reputation still seems astonishing. Retro- spectively, Spencer appears a very un-English thinker: not because England does not produce thinkers like him-Buckle is another example, as is perhaps Arnold Toynbee in our century-but because there seems to be something in English intellectual life that resists theorizing on the grand scale, at least as far as human affairs are concerned.2

Why this great lacuna in the English intellectual tradition? Why did the country that became the first urban society in history, and launched the world on the course of indus- trialization that it still follows, not develop a form of inquiry appropriate to these momen- tous developments? Why-at least until very recently-no sociology in England? Several interesting attempts have been made to answer this question, and in what follows I consider some of them in detail. Their general tone and tenor, and indeed the main impetus for raising the question at all, are a lament for a lost or missing tradition of thought. English culture has suffered immeasurably, so the claim is, from the absence of sociology-from the lack, that is, of a discipline that takes systematic inquiry into the nature of society, and especially of modern society, as its object. The loss has been both intellectual and institutional. Not only are there virtually no English thinkers among the "founding fathers" of sociology; when sociology did develop in England, after the Second World War, it was almost wholly dependent on foreign models, mostly American, for the substance of its theoretical and practical work in universities and research institutes.

I do not in the main want to disagree with this view. The absence of sociology from English intellectual life for most of the past century has been a serious weakness. It has severely limited the English contribution to twentieth-century social thought. The loss is particularly noticeable when comparisons are made with past English contributions. Don- ald Levine, for instance, in a wide-ranging account of the origins and growth of sociology, gives pride of place to Thomas Hobbes as "the central foundational figure for modern social science." The theoretical frameworks not just of sociology, he claims, but of all the other social sciences, "consist of elaborations, revisions, or replacements of the Hobbesian conception of social science" (Levine 1995:121). The melancholy fact is, as he shows, that so far as sociology is concerned it was not Hobbes's native land, England, that led the way in this work of criticism and elaboration but thinkers from the European continent and North America.

So there is clearly something to regret. But that is not the whole story. There were good reasons why sociology did not develop-good not only in the sense of making intelligible this fact but, in a more positive vein, in pointing us toward those forms of thought (and action) that did arise in response to the challenges of the times. That these did not amount to sociology in the currently received sense is undeniable; so too is the fact that sociology might have been a better tool for the purpose. But in the pressing circumstances of the time-a new kind of society facing unprecedented problems, for which there were simply no time-honored solutions-we might feel that the intellectual responses were not so neg-

2And mainly in modern times. There seems to have been no such inhibition in earlier centuries, as the names Hooker, Hobbes, and Locke eloquently testify. Herbert Butterfield (1944:7) long ago plausibly suggested that part of the reason for the English suspicion of grand theory sprang from their revulsion against the French Revolution and the abstract theories of the philosophes that were supposedly its cause. For an influential view of the contrast between French and English styles of thought, noting the dominance of empiricism in England, see Taine ([1868/1870] 1958:242-77); see also for this feature of the modern English intellectual tradition Thomp- son (1978:56-64); Collini (1991:342-73).

43



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

ligible or irrelevant. Certainly that was the feeling of many foreign observers, who were sufficiently impressed by the English way in thought and policy to seek to emulate it in their own societies.

There is a further point. Though sociology did not take root in England, other relevant intellectual disciplines did. These included the study of literature, especially English literature, and the study of history, especially English history. Both these subjects, as systematic disciplines, were relative latecomers on the English scene-later than most people realize. They established themselves in the universities only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at just about the time that sociology was being institutionalized elsewhere, notably in the United States. Why were these disciplines successful in England, when sociology was not? What does this tell us about forms of national development and forms of thought?

One of the purposes of the following discussion is to examine this question in the English case. The antipathy to sociology-or what was perceived to be sociology-has to be understood in relation to some dominant characteristics of the national culture, at least as this had come to be defined by the nineteenth century. By those criteria, sociology did not fit (though other forms of social inquiry did and were vigorously prosecuted). By contrast, literature and history appeared to go along the grain of the national culture-to be consonant not just with what was seen to be its strengths but what were seen to be its peculiar needs, at a particular stage of development. Moreover, since both literature and history were in England deeply involved with social and political issues, they could in certain respects stand for a peculiarly English sociology-sociology by another name, perhaps, or sociology by stealth, or "implicit sociology." 3 They could, that is, offer sociological understanding along with what was often seen as their more explicit purpose, to give moral and practical guidance. Building on this tradition, I shall argue, later intellectuals working within these disciplines were able to make important contributions to social theory. English sociology, in the strict sense, arrived very late; but that does not mean that the English intellectual tradition lacked sociological awareness and understanding, nor was incapable of making its own offering to sociology, even though much of this took place outside the confines of formal academic sociology. In a sense it was the very richness of the offering that crowded out sociology and drew many intellectuals into history and literature who in other countries might have gone into sociology.

The place of literature and history in the national culture, and their sociological contribution, will be considered later. First we must look at the fate of sociology itself and the reasons why it found it so difficult to establish itself in English culture.

THE OBSTACLE: INDIVIDUALISM, RATIONALISM, AND REFORM

"Even today Weber and Durkheim are not names which penetrate and suffuse the consciousness of the British intelligentsia" (Annan 1959:9). So declared Noel Annan some years ago in a famous lecture delivered in memory of the first professor of sociology at London Uni- versity, L. T. Hobhouse. As portrayed by Annan and others, in their account of why English intellectuals (the very word of course being suspect in English ears, as redolent of continental abstraction) had not developed a sociological consciousness, Hobhouse himself exemplified the main problem. He had tried valiantly to fuse English liberalism with continental Hegelianism, but his English moralism and Protestantism kept getting in the way of the more systematic, collectivist vision that he also sought to promote. Striving to resist the individualism of the social Darwinism that was rampant in late-nineteenth-century English thought,

31 owe this felicitous term to one of the anonymous reviewers of this article. See further the discussion below on "concealed sociology."

44




he was unable to throw off the deeper heritage of evolutionary progressivism that charac- terized English thinking in the second half of the nineteenth century (Burrow 1966; Collini 1979:147-70; Sanderson 1992:1-35). The peculiarly English brand of "ethical socialism" that he elaborated-a concoction compounded of "moral collectivism" and "Idealist teleology" (Collini 1979:253)-may have avoided the conventional forms of individualism, but since for Hobhouse socialism was merely "advanced Liberalism" (Collini 1979:129) his thinking inevitably carried many of the individualist premises of liberal thought. In any case it proved wholly incapable of providing the tools for a systematic sociology. Since Hobhouse was for the first three decades of the twentieth century the only professor of sociology in England, and since his successor Morris Ginsberg, equally solitary, loyally carried on in the following two decades the same tradition of thought as his teacher, it is not difficult to see why soci-

ology should not have developed as an academic discipline in England ( Shils 1970:768-70; Halsey 1982:152-53, 159-60; Hawthorn 1987:111).4

Hobhouse was simply one of the many victims of what Annan, using the term in a somewhat eccentric fashion, called the dominant tradition of English "positivism." By this he meant, as is common with the term, a scientific approach to human behavior; but, more debatably, he associates it with a resolutely individualistic approach. English thinkers, argued Annan, had from the seventeenth century onward constructed a model of the rational individual making choices on the basis of the dictates of reason and conscience. The great expression of this view, and the one that ensured its triumph in English thought, was classical economics: the branch of social science that since the eighteenth century had been the one in which the En-

glish most excelled and that had achieved paramount and paradigmatic status.5 Such a dominant influence, taken with the laissez-faire policies that had apparently brought England to the pinnacle of economic and political success in the nineteenth century, had made it almost

impossible for alternative accounts of the relation of the individual to society to establish themselves. Even Spencer, despite his heroic efforts to construct a theory of the social system, no-

toriously ended up privileging the individual over society: a case perhaps of his liberal politics overwhelming his intellectual system, as was to happen with Hobhouse and other English Hegelians.6 So too Tylor's evolutionary anthropology was governed by the belief that dif-

4It is telling that the first and, for half a century, the only chair of sociology in England-the Martin White chair established in 1906 at the London School of Economics-should be endowed by a private philanthropist; that it should be offered to an Oxford classics don turned journalist (L. T. Hobhouse); and that the first sociology chair at one of the two ancient universities-the Cambridge chair, established in 1969-should be given to a social anthropologist (John Barnes): a not uncommon practice in the new sociology departments established in the 1950s and 1960s, as for instance the appointment of Paul Stirling as professor of sociology at the University of Kent, Michael Banton at Bristol, and Peter Worsley at Hull.

In 1925 the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, an American institution wishing to help its less well endowed English brethren and perhaps also to spread the light of the new thinking, offered Cambridge two chairs, one in political science and the other in sociology. Cambridge accepted the first (Ernest Barker became the first professor of political science, though characteristically his chair was placed in the history faculty) and rejected the second (Soffer 1982:779). Cambridge later relented, but Oxford held out for much longer. Only in 1999 did it finally decide to establish a chair in sociology, though the sociologist A. H. Halsey was given a chair in "social and administrative studies" there in the 1970s.

5It is probably right to point out-as did one of the anonymous reviewers of this article-that Annan here, as do many others, thinks of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations as establishing the pattern of English classical economics but fails to consider it in the context of Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, which severely qualifies the individualism of the former work by exhibiting the mechanism of sympathy that makes the individual take into account the responses of others. This may be one respect in which the differences between Scottish and English thought are important, though given the general incorporation of the Wealth of Nations in English thought and the comparative neglect of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, it does not seriously affect Annan's general point.

6It is true that Spencer himself regarded his evolutionism and his individualism as two sides of the same scientific coin (the theory of progress through natural selection and the "survival of the fittest"). But as most students of his thought acknowledge, the passionate advocacy of individualism (by which he largely meant noninterference by the state) in his later writings-see, for example, Man versus the State (1884)-went far beyond what in principle was proper to its place in a supposedly scientific theory. See Peel (1971:185-91, 234-35); Collini (1979:26-27, 154-55); Hawthorn (1987:90-104).

45



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

ferences in customs and beliefs could be explained in terms of individual psychology, while the relentless rationalism of Frazer's The Golden Bough, with its theme that all religion is a gigantic fraud, ruled out any functional or other sociological explanation of religious beliefs and practices-along the lines, say, of Durkheim's Elementary Forms. The immense influence of The Golden Bough on English intellectual life in the first part of the twentieth century was a distinct deterrent to the growth of an outlook that accepted nonrational and nonpsychological explanations of human behavior and beliefs. Even Malinowski, who did so much to break the hold of positivism on English anthropology, nevertheless gained wider acceptance in the culture at large mainly because he remained a prisoner of nineteenth- century mechanistic ideas (see Leach 1957).

English individualism and rationalism were complemented by that moralism that many foreigners have always noted as a hallmark of English writing, both fictional and nonfic- tional. Annan, along with many other observers, sees this as the consequence of England's unique history of peaceful and gradual change in modern times. "To see individual and social action in a single framework of right and wrong is possible only in a country with a peaceful history; it is impossible where there is no general moral consensus and where the claim of one group competes violently with that of other groups" (Annan 1959:15; see also Taine [1865/1870] 1958:258-71; Bergonzi 1979). While not disdaining morality in social and political theorizing, Annan observed that "the passion ... in this country for laying down how men ought to behave and how society ought to be reorganized in order that they may behave better" had led to the neglect of the new techniques for describing how in fact men do behave and of what might be involved in trying to bring about comprehensive social reorganization (Annan 1959:18).7 For Durkheim too, England's peaceful evolution and the self-satisfaction that it bred were precisely what had inhibited in England that self-reflectiveness that was essential for sociological thinking. The contrary condition of France, he noted with some complacency, was what made of sociology "an essentially French science" (Durkheim [1915] 1960:376).

Annan's account of English intellectual development has been strikingly influential. So far as English sociology goes, it has been complemented, rather than replaced, by two further important contributions, those of Philip Abrams (1968) and Perry Anderson ([1968] 1992a). Abrams largely accepts Annan's picture, but whereas Annan took the English intellectual tradition to task, Abrams puts the stress on the institutional tradition. The reason why sociology did not develop in England, according to Abrams, was that the unique permeability and responsiveness of British government-relative at least to other governments of the time-made it appear unnecessary to develop a special science of society. The tools to hand-in the concepts of classical political economy, the strong statistical tradition, and the beliefs in progress and the possibilities of reform-seemed to intellectuals and administrators alike sufficient to enable them to get on with the urgent task of ordering and reforming the newly developing urban-industrial society; and En- glish political and social institutions offered no real barrier to such an intent. In bodies with apparently promising titles such as the Statistical Society of London, the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, and the Sociological Society, intellectuals, politicians, civil servants, and civic-minded philanthropists, clergy, and doc- tors met and debated schemes of social reform, many of which they had the satisfaction of seeing put on the statute book. They rarely debated social theory, for what was the

7 It is perhaps worth noting that Annan's account of the reasons for the absence of an English sociology largely reprises that of Talcott Parsons in The Structure of Social Action (see Parsons [1937] 1949: esp. 87-125). It is from Parsons too that Annan appears to derive his characterization of positivism as "individualistic."

46




need?8 The orderly progress of English society, under the beneficent direction of a re- sponsive and responsible elite, seemed capable of indefinite extension. "Social action without social theory" is how Abrams (1968:39) characterizes the "ameliorism" that was the principal feature of nineteenth-century English society; "boring from within" was the rendition of the Fabians, the most representative and theoretically sophisticated of the groups that pursued the strategy of operating according to, rather than against, the grain of national institutional life.

The casualty in all this was English sociology. Theoretical and practical energies went elsewhere. As Abrams puts it: "[English] society provided numerous outlets for social concern of a legitimate, satisfying, and, indeed, seductive nature; all these were disincen- tives to role-innovation.... Performing administrative and intelligence functions for government soaked up energies which might have gone toward sociology had such opportunities not been there" (Abrams 1968:4-5). It was not so much, or not only, the English intellectual tradition that discouraged the growth of a native sociology. It was the very system of British government, as it had evolved since the settlement of 1688, that was the obstacle, by the fact that it made reform seem relatively easy and unproblematic and offered English intellectuals practical and political roles that were hard to come by in neighboring countries. The idea of social "intelligence" became not so much a matter of understanding society in all its dimensions as of giving practical guidance on what were seen as largely technical problems for government. "The [English] intelligentsia, positively oriented to government and enmeshed in the country's social, ecclesiastical, and political elites, found a solution which directly discouraged the growth of sociology. They reduced the idea of intelligence to a matter of facts and figures, creating an empirical tradition of which the great monuments are government inquiries, massive but intellectually sterile levers of social reform. Statistician, administrator, reform politician- these were the roles the system encouraged" (Abrams 1968:5; see also 148-49; cf. Hawthorn 1987:110-11; Lepenies 1988:154). It was symptomatic that, when forced to choose between the department of sociology and that of social administration at the newly founded London School of Economics, the more able and active recruits to social science, such as R. H. Tawney and Clement Atlee, chose the latter. In this they marked out the future. Booth, Rowntree, the Webbs, Geddes, Galton, Beveridge: these, rather than Spencer, Hobhouse, or Ginsberg, are the representative figures of the English tradition of social science.9

8 Speaking of the work of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science [NAPSS], whose annual

five-day congresses between 1857 and 1886 attracted great public attention and whose members included many of the leading public figures in the land, Abrams says: "What is missing is any developed concept of the social system, any extended or general analysis of structured interactions between individuals or classes, any theory of the social basis of the state. Where there is a model of society it is typically an administrative one suffused with moral judgment" (Abrams 1968:48-49). For a more charitable reading of the activities of the NAPSS, which nevertheless concurs in the main with Abrams's characterization, see McGregor (1957:152-54); Goldman (1986, 1987); Yeo (1996:128-37, 148-80). Yeo remarks that "the Association was the first middle-class forum in Britain to welcome the public voice of women"; it was also unusually open to a broad range of working-class views and voices. She too though notes the "moratorium on theory" (1996:129, 157).

9 The split between sociology and social administration continued to mark the London School of Economics for most of this century, with most of the important names appearing in the latter department-Richard Titmuss, Peter Townsend, David Donnison, Brian Abel-Smith. It was entirely characteristic that the leading British sociologist at the school, T. H. Marshall, should for most of his time there hold a chair of social administration rather than one of sociology and that Ginsberg's successor in the Martin White chair of sociology should be a demog- rapher, David Glass, who had almost no interest in social theory.

At a lower and more personal level: The William Ellis School in north London, which I attended as a pupil, was founded in 1869 to further the principles of William Ellis, a Victorian follower of John Stuart Mill and one of the pioneers of social science education. Unusually for an English school in the 1950s and 1960s, the school taught government and economics-but it was inconceivable that it would teach sociology!

47



If Annan stresses ideas and Abrams institutions, Perry Anderson ([1968] 1992a, [1990] 1992b) puts the accent on class. For Anderson, classical European sociology was the product of a bourgeois class in its engagement, on the one hand, with the traditional agrarian ruling class and, on the other, with the challenge posed by the new industrial working class. Sociology was the "synthetic" or "totalizing" response to both aristocratic conservatism and Marxism. The condition of continental societies, marked by violent class con- flicts, allowed for the development of both sociology and Marxism (and, as Karl Mannheim noted, a reinvigorated, combative conservatism).

In England by contrast, Anderson argues, the industrial bourgeoisie emerged and developed as a subordinate member of a composite ruling class headed by an agrarian aristoc- racy that had already vigorously and successfully embraced capitalism. At the same time the English working class and its supporters adopted Labourism, rather than Marxism, as their ideology, thereby removing any revolutionary threat to the capitalist order and its principal beneficiaries. Hence, asserts Anderson in an interesting variant on Abrams's account, there was no structural requirement for sociology in England. Unlike their continental counterparts, the English bourgeoisie saw no need for developing a justificatory ideology.

Britain . . . lacking-unlike fin-de-siecle Germany, France or Italy-the spur of an

insurgent socialism, missed the moment of a Weber, Durkheim or Pareto; and never knew the Marxist reprise of a Lukacs, Sartre or Gramsci. Its dominant bloc had no interest in, or need of, any social theory liable to look too analytically at the social formation it governed as a natural kingdom. Piecemeal empirical research, serving practical adjustment or partial reform, was all that was required. (Anderson [1990] 1992b:205; see also [1968] 1992a:56-57, 92-93; and cf. Hawthorn 1987:169-70)10

Annan, Abrams, and Anderson differ in their emphases, but together they present a remarkably coherent, consistent, and largely persuasive account of the failure of sociology to develop as a distinct discipline in England. Later scholars have rounded out the picture without adding anything essentially new (see, e.g., Soffer 1982; Goldman 1987; Yeo 1996). Reba Soffer thus sums up the consequences of this failure.

After a promising beginning in 1903 [the founding of the Sociological Society], sociology in Britain virtually had disappeared by the outbreak of the Great War. In the long period between the eclipse of Herbert Spencer in the 1890s and the revival of sociology in the 1950s, sociology hardly existed in the British Isles as an intellectual enterprise or even a series of pragmatic prescriptions. In Britain, aside from the London School of Economics where L. T. Hobhouse and his successor Morris Ginsberg taught an evolutionary sociology, there were no academic courses in sociology, no synthetic theorists, no genuinely professional associations, no commanding journal of sociological work or opinion, and no sociologists. Within just four years after its enthusiastic launching in 1903, the field of sociology declined abso-

10While revolution was never a serious threat to the modern ruling order in England, and therefore no systematic alternative theory to Marxism needed to be elaborated, there was certainly a sense that the disorder of early industrial society had to be confronted to head off potential discontent. Abrams shows (1968:58-61, 84-88) that insofar as continental sociology impinged on English social thought in the nineteenth century, it was the work of Comte and, especially, Frederic Le Play, that was most influential. This was because what both offered was a theory of "social peace" through social reform, as an antidote to class conflict and socialism (see also on this Sanford Elwitt in Elwitt and Goldman 1988:209-14. Elwitt includes Durkheim in this perspective). On early English sociology as a response to the socialist challenge, see also Yeo (1996:235-37).

48 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY




lutely in Britain both as a theoretical and as an applied study. Until after the Second World War there was no academic or public demand for sociologists. In the long and barren hiatus between 1907 and the 1950s, only schools of social work survived. (Soffer 1982:768; cf. Yeo 1996:233-37).

This is a fair and largely accurate summary, though some may demur at the implied slight to the native tradition of empirical social science (see, e.g., Kent 1981). Sociology was a blank space in English intellectual life in the first half of this century. The questions are: How much does this matter? Was it so different elsewhere? Does England suffer by comparison with the greater theoretical sophistication of other cultures? Is social theory in any case to be equated with sociology?

ENGLISH EXCEPTIONALISM?

Science and reform, it is clear, were conjoined in the Victorian mind."l This made the English somewhat impatient with abstract social theory. Were they so wrong? English society was the first in the world that had to deal with the novel problems of industrial- ization. The urgent need seemed to be to do something, and to do it quickly, to alleviate the condition of the great body of people subjected to its unprecedented stresses. This was the contribution of Victorian "ameliorism," a tradition continued in the twentieth century by a host of social scientists who saw it as their task to link their studies to the work of public policy and social reform. William Beveridge and social security, Richard Titmuss and the national health service, Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith in relation to poverty pro- grams, A. H. Halsey and the reform of English selective education-these were the kinds of thinkers who exemplified the English traditions of social science.12 Together with their Victorian forbears they delivered a British welfare state that, with all its deficiencies, has been widely admired for its humaneness and breadth of compassion. It was created, moreover, with a degree of orderliness and consensus that is remarkable when comparisons are made with similar efforts elsewhere. Who might not feel that the sacrifice of academic sociology was a price worth paying?

This feeling is heightened when we see that academic sociology elsewhere, especially in Europe, was at least in part a response to the failure of social reform in those countries. Lawrence Goldman has provocatively argued, in a series of articles (1983, 1986, 1987, 1998), that Abrams's and Anderson's lament for the absence of sociology in England might be better converted into a glow of satisfaction that England accomplished what others could only aspire to. All Western intellectuals in the nineteenth century, he claims, were seized with the same sense of urgency as the English; and all conceived social science as the tool to facilitate reform. Positivism, as the dominant tendency in all European societies, is a case in point. "Savoir pour pouvoir" was the slogan of Comtean positivism-or, as Comte himself put it in the Cours de Philosophie Positive, "science, d'ou prevoyance: prevoyance, d'ou action." Thus in considering the case of the English National Associa- tion for the Promotion of Social Science-a prime example for Abrams of English policy- oriented "ameliorism"-we have to see that its aims were no different from that of the most influential school of continental social theory.

l "A notion of objective science for reform . . . might ... be called the dominant British tradition until the 1950s" (Yeo 1996:300).

12For brief accounts of the work of these social scientists see Kent (1981); Halsey (1982); Bulmer (1985). One might also of course wish to include in this list John Maynard Keynes-one of the two pillars, with Beveridge, of the British welfare state-though unlike Beveridge and the others Keynes was also a major contributor to theory.

49



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

The Social Science Association must be located in the context of this nineteenth- century positivism where science was to lead to control. The very idea of a science of society had emerged in late eighteenth century France as "a conception of a unified science of public policy" [Brian Head], and it retained those instrumental associations even as it crossed frontiers and entered public consciousness in Britain half a century later. To divide between science and reform is to fail to appreciate a dis- tinguishing characteristic of the tradition. (Goldman 1987:149)

But where England largely succeeded in marrying "science" and "reform," the oppo- site was the case on the European continent and even in the United States. In considering the efforts of the American Social Science Association, founded in Boston in 1865 on the English model, the German Verein fir Sozialpolitik, started in 1872 as a reform association by liberal thinkers and publicists, and even the Franco-Belgian International Social Science Association, also modeled on the English example, Goldman finds a record of marked failure to influence policy making in their respective countries in any serious way. The consequence was a turn to academic sociology, to "theory" as a refuge from the unaccommodating world of practice. This is precisely how Marianne Weber, for instance, saw the evolution of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik. She noted its early involvement with practical politics, its attempts to influence legislators. "But when at the beginning of the eighties Bismarck started to engage in social politics, thus reducing the prospects for a direct influence upon government machinery, the Association gave up its activities of agitation and replaced propagandistic with academic discussion. The accent was shifted to strictly scientific investigations of current problems" (quoted in Goldman 1987:164).

The message seems clear. The organization of the English Social Science Association was, pace Annan, Anderson, and others, "no 'peculiarity of the English,' no exemplifica- tion of a stubborn indigenous empiricism, but an institutional example and an intellectual inspiration to similar liberal constituencies in other countries." It offered a model of the relationship between social science and reform politics that, largely successful in England, proved unattainable elsewhere. "In this model, sociology only found an academic haven when, for a variety of reasons, it failed to find its place in the world of affairs. It was not that a reformist social science 'frustrated' the development of an academic sociology: rather, 'sociology' had its origins in the frustration of reformism" (Goldman 1987:168, 171).

Goldman does not so much, as he thinks, turn Abrams's argument on its head as give it a novel gloss. He agrees in fact with Abrams that sociology was "unnecessary" in England because there was a more commanding model of inquiry available, one that yielded more satisfaction than pure theory. The difference is that what Abrams (and Annan and Ander- son) regrets as a "failure" of English culture Goldman is more inclined to see as a matter for congratulation. The English model, far from being something that needs apology, was in fact widely envied and emulated by European and American liberals. It represented a triumph of "Englishness" and of the English aptitude for mixing social inquiry with practical politics.

Goldman thus ironically reinstates the "peculiarity of the English," despite his intention to emphasize common concerns in all Western societies. But he does so largely to protest at the unhistorical and anachronistic nature of most attempts-including that of Abrams-to write the history of sociology (see especially Goldman 1983:587-89). Most of these are efforts at a retrospective reconstruction of their discipline, as currently conceived and practiced. The intention is to discover the "origins" or "seeds" of the subject, in the fre-

50




quently disparate and disconnected intellectual elements that actually existed at any one place or time. These elements-or, as Robert Nisbet (1967) has put it, "unit-ideas"-are then bundled together to form a "sociological tradition."

The English case, as Goldman presents it, shows the dangers of this procedure. England is contrasted with more "successful" models of the development of sociology elsewhere and is berated for its backwardness. Not only does this ignore the actual history of the matter, which is that several societies sought to emulate the English model and only turned to academic sociology when these efforts failed, but, more important, it neglects the variety and specificity of the different forms of "social science" in the nineteenth century, and of their relationships to their respective societies. Sociology was not some unified, teleo- logically willed, collective project of the European mind. It emerged out of various attempts to make sense of the new kind of industrial society and to harness social knowledge to ameliorative ends. The English model was one such-a particularly significant and widely noted one, as it happened, since England was the first society to struggle with the novel problems of industrialism (as Tocqueville, Marx, and Weber in their different ways acknowledged). That it did not, in the end, give rise to the academic study of sociology may have become a cause for regret for certain English intellectuals later, but that should not affect our appreciation of its relevance and legitimacy for its own time or, more important, its considerable success in achieving a goal that seemed to elude many other contemporane- ous societies.13

There is a further way in which the standard accounts of the history of sociology need to be challenged. Goldman largely accepts the conventional view that, while sociology languished in England, it flourished vigorously in other Western societies, notably France, Germany, and the United States. It is indeed implicit in his thesis that sociology was a response to the failure of reform in those societies. But is this too not the stuff of myth? Is it not the product of the same retrospective, "Whiggish" writing of history that he charges Abrams and others with in the English case? Because sociology has come to be a strong presence in the intellectual life of those societies, the tendency has been to construct sociological "traditions" that begin somewhere in the late nineteenth century and are shown- or, more commonly, assumed-to continue in the course of the twentieth (see, e.g., Bot- tomore and Nisbet 1979; Soffer 1982).

The evidence suggests that only in the United States can sociology be truly said to have been institutionalized in the decades around the turn of the century. Europe had the big names-Comte, Spencer, Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Tonnies, Simmel, Pareto-and American sociology was largely indebted, in its early stages at least, to European, especially German, intellectual influences. But the institutional instruments

13 Speaking of nineteenth-century American attempts to learn from the British example, Goldman remarks that it was not only British ideas that Americans admired but also "British ways of organizing and harmonizing social knowledge, expertise and politics. What was respected and replicated was not a philosophy so much as a modus operandi, a method and procedure" (Goldman 1998:23). It was this "method" that American society as much as continental European ones found difficult to institutionalize, and their failure in this respect can plausibly be held to be at least one of the impulses toward a more academic and theoretical form of inquiry. For a critical exchange on this position see Elwitt and Goldman (1988). There is an interesting parallel to Goldman's argument in Steven Seidman's view that "whereas Anglo-American social theory emerged as part of the triumph of liberal civilization, European social theory was elaborated in the context of the failure of liberalism and developed, in part, as its critique" (Seidman 1983:13). The difference here is that Goldman also sees a failure of liberal reformism in America at a critical juncture. A further parallel to Goldman's analysis is Edward Thompson's wide-ranging defense (1978) of the English intellectual tradition against the onslaught of Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, and other New Left critics. Like Goldman he partly concedes the case: "The English experience certainly did not encourage sustained efforts of synthesis: since few intellectuals were thrown into prominence in a conflict with author- ity, few felt the need to develop a systematic critique" (1978:59). But, once more, the argument is that in the conditions of English life and politics such a synthesis was not necessary and other, more relevant, strengths developed.

51



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

for furthering sociology that we associate with the universities of Chicago, Michigan, Wisconsin, and later Columbia and Harvard were conspicuously absent in the European case. As is well known neither Weber, T6nnies, Simmel, nor any of the other leading figures of German sociology ever held a chair of sociology, and their work gave rise to no systematic tradition of teaching and research in sociology. Weber was virtually unknown in the Germany of the 1920s, and the Nazi experience put paid to any further serious sociological work. It was left to the American Talcott Parsons, in The Structure of Social Action ([1937] 1949), to rehabilitate Weber, T6nnies, and the other German sociologists-even for the Germans-and so bless them, retrospectively, as among the "founding fathers" of sociology.

And France and Durkheim? We are accustomed to thinking of France as the one Euro- pean country where sociology did become firmly institutionalized, mainly because of the work of Durkheim, the work of his disciples, and his editorship of L'Annee Sociologique. But we should not forget that Durkheim was for most of his professional career, both at Bordeaux and the Sorbonne, a professor of education, and only in his later years at the Sorbonne was he able to convert this to the title "Professor of Education and Sociology." Moreover, and more important, Durkheim succeeded in establishing sociology in France mainly through his own individual effort, not through institutional provision. He gathered around him a band of enthusiastic disciples, but there were no research careers and no academic posts for them, and most of them did not go on to become professional or academic sociologists. "Hence when Durkheim passed from the scene, the body of interpretation which had developed from his teaching and writing ceased to grow, and French sociology as the study of modern society practically disappeared for more than a quarter of a century" (Shils 1970:767; see also 786-88).14

England, it appears, was not so different after all. Nowhere in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe did sociology establish itself as a serious, systematic discipline in the way that it did in the United States. Sociologists there might be on the continent, in the form of imposing thinkers who thought sociologically, and this marks an important difference from the English scene.'5 But to develop sociology as a discipline European sociology had to await an intellectual Marshall Plan from America, which duly arrived in the post-Second World War period in the writings of Parsons, Merton, Mills, and others. Only then did European universities set up or revive departments of sociology and begin the massive expansion of the subject that continued until the early 1980s. To all intents and purposes sociology in Europe is a postwar phenomenon-which means that, as with much else in postwar Europe, it has a heavy American accent.16

14This is clearly not the place to provide extensive documentation on the sweeping generalizations of this and the previous paragraph. Fortunately there is no real need to do so as they are more or less accepted now, and there are several good general accounts with full references to the relevant studies. Most stimulating I have found Shils (1970); see also Hawthorn (1987: esp. 164-216); Soffer (1982); Lepenies (1988), especially Part III on Ger- many; Mazlish (1989). On Durkheim and French sociology, see Lukes (1973); Clark (1973); Karady (1981). 5 We might therefore say, adapting the old formulation, that the question should be, not so much why no sociology, but why no (or so few) sociologists, in England?

16In this sense I very much agree with Jeffrey Alexander's verdict, contra Richard Munch and certain other contributors to Nedelmann and Sztompka (1993), that "virtually every strand of contemporary European sociological theory builds in fundamental ways upon American postwar thought" (Alexander 1994:6). This does not of course mean that American social thought was purely indigenous. Just as European thinkers, including the Englishman Herbert Spencer, were highly influential in American sociology before the First World War, it has been argued that Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments should be considered an important source of the American school of symbolic interactionism that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, since Smith's work was highly regarded by Cooley and Mead, the founders of the school. The point however is that it was largely in American vessels that the work of these European thinkers was carried back across the Atlantic. For some interesting reflections on "the American tradition," see Levine (1995:251-68)

52




This has certainly been the case in England, which shared in the general European expansion of the subject. Graduate students in sociology in the 1960s and 1970s-of whom I was one-cut their teeth on Parsons, Homans, Blau, Bell, Lipset, Shils, Gouldner, and Goffman. Later came the Marxists: the recovery of Lukacs and Gramsci, and the influence of continental theorists such as Althusser and Habermas. But this then raises again the question: what is specifically English (or British) sociology? If the dominant influences in the postwar period, when sociology finally arrived on the scene in England as in the rest of Europe, have been American and continental European, what if any is the native strand of thought that can be counted English sociology?

ENGLISH SOCIOLOGY TODAY

Writing in 1968, Perry Anderson had this to say about English sociology following the first wave of postwar expansion: "To this day, despite the recent growth of sociology as a formal discipline in England, the record of listless mediocrity and wizened provincialism is unrelieved. The subject is still largely a poor cousin of 'social work' and 'social administration,' the dispirited descendants of Victorian charity" (Anderson [1968] 1992a:53). Twenty years later-in 1990, to be precise-Anderson noted a remarkable change. By now there had emerged "an outstanding indigenous sociology." As representative of this school he instanced the work of Anthony Giddens, Michael Mann, W. G. Runciman, and Ernest Gellner ([1990] 1992b:207).

This is not the place to conduct an assessment or give even a schematic history of postwar English sociology. One simply has to note what is obvious to anyone who reads a representative selection of texts produced by English sociologists over the past 40 years: that the bulk of English sociology has either continued the pattern of Victorian empirical investigation-in the Booth-Rowntree-Galton vein-or has been a response to models and ideas stemming from American and continental European sources (see, e.g., Eldredge 1980; Kent 1981; Abrams et al. 1981; Bulmer 1985; Albrow 1989, 1993). That much important and constructive work has been done under these two heads cannot be doubted. What must be questioned is Anderson's observation that a true "indigenous sociology" has emerged in England, one that is recognizably so to the outside world.

His own selection of representative figures, apart from being somewhat eccentric, makes the point. W. G. Runciman is virtually unknown outside Britain, and even in Britain his works rarely appear on sociology reading lists. Ernest Gellner taught for a while in the sociology department at the London School of Economics, but his post was "with special reference to philosophy" and he later became professor of social anthropology at Cambridge. He has always been better known to philosophers and anthropologists than to sociologists. In any case to pigeonhole so many-sided a thinker-one of that dazzling band of anti-Marxist "white emigres" that settled in England before and after the Second World War (Anderson [1968] 1992a:60-65)-as a native sociologist is seriously to misrepresent his intellectual contribution, whether in England or abroad (see Davis 1991). Mann's multivolume Sources of Social Power (1986- ) is certainly outstanding, but it has not created any kind of intellectual following in England, and Mann himself has continued the work abroad, at the University of California at Los Angeles (where, incidentally, Perry Anderson also seems to have found some kind of intellectual home).

Only Anthony Giddens, of contemporary English sociologists, is of true international stature, a position confirmed by his recent appointment to the directorship of the London School of Economics. Giddens has raised the profile of English sociology as no other

53



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

thinker in this century. But one swallow does not make a summer, and one English so-

ciologist does not make English sociology.17 English sociology may perhaps have es-

caped its "wizened provincialism," but the creative impulses still seem to come from outside.

It has to be said that the failure of English sociology to make much of a mark abroad has been matched by its failure to make much impression within its own national culture. Not

only is what Noel Annan said in 1959 still true-that the English intelligentsia is largely unaware of Weber and Durkheim-it has stoutly resisted Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Touraine, Beck, Habermas, Luhmann, and even Giddens as well.18 The English public has followed suit. A recent account notes that "sociology today scarcely registers with the

public" (Christie 1999:1). This is despite what the author believes to be considerable

sociological thinking and research, of an imaginative and important kind, in England today. But not only has that failed to be communicated to the general public in any forceful way, along the lines, say, of Richard Dawkins's books in biology or Asa Briggs's in history, it has also, according to the author, mostly taken place outside departments of sociology and indeed outside universities altogether, in independent "think tanks" and policy-related institutes. In any case English sociology, as a body of knowledge systematically created by professionals within scholarly institutions, does not come out well. The situation appears to be one of "sociology without sociologists" (Christie 1999:1)-a familiar refrain in

English intellectual life, if we interpret the term sociology generously. It is significant that the one English journal of sociology to break through the national

barrier is Theory, Culture, and Society (cf. Albrow 1993:87). This is not because it deals

mainly with English thinkers-quite the contrary, the luminaries it treats are for the most part the usual crop of classic and contemporary European and American theorists. It is more that the type of theory, cultural theory, that it has taken as its main focus seems peculiarly congenial to the English intellectual temperament. It suggests that in

looking for the contributions of English social theory, past and present, we might be best advised to look not to English sociology but to other regions of the national culture. Is there an "English sociology" that does not so much not know its name as refuse to acknowledge it?

17There are of course exceptions to this stark statement. I should like to instance Zygmunt Bauman, though here again his influence, both in sociology and more generally, seems to be greater outside England than within. (It took the Italians to recognize his worth by awarding his Modernity and the Holocaust the Amalfi Prize for sociology. One cannot imagine the English having a national prize for sociology at all.) It should also be remembered that Norbert Elias lived quietly among the English (as a sociologist at Leicester University) for several decades without anyone paying much attention to him.

Another outstanding figure is Michael Young, "the most original and influential sociologist" in England, according to Noel Annan (1991:348). Intellectually fertile, enterprising, and energetic, he nevertheless exemplifies precisely the predicament of English sociology in being known and respected mainly in England-and then more by nonsociologists than sociologists. For an appreciation, see Dench, Flower, and Gavron (1995).

One further indication. The International Sociological Association in 1998 conducted a plebiscite among its members as to what they regarded as the outstanding works of sociology in the twentieth century. Of the ten works that came out at the top, five were by Americans, four by Germans, and one by a Frenchman; there were none by English sociologists. See International Sociological Association (1998:324).

8 In the 1970s, as a BBC Talks producer, I once proposed a program on Durkheim. The meeting gave me its blessing, on the grounds that producers should be allowed to pursue their passions, however quaint. But many at the meeting-composed of cultural Third Programme types-confessed that they barely knew the name and certainly could attach no meaning to it. (The Third Programme-now called Radio 3-was the BBC's cultural network, devoted mainly to classical music, talks, and documentaries.)

For Annan's later assessment of the state of English sociology see Annan (1991:345-55). It is not flattering and explains for him why the best sociologists, such as Michael Young and Gary Runciman, have been mavericks with very little influence on the subject. As for Giddens, it is only with his appointment as director of the London School of Economics, and the concomitant arrival of Tony Blair's "New Labour" government, that he has begun to play the role of "public intellectual"-the first sociologist in England since Hobhouse to do so (though a case could be made for A. H. Halsey or Michael Young).

54




SOCIAL THEORY WITHOUT SOCIOLOGY?

I suggested earlier (in the first section) that other disciplines established in nineteenth- century England may have "taken up the slack," or filled the gap, created by the absence of sociology. One such was literature.'9 Here England was in the forefront of what has been noted as a general phenomenon in nineteenth-century Europe. Wolf Lepenies (1988) and Bruce Mazlish (1989) have both in different ways suggested that the rise of sociology was to an important extent bound up with an engagement with literature. For Lepenies sociology emerged as a kind of third way, or a "third culture," following a battle of the books between literary and scientific intellectuals for the soul of the new industrial society. Mazlish describes the growth of a certain literary sensibility, in the face of the tremendous problems of the new society, and sees sociology as the "scientific" heir to the new sensibility.

But not in England, as both Lepenies and Mazlish acknowledge. Here the literary sensibility continued to hold sway. The prestige of literature, the pride that English people took in their rich literary heritage, would in any case have ensured that any new discipline would have had to struggle for public attention. But the fact was that for the English their poets, novelists, and literary critics seemed to be doing a more than adequate job of analysis and criticism of the novel problems of nineteenth-century industrial society. Writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, H. G. Wells, and a host of others wrote pas- sionately, both in fiction and in nonfiction, about poverty and the poor, the new industrial city, the new social classes, the impact of the new utilitarian philosophy, the rise of mass politics and mass culture. It was a characteristically clever move on the part of the rising politician and future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli to make his contribution to the public debates in the form of novels.20 The fact is that nineteenth-century English literature, especially in the form of the novel, made as profound an anatomy of the new industrialism, the more powerful for being imaginatively expressed, as the new social science-a view shared, for instance, by Karl Marx.21

For Lepenies, indeed, one of the reasons why sociology did not develop in England was that the English already had it-or rather that they had a "concealed sociology" (Lepenies 1988:195). Lepenies pays particular attention to the dominant school of literary criticism that ran from Matthew Arnold to F. R. Leavis. Here the attempt was made to see literature as the vehicle for a particular kind of social and moral analysis, a representation of society that was at once an account of it and a critique of its spiritual and moral content. This was indeed very much in the long-standing English vein identified by Annan. Carried through into the twentieth century it had a profound effect on the character not just of literary studies but of humanistic studies in general, including those concerned specifically with

19Had anthropology chosen to turn its lens on its own society, as to some extent was the case in France, we can imagine an intriguing alternative avenue. But for various reasons this did not happen in England. For the development of British anthropology, see Kuklick (1992) and Kuper (1996). Both Kuklick and Kuper argue that British anthropologists, though they did not study their own culture, were intensely aware of it in their studies of other cultures.

20The best known of which are Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845). Disraeli was perfectly well aware of what he was doing. "In the temper of the times," he wrote, "the form of fiction ... offered the best chance of influ- encing opinion" (quoted in Kumar 1995:9). For an account of the literary response to the new working class, and the new problems of poverty, in Victorian and post-Victorian England, see Kumar (1995).

21 See Marx's well-known tribute to "the present splendid brotherhood of fiction writers in England, whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together" (quoted in Baxandall and Morawski 1973:105). Engels's comment on Balzac's picture of French society, "from which ... I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together" (quoted in Baxandall and Morawski 1973:115), shows that he and Marx would include the social scientists in their unfavorable comparison with the novelists.

55



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

social analysis. Hence for Lepenies the typical English product of the postwar period was not sociology proper but "cultural studies"-a "blend of sociology and literary criticism" that was already present in the thinking of nineteenth-century English literary intellectuals (Lepenies 1988:155-95).

Lepenies's perception seems to me essentially correct. In the nineteenth century there took place an intensification of the role of literature that lifted it higher than the already elevated position it occupied in the national culture. For critics such as Matthew Arnold, literature-the writing and the study of it-had to play the part of a secular religion. It had to provide the moral force once contributed by the traditional religion of Christianity that Arnold saw as being in irretrievable decline. Literature took on a missionary quality. Its task was not simply to moralize but to civilize. This is why toward the end of the century it was seen as the most suitable vehicle for the education of new public constituencies such as women and the working class. Literature would heighten their moral sensibilities and help them understand their new civic duties (Baldick 1983; see also Collini 1991).

The nineteenth-century sanctification of literature has ensured that the dominant tradition among the English intelligentsia in the past two centuries has been literary-if by that we understand the writing not just of poets and novelists but also of literary and cultural critics. The intelligentsia's function of social analysis and criticism, of establishing author- itative standards and values for society, has been carried out by a series of commanding literary figures-from Wordsworth and Coleridge, through Carlyle, Dickens, Kingsley, and George Eliot, to Arnold, Ruskin, Morris, Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Orwell, Leavis, and Williams. F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948) and Raymond Williams's Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958) jointly map that tradition and mark out the terrain that, in their different ways, they both wished to cultivate. It is clear that both are as much concerned with analyses and visions of society as they are with qualities of literary merit. In Will- iams's case this is explicit in his political and theoretical writings, such as Marxism and Literature (1977) and Politics and Letters (1979). But it is no less clear from the contributions to Leavis's journal Scrutiny, which contain precisely that "blend of sociology and literary criticism" noted by Lepenies.22

The Leavis-Williams type of "literary sociology" was taken up by Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and the Birmingham school of "cultural studies" that throughout the 1960s and 1970s produced some of the most creative theoretical writing in England. Unlike English sociology, this had a distinct international impact, as shown for instance in the success of Paul Willis's Learning to Labour (1977) in the United States. Once more England's contribution to social theory came not from the professional sociologists but from a new synthetic field of studies that drew equally on the native inheritance of literary and cultural criticism, American symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, and continental Marx- ism.23 The influential work of Terry Eagleton (e.g., 1976), a radical disciple of Williams, has also to be seen as arising out of this creative synthesis, though in his case the continental stress was stronger.

It would be wrong to say that the literary critics have made all the running in defining the mission of the English intelligentsia (for an alternative view, see Hall 1979). In areas where English thought has always been strong-economics, political theory, social

22This is well-tilled ground. For some good overviews and discussions of this literary and cultural tradition, see Johnson (1979); Mulhem (1979); Inglis (1982, 1995); Sinfield (1989).

23For a sample of the work of the Centre, see Hall et al. (1978); Hall et al. (1980). One should also mention Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), which in its blend of literature, autobiography, sociology, and the analysis of popular culture can almost be considered the "foundational document" of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, of which Hoggart was the founder and first director.

56




anthropology-important additions to social theory continued to be made.24 But one further source was perhaps even more important in matching the contribution of the literary intellectuals. This was the work of the English historians. What is interesting here is the extent to which they too have often drawn on the native tradition of literary analysis and cultural criticism.

History, as we have noted, was established in the universities only in the late nineteenth century-at about the same time as the study of English literature. Both faced the problem that they were regarded by the scholarly establishment as redundant, if not intellectually negligible, disciplines: for did not the classics provide, to an unmatched degree, all that was necessary in the way of historical and literary instruction, quite apart from the training in language and logical thought that they also supremely offered? English gradually-at first in the provincial universities, then in the cultural heartland of Oxford and Cambridge- broke down this resistance by offering itself as an acceptable substitute, a sort of "poor man's classics," for the less able students, in an era of expanding higher education. It was also seen as important to train students in the study of literature so that they could go out as teachers to the schools and the new institutions of adult education to perform their civilizing function (Baldick 1983; Doyle 1986).

Literature in any case had the prestige of the great tradition of English letters behind it, recently enhanced by the advocacy of such influential critics as Matthew Arnold. Gaining acceptance for its study in the universities, and in the national culture generally, was rendered the easier by this fact. But what of history? Why should it have succeeded? And why in particular should it have succeeded where sociology failed?

History succeeded in part for the same reasons as English. It was seen to offer, in a more appealing and more easily assimilable form, some of the qualities of intellectual discipline and moral education traditionally provided by the classics. But there were more important contemporary reasons for its acceptance. It came to be seen as a more fitting preparation for statesmanship and public life than a classical education, hitherto the fa- vored discipline to that end. This was largely because of England's new role in the world. England was the first industrial society and the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. By the time of the First World War its empire had outstripped Rome's, occupying a fifth of the world's landmass and incorporating a quarter of the world's population. It was imperative that English statesmen should know about their own history, not just that of a dead civilization with its dead language. England's development was widely regarded as unique, in the context of both the ancient and the modern worlds. It had succeeded not just commercially, to an unprecedented degree, but, more important, it had led the way in the invention and elaboration of free political institutions. This was why history, especially English history, was necessary. Its task was to teach future statesmen and public leaders how this unique evolution had come about, what qualities of character and conduct had been responsible for this fortunate outcome, and how best therefore to secure this inheritance and pass it safely on to posterity. Truly

24 One can do no more than list some names here. In economics, J. M. Keynes, Nicholas Kaldor, Joan Robinson, John Hicks, Fred Hirsch, Amartya Sen; in political theory Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Quen- tin Skinner, Alasdair McIntyre; in social anthropology, Edmund Leach, Rodney Needham, Mary Douglas, Jack Goody, Ernest Gellner. There are problems with disciplinary attribution in a number of cases, but with the exceptions of Gellner and McIntyre, who for a while taught sociology, all the others contributed to social theory from outside sociology. For a brief account of some of these figures, see Annan (1991); Anderson ([1990] 1992b). A case could also be made for psychoanalysis in the contributions of Melanie Klein and her followers, as well as in the writings of the "antipsychiatry" school of R. D. Laing and David Cooper. But apart from the fact, noted by Anderson, that psychoanalysis has had "virtually nil" impact on English culture, these on the whole are not the schools that have had the greatest impact on social theory. See Anderson ([1990] 1992a:87-88).

57



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

nothing could compare in importance with this task and with this role allotted to historical study. That this would amount to what a later generation of professional historians would characterize and criticize as the "Whig interpretation of history" is obvious. But the point was not to train future historians. History was for service to the nation. It was to enhance the understanding of national life so that public servants, at home and abroad, could strengthen English institutions and spread as far as possible the English way of

doing things.25 It was inconceivable that sociology, as currently understood, could have played that

role. Sociology, despite what Durkheim and his disciples were trying to do in France, was more likely to undermine faith in national institutions than strengthen commitment. Through- out the Western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, history was taught as a celebration of the nation and national life-"1066 and All That." Sociology by contrast was a critical and questioning discipline, not simply in the version developed by left-wing thinkers but even in the more influential positivist forms that took their descent from Comte and Spencer.26 In its German variant, as presented in the work of Weber, Simmel, T6nnies, and others, it offered a penetrating and distinctly disquieting critique of the institutions and values of modernity. English sociology hovered uneasily between all these influences, settling finally for a weak positivist version that was an easy target for the criticisms of anthropologists, economists, and historians. Given the dominant inheritance of English individualism, empiricism, and "ameliorism," sociology was quite incapable of offering an alternative "grand narrative" of the kind that the "Whig interpretation of history" so commandingly supplied, with its own vastly more elaborated and unabashed celebration of the unique English qualities.

It is no surprise that budding social scientists in England, such as the Hammonds and R. H. Tawney, should turn to history (Soffer 1982:772); or that later intellectuals with a talent for social analysis and social criticism should feel that, in England at least, history (or literature) rather than sociology would be a stronger base, institutionally and culturally, from which to work.27 History, blessed from the top of society, promoted by its elite institutions and some of its most prominent public figures-think of Winston Churchill- established itself in the national culture in a way impossible for sociology. By the beginning of the twentieth century it had already overtaken classics as the preferred subject for students in the major public schools and at Oxford and Cambridge (Soffer 1987:82). Nor was this simply as the most favorable route to public positions at home and abroad. For any bright aspiring intellectual with a critical mind and outlook, history was the obvious subject to study (where indeed, apart from one college in London and a few provincial outposts, could one have studied sociology in England if one had wanted to before the Second World War?). History could therefore lead away from its original celebratory, propagandistic purpose. In the right hands it could become a tool of acute theoretical

25On the establishment of history as a university subject, and the arguments for its adoption, see Burrow (1981); Robbins (1981); Heyck (1982:140-50); Soffer (1987). See also, specifically on Cambridge, Rothblatt (1981:155-80). And cf. an address to the Historical Association in 1909 by W. Mercier: "Teachers of history should interpret the national character, the national ideals, and educate their pupils in the ethos of their own race. Nations, no more than individuals, can[not] afford to dispense with their own peculiar characteristics" (in Rob- bins 1981:418-19).

26It should be remembered that Spencer, the man with whose name sociology was more or less synonymous in England, was a controversial and combative figure in his later years, seen as threatening the emerging national consensus on the need for state intervention and state regulation. See Peel (1971:224-48). Durkheim too, as his activities during the Dreyfus affair made clear, was as much a critic as an apologist for the institutions of the Third Republic, while his sociology as a whole can plausibly be read as a critique of the main tendencies of modem capitalist society. See Turner (1992); on Durkheim and the Dreyfus affair, see Lukes (1973:320-60).

271 well remember this advice being given to me by the social historian Raphael Samuel.

58




analysis and penetrating social criticism-a form of "concealed" or "implicit" sociology even more powerful and wide ranging than in the case of English studies. Mixed with literature, as indeed was often the case, it could be an even subtler and more persuasive form of inquiry.

Thus it is that the postwar English historians have not just been internationally re- cognized for their history writing, they have arguably also made a significant contribution to social theory-more so, indeed, than English sociologists. This has been true especially of the left-leaning and Marxist historians. In the work of Rodney Hilton on the English Middle Ages, Christopher Hill (and before him R. H. Tawney) on the Reformation and the English Revolution, Keith Thomas on religion and magic in early modern times, Eric Hobsbawm on the "long nineteenth" and the "short twentieth" centuries, Edward Thompson on the English working class, Asa Briggs on Victo- rian cities, Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop group on popular culture, English historians have offered major insights on such matters as the origins and nature of capitalism, the role of ideas in social change, the social functions of religion, the causes and meaning of revolution, the character of rural and urban uprisings, the social consequences of industrialism, the form of the industrial city, the concept of social class, and the nature of nationalism.28 It is difficult to imagine a more creative sociological contribution, one moreover that has the added appeal of construct- ing theory out of, rather than in the face of, history. Nor is it only left-wing historians, with the obvious stimulus of Marx, who have been fertile in theory. Liberal and conser- vative historians, such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Harold Perkin, Peter Laslett, and Jonathan Clark, have offered stimulating insights into the nature of religious movements and beliefs, family structure and political change in premodern society, and the class systems and forms of knowledge typical of modernity.29 In many of these cases-as in Trevor- Roper on Thomas More, Hill on Milton and Richardson, Briggs on Charlotte Bronte and H. G. Wells-the role of literature in shaping perceptions and aiding our understanding is fully acknowledged.

Edward Thompson deserves a special mention. Not only has his work been highly influential in sociology-his The Making of the English Working Class (1963) appears on innumerable sociology reading lists-but he exemplifies in the highest degree that fusion of literature, history, and social theory as social criticism that has been the hallmark of the English intelligentsia for the past century and more. Starting with a monu- mental study of William Morris, he moved on to the classic account of the rise of the English working class and continued with numerous studies of class, culture, and conflict in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. In the process he has illuminated the study of the crowd and crowd psychology; he has explored the impact of industrialism on modes of thinking and feeling; he has shown the persistence of customary norms and beliefs in mediating the effects of modern market economies; he has made it impossible for us to think seriously of class without adding a historical and dynamic dimension; and he has helped us to understand what it is to reconstruct and understand a culture and a community, past or present. It was fitting, and entirely characteristic, that he should conclude-prematurely, by all the signs-his work with an account of William Blake, the English radical whose combination of literary and social concerns supremely illus-

28 Some of this work is described, with the relevant references, in Kaye (1992), Annan (1991:356-78), Ander- son ([1990] 1992b:281-93).

29See, for example, Trevor-Roper (1978); Perkin (1969, 1990); Laslett (1985); Clark (1985, 1986). We might add that in current debates about English national identity, no English sociologist has contributed as much as historians such as Raphael Samuel, Linda Colley, and David Cannadine-see, for instance, Colley (1994).

59



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

trates the English cultural tradition (as also in the case of William Morris, Thompson's other hero).30

"ENGLISHNESS" AND "THE SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITION"

Each nation gets the social theory it deserves-or, rather, that is consonant with its political and social development. For various historical reasons, a political system emerged in England that made it peculiarly easy for certain kinds of intellectuals to get close to the machinery of government. Their intellectual interests were fashioned by the possibilities opened up by this unusual and attractive situation. In this context sociology, as a theoretical and academic discipline, appeared irrelevant.

But this is not quite the same as saying that English thought was hostile to social theory, if by this we mean an understanding of the nature of past and present society. In literature, history, anthropology, even at times economics and political science, the resources were found to engage with society in such a way as to produce an impressive body of work, much of which carried clear theoretical implications. That not all practitioners realized this, or were much concerned when it was drawn to their attention, is not the point. Soci- ologists at least should be able to recognize it and to profit from it.

The claim is not being made that all this amounted to a full-fledged indigenous sociology. One only has to look to the United States, or perhaps contemporary France, to see what such a claim would imply. English sociology is indeed manifestly an "unfinished project"; the construction of a distinctively English school of sociology still seems a dis- tant prospect, and there is nothing to suggest that it is an inevitability. The English government, and the English public generally, exhibit a marked lack of interest in sociology and seem largely unimpressed by its record to date. That could no doubt be said of many Western societies today. The difference is that in many cases sociology has been sufficiently vigorously launched to develop a momentum of its own, which at least gives it a certain protection against the vicissitudes of public policy and intellectual fashions. Noth- ing of the kind is true in England.

What I have been trying to argue is that though England did not produce a distinctive sociology, it did encourage a form of inquiry that is sufficiently close to the concerns of sociologists to count as an important contribution to social theory. We may if we wish call this an "implicit" or "concealed" sociology. "Implicit sociology," as the term implies,

30For some of Thompson's best-known essays, see Thompson (1993). Thompson's work is discussed exten- sively in Kaye (1992); Kaye and McClelland (1990); Palmer (1994). For an explicit recognition of Thompson's contribution to social theory, see also Calhoun (1994). One need hardly say that despite one of Thompson's best-known books being entitled The Poverty of Theory, the essays that make up the book are alive with theoretical insights-not least the famous essay "The Peculiarities of the English" (1978). It is this that makes me resist the objection raised by one of the anonymous reviewers of this article that Thompson was "antitheory" and would not have liked to be included in a discussion that saw him as a significant social theorist. It is no doubt true that Thompson "would not be comfortable in being assimilated to any sort of 'sociological tradition' "-but that would also be true of almost anyone, sociologist or nonsociologist, working within the Marxist tradition, which has often thought of sociology as a "bourgeois science" and resisted many of what they see as its working assumptions (consensus, integration, an ahistorical approach, etc.). It is also true that Thompson polemicized vigorously and, on occasion, vitriolically, against what he saw as the excessively abstract theorizing of certain Marxists within both Britain and France. But I would contend that whatever skepticism Thompson may have expressed occasionally about theory, his own work shows him to have had a consummate grasp of theory, if by that we mean a general understanding of social behavior, social institutions, and the dynamics of social change. Whigs and Hunters (1977), his study of the responses to the eighteenth-century Black Act against poaching, is as good an example of all this as any, showing his meticulous handling of detail and his general grasp of social structure. This powerful combination of qualities is mentioned by almost all commentators on Thompson. See, for instance, Calhoun (1994). See also Calhoun's study (1982) of the nineteenth-century English working class, which, noting Thompson's "theoretical intentions," is a full-scale engagement with Thompson on the theoretical understanding of concepts such as class, community, and collective action-hardly worth doing unless Thomp- son had posed a theoretical challenge.

60




often hints at rather than spells out its theoretical presuppositions or concerns. It teaches by example rather than in the form of systematic statements of principles. One often has to dig out the theoretical insight or principle lurking, sometimes unsuspected by the author, in the body of the work. But this can be a gain rather than a loss. Works that, like many works of history, do not wear their theory too obviously on the outside can be enjoyable to read and impart their theory without a conscious striving on the part of the reader. Education by stealth has always been the preferred strategy of good pedagogues.

Or we may, considering the central role of literature and history, also call the English contribution a kind of "literary," "cultural," or "historical" sociology. It may not have the systematic quality or explicit theoretical purpose of what currently passes under those heads, but it is noticeable how often one sees references to the work of Williams and Thompson in sociologists' writing in the areas of history or culture (see, e.g., Hays 1994; Corse 1997). An analogous case of a figure highly influential in certain branches of contemporary sociology would be the American cultural critic Edward Said. Said not only in several places acknowledges a debt to Williams and Thompson but in his blend of literature, history, and cultural criticism exemplifies just that kind of synthetic social theory that marks the contribution of the English thinkers (see, e.g., Said 1993). All this suggests that what the English thinkers were doing overlaps in important ways with some of the most interesting current developments in sociology.

The "Englishness" of English social theory leads us finally to reflect briefly on the sociological tradition in general. It has become common to try to identify particularly important figures, and certain lines of descent, that went toward the making of the discipline that we as sociologists currently practice. That endeavor seems to me entirely worth- while, even if there will never be complete agreement on who belongs to the sociological pantheon or which are the most important tributaries to the broad sociological stream. The danger however is that we end up reifying or "essentializing" the subject, seeing it as a single project when in fact it has always been multistranded. However important are Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, what we have drawn from them may be only a relatively restricted set of themes and approaches. Not only does it leave out certain "micro" varieties of social theory that are always having to be rediscovered, more damaging, it leaves out large areas of literary and cultural life that are regarded as the province of other disciplines. Until recently one would have wanted to say that it also leaves out history-despite Marx and what following from him should have been a continuous engagement with history in the discipline. That has now come to be remedied to a certain extent, though the battle is far from won. But other areas, such as literature, remain highly controversial.

Again, that is as it should be. It would be a bad thing if any area were annexed to sociology in a full and final way. The lines of demarcation and debate must remain per- manently fluid and open. What the English case demonstrates is that the absence of something called "sociology," in any of its definitions or manifestations, should not lead us to construe this as a lack of interest in social investigation or social theory. We need to keep our eyes open for the less obvious signs of their presence, and when we look there we may well, as in the English case, be richly rewarded.

REFERENCES

Abrams, Philip. 1968. The Origins of British Sociology: 1834-1914. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Abrams, Philip, Rosemary Deem, Janet Finch, and Paul Rock, eds. 1981. Practice and Progress: British Soci-

ology 1950-1980. London, England: George Allen and Unwin. Albrow, Martin. 1989. "Sociology in the United Kingdom after the Second World War." Pp. 194-219 in National

Traditions in Sociology, edited by N. Genov. Beverly Hills, CA, and London, England: Sage Publications.

61



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

. 1993. "The Changing British Role in European Sociology." Pp. 81-97 in Sociology in Europe: In Search

of Identity, edited by Birgitta Nedelmar and Piotr Sztompka. Berlin, Germany, and New York: Walter de

Gruyter. Alexander, Jeffrey. 1994. "How 'National' Is Social Theory?" Theory: Newsletter of the Research Committee on

Social Theory, International Sociological Association Autumn:2-7. Anderson, Perry. [1968] 1992a. "Components of the National Culture." Pp. 48-104 in English Questions, by

Perry Anderson. London, England, and New York: Verso. . [1990] 1992b. "A Culture in Contraflow." Pp. 193-301 in English Questions, by Perry Anderson. Lon-

don, England, and New York: Verso. Annan, Noel. 1959. The Curious Strength of Positivism in English Political Thought. London, England: Oxford

University Press. . 1991. Our Age: The Generation That Made Post-War Britain. London, England: Fontana.

Baldick, Chris. 1983. The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. Baxandall, Lee, and Stefan Morawski, eds. 1973. Marx and Engels on Literature andArt: A Selection of Writings.

St. Louis, MO: Telos Press. Bergonzi, Bernard. 1979. "The Ideology of Being English." Pp. 56-79 in The Situation of the Novel, by Bernard

Bergonzi. London, England: Macmillan. Bottomore, Tom, and Robert Nisbet, eds., 1979. A History of Sociological Analysis. London, England: Heinemann. Bulmer, Martin, ed. 1985. Essays in the History of British Sociological Research. Cambridge, England: Cam-

bridge University Press. Burrow, J. W. 1966. Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory. Cambridge, England: Cambridge

University Press. . 1981. A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the Victorian Past. Cambridge, England: Cambridge

University Press. Butterfield, Herbert. 1944. The Englishman and His History. London, England: Cambridge University Press. Calhoun, Craig. 1982. The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the

Industrial Revolution. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. . 1994. "E. P. Thompson and the Discipline of Historical Context." Social Research 61:223-43.

Christie, Ian. 1999. "Return of Sociology." Prospect January: 1-3. Clark, J. C. D. 1985. English Society 1688-1832. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

. 1986. Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Cen- turies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, Terry Nichols. 1973. Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Colley, Linda. 1994. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. London, England: Pimlico. Collini, Stefan. 1991. "The Whig Interpretation of English Literature: Literary History and National Identity."

Pp. 342-73 in Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930, by Stefan Collini. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

. 1979. Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England 1880-1914. Cam- bridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Corse, Sarah. 1997. Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States. Cam- bridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Davis, John. 1991. "An Interview with Ernest Gellner." Current Anthropology 32:63-72. Dench, Geoff, Tony Flower, and Kate Gavron, eds. 1995. Young at Eighty: The Prolific Public Life of Michael

Young. Manchester, England: Carcanet. Doyle, Brian. 1986. "The Invention of English." Pp. 89-115 in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920,

edited by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd. London, England: Croom Helm. Durkheim, Emile. [1915] 1960. "Sociology." Pp. 376-85 in Essays on Sociology and Philosophy by Emile

Durkheim et al., edited by Kurt H. Wolf. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Eagleton, Terry. 1976. Criticism and Ideology. London, England: New Left Books. Eldredge, John. 1980. Recent British Sociology. London, England: Macmillan. Elwitt, Sanford, and Lawrence Goldman. 1988. "Debate: Social Science, Social Reform, and Sociology." Past

and Present 121:209-19. Freund, Julien. 1979. "German Sociology in the Time of Max Weber." Pp. 149-86 in A History of Socio-

logical Analysis, edited by Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet. London, England: Heinemann. Goldman, Lawrence. 1983. "The Origins of British 'Social Science': Political Economy, Natural Science, and

Statistics, 1830-1835." Historical Journal 26:587-616. . 1986. "The Social Science Association, 1857-1886: A Context for Mid-Victorian Liberalism." English

Historical Review 101:95-134. . 1987. "A Peculiarity of the English? The Social Science Association and the Absence of Sociology in

Nineteenth-Century Britain." Past and Present 114:133-71.

62




. 1998. "Exceptionalism and Internationalism: The Origins of American Social Science Reconsidered." Journal of Historical Sociology 11:1-36.

Hall, John A. 1979. "The Curious Case of the English Intelligentsia." British Journal of Sociology 30:291-306. Hall, Stuart, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clark, and Brian Roberts. 1978. Policing the Crisis. London,

England: Macmillan. Hall, Stuart, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, eds. 1980. Culture, Media, Language. London,

England: Hutchinson. Halsey, A. H. 1982. "Provincials and Professionals: The British Post-War Sociologists." Archives Europeennes

de Sociologie 23:150-75. Hawthorn, Geoffrey. 1987. Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Sociology, 2d ed. Cambridge, England:

Cambridge University Press. Hays, Sharon. 1994. "Structure and Agency and the Sticky Problem of Culture." Sociological Theory 12:57-72. Heyck, T. W. 1982. The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England. London, England: Croom

Helm. Inglis, Fred. 1982. Radical Earnestness: English Social Theory, 1880-1980. Oxford, England: Martin Robertson.

. 1995. Raymond Williams. London, England, and New York: Routledge. Johnson, Lesley. 1979. The Cultural Critics. London, England: Routledge and Kegan Paul. International Sociological Association. 1998. Social Knowledge: Heritage, Challenges, Perspectives. Confer-

ence Catalogue of the 14th World Congress of Sociology. Montreal, Canada: International Sociological Association.

Karady, Victor. 1981. "The Prehistory of Present-Day French Sociology (1917-1957)." Pp. 33-47 in French Sociology: Rupture and Renewal since 1968, edited by Charles Lemert. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kaye, Harvey J. 1992. The Education of Desire: Marxists and the Writing of History. New York: Routledge. Kaye, Harvey J., and Keith McClelland, eds. 1990. E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives. Cambridge, England:

Polity Press. Kent, Raymond A. 1981. A History of British Empirical Sociology. Aldershot, England: Gower. Kuklick, Henrika. 1992. The Savage Within: A History of British Anthropology 1885-1945. Cambridge, England:

Cambridge University Press. Kumar, Krishan. 1995. "Versions of the Pastoral: Poverty and the Poor in English Fiction from the 1840s to the

1950s." Journal of Historical Sociology 8:1-35. Kuper, Adam. 1996. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, 3d ed. London, England,

and New York: Routledge. Laslett, Peter. 1985. The World We Have Lost: Further Explored. 3d ed. London, England: Methuen. Leach, Edmund. 1957. "The Epistemological Background to Malinowski's Empiricism." Pp. 119-37 in Man and

Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski, edited by Raymond Firth. London, England: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Lepenies, Wolf. 1988. Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Levine, Donald N. 1995. Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago, IL, and London, England: University of Chicago Press.

Lukes, Steven. 1973. Emile Durkheim, His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study. London, England: Allen Lane the Penguin Press.

Mazlish, Bruce. 1989. A New Science: The Breakdown of Connections and the Birth of Sociology. New York and Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

McGregor, 0. R. 1957. "Social Research and Social Policy in the Nineteenth Century." British Journal of Soci- ology 8:146-57.

Mulhern, Francis. 1979. The Moment of "Scrutiny." London, England: New Left Books. Nedelmann, Birgitta, and Piotr Sztompka, eds. 1993. Sociology in Europe: In Search of Identity. Berlin, Ger-

many, and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Nisbet, Robert. 1967. The Sociological Tradition. London, England: Heinemann. O'Brien, Connor Cruise. 1982. "Introduction" . Pp. 9-76 in Reflections on the Revolution in France, by Edmund

Burke, edited by Connor Cruise O'Brien. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books. Palmer, Bryan D. 1994. E. P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions. London, England, and New York:

Verso. Parsons, Talcott. [1937] 1949. The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press. Peel, J. Y. D. 1971. Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist. London, England: Heinemann. Perkin, Harold. 1969. The Origins of Modern English Society: 1780-1880. London, England: Routledge and

Kegan Paul. . 1990. The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880. London, England: Routledge.

Robbins, Keith. 1981. "History, the Historical Association, and the 'National Past'." History 66:413-25.

63



64 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Rothblatt, Sheldon. 1981. The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England. New ed.

Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London, England: Chatto and Windus. Sanderson, Stephen K. 1992. Social Evolutionism: A Critical History. Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, England:

Blackwell. Seidman, Steven. 1983. Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory. Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles,

CA: University of California Press. Shils, Edward. 1970. "Tradition, Ecology, and Institutions in the History of Sociology." Daedalus 99:760-825. Sinfield, Alan. 1989. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Soffer, Reba. 1982. "Why Do Disciplines Fail? The Strange Case of British Sociology." English Historical

Review 97:767-802. . 1987. "Nation, Duty, Character, and Confidence: History at Oxford, 1850-1914." Historical Journal

30:77-104. Taine, Hippolyte. [1868/1870] 1958. Notes on England, translated by Edward Hyams. Fair Lawn, NJ: Essential

Books. Thompson, E. P. 1978. "The Peculiarities of the English." Pp. 35-91 in The Poverty of Theory, and Other Essays,

by E. P. Thompson. London, England: Merlin Press. . 1993. Customs in Common. London, England: Penguin Books.

Trevor-Roper, H. R. 1978. The European Witch Craze in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Harmond- sworth, England: Penguin Books.

Turner, Bryan S. 1992. "Preface to the Second Edition." Pp. xiii-xliii in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, by Emile Durkheim. London, England, and New York: Routledge.

Yeo, Eileen Janes. 1996. The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations of Gender and Class. London, England: Rivers Oram Press.



sociology and the englishness of english social theory

Documents