sociology and the englishness of english social theory

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Sociology and the Englishness ofEnglish Social Theory*

Krishan Kumar

University of Virginia

Although England has a rich tradition of social and political thought, sociology doesnot figure strongly in this tradition. Several influential accounts—such as those by NoelAnnan, Philip Abrams, and Perry Anderson—exist to explain this fact. I examine theseaccounts and, while largely agreeing with the explanations, question whether we shouldaccept the authors’ conclusions. In particular, we need to ask whether England was sodifferent from other countries in this respect. Moreover, even if sociology was weak inEngland, does this mean that the contribution of English social theory was also weak?What alternative traditions of social thought might exist? In examining the Englishcase, we may get some insight not just into the “peculiarities of the English” but alsointo the way in which the history of sociology has come to be written and into some ofthe 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, andtheory judged by practice. A truth has no value unless it leads to useful applicationsin 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, nothingcan 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 Francedeveloped a strong sociological tradition, and Germany was well on the way to doing sountil thrown off course by the Nazi experience, in England a dominant literary and mor-alistic influence severely constricted the sociological imagination. For reasons of nationalhistory or institutional prominence, certain social science disciplines~not always so calledor so regarded! continued their vigorous development. This was true above all of econom-ics ~“political economy”! but also of law and jurisprudence, reflecting the importance ofconstitutional developments. Political theory and political philosophy, reinvigorated by astrand 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 helpfulcomments, especially Jiri Musil, Ken Thompson, and Peter McMylor. Thanks also to the editor and three anon-ymous reviewers forSociological Theory,who raised some good questions and helped to make the argumenttighter and more focused. Address correspondence to: Krishan Kumar, Department of Sociology, University ofVirginia, 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

heights reached in the era of Bentham and J. S. Mill, not to mention that of Hobbes andLocke. Most strikingly, and most relevant from the point of view of sociology, there wasthe development of anthropology, in the hands of Tylor, Maine, McLennan, Lubbock,Frazer, and ultimately—stemming from a very un-English provenance—Malinowski. Butnot 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 anunpromising bedfellow for sociology; and by the time Malinowski arrived on the sceneanthropology was already established, institutionally and intellectually, as a separate dis-cipline, indifferent to and for the most part condescending toward the pretensions ofsociology.

Sociology cannot be said to have been wholly absent from the nineteenth-century Englishscene. After all was not Herbert Spencer a household name throughout Europe and indeedbeyond, a fit antagonist for Durkheim, and the venerable sage to whom the Japaneseturned when in the 1890s they sought Western guidance on their new constitution~Peel1971:233!? Then there was H. T. Buckle, another thinker with a European-wide reputa-tion, whoseHistory of Civilizationnot only played, as Julien Freund says, “a determiningrole” in early German sociology but came upon Vilfredo Pareto “like a bolt of lightning”and appeared to him “thene plus ultraof reasoning applied to the social sciences”~Freund1979:150, 185 n!. John Stuart Mill, admirer of Comte and Tocqueville, might also make apassable candidate as a “founding father of English sociology”—if such an idea did notsound quaint. And behind all English social thought of this time was the fertilizing influ-ence of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment—the writings of Smith, Hume,Kames, Ferguson, and Millar that via such journals as theEdinburgh Reviewhad becomethe 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 theScottish 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 pow-erful influence on continental social thought in the nineteenth century? His stress on soci-ety as opposed to government and the state makes him one of the most promising candidatesfor the title of~a! founding father of English sociology. But, apart from some influence onColeridge and certain other English conservatives, Burke’s sociological thought was neverfirmly 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 toassimilate him~see, e.g., O’Brien 1982:41!. Certainly, as with these other writers, heseems 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 notbereft of ancestry—indeed few other countries could boast of one so rich or fertile. It isequally clear that the old charge is true: England did not produce sociological thinkerscomparable to those of France, Germany, the United States, or even Italy or Russia. Thereis no English Marx, Weber, Simmel, Comte, Tocqueville, Durkheim, or Pareto—not evena 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 devel-oped. Indeed for many would-be English social scientists it was precisely Spencer’sthinking—his evolutionism and his individualism—that together with the weight of his

1This essay is mainly concerned with English social thought. But one has to acknowledge the frequent andfamiliar annexation by the English of thinkers hailing from the rest of the United Kingdom—Burke and Humebeing 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 questionof the national identities of the different parts of the United Kingdom—I do not think this otherwise indefensibleprocedure particularly affects the present discussion. The writers discussed—for example, Noel Annan—moveblithely between “English” and “British” without apparently feeling that it matters, and in this case I think theyare right.

42 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

prestige led them away from sociology altogether, toward other fields. The sociology thatwasconstructed—piecemeal, fragmented, narrowly empirical—lacked any unifying or sys-tematic theory, precisely the element that Spencer had provided almost too well. In thatsense “modern British sociology was built, more than anything else, as a defense againstSpencer”~Abrams 1968:67; cf. Peel 1971:224–38!—a tragic loss of opportunity. After hisdeath—indeed for a considerable time before it—Spencer was forgotten in England with acompleteness 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 pro-duce thinkers like him—Buckle is another example, as is perhaps Arnold Toynbee in ourcentury—but because there seems to be something in English intellectual life that resiststheorizing 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 thatbecame 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? Severalinteresting attempts have been made to answer this question, and in what follows I con-sider some of them in detail. Their general tone and tenor, and indeed the main impetus forraising the question at all, are a lament for a lost or missing tradition of thought. Englishculture has suffered immeasurably, so the claim is, from the absence of sociology—fromthe lack, that is, of a discipline that takes systematic inquiry into the nature of society, andespecially of modern society, as its object. The loss has been both intellectual and institu-tional. Not only are there virtually no English thinkers among the “founding fathers” ofsociology; when sociology did develop in England, after the Second World War, it wasalmost wholly dependent on foreign models, mostly American, for the substance of itstheoretical and practical work in universities and research institutes.

I do not in the main want to disagree with this view. The absence of sociology fromEnglish intellectual life for most of the past centuryhasbeen a serious weakness. It hasseverely limited the English contribution to twentieth-century social thought. The loss isparticularly 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 modernsocial science.” The theoretical frameworks not just of sociology, he claims, but of all theother social sciences, “consist of elaborations, revisions, or replacements of the Hobbesianconception of social science”~Levine 1995:121!. The melancholy fact is, as he shows, thatso far as sociology is concerned it was not Hobbes’s native land, England, that led the wayin this work of criticism and elaboration but thinkers from the European continent andNorth America.

So there is clearly something to regret. But that is not the whole story. There were goodreasons why sociology did not develop—good not only in the sense of making intelligiblethis fact but, in a more positive vein, in pointing us toward those forms of thought~andaction! that did arise in response to the challenges of the times. That these did not amountto sociology in the currently received sense is undeniable; so too is the fact that sociologymight have been a better tool for the purpose. But in the pressing circumstances of thetime—a new kind of society facing unprecedented problems, for which there were simplyno 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 namesHooker, Hobbes, and Locke eloquently testify. Herbert Butterfield~1944:7! long ago plausibly suggested thatpart of the reason for the English suspicion of grand theory sprang from their revulsion against the FrenchRevolution and the abstract theories of the philosophes that were supposedly its cause. For an influential view ofthe contrast between French and English styles of thought, noting the dominance of empiricism in England, seeTaine~@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!.

SOCIOLOGY AND THE ENGLISHNESS OF ENGLISH SOCIAL THEORY 43

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

There is a further point. Though sociology did not take root in England, other relevantintellectual disciplines did. These included the study of literature, especially English lit-erature, and the study of history, especially English history. Both these subjects, as sys-tematic disciplines, were relative latecomers on the English scene—later than most peoplerealize. They established themselves in the universities only in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, at just about the time that sociology was being institutionalizedelsewhere, 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 andforms of thought?

One of the purposes of the following discussion is to examine this question in theEnglish case. The antipathy to sociology—or what was perceived to be sociology—has tobe understood in relation to some dominant characteristics of the national culture, at leastas this had come to be defined by the nineteenth century. By those criteria, sociology didnot fit ~though other forms of social inquiry did and were vigorously prosecuted!. Bycontrast, literature and history appeared to go along the grain of the national culture—to beconsonant not just with what was seen to be its strengths but what were seen to be itspeculiar needs, at a particular stage of development. Moreover, since both literature andhistory were in England deeply involved with social and political issues, they could incertain 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 soci-ological understanding along with what was often seen as their more explicit purpose, togive moral and practical guidance. Building on this tradition, I shall argue, later intellec-tuals working within these disciplines were able to make important contributions to socialtheory. English sociology, in the strict sense, arrived very late; but that does not mean thatthe English intellectual tradition lacked sociological awareness and understanding, norwas incapable of making its own offering to sociology, even though much of this tookplace outside the confines of formal academic sociology. In a sense it was the very richnessof the offering that crowded out sociology and drew many intellectuals into history andliterature who in other countries might have gone into sociology.

The place of literature and history in the national culture, and their sociological contri-bution, will be considered later. First we must look at the fate of sociology itself and thereasons 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 conscious-ness of the British intelligentsia”~Annan 1959:9!. So declared Noel Annan some years agoin 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 Englishintellectuals~the very word of course being suspect in English ears, as redolent of continen-tal abstraction! had not developed a sociological consciousness, Hobhouse himself exem-plified the main problem. He had tried valiantly to fuse English liberalism with continentalHegelianism, but his English moralism and Protestantism kept getting in the way of the moresystematic, collectivist vision that he also sought to promote. Striving to resist the individ-ualism of the social Darwinism that was rampant in late-nineteenth-century English thought,

3I owe this felicitous term to one of the anonymous reviewers of this article. See further the discussion belowon “concealed sociology.”


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; Collini1979:147–70; Sanderson 1992:1–35!.The peculiarly English brand of “ethical socialism” thathe elaborated—a concoction compounded of “moral collectivism” and “Idealist teleology”~Collini 1979:253!—may have avoided the conventional forms of individualism, but sincefor Hobhouse socialism was merely “advanced Liberalism”~Collini 1979:129! his thinkinginevitably carried many of the individualist premises of liberal thought. In any case it provedwholly incapable of providing the tools for a systematic sociology. Since Hobhouse was forthe 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 followingtwo 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 some-what 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 mak-ing choices on the basis of the dictates of reason and conscience. The great expression of thisview, and the one that ensured its triumph in English thought, was classical economics: thebranch 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 dom-inant influence, taken with the laissez-faire policies that had apparently brought England tothe pinnacle of economic and political success in the nineteenth century, had made it almostimpossible for alternative accounts of the relation of the individual to society to establish them-selves. 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 politicsoverwhelming his intellectual system, as was to happen with Hobhouse and other EnglishHegelians.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 Whitechair 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 sociologychair at one of the two ancient universities—the Cambridge chair, established in 1969—should be given to asocial anthropologist~John Barnes!: a not uncommon practice in the new sociology departments established inthe 1950s and 1960s, as for instance the appointment of Paul Stirling as professor of sociology at the Universityof 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 endowedEnglish brethren and perhaps also to spread the light of the new thinking, offered Cambridge two chairs, one inpolitical science and the other in sociology. Cambridge accepted the first~Ernest Barker became the first pro-fessor of political science, though characteristically his chair was placed in the history faculty! and rejected thesecond~Soffer 1982:779!. Cambridge later relented, but Oxford held out for much longer. Only in 1999 did itfinally decide to establish a chair in sociology, though the sociologist A. H. Halsey was given a chair in “socialand 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, asdo many others, thinks of Adam Smith’sWealth of Nationsas establishing the pattern of English classicaleconomics but fails to consider it in the context of Smith’sTheory of Moral Sentiments,which severely qualifiesthe individualism of the former work by exhibiting the mechanism of sympathy that makes the individual takeinto account the responses of others. This may be one respect in which the differences between Scottish andEnglish thought are important, though given the general incorporation of theWealth of Nationsin Englishthought and the comparative neglect of theTheory of Moral Sentiments,it does not seriously affect Annan’sgeneral point.

6It is true that Spencer himself regarded his evolutionism and his individualism as two sides of the samescientific coin~the theory of progress through natural selection and the “survival of the fittest”!. But as moststudents of his thought acknowledge, the passionate advocacy of individualism~by which he largely meantnoninterference by the state! in his later writings—see, for example,Man versus the State~1884!—went farbeyond 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!.


ferences in customs and beliefs could be explained in terms of individual psychology, whilethe relentless rationalism of Frazer’sThe Golden Bough,with its theme that all religion is agigantic fraud, ruled out any functional or other sociological explanation of religious beliefsand practices—along the lines, say, of Durkheim’sElementary Forms. The immense influ-ence ofThe Golden Boughon English intellectual life in the first part of the twentieth cen-tury was a distinct deterrent to the growth of an outlook that accepted nonrational andnonpsychological explanations of human behavior and beliefs. Even Malinowski, who didso much to break the hold of positivism on English anthropology, nevertheless gained wideracceptance 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 manyforeigners 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’sunique history of peaceful and gradual change in modern times. “To see individual andsocial action in a single framework of right and wrong is possible only in a country with apeaceful history; it is impossible where there is no general moral consensus and where theclaim of one group competes violently with that of other groups”~Annan 1959:15; see alsoTaine@1865/1870# 1958:258–71; Bergonzi 1979!. While not disdaining morality in socialand political theorizing, Annan observed that “the passion . . . in this country for layingdown how men ought to behave and how society ought to be reorganized in order that theymay behave better” had led to the neglect of the new techniques for describing how in factmen do behave and of what might be involved in trying to bring about comprehensivesocial reorganization~Annan 1959:18!.7 For Durkheim too, England’s peaceful evolutionand the self-satisfaction that it bred were precisely what had inhibited in England thatself-reflectiveness that was essential for sociological thinking. The contrary condition ofFrance, he noted with some complacency, was what made of sociology “an essentiallyFrench 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 twofurther important contributions, those of Philip Abrams~1968! and Perry Anderson~@1968#1992a!. Abrams largely accepts Annan’s picture, but whereas Annan took the Englishintellectual tradition to task, Abrams puts the stress on the institutional tradition. Thereason why sociology did not develop in England, according to Abrams, was that theunique permeability and responsiveness of British government—relative at least to othergovernments of the time—made it appear unnecessary to develop a special science ofsociety. The tools to hand—in the concepts of classical political economy, the strongstatistical tradition, and the beliefs in progress and the possibilities of reform—seemed tointellectuals and administrators alike sufficient to enable them to get on with the urgenttask 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. Inbodies with apparently promising titles such as the Statistical Society of London, theNational 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 satisfactionof seeing put on the statute book. They rarely debated social theory, for what was the

7It is perhaps worth noting that Annan’s account of the reasons for the absence of an English sociology largelyreprises that of Talcott Parsons inThe Structure of Social Action~see Parsons@1937# 1949: esp. 87–125!. It isfrom Parsons too that Annan appears to derive his characterization of positivism as “individualistic.”


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 actionwithout social theory” is how Abrams~1968:39! characterizes the “ameliorism” that wasthe principal feature of nineteenth-century English society; “boring from within” was therendition of the Fabians, the most representative and theoretically sophisticated of thegroups that pursued the strategy of operating according to, rather than against, the grainof national institutional life.

The casualty in all this was English sociology. Theoretical and practical energies wentelsewhere. As Abrams puts it: “@English# society provided numerous outlets for socialconcern of a legitimate, satisfying, and, indeed, seductive nature; all these were disincen-tives to role-innovation. . . . Performing administrative and intelligence functions for gov-ernment soaked up energies which might have gone toward sociology had such opportunitiesnot been there”~Abrams 1968:4–5!. It was not so much, or not only, the English intel-lectual tradition that discouraged the growth of a native sociology. It was the very systemof British government, as it had evolved since the settlement of 1688, that was the ob-stacle, by the fact that it made reform seem relatively easy and unproblematic and of-fered English intellectuals practical and political roles that were hard to come by inneighboring countries. The idea of social “intelligence” became not so much a matterof understanding society in all its dimensions as of giving practical guidance on whatwere 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 empir-ical tradition of which the great monuments are government inquiries, massive but intel-lectually 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 forcedto choose between the department of sociology and that of social administration at thenewly founded London School of Economics, the more able and active recruits to socialscience, such as R. H. Tawney and Clement Atlee, chose the latter. In this they markedout the future. Booth, Rowntree, the Webbs, Geddes, Galton, Beveridge: these, ratherthan Spencer, Hobhouse, or Ginsberg, are the representative figures of the English tradi-tion of social science.9

8Speaking of the work of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science@NAPSS#, whose annualfive-day congresses between 1857 and 1886 attracted great public attention and whose members included manyof the leading public figures in the land, Abrams says: “What is missing is any developed concept of the socialsystem, any extended or general analysis of structured interactions between individuals or classes, any theory ofthe social basis of the state. Where thereis a model of society it is typically an administrative one suffused withmoral judgment”~Abrams 1968:48–49!. For a more charitable reading of the activities of the NAPSS, whichnevertheless 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 Britainto welcome the public voice of women”; it was also unusually open to a broad range of working-class views andvoices. She too though notes the “moratorium on theory”~1996:129, 157!.

9The split between sociology and social administration continued to mark the London School of Economics formost 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 soci-ologist at the school, T. H. Marshall, should for most of his time there hold a chair of social administration ratherthan 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, wasfounded in 1869 to further the principles of William Ellis, a Victorian follower of John Stuart Mill and one of thepioneers of social science education. Unusually for an English school in the 1950s and 1960s, the school taughtgovernment and economics—but it was inconceivable that it would teach sociology!


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 prod-uct of a bourgeois class in its engagement, on the one hand, with the traditional agrarianruling class and, on the other, with the challenge posed by the new industrial workingclass. Sociology was the “synthetic” or “totalizing” response to both aristocratic conser-vatism 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 Mannheimnoted, a reinvigorated, combative conservatism!.

In England by contrast, Anderson argues, the industrial bourgeoisie emerged and devel-oped 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 timethe English working class and its supporters adopted Labourism, rather than Marxism, astheir ideology, thereby removing any revolutionary threat to the capitalist order and itsprincipal beneficiaries. Hence, asserts Anderson in an interesting variant on Abrams’saccount, there was no structural requirement for sociology in England. Unlike their con-tinental counterparts, the English bourgeoisie saw no need for developing a justificatoryideology.

Britain . . . lacking—unlikefin-de-siècleGermany, France or Italy—the spur of aninsurgent socialism, missed the moment of a Weber, Durkheim or Pareto; and neverknew the Marxist reprise of a Lukács, Sartre or Gramsci. Its dominant bloc had nointerest in, or need of, any social theory liable to look too analytically at the socialformation it governed as a natural kingdom. Piecemeal empirical research, servingpractical 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 aremarkably coherent, consistent, and largely persuasive account of the failure of sociologyto develop as a distinct discipline in England. Later scholars have rounded out the picturewithout 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. Inthe long period between the eclipse of Herbert Spencer in the 1890s and the revivalof sociology in the 1950s, sociology hardly existed in the British Isles as an intel-lectual enterprise or even a series of pragmatic prescriptions. In Britain, aside fromthe London School of Economics where L. T. Hobhouse and his successor MorrisGinsberg taught an evolutionary sociology, there were no academic courses in soci-ology, no synthetic theorists, no genuinely professional associations, no command-ing journal of sociological work or opinion, and no sociologists. Within just fouryears 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 system-atic alternative theory to Marxism needed to be elaborated, there was certainly a sense that the disorder of earlyindustrial society had to be confronted to head off potential discontent. Abrams shows~1968:58–61, 84–88! thatinsofar as continental sociology impinged on English social thought in the nineteenth century, it was the work ofComte and, especially, Frédéric Le Play, that was most influential. This was because what both offered was atheory of “social peace” through social reform, as an antidote to class conflict and socialism~see also on thisSanford Elwitt in Elwitt and Goldman 1988:209–14. Elwitt includes Durkheim in this perspective!. On earlyEnglish sociology as a response to the socialist challenge, see also Yeo~1996:235–37!.


lutely in Britain both as a theoretical and as an applied study. Until after the SecondWorld War there was no academic or public demand for sociologists. In the long andbarren 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 impliedslight to the native tradition of empirical social science~see, e.g., Kent 1981!. Sociologywasa blank space in English intellectual life in the first half of this century. The questionsare: How much does this matter? Was it so different elsewhere? Does England suffer bycomparison with the greater theoretical sophistication of other cultures? Is social theory inany case to be equated with sociology?

ENGLISH EXCEPTIONALISM?

Science and reform, it is clear, were conjoined in the Victorian mind.11 This made theEnglish somewhat impatient with abstract social theory. Were they so wrong? Englishsociety 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 thecondition of the great body of people subjected to its unprecedented stresses. This was thecontribution of Victorian “ameliorism,” a tradition continued in the twentieth century by ahost of social scientists who saw it as their task to link their studies to the work of publicpolicy and social reform. William Beveridge and social security, Richard Titmuss and thenational 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 kindsof thinkers who exemplified the English traditions of social science.12 Together with theirVictorian forbears they delivered a British welfare state that, with all its deficiencies, hasbeen widely admired for its humaneness and breadth of compassion. It was created, more-over, with a degree of orderliness and consensus that is remarkable when comparisons aremade with similar efforts elsewhere. Who might not feel that the sacrifice of academicsociology was a price worth paying?

This feeling is heightened when we see that academic sociology elsewhere, especiallyin 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 mightbe better converted into a glow of satisfaction that England accomplished what otherscould only aspire to. All Western intellectuals in the nineteenth century, he claims, wereseized with the same sense of urgency as the English; and all conceived social science asthe tool to facilitate reform. Positivism, as the dominant tendency in all European soci-eties, is a case in point. “Savoir pour pouvoir” was the slogan of Comtean positivism—or,as Comte himself put it in theCours de Philosophie Positive,“science, d’ou prévoyance:prévoyance, 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 themost influential school of continental social theory.

11“A notion of objective science for reform . . . might . . . be called the dominant British tradition until the1950s”~Yeo 1996:300!.

12For brief accounts of the work of these social scientists see Kent~1981!; Halsey~1982!; Bulmer~1985!. Onemight 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 totheory.


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 scienceof society had emerged in late eighteenth century France as “a conception of a uni-fied science of public policy”@Brian Head#, and it retained those instrumental asso-ciations even as it crossed frontiers and entered public consciousness in Britain halfa 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 consideringthe efforts of the American Social Science Association, founded in Boston in 1865 onthe English model, the GermanVerein für Sozialpolitik,started in 1872 as a reform as-sociation by liberal thinkers and publicists, and even the Franco-Belgian InternationalSocial Science Association, also modeled on the English example, Goldman finds arecord of marked failure to influence policy making in their respective countries inany serious way. The consequence was a turn to academic sociology, to “theory” as arefuge from the unaccommodating world of practice. This is precisely how MarianneWeber, for instance, saw the evolution of theVerein für Sozialpolitik. She noted its earlyinvolvement with practical politics, its attempts to influence legislators. “But when at thebeginning of the eighties Bismarck started to engage in social politics, thus reducing theprospects for a direct influence upon government machinery, the Association gave up itsactivities of agitation and replaced propagandistic with academic discussion. The accentwas shifted to strictly scientific investigations of current problems”~quoted in Goldman1987:164!.

The message seems clear. The organization of the English Social Science Associationwas, pace Annan, Anderson, and others, “no ‘peculiarity of the English,’ no exemplifica-tion of a stubborn indigenous empiricism, but an institutional example and an intellectualinspiration to similar liberal constituencies in other countries.” It offered a model of therelationship between social science and reform politics that, largely successful in England,proved unattainable elsewhere. “In this model, sociology only found an academic havenwhen, for a variety of reasons, it failed to find its place in the world of affairs. It was notthat 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 ita novel gloss. He agrees in fact with Abrams that sociology was “unnecessary” in Englandbecause there was a more commanding model of inquiry available, one that yielded moresatisfaction 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 matterfor congratulation. The English model, far from being something that needs apology, wasin fact widely envied and emulated by European and American liberals. It represented atriumph of “Englishness” and of the English aptitude for mixing social inquiry with prac-tical politics.

Goldman thus ironically reinstates the “peculiarity of the English,” despite his intentionto emphasize common concerns in all Western societies. But he does so largely to protestat the unhistorical and anachronistic nature of most attempts—including that of Abrams—towrite the history of sociology~see especially Goldman 1983:587–89!. Most of these areefforts at a retrospective reconstruction of their discipline, as currently conceived andpracticed. The intention is to discover the “origins” or “seeds” of the subject, in the fre-


quently disparate and disconnected intellectual elements that actually existed at any oneplace or time. These elements—or, as Robert Nisbet~1967! has put it, “unit-ideas”—arethen bundled together to form a “sociological tradition.”

The English case, as Goldman presents it, shows the dangers of this procedure. Englandis contrasted with more “successful” models of the development of sociology elsewhereand is berated for its backwardness. Not only does this ignore the actual history of thematter, which is that several societies sought to emulate the English model and only turnedto academic sociology when these efforts failed, but, more important, it neglects the vari-ety and specificity of the different forms of “social science” in the nineteenth century, andof 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 attemptsto make sense of the new kind of industrial society and to harness social knowledge toameliorative ends. The English model was one such—a particularly significant and widelynoted one, as it happened, since England was the first society to struggle with the novelproblems of industrialism~as Tocqueville, Marx, and Weber in their different ways acknowl-edged!. That it did not, in the end, give rise to the academic study of sociology may havebecome a cause for regret for certain English intellectuals later, but that should not affectour appreciation of its relevance and legitimacy for its own time or, more important, itsconsiderable 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 needto be challenged. Goldman largely accepts the conventional view that, while sociologylanguished 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 aresponse to the failure of reform in those societies. But is this too not the stuff of myth? Isit not the product of the same retrospective, “Whiggish” writing of history that he chargesAbrams and others with in the English case? Because sociology has come to be a strongpresence in the intellectual life of those societies, the tendency has been to constructsociological “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 tohave been institutionalized in the decades around the turn of the century. Europe had thebig names—Comte, Spencer, Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Tönnies, Simmel,Pareto—and American sociology was largely indebted, in its early stages at least, toEuropean, especially German, intellectual influences. But the institutional instruments

13Speaking of nineteenth-century American attempts to learn from the British example, Goldman remarks thatit was not only British ideas that Americans admired but also “British ways of organizing and harmonizing socialknowledge, expertise and politics. What was respected and replicated was not a philosophy so much as amodusoperandi,a method and procedure”~Goldman 1998:23!. It was this “method” that American society as much ascontinental European ones found difficult to institutionalize, and their failure in this respect can plausibly be heldto be at least one of the impulses toward a more academic and theoretical form of inquiry. For a critical exchangeon this position see Elwitt and Goldman~1988!. There is an interesting parallel to Goldman’s argument in StevenSeidman’s view that “whereas Anglo-American social theory emerged as part of the triumph of liberal civiliza-tion, European social theory was elaborated in the context of the failure of liberalism and developed, in part, asits critique” ~Seidman 1983:13!. The difference here is that Goldman also sees a failure of liberal reformism inAmerica at a critical juncture. A further parallel to Goldman’s analysis is Edward Thompson’s wide-rangingdefense~1978! of the English intellectual tradition against the onslaught of Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, and otherNew Left critics. Like Goldman he partly concedes the case: “The English experience certainly did not encour-age 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 theconditions of English life and politics such a synthesis was not necessary and other, more relevant, strengthsdeveloped.


for furthering sociology that we associate with the universities of Chicago, Michigan,Wisconsin, and later Columbia and Harvard were conspicuously absent in the Europeancase. As is well known neither Weber, Tönnies, Simmel, nor any of the other leadingfigures of German sociology ever held a chair of sociology, and their work gave rise tono systematic tradition of teaching and research in sociology. Weber was virtually un-known in the Germany of the 1920s, and the Nazi experience put paid to any furtherserious sociological work. It was left to the American Talcott Parsons, inThe Structure ofSocial Action~@1937# 1949!, to rehabilitate Weber, Tönnies, and the other Germansociologists—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 thework of Durkheim, the work of his disciples, and his editorship ofL’Année Sociologique.But we should not forget that Durkheim was for most of his professional career, both atBordeaux and the Sorbonne, a professor of education, and only in his later years at theSorbonne was he able to convert this to the title “Professor of Education and Sociology.”Moreover, and more important, Durkheim succeeded in establishing sociology in Francemainly through his own individual effort, not through institutional provision. He gatheredaround him a band of enthusiastic disciples, but there were no research careers and noacademic posts for them, and most of them did not go on to become professional oracademic sociologists. “Hence when Durkheim passed from the scene, the body of inter-pretation which had developed from his teaching and writing ceased to grow, and Frenchsociology as the study of modern society practically disappeared for more than a quarter ofa century”~Shils 1970:767; see also 786–88!.14

England, it appears, was not so different after all.Nowherein nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Europe did sociology establish itself as a serious, systematic disciplinein the way that it did in the United States. Sociologists there might be on the continent, inthe form of imposing thinkers who thought sociologically, and this marks an importantdifference from the English scene.15 But to develop sociology as a discipline Europeansociology had to await an intellectual Marshall Plan from America, which duly arrived inthe 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 beginthe massive expansion of the subject that continued until the early 1980s. To all intents andpurposes sociology in Europe is a postwar phenomenon—which means that, as with muchelse 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 andthe previous paragraph. Fortunately there is no real need to do so as they are more or less accepted now, and thereare 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!.

15We might therefore say, adapting the old formulation, that the question should be, not so much why nosociology,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 othercontributors to Nedelmann and Sztompka~1993!, that “virtually every strand of contemporary European socio-logical theory builds in fundamental ways upon American postwar thought”~Alexander 1994:6!. This does not ofcourse mean that American social thought was purely indigenous. Just as European thinkers, including theEnglishman Herbert Spencer, were highly influential in American sociology before the First World War, it hasbeen argued that Adam Smith’sTheory of Moral Sentimentsshould be considered an important source of theAmerican school of symbolic interactionism that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, since Smith’s work washighly regarded by Cooley and Mead, the founders of the school. The point however is that it was largely inAmerican vessels that the work of these European thinkers was carried back across the Atlantic. For someinteresting reflections on “the American tradition,” see Levine~1995:251–68!


This has certainly been the case in England, which shared in the general Europeanexpansion of the subject. Graduate students in sociology in the 1960s and 1970s—ofwhom I was one—cut their teeth on Parsons, Homans, Blau, Bell, Lipset, Shils, Gouldner,and Goffman. Later came the Marxists: the recovery of Lukács and Gramsci, and theinfluence of continental theorists such as Althusser and Habermas. But this then raisesagain the question: what is specificallyEnglish ~or British! sociology? If the dominantinfluences in the postwar period, when sociology finally arrived on the scene in England asin the rest of Europe, have been American and continental European, what if any is thenative 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 firstwave of postwar expansion: “To this day, despite the recent growth of sociology as aformal discipline in England, the record of listless mediocrity and wizened provincialismis unrelieved. The subject is still largely a poor cousin of ‘social work’ and ‘social admin-istration,’ the dispirited descendants of Victorian charity”~Anderson@1968# 1992a:53!.Twenty years later—in 1990, to be precise—Anderson noted a remarkable change. Bynow there had emerged “an outstanding indigenous sociology.” As representative of thisschool he instanced the work of Anthony Giddens, Michael Mann, W. G. Runciman, andErnest Gellner~@1990# 1992b:207!.

This is not the place to conduct an assessment or give even a schematic history ofpostwar English sociology. One simply has to note what is obvious to anyone who reads arepresentative 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 empiricalinvestigation—in the Booth–Rowntree–Galton vein—or has been a response to modelsand ideas stemming from American and continental European sources~see, e.g., Eldredge1980; Kent 1981; Abrams et al. 1981; Bulmer 1985; Albrow 1989, 1993!. That muchimportant 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” hasemerged 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 inBritain his works rarely appear on sociology reading lists. Ernest Gellner taught for awhile 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 anthropol-ogy at Cambridge. He has always been better known to philosophers and anthropologiststhan to sociologists. In any case to pigeonhole so many-sided a thinker—one of thatdazzling band of anti-Marxist “white émigrés” that settled in England before and afterthe Second World War~Anderson@1968# 1992a:60–65!—as a native sociologist is seri-ously to misrepresent his intellectual contribution, whether in England or abroad~seeDavis 1991!. Mann’s multivolumeSources of Social Power~1986– ! is certainly out-standing, but it has not created any kind of intellectual following in England, and Mannhimself 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 intellectualhome!.

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


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 fromoutside.

It has to be said that the failure of English sociology to make much of a mark abroad hasbeen matched by its failure to make much impression within its own national culture. Notonly is what Noel Annan said in 1959 still true—that the English intelligentsiais 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 hasfollowed suit. A recent account notes that “sociology today scarcely registers with thepublic” ~Christie 1999:1!. This is despite what the author believes to be considerablesociological 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, ithas also, according to the author, mostly taken place outside departments of sociology andindeed outside universities altogether, in independent “think tanks” and policy-relatedinstitutes. In any case English sociology, as a body of knowledge systematically created byprofessionals within scholarly institutions, does not come out well. The situation appearsto be one of “sociology without sociologists”~Christie 1999:1!—a familiar refrain inEnglish intellectual life, if we interpret the termsociologygenerously.

It is significant that the one English journal of sociology to break through the nationalbarrier isTheory, Culture, and Society~cf. Albrow 1993:87!. This is not because it dealsmainly with English thinkers—quite the contrary, the luminaries it treats are for themost 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 focusseems peculiarly congenial to the English intellectual temperament. It suggests that inlooking for the contributions of English social theory, past and present, we might be bestadvised to look not to English sociology but to other regions of the national culture. Isthere an “English sociology” that does not so much not know its name as refuse to ac-knowledge it?

17There are of course exceptions to this stark statement. I should like to instance Zygmunt Bauman, thoughhere 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 hisModernity and the Holocaustthe Amalfi Prize forsociology. One cannot imagine the English having a national prize for sociology at all.! It should also be remem-bered that Norbert Elias lived quietly among the English~as a sociologist at Leicester University! for severaldecades without anyone paying much attention to him.

Another outstanding figure is Michael Young, “the most original and influential sociologist” in England, accord-ing to Noel Annan~1991:348!. Intellectually fertile, enterprising, and energetic, he nevertheless exemplifiesprecisely the predicament of English sociology in being known and respected mainly in England—and then moreby 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 itsmembers as to what they regarded as the outstanding works of sociology in the twentieth century. Of the tenworks that came out at the top, five were by Americans, four by Germans, and one by a Frenchman; there werenone by English sociologists. See International Sociological Association~1998:324!.

18In the 1970s, as a BBC Talks producer, I once proposed a program on Durkheim. The meeting gave me itsblessing, on the grounds that producers should be allowed to pursue their passions, however quaint. But many atthe meeting—composed of culturalThird Programmetypes—confessed that they barely knew the name andcertainly could attach no meaning to it.~TheThird Programme—now called Radio 3—was the BBC’s culturalnetwork, 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 andexplains for him why the best sociologists, such as Michael Young and Gary Runciman, have been maverickswith very little influence on the subject. As for Giddens, it is only with his appointment as director of the LondonSchool of Economics, and the concomitant arrival of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” government, that he has begunto play the role of “public intellectual”—the first sociologist in England since Hobhouse to do so~though a casecould be made for A. H. Halsey or Michael Young!.


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 ofsociology. One such was literature.19 Here England was in the forefront of what has beennoted as a general phenomenon in nineteenth-century Europe. Wolf Lepenies~1988! andBruce Mazlish~1989! have both in different ways suggested that the rise of sociology wasto an important extent bound up with an engagement with literature. For Lepenies sociol-ogy emerged as a kind of third way, or a “third culture,” following a battle of the booksbetween literary and scientific intellectuals for the soul of the new industrial society. Mazlishdescribes the growth of a certain literary sensibility, in the face of the tremendous prob-lems 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 sen-sibility continued to hold sway. The prestige of literature, the pride that English peopletook in their rich literary heritage, would in any case have ensured that any new disciplinewould have had to struggle for public attention. But the fact was that for the English theirpoets, novelists, and literary critics seemed to be doing a more than adequate job of analy-sis and criticism of the novel problems of nineteenth-century industrial society. Writerssuch as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, WilliamThackeray, 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 industrialcity, the new social classes, the impact of the new utilitarian philosophy, the rise of masspolitics and mass culture. It was a characteristically clever move on the part of the risingpolitician and future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli to make his contribution to thepublic debates in the form of novels.20 The fact is that nineteenth-century English litera-ture, especially in the form of the novel, made as profound an anatomy of the new indus-trialism, the more powerful for being imaginatively expressed, as the new social science—aview shared, for instance, by Karl Marx.21

For Lepenies, indeed, one of the reasons why sociology did not develop in England wasthat the English already had it—or rather that they had a “concealed sociology”~Lepenies1988:195!. Lepenies pays particular attention to the dominant school of literary criticismthat ran from Matthew Arnold to F. R. Leavis. Here the attempt was made to see literatureas the vehicle for a particular kind of social and moral analysis, a representation of societythat was at once an account of it and a critique of its spiritual and moral content. This wasindeed very much in the long-standing English vein identified by Annan. Carried throughinto the twentieth century it had a profound effect on the character not just of literarystudies 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 canimagine an intriguing alternative avenue. But for various reasons this did not happen in England. For the devel-opment of British anthropology, see Kuklick~1992! and Kuper~1996!. Both Kuklick and Kuper argue thatBritish anthropologists, though they did not study their own culture, were intensely aware of it in their studies ofother cultures.

20The best known of which areConingsby~1844! andSybil ~1845!. Disraeli was perfectly well aware of whathe 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, andthe new problems of poverty, in Victorian and post-Victorian England, see Kumar~1995!.

21See Marx’s well-known tribute to “the present splendid brotherhood of fiction writers in England, whosegraphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by allthe 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 theprofessed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together”~quoted in Baxandall and Morawski1973:115!, shows that he and Marx would include the social scientists in their unfavorable comparison with thenovelists.


social analysis. Hence for Lepenies the typical English product of the postwar period wasnot 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 theretook place an intensification of the role of literature that lifted it higher than the alreadyelevated 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 hadto provide the moral force once contributed by the traditional religion of Christianity thatArnold saw as being in irretrievable decline. Literature took on a missionary quality. Itstask was not simply to moralize but to civilize. This is why toward the end of the centuryit was seen as the most suitable vehicle for the education of new public constituencies suchas women and the working class. Literature would heighten their moral sensibilities andhelp them understand their new civic duties~Baldick 1983; see also Collini 1991!.

The nineteenth-century sanctification of literature has ensured that the dominant tradi-tion among the English intelligentsia in the past two centuries has been literary—if by thatwe understand the writing not just of poets and novelists but also of literary and culturalcritics. 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 commandingliterary figures—from Wordsworth and Coleridge, through Carlyle, Dickens, Kingsley,and George Eliot, to Arnold, Ruskin, Morris, Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Orwell, Leavis, andWilliams. F. R. Leavis’sThe Great Tradition~1948! and Raymond Williams’sCulture andSociety 1780–1950~1958! jointly map that tradition and mark out the terrain that, in theirdifferent ways, they both wished to cultivate. It is clear that both are as much concernedwith 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 asMarxism andLiterature ~1977! andPolitics and Letters~1979!. But it is no less clear from the contri-butions to Leavis’s journalScrutiny,which contain precisely that “blend of sociology andliterary 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 1960sand 1970s produced some of the most creative theoretical writing in England. UnlikeEnglish sociology, this had a distinct international impact, as shown for instance in thesuccess of Paul Willis’sLearning to Labour~1977! in the United States. Once more England’scontribution to social theory came not from the professional sociologists but from a newsynthetic field of studies that drew equally on the native inheritance of literary and culturalcriticism, 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 conti-nental stress was stronger.

It would be wrong to say that the literary critics have made all the running in definingthe mission of the English intelligentsia~for an alternative view, see Hall 1979!. In areaswhere 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, seeJohnson~1979!; Mulhern ~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 mentionRichard Hoggart’sThe Uses of Literacy~1957!, which in its blend of literature, autobiography, sociology, and theanalysis of popular culture can almost be considered the “foundational document” of the Birmingham Centre forCultural Studies, of which Hoggart was the founder and first director.


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

History, as we have noted, was established in the universities only in the late nineteenthcentury—at about the same time as the study of English literature. Both faced the problemthat they were regarded by the scholarly establishment as redundant, if not intellectuallynegligible, disciplines: for did not the classics provide, to an unmatched degree, all thatwas necessary in the way of historical and literary instruction, quite apart from the trainingin language and logical thought that they also supremely offered? English gradually—atfirst 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 “poorman’s classics,” for the less able students, in an era of expanding higher education. It wasalso seen as important to train students in the study of literature so that they could go outas teachers to the schools and the new institutions of adult education to perform theircivilizing 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. Gainingacceptance for its study in the universities, and in the national culture generally, wasrendered the easier by this fact. But what of history? Why should it have succeeded? Andwhy 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 amore appealing and more easily assimilable form, some of the qualities of intellectualdiscipline and moral education traditionally provided by the classics. But there were moreimportant contemporary reasons for its acceptance. It came to be seen as a more fittingpreparation 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 theworld. England was the first industrial society and the wealthiest and most powerfulcountry in the world. By the time of the First World War its empire had outstrippedRome’s, occupying a fifth of the world’s landmass and incorporating a quarter of theworld’s population. It was imperative that English statesmen should know about theirown history, not just that of a dead civilization with its dead language. England’s devel-opment was widely regarded as unique, in the context of both the ancient and the modernworlds. It had succeeded not just commercially, to an unprecedented degree, but, moreimportant, it had led the way in the invention and elaboration of free political institu-tions. This was why history, especially English history, was necessary. Its task was toteach 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

24One 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, JackGoody, Ernest Gellner. There are problems with disciplinary attribution in a number of cases, but with theexceptions of Gellner and McIntyre, who for a while taught sociology, all the others contributed to social theoryfrom 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, aswell 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 arenot the schools that have had the greatest impact on social theory. See Anderson~@1990# 1992a:87–88!.


nothing could compare in importance with this task and with this role allotted to histor-ical study. That this would amount to what a later generation of professional historianswould characterize and criticize as the “Whig interpretation of history” is obvious. Butthe point was not to train future historians. History was for service to the nation. It was toenhance 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 ofdoing things.25

It was inconceivable that sociology, as currently understood, could have played thatrole. Sociology, despite what Durkheim and his disciples were trying to do in France, wasmore likely to undermine faith in national institutions than strengthen commitment. Through-out the Western world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, history wastaught as a celebration of the nation and national life—“1066 and All That.” Sociology bycontrast was a critical and questioning discipline, not simply in the version developed byleft-wing thinkers but even in the more influential positivist forms that took their descentfrom Comte and Spencer.26 In its German variant, as presented in the work of Weber,Simmel, Tönnies, and others, it offered a penetrating and distinctly disquieting critique ofthe institutions and values of modernity. English sociology hovered uneasily between allthese influences, settling finally for a weak positivist version that was an easy target for thecriticisms of anthropologists, economists, and historians. Given the dominant inheritanceof English individualism, empiricism, and “ameliorism,” sociology was quite incapable ofoffering an alternative “grand narrative” of the kind that the “Whig interpretation of his-tory” so commandingly supplied, with its own vastly more elaborated and unabashedcelebration 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 talentfor social analysis and social criticism should feel that, in England at least, history~orliterature! 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 eliteinstitutions 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 begin-ning of the twentieth century it had already overtaken classics as the preferred subject forstudents in the major public schools and at Oxford and Cambridge~Soffer 1987:82!. Norwas this simply as the most favorable route to public positions at home and abroad. Forany bright aspiring intellectual with a critical mind and outlook, history was the obvioussubject to study~where indeed, apart from one college in London and a few provincialoutposts, could one have studied sociology in England if one had wanted to before theSecond 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 historyshould 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 inEngland, was a controversial and combative figure in his later years, seen as threatening the emerging nationalconsensus on the need for state intervention and state regulation. See Peel~1971:224–48!. Durkheim too, as hisactivities during the Dreyfus affair made clear, was as much a critic as an apologist for the institutions of theThird Republic, while his sociology as a whole can plausibly be read as a critique of the main tendencies ofmodern capitalist society. See Turner~1992!; on Durkheim and the Dreyfus affair, see Lukes~1973:320–60!.

27I well remember this advice being given to me by the social historian Raphael Samuel.


analysis and penetrating social criticism—a form of “concealed” or “implicit” sociologyeven more powerful and wide ranging than in the case of English studies. Mixed withliterature, as indeed was often the case, it could be an even subtler and more persuasiveform 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 contri-bution to social theory—more so, indeed, than English sociologists. This has beentrue especially of the left-leaning and Marxist historians. In the work of Rodney Hiltonon the English Middle Ages, Christopher Hill~and before him R. H. Tawney! onthe Reformation and the English Revolution, Keith Thomas on religion and magic inearly modern times, Eric Hobsbawm on the “long nineteenth” and the “short twenti-eth” 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 na-ture 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 conceptof social class, and the nature of nationalism.28 It is difficult to imagine a more cre-ative 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 JonathanClark, have offered stimulating insights into the nature of religious movements and be-liefs, family structure and political change in premodern society, and the class systemsand 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 Brontë andH. G. Wells—the role of literature in shaping perceptions and aiding our understanding isfully acknowledged.

Edward Thompson deserves a special mention. Not only has his work been highlyinfluential in sociology—hisThe Making of the English Working Class~1963! appearson innumerable sociology reading lists—but he exemplifies in the highest degree thatfusion of literature, history, and social theory as social criticism that has been the hall-mark 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 theEnglish working class and continued with numerous studies of class, culture, and conflictin eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. In the process he has illuminated the studyof the crowd and crowd psychology; he has explored the impact of industrialism onmodes of thinking and feeling; he has shown the persistence of customary norms andbeliefs in mediating the effects of modern market economies; he has made it impossiblefor us to think seriously of class without adding a historical and dynamic dimension; andhe has helped us to understand what it is to reconstruct and understand a culture and acommunity, past or present. It was fitting, and entirely characteristic, that he shouldconclude—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-

28Some 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 mightadd that in current debates about English national identity, no English sociologist has contributed as much ashistorians such as Raphael Samuel, Linda Colley, and David Cannadine—see, for instance, Colley~1994!.


trates the English cultural tradition~as also in the case of William Morris, Thompson’sother hero!.30

“ENGLISHNESS” AND “THE SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITION”

Each nation gets the social theory it deserves—or, rather, that is consonant with its polit-ical and social development. For various historical reasons, a political system emerged inEngland that made it peculiarly easy for certain kinds of intellectuals to get close to themachinery of government. Their intellectual interests were fashioned by the possibilitiesopened up by this unusual and attractive situation. In this context sociology, as a theoret-ical 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 werefound 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 realizedthis, 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 sociol-ogy. One only has to look to the United States, or perhaps contemporary France, to seewhat such a claim would imply. Englishsociologyis indeed manifestly an “unfinishedproject”; 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 gov-ernment, and the English public generally, exhibit a marked lack of interest in sociologyand seem largely unimpressed by its record to date. That could no doubt be said of manyWestern societies today. The difference is that in many cases sociology has been suffi-ciently vigorously launched to develop a momentum of its own, which at least gives it acertain 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 distinctivesociology, it did encourage a form of inquiry that is sufficiently close to the concerns ofsociologists to count as an important contribution to social theory. We may if we wish callthis 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’scontribution to social theory, see also Calhoun~1994!. One need hardly say that despite one of Thompson’sbest-known books being entitledThe Poverty of Theory,the essays that make up the book are alive with theo-retical insights—not least the famous essay “The Peculiarities of the English”~1978!. It is this that makes meresist the objection raised by one of the anonymous reviewers of this article that Thompson was “antitheory” andwould not have liked to be included in a discussion that saw him as a significant social theorist. It is no doubt truethat Thompson “would not be comfortable in being assimilated to any sort of ‘sociological tradition’”—but thatwould also be true of almost anyone, sociologist or nonsociologist, working within the Marxist tradition, whichhas often thought of sociology as a “bourgeois science” and resisted many of what they see as its workingassumptions~consensus, integration, an ahistorical approach, etc.!. It is also true that Thompson polemicizedvigorously and, on occasion, vitriolically, against what he saw as the excessively abstract theorizing of certainMarxists within both Britain and France. But I would contend that whatever skepticism Thompson may haveexpressed occasionally about theory, his own work shows him to have had a consummate grasp of theory, if bythat 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 asgood an example of all this as any, showing his meticulous handling of detail and his general grasp of socialstructure. 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 theoreticalunderstanding of concepts such as class, community, and collective action—hardly worth doing unless Thomp-son had posed a theoretical challenge.


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

Or we may, considering the central role of literature and history, also call the Englishcontribution a kind of “literary,” “cultural,” or “historical” sociology. It may not have thesystematic quality or explicit theoretical purpose of what currently passes under thoseheads, but it is noticeable how often one sees references to the work of Williams andThompson 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 con-temporary sociology would be the American cultural critic Edward Said. Said not only inseveral places acknowledges a debt to Williams and Thompson but in his blend of litera-ture, history, and cultural criticism exemplifies just that kind of synthetic social theory thatmarks the contribution of the English thinkers~see, e.g., Said 1993!. All this suggests thatwhat the English thinkers were doing overlaps in important ways with some of the mostinteresting current developments in sociology.

The “Englishness” of English social theory leads us finally to reflect briefly on thesociological tradition in general. It has become common to try to identify particularlyimportant figures, and certain lines of descent, that went toward the making of the disci-pline 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 sociologicalpantheon or which are the most important tributaries to the broad sociological stream. Thedanger however is that we end up reifying or “essentializing” the subject, seeing it as asingle 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 restrictedset of themes and approaches. Not only does it leave out certain “micro” varieties of socialtheory that are always having to be rediscovered, more damaging, it leaves out large areasof literary and cultural life that are regarded as the province of other disciplines. Untilrecently one would have wanted to say that it also leaves out history—despite Marx andwhat following from him should have been a continuous engagement with history in thediscipline. That has now come to be remedied to a certain extent, though the battle is farfrom 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 tosociology 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 some-thing called “sociology,” in any of its definitions or manifestations, should not lead us toconstrue this as a lack of interest in social investigation or social theory. We need to keepour eyes open for the less obvious signs of their presence, and when we look there we maywell, as in the English case, be richly rewarded.

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