1. Goran Therboni, Science Class and Society: On the Formation of Sociology and Historical Materialism. London: New Left Books, 1976; Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Sociology. Cambridge: C.U.P., 1976.

2. E.g. H. E. Barnes, An Introduction to the History of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948; a recent but vintage example is R. Fletcher, The Making of Sociology: a Study of Sociological Theory. London: Nelson, 1971.

3. Talcott Parson's The Structure of Social Action. Glencoe: Free Press, 1937, being the classic of the genre. R. A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition. London: Heinemann, 1967 is very much of this type with its concern to point a finger of tu quoque at the liberal establishment of American sociology. D. Matza's Becoming Deviant. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969, combines a history with advocacy of a perspective for the sociology of deviance, as does M. Harris's Rise of Anthropological Theory. London: Routledge, 1969.

4. These are so numerous that one need only mention A. Giddens' Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: C.U.P., 1971, or the introductions to the various volumes in Chicago's `Heritage of Sociology' series.

5. Outstanding examples being Wolfgang Mommsen's Max Weber und die Deutsche Politik, Tubingen, 1974, H. S. Hughes' still valuable Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890-1930. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959 or J. W. Burrow's Evolution and Society: a Study in Victorian Social Thought. Cambridge: C.U.P., 1966.

6. That this is a farrago, is well illustrated by the contents of Reynolds and Reynolds' reader, Sociology of Sociology, New York: McKay, 1970. Some of it, concerned merely with be labouring establishment sociologists in America for unjustified pretensions to `value-freedom', has little to do with the history of the subject. But there is the valuable work done by Oberschall, Lazarsfeld and others on such matters as the institutionalization of empirical sociology, case studies of new particular pieces of research were done, etc. modelled on comparable work in the `sociology of science'. And then again there are the two major works claiming the label: R. W. Friedrichs' A Sociology of Sociology. New York: Free Press, 1970 and A. W. Gouldner's The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. London: Heinemann, 1971. The latter is a sort of mythologized history of the kind rightly stigmatized by Giddens in `Classical Social Theory and the Origins of Modern Sociology', Amer. J. Soc. 82 (1976). It also seems a good example of the `prophetic mode of sociology' celebrated by Friedrichs. Both books are commended, not without criticism, by Therborn, who seems to take them in part as exemplars for his own.

7. G. R. Elton, The Practice of History, Sydney: Sydney U.P., 1967, critically noted by Gareth Stedmanjones, `Historical Sociology to Theoretical History', Brit. J. Social. 27, 1976, 295-305.

8. Hawthorn, op cit., p. 255.

9. In his influential article `Understanding and Explanation in the History of Ideas', History and Theory 8 (1969), pp. 3-53.

10. Hawthorn, op cit., p. 257.

11. E.g. P. Q. Hirst, Durkheinm Bernard and Epistemology. London: Routledge, 1974.

12. In fact Therborn attempts to synthesize two kinds of approach to the history of thought which have often been considered quite antithetical. To the extent that it is Althusserian, his work falls in the `internalist' tradition of history of science, running back to the work of figures like Koyre and Canguilhem. To the extent that it is an essay in the sociology of knowledge (and his relating the `bourgeois' social thought of figures like Pareto to their banking interests or political activities shows that it is), the affimities are to the `externalist' approach in the history of science represented in the 1930S by both Marxists (like Hessen or Bernal) and sociologists (like Merton), to which Koyre and his kind were vehemently opposed. Therborn himself seems unaware of this paradoxical ancestry, and does nothing to indicate how its dilemmas might be resolved.

13. For a useful survey of earlier attempts by Marxists to relate to sociology, see T. B. Bottomore, Marxist Sociology. London: Macmillan, 1975.

14. Therborn, op cit., p. 217.

15. Ibid., p. 224.

16. Ibid., p. 143.

17. Ibid., p. 429.

18. Ibid., p. 59.

19. As Giddens observes, New Rules of the Sociological Method. London:Hutchinson, 1976, p. 142; Therborn, pp. 58-59 notes the `certain resemblance' to Kuhn's concept.

20. Cf. Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, pp. 121, 143-151.

21. For a case study, Robin Horton, `On the Rationality of Conversion', Africa 45 (1975); and for a valuable critique of Kuhn along these lines, M. D. King, `Reason, Tradition and the Progressiveness of Science', History and Theory 10 (1971), pp. 3-32, to which I am considerably indebted.

22. Quoted by Therborn, op cit., p. 61.

23. And, it would seem, by Marx too, referring to his predecessors: `Science, unlike other architects, builds not only castles in the air, but may construct separate habitable storeys of the building before laying the foundation stone'. (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. London, 1971), p. 57.

24. `Understanding a Primitive Society', Amner. Phil. Q., 1 (1964).

25. G. Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

26. Therborn, op cit., p. 77.

27. R. Heilbronner, The Worldly Philosophers. London: Allen Lane, 1969; K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon, 1957 edn., esp. chap. 11.

28. Therborn, op cit., pp. 115 ff.

29. Ibid., p. 144.

30. Cf. Parsons' definition of sociology as `the science which attempts to develop an analytical theory of social systems in terms of the property of common-value integration'. Structure of Social Action, New York: Free Press, 1949 edn. (orig. 1937), p. 768.

31. Therborn, op Cit., p. 221.

32. Ibid., p. 382.

33. For example, the whole section dealing with Weber presents one of the best short accounts of his work in relation to its intellectual context, stressing its character as `the offspring of an encounter between German historicism and Austrian marginalist economics' (p. 280), which is a valuable corrective to the kind of view presented by I. Zeitlin (Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968, chap. 11) that it was merely part of a `debate with Marx's ghost'.

34. Therborn, op cit., p. 429 The ineradicably Hegelian assumptions of the concept of transcendence (Aufhebung) are well discussed in S. Avineri, Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx. Cambridge: Univeristy Press, 1971, esp. pp. 36-38.

35. A model for this latter approach is William Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, founded upon their History. London: Parker, new edn. 1847, in contrast to the better-known rational' approach of J. S. Mill. It is important to stress that such an approach cannot depend entirely on an empirical method, since if it did it could not be critical, only amounting to a systematization of existing practice in a discipline.

There are insuperable difficulties in the project of deriving adequate practice in the social sciences from either the practices of particular natural sciences or what is held to be `scientific' in general (by whatever criteria of scientificity). In the first case it must always need to be additionally established by means of a particular ontological argument, that the distinctive subject matter of the social science made it appropriate for the practice to be transferred-so that the fact of its practice elsewhere would be irrelevant. In the second case, any such general criteria of scientificity could only be compelling on the grounds of their conformity with universal criteria of rationality (such as the avoidance of contradiction or petitio principii), which again stand or fall in their own right. We are left with only two sources of guidance: universal rational criteria, not peculiar to `science', and an ontology of our particular subject matter. Any arguments about `scientificity' as such (so characteristic of Althusser's disciples-cf. Therborn, p. 59) are wholly beside the point, being more to do with laying claim to the cachet of authority which the epithet `scientific' confers.

36. For a further example of this doctrine, cf. P. Q. Hirst, Social Evolution and Sociological Categories. London: Allen and Unwin, 1976, and my review in Times Higher Educational Supplement, 28th Jan. 1977.

37. B. Hindess and P. Q. Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production. London: Routledge, 1975, pp. 2-3.

38. Cf. S. Ossowski, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness. London: Routledge, 1963 passim; A. Briggs, `The Language of Class in Nineteenth Century England', in A. Briggs and J. Saville (eds.), Essays in Labour History. London:Macmillan, 1967. Marx's tributes to the historians and economists who preceded him in the analysis of class and the description of class-struggle are well known. A key link was, of course, Engels' The Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844.

39. Cf. the acute comments of J. A. Barnes, `African Models in the New Guinea Highlands' Man 62 (1962)-but also see, opposed, J. S. La Fontaine, `Descent in New Guinea' in J. Goody (ed.), The Character of Kinship. Cambridge: C.U.P., 1973, who is right to make the point that Fortes' concepts were meant to be universal; Fortes' views on kinship, elaborated in relation to his classic Tallensi material, were challenged on a data base in Ceylon, by Leach (Pul Eliva, Cambridge: University Press, 1961), who also casts his argument in universal terms; further examples are discussed in J. D. Y. Peel, `Sociology and the Historiography of the Yoruba',J. Hist. Soc. Nig. (forthcoming). A disappointing feature of Adam Kuper's history Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School 1922-72, London: Allen Lane, 1973, is that it pays little systematic attention to this vital source of theoretical disagreement among anthropologists.

40. As, pace the Forte-Leach interchange, Jack Goody has done in a series of pieces contrasting African and European/Asian social structures, above all Bridewealth and Dowry (ed. Goody and Tambiah), Cambridge: University Press, 1973, and Production and Reproduction, Cambridge: University Press, 1977.

41. Cf. Perry Anderson's very useful survey of its genealogy, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London: New Left Books, 1974, pp. 462-472.

42. Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, chap. 4. They are quite right to further insist, pp. 219-220, that (at the most general level, one presumes) `the same concepts apply to the Orient and Occident'. But the stubborn empirical problem remains: how do we give an account of the forms and relations of state and society in these particular Asian societies, when our principal candidate for the universal comparative concept, `mode of production', seems already stained by its occidental provenance? To be left with `feudalism' as the seemingly most relevant particular category is to be taken right back to where the journey began.

43. Several examples in M. Bloch (ed.) Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology. London: Malaby, 1975-esp. the essays by Bloch himself, Friedmann and Terray, all empirically admirable.

44. Thus Terray's reworking of Meillassoux's Gouro material (Marxism and `Primitive' Societies: Two Studies. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), as judged by Hindess and Hirst, op cit., pp. 61-62.

Book Review: Two Cheers for Empiricism;or,What is the Relevance of the History of Sociology to its Current Practice?

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