Philosophy of the Social

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The Sociology of Sociology

Anthony King
Philosophy of the Social Sciences 2007; 37; 501
DOI: 10.1177/0048393107307665
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Review Essays

The Sociology of Sociology

Anthony King
Exeter University

Philosophy of
the Social Sciences
Volume 37 Number 4
December 2007 501-524
2007 Sage Publications
10.1177/0048393107307665
http://pos.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com

In this recent history of British sociology, Andrew Halsey suggests an

intriguing connection between political economic rgimes in the twentieth
century and the development of sociology as an academic discipline, dividing
British sociology into four periods, 1900-1950, 1950-1967, 1968-1975, and
1975-2000. In this way, by connecting disciplinary developments with
contemporaneous rgimes of economic regulation, Halsey begins to outline
a sociology of sociology. However, although much of Halseys book is informative, especially his description of the period from 1950-1967 when he
personally entered the discipline, Halsey ultimately fails to develop his sociology of the discipline sufficiently, especially after 1967. Although it does not
claim to be comprehensive, this essay attempts to develop Halseys sociology
of the discipline.
Keywords: British sociology; social theory; twentieth century

Halsey, A. (2004). A History of Sociology in Britain: Science, Literature

and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

s part of his recent book on the history of British sociology, Andrew

Halsey asked British sociology professors to identify individuals who
had been particularly decisive in the development of the discipline. One
response stood out sufficiently for Halsey to record it in full: I would not
pick out any specific figure. I think that sociology has been developed by
the sociological community, generally impeded by the fetishism of great
men (Halsey 2004, 49). The humorless reply exemplifies the sanctimony
which, as Andrew Abbott has noted (2005), often characterizes professional
sociology. However, the reply also illustrates the central purpose of Halseys
book. Halsey calls his book A History of Sociology in Britain but, in fact, it
is a sociology of British sociology. Halsey aims to identify the institutional
and social context in which professional sociology has been conducted in
this country since Leonard Hobhouse took the first chair of sociology at the
Received 13 September 2006
Authors Note: I am extremely grateful to Ian Jarvie for his useful comments on this article
and to Marta Trzebiatowska for reading an early draft.
501
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London School of Economics in 1909. Halsey analyzes the sociological

community which has allowed certain prominent individuals to become
academic fetishes. Given the central importance of the sociology of knowledge to the discipline since the 1970s, it is perhaps remarkable that sociologists have rarely turned their sceptical eye on sociology itself. While
Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, Barry Barnes, and Harry Collins subject the
natural sciences to intense scrutiny, sociology cannot exempt itself from its
critical gaze. Halsey seeks to re-dress this absence of academic reflexivity.
Intriguingly, if almost unwittingly, Halsey connects the development of British
sociology, as an intellectual practice, with the main political economic
rgimes of the twentieth century. Thus, Halsey divides the history of British
sociology into four periods: 1900 to 19501, 1950 to 1967, 1968 to 1975, and
1976 to 2000, broadly paralleling the rgimes of economic regulation in
twentieth-century Britain.
Echoing the work of many other social scientists, Ernest Mandel (1975),
for instance, has argued for three main periods of capitalism. Thus, a free
market period ran from the Industrial Revolution of early nineteenth century
to approximately the 1930s. Certainly the state provided the legal and institutional context in which the market operated, as Karl Polanyi so brilliantly
demonstrated, but states did not macro-manage the economy as a whole.
In the 1920s, this free market rgime began to collapse, to be replaced by
monopoly capital. The Wall Street Crash and the Depression demonstrated
that the free market system of regulation was no longer a viable basis of
economic development. The state sought to intervene in the management
of the economy which was increasingly dominated by larger concentrations of
capital. Roosevelts New Deal represented the rise of a new system of regulation which in Britain manifested itself in the form of Keynesianism, both
solidifying as a new paradigm of regulation in the Second World War. In most
of the rest of Europe, state interventionism in the 1930s and 40s took the
dark form of fascism in Western Europe and Communism east of the Oder.
Writing in the 1920s, Gramsci presciently described this new economic
rgime as Fordism, employing a specialist concept of mass production to
describe a much wider political economic complex. As a system of mass
production regulated by an interventionist state, Fordism was extraordinarily
successful in raising living standards, especially after the Second World
War. The 1950s constituted the high point of this rgime of regulation when
an affluent society emerged out of the disasters of the 1930s and 40s. Not
1. In fact, in the text, Halsey emphasizes the Second World War as the critical divide and, thus,
1945 not 1950. 1945 is used throughout the text to periodize British sociology itself.

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only did the new welfare state intervene in macro-economic management

but it arbitrated between labor and capital to produce a distinctive triangular
corporatist settlement.
Fordisms long boom itself came to an end toward the end of the 1960s,
eventually collapsing in the 1970s. From the late 1960s, a series of industrial
disputes undermined the corporatist settlement between labor and capital
and it became impossible for the state to act as arbitrator between the two
groups. Increasing economic competition, especially from Japan, and, finally,
the oil crises of 1973 and 1974 undermined the states ability to regulate the
economy. At this point, Mandel identifies the rise of a third political economic
rgime: multinational capital. In the late 60s, a series of mergers between
major enterprises produced new capitalist conglomerates which began to
compete transnationally with each other. They no longer only had markets
in other nations but a global network of production and distribution. These
multinationals were able to subvert the authority of the state through foreign
direct investment. By the 1980s and especially the later half of that decade,
a new rgime of regulation had begun to emerge, to be described as postFordism by many commentators. Economic liberalism has returned as the
dominant economic philosophy and states sought to regulate the competition
between transnational corporations only indirectly.
The twentieth century can be broadly periodized into four rgimes; the
liberalist era ran from 1900 to the 1930s, the Fordist from the 1930s to
1970, followed by the collapse of Fordism in the 1970s, and, finally, the rise
of post-Fordism in the 1980s. Few of these specific terms appear in Halseys
book but the parallel between his periodization of British sociology with
its four periods and this standard account of twentieth-century economic
development is too striking to ignore. Of course, there is no suggestion that
there is any direct causal relation between sociology and the political economy in which it was conducted. Neither the economy nor the system of
state regulation determined sociological inquiry directly. Rather, in each
era, the central political and social issues of the day which confronted
all members of British society also framed and channelled sociological
research. Sociologists, institutionally embedded in universities, were themselves connected professionally and personally to other public and private
sector organizations and groups. Consequently, they necessarily reflected
the concerns and priorities of the wider culture which they analyzed. Sociology
was part of the Zeitgeist. Ultimately, Halseys book insightfully implies that
each era of the twentieth century gave rise to the kind of sociology which it
deserved. This is a deeply suggestive way of comprehending the development
of the discipline.

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Imperial Sociology: 1900-1945

Who reads Hobhouse now? (Halsey 2004, 53). Referencing Parsons
famous question at the start of The Structure of Social Action (1956), Halsey
neatly introduces an obvious question which confronts British sociologists.
Why was British sociology so underdeveloped before the Second World
War and is the work which was done in its name by Leonard Hobhouse and
Edward Westermarck, in particular, now all but forgotten? The underdevelopment of sociology in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century is
an anomaly which must be explained. In Germany, France, and the United
States, by contrast, sociology enjoyed high academic status from the beginning of the twentieth century. The prominence of sociology in France and
Germany was perhaps a product of the strength of the state in those countries
and, therefore, the centrality of social issues to national debate. Sociology was
an intellectual manifestation of the state and its power. In addition, flowing
respectively from Hegel and Rousseau, there was a strong tradition of social
philosophy in both countries. Yet, in the United States where the state, as in
Britain, was always much weaker, a powerful tradition of sociology also
developed before the Second World War. The Chicago School was the most
obvious example of the academic status of the discipline but at both Harvard
and Columbia strong sociology programmes had also been developed (Halsey
2004, 69). It is strange that sociology did not develop in Britain.
Halsey does not provide a definitive explanation of why sociology was
so neglected in Britain but he suggests some likely possibilities. In his chapter
on pre-War sociology, Halsey concludes with a discussion of social anthropology on the grounds that the boundaries without and divisions within
sociology were defined more fluidly in the early part of the twentieth
century (Halsey 2004, 65). However, Halseys discussion of social anthropology suggests not merely a blurring of the two disciplines but the superiority of anthropology in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century.
Indeed, Halsey is necessarily diverted into a discussion of sociologys sister
discipline precisely because of the latters intellectual dominance in these
decades. Sociology simply did not have sufficient intellectual autonomy to
merit its own pre-War history. Indeed, it is notable that much of Edward
Westermarcks sociology explicitly focused on Islamic culture in North
Africa and marriage practices in particular; it was indistinguishable from
anthropology.
Halsey does not explore the thesis but it seems highly probable that the
pre-eminence of social anthropology and the concomitant underdevelopment
of sociology in Britain was a result of the Empire. For Britain, the colonial

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encounter was a political and intellectual center of gravity, demanding analysis

and debate. Although Asads (1973) critique of social anthropology is in
places overly conspiratorial, he demonstrates the close institutional connection between social anthropologists and the colonial administration. To conduct
his research on the Azande, Evans-Pritchard (1937) was given the local
status of a colonial official, while S. F. Nadels A Black Byzantium includes
a forward by Lord Lugard, former Governor General of Nigeria and the
architect of British West Africa. Anthropologists were not necessarily apologists for the Empire but their close colonial connections aided their research
and seem to have facilitated their high status within Britain. Anthropologists
threw fascinating light on the sources of British greatness. Sociologists, by
contrast, seemed to be concerned with less appealing issues; with the condition of the working class, industrialization, urbanization, and state policy.
The exotic was replaced with a grim analysis of the mundane. Not only was
sociology dissonant with Britains imperial self-perception but its interests
and methods conflicted with the liberal consensus and the states laissez-faire
approach to urban and industrial problems. The collectivist orientation of
sociological theory contrasted with the dominant individualism of the time.
It seems likely that sociology in Britain was underdeveloped precisely
because Britain was an imperial power, therefore. The Empire may also have
influenced the research which was conducted under the name of sociology.
In particular, the colonial encounter seemed to have prioritized the issue of
evolutionand, indeed Darwinismin the works of early sociologists like
Hobhouse and Westermarck. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Darwinism had not only colonized a whole area of scientific investigation
but had also influenced much broader trends of thought, connecting closely
with the imperial projects of the major European powers. In some cases,
such as in the phrenological studies of the late nineteenth century or the
writings of De Gobineau, Darwinism assumed a virulent form of racism.
Darwinism was also sometimes mobilized to justify the liberal economy in
which only the strongest companies could adapt and survive. Darwinism was
part of a cultural paradigm which was dominant from the middle of the nineteenth century and reflecting this Darwinian hegemony both Westermarcks
and Hobhouses work was substantially concerned with social evolution.
However, both sociologists sought to engage critically with and, ultimately,
to reject Darwinian socio-biology even while adopting an evolutionary framework. Thus, Hobhouses Mind in Evolution (1901) and Morals in Evolution
(1906) and Westermarcks The Origins and Development of Moral Ideas
(1906) dismiss biological accounts of human social development. For them,
humans do not simply behave; they must collectively understand what they,

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as members of a group, are trying to do: The heart of social life is human
purpose, and purpose is to be interpreted not like an event in nature through
its causes but in terms of its wisdom or unwisdom, its goodness or badness,
in a word its value (Hobhouse 1924, 12). Consequently, a biology based
on individual organic evolution which ignores human consciousness must
be inadequate to the explanation of human culture. Rather human social
development had to be understood as orthogenic evolution. Human development is a cultural product of the social group, developed through social
interaction and meaningful discussion. It was not the manifestation of bare
individual need. For Hobhouse, the true method of social enquiry is not
scientific at all but philosophical (Hobhouse 1924, 12). Sociology must be
philosophical because it is concerned with meaning and understanding not
with mechanics.
In addition to the evolutionary theme, the work of Hobhouse and
Westermarck is also characterized by a concern with individualism and
liberalism. In this, their work was a reflection of the culture of the time.
Although liberalism experienced a strange death after the First World War,
even Hobhouses and Westermarcks later work remained heavily influenced by liberal concerns. Hobhouse and Westermarck articulated the British
political consensus in sociological form, elucidating the cultural origins
of individualism. Nevertheless, as with evolution, they adopted an interesting sociological position on liberalism, arguing that individual freedom was a
social product not the essential property of the individual. Opposing the
merely slack freedom of simple societies, Hobhouse describes the positive liberty of higher communities:
But there is also a freedom which is the soundest basest of efficiencythe
willing partnership of the citizen in the common life, not cramping, but
enlarging and enriching the individual personality. Such freedom is only
possible if each man effectually feels the common good to be in some sort
his own, that is, it implies some kind of measure of equality in partnership.
(Hobhouse 1924, 35)

Positive freedom is, for Hobhouse, a collective good, produced in social

groups as humans mutually support each others efforts to contribute to shared
goals. In an interesting parallel with Durkheims Division of Labourand in
direct opposition to the liberal Cult of the IndividualHobhouse claims that
humans become freer as they become more dependent on each other.
Unfortunately, although in many respects admirable, the work of Hobhouse
and Westermarck is compromised by its concern with issues parochially
specific to Edwardian Britain such as social evolution and liberal politics.

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Today, they remain, as Halsey rightly notes, almost unread. Halseys History
sets itself an important task of illuminating the much neglected origins of
British sociology. However, while always interesting, Halseys account lacks
a level of detail and precision to provide a convincing story. Of course, in this,
Halsey demonstrates only the reality of contemporary British sociology;
there is very little intellectual connection between the work conducted under
the name of sociology in Britain between the first and second halves of the
twentieth century.

Keynesian Sociology: 1945-1967

While Halseys history of pre-War sociology is somewhat sparse, his
book comes alive in his description of the institutionalisation of British
sociology after the War. This is the strongest part of the book. It is obvious
why Halseys account attains an authoritative and yet intimate tone in this
section. This is precisely the period in which Halsey himself was inducted
into the profession in which he was to become a leading light. He is able to
fuse personal biography with institutional development in a rich description
of the rise of an intellectual discipline out of the margins. Halsey notes in a
pointed aside that Hobhouse and Marshall were both from public school.
Indeed, he records Marshalls honest deprecations of his higher professional
class background: Add to this my conventional schooling, first in a very
select preparatory boarding school, and then at Rugby, a solidly bourgeois
and not particularly snobbish Public School and it is easy to understand
how limited, and how naively unsociological was my youthful view of
society (Halsey 2004, 75). After the War, by contrast, sociologists were
increasingly drawn not from public schools but from grammar schools and
they had often served in the armed forces. Like many other British conscripts, the War acted as a crucible for a new political consciousness for
these future British sociologists. They remained committed nationalists but
they argued themselves into democratic socialism and enthusiastic support
for Attlees government on His Majestys ships, airfields and army camps
(Halsey 2004, 73). Above all, these new acolytes to the discipline regarded
the working class as the central focus of their inquiries. While Marshall
noted that he knew nothing of working class life (Halsey 2004, 75), they
immersed themselves into the realities of urban existence in Britain. They
constituted an intellectual arm of Beveridges strategy of universal enfranchisement, seeking to incorporate the working class into the very centre of
academic discussion.

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In this way, these new sociologists were ultimately an element in

the emergent corporatist consensus providing academic mediation between
capital, labor, and the state itself. It was no accident that British sociology
enjoyed its closest relationship to government during this period. Indeed,
Raymond Aron dismissed British sociology as preoccupied with the
intellectual problems of the Labour Party. Although intended disparagingly,
Aron accurately identified the underlying ethos of the discipline. British
sociology was forged in this distinctive cultural milieu when a new social
cohort entered the discipline at a moment of changing national politics.
These emerging academics, Halsey among them, had the energy and imagination to address the critical issues of post-War Britain. They sought to
analyse the reality of British society in order to contribute actively to the
One-Nation consensus. It was, according to Halsey, a golden age (Halsey
2004, 112).
In one of the most evocative passages in the book, Halsey describes the
unlikely ground in which the seeds of this intellectual florescence were sown.
The LSE was an intellectual-cum-political Mecca. Its buildings sprawled in
grimy vitality on the East and West sides of Houghton Street off the Aldwych.
Demob suits and battle jackets, incongruously adorned by the college scarf,
thronged the street between the two main lecture theatres. The library was
heavily used, assailing the nostrils with the mustiness of books and the sickliness of human sweat. The students refectory was a clutter of cheap and
unappetizing snacks, and the Students Union pub, The Three Tuns, normally
permitted no more than standing in discomfort. But the aspiring sociologists
were indifferent to the chaotic ugliness of the architecture. The inconveniences
of the human ant heap were of no significance by comparison with the conversation and the visibility and audibility of great scholars. (Halsey 2004, 74)

It is interesting to compare this milieu with the sterility which Kingsley

Amis (1954) records in his novel about post-War university life, Lucky Jim.
Although an economic historian, the protagonist in that novel, a grammar
school-educated social democrat represented precisely the profile of the postWar British sociologist and its disdain for enduring Edwardian archaism.
This new intellectual culture manifested itself most clearly in the series of
publications which began to appear from the late 1950s, documenting and
analyzing the British working class. Richard Hoggarts Uses of Literacy
(1956) was seminal in this regard, initiating a wave of publication on the
working class. Clearly, Goldthorpe and Lockwoods Affluent Worker number
remains the most prominent among these but there were a number of major
contributions in which this work should be situated, including Dennis,

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Henriques, and Slaughters Coal is Our Life (1969), Robins The Classic
Slum (1971), Zweigs The Worker in an Affluent Society (1961), and Jacksons
Working Class Community (1961). Illustrating the close relationship between
sociology and contemporary politics, all of these books sought to examine
directly or indirectly the validity of the embourgeoisement thesis. They
analyzed how the working class was changing in the face of Fordist affluence
and, indeed, whether the working class was disappearing entirely. Within
that framework, the studies constituted the first sustained sociological studies
of Britain conducted within the academy.
The empirical focus of British sociology in the post-War era reflected
the emergent political economic rgime. Yet, the theoretical framework in
which that work was conducted is also explicable historically. While Parsons
dominated American sociology in the post-War period, his reception was
less assured in Britain. While they recognized the importance of The Structure
of Social Action, British sociologists were deeply sceptical of The Social
System. Functionalism was certainly not the undisputed sociological piety
of the 1950s which the fashion of the 1970s made it out to be (Halsey 2004,
85). On the contrary, Both Parsons and Marx offered theories of society
as a totality in terms of categories which were surely too arbitrary to carry
the empirical weight of social analysis of a particular country in a particular
historical period (Halsey 2004, 85). For Halsey, Lockwoods famous theory
of system and social integration sought precisely to overcome the limitations of Parsons emphasis on norms and Marxs account of the objective
social system as fundamental to social order (Halsey 2004, 86). It represented a typically pragmatic middle way by British sociology. In fact, it is
not at all clear that Lockwood had superseded Parsons. While he avoided
Parsons weirdly unwieldy and polysyllabic prose (Halsey 2004, 85), his
notion of an objective social system sustained at localized points by the
inculcation of collective norms in processes of social integration was reminiscent of Parsons work. Yet, the unacknowledged parallel with Parsons ran
much deeper than this.
While dismissing Parsonian esoterica, the theoretical substructure of
British sociology in the post-war era nevertheless demonstrated a close
family resemblance to Parsons. Although British sociologists rejected the
implied, though not necessarily intended, emphasis on social harmony in
Parsons work, their work presumed that social order was ultimately based
on normative consensus. Through their research, they demonstrated that pure
objective economic factors are themselves not enough to comprehend the
working class. The collective beliefs and understandings of the working class
had to be considered for these beliefs had a decisive role in determining

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what the working class actually was. The working class demonstrated that
social order was possible only through sharing norms, culture, and lifestyle.
The efflorescence of British sociology after the Second World War occurred
in a distinctive political situation. Precisely because Halsey was personally
involved in these developments, he tells the story of this intellectual naissance with force. Within a convincing story of disciplinary developments, he
weaves personalised leitmotifs to produce a genuinely sociological account
of the rise of British sociology. Unfortunately, for Halsey, things were about
to fall apart.

The Post-War Crisis: 1968-85

For Halsey, the sociological crisis of this period was closely related to
the collapse of the Post-War settlement more widely. Halsey identifies
student troubles, economic crisis, and the Thatcher government as fatal to
sociology. Indeed, for Halsey, it was the combination of social, political
and economic forces which spelt at least temporary disaster for sociology
(Halsey 2004, 143). In particular, where sociology had enjoyed government
patronage during the previous decades, the Thatcher governments from
1979 were actively hostile to sociology. Keith Joseph infamously rejected
sociologys claim to being a science, preferring the putatively less ambitious
and better established disciplines which are heirs to the grander claims of
sociologyfor example, human geography, social psychology and social
anthropology (Halsey 2004, 139-40).
These institutional difficulties manifested themselves intellectually in
the discipline. Halsey claims that the discipline began to decline and fragment
in the 1970s. Above all, Halsey claims that the politicization of the discipline,
first by Marxism, and then by feminism, split and weakened the collective
ranks of the sociologists (Halsey 2004, 122, 143). Of course, both Marxists
and feminists would claim that they did not undermine the discipline but
raised it to a higher plane, overcoming the unseen normative biases of postWar sociology. Unfortunately, at this critical point in the development of
the discipline in Britain, Halsey fails to engage with the work of British
sociologists with any precision, vitiating his analysis of the disciplines
development. While Halsey vividly recalls Britains golden age, he only
regrets developments in the 1970s and 1980s and the text becomes cursory.
His comments on the putative destructiveness of Marxism and feminism are
assertive at best.

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Yet within the framework which Halsey provides it is possible to

comprehend the dynamics at work within the discipline in this troubled
decade. In the 1970s, one of the most distinctive Marxian research programs
within British sociology was represented by the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS). The Centre was founded by Richard
Hoggart in the 1960s for the sociology of working class culture and, by the
1970s, its leading figure was Stuart Hall. Recognizing that the economic
focus of much of Marxs writing was limiting, Hall mobilized Antonio
Gramscis Hegelianized Marx to provide the theoretical framework for the
Centres work. Class and class conflict remained the enduring focus of
the Centres studies, comprehended within a historical trajectory, but the
collective understandings of the working class and the hegemonic project
of the state had to be an essential element of any sociological analysis.
In Resistance Through Rituals (1976) and the celebrated Policing the Crisis
(1978), Hall et al. conducted cultural analysis within a structuralist class
framework. They sought to explain individual cultural responses to structural
transformations of class: conflicts of interest arise, fundamentally, from the
difference in the structural position of the classes in the productive realm;
but they have their effects in social and political life (Hall and Jefferson
1976, 38). These studies were sociologically important. Yet, they demonstrated the analytical tensions at work in sociology at this time. Although
the BCCCS rightly disparaged the crude structural economism of Althusser
and Poulantzas, their approach was ultimately only a revision of it. Although
the cultural sphere had some partial autonomy, the origin of subcultures,
resistance, and struggles against hegemony remained the productive realm
and the objective class structure which arose therefrom. The economic structuralism of the BCCCS distorted their always fascinating interpretations of
new working class subcultures.
For instance, John Clarke described how skinheads sought the magical
recreation of a working class community; the skinheads had to use an image
of what that community was as the basis of their style (Clarke 1976, 100).
Yet, although these young men understood themselves as protecting their
locales, their strategies, from dress-style to football hooliganism and Pakibashing, denoted a quite radical transcendence of their parents culture.
They were forming new groups and were engaged in quite new forms of
social practice. Any image of a working class past mobilized by them was
invented in the face of current exigencies. Clarke recognized the profound
transformations which the skinheads embodied but armed with a structuralist
theory could not fully acknowledge them. Thus, their imaginary re-creation
of a working class culture nevertheless constituted a structural reproduction

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of their position. Clarke, like the skinheads he studied, searched for a pristine
and authentic working class. Throughout these works, then, there is a tension
between the rich dynamism of the empirical material and the more wooden
theoretical system in which that material appears. Increasingly inappropriate
concepts of class and structure were mobilized as analytical frameworks of
inquiry which were not adequate to the collective cultural processes which
the BCCCS sought to describe. In effect, Marxian sociologists of the 1970s
and early 1980s were trying to analyze dynamic processes with static
concepts. The Marxian sociology of the 1970s recognized the profundity of
contemporary social transformations but its concepts were becoming as
strained as the Keynesian principles which underpinned this order.
A similar tension between conceptual rigidity and empirical insight was
evident in emergent British feminism from the late 1960s. De Beauvoirs
Second Sex initially constituted a foundational text for the movement. However,
while De Beauvoirs work employed a sophisticated Hegelian theory of
self-realization based on the Master-Slave dialectic, British feminists, in
particular, adopted a more direct approach. While British feminists were
spread on a continuum between Marxist and radical theorists who respectively
understood womens subordination as a product of capitalism or patriarchy,
they were broadly unified around certain central premises (Jackson 1998, 13).
Drawing on structural Marxism, British feminismand particularly
the patriarchy theory of radical feminismunderstood women as a sex class.
The exploitation of women by men was a universal fact. All women, like all
workers, were unified by this exploitation whatever apparent social difference
seemed to exist between them (Walby 1992, 21). Women who did not see
their role as a form of exploitation or who did not act in accordance with
the interests of their sex class were guilty of false consciousness. In the 1970s
and 80s, feminism and patriarchy theory, in particular, was theoretically blunt
but, on the basis of it, British feminists produced some very interesting work.
The problem was, of course, that the concept of the sex class was theoretically and empirically reductive. It was simply unsustainable to demand the
unity of all women despite the obvious social differences between them or
to dismiss any female compliance as mystified. Moreover, the concept simply
could not explain the dramatic social changes which were occurring to women
at this point. Like Marxian sociology, feminism illuminated a hitherto ignored
dimension of social reality but it framed its subject in a way which obscured
many of the most interesting aspects of change. Similarly, although Halsey
ignores the sociology of race beyond some very brief references to John Rex,
the study of race in Britain assumed a similar structuralist form to Marxism

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and feminism.2 Halsey is not completely correct when he claims that Marxism
and feminism undermined the discipline. On the contrary, theyalong with
the ignored study of racedrove it forward as they responded to contemporary transformations but, rather like British workers in their Ford Cortinas,
outmoded concepts were still the vehicles of their analysis.
Anthony Giddens, as the most prominent British sociologist, is particularly interesting here in illustrating the adherence to increasingly obsolete
concepts in a changing era. Giddens rise to prominence in British and
international sociology was a product of the important role he assumed in
re-affirming the importance of classical sociology to the discipline at a time
of radical change and the introduction of Continental theory as well as, above
all, hermeneutics into British sociology. These two projects were closely
related since Giddens effectively fused contemporary styles of European
thought with a re-interpretation of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim in order to
produce a social theory adequate to the 1970s and beyond. It is an achievement for which he has been rightly lauded. However, the tensions which are
manifest within Marxian and feminist sociology of time are also evident
in Giddens structuration theory (1984), albeit at a more abstract level.
Structuration theory sought precisely to reconcile objectivist, functionalist
approaches with (putatively) subjectivist, hermeneutic, and interactive
social theories. It sought to explain how social institutions were reproduced
but also potentially transformed by the individual. Each individual was
confronted by objective social conditions but an individual was always free
to do otherwise. An individual could always improvise and innovate. As a
result of all these individual innovations, the social structure as a whole
would be changed in a process of unintended consequences. Giddens structuration theory remains an important statement of social theory but it denotes
the fundamental problem of sociology at that time. It preserves the concept
of structure while emphasising the interactive dynamics of human social
existence. Consequently, structuration theory seeks a new synthesis which
re-interprets functionalist and hermeneutic traditions. Yet, ultimately, it
falsely individualizes the hermeneutic tradition and then freezes these two
approaches in an easy stand-off with each other; Giddens oscillates between
2. Thus, although Rex and Moore eschew economistic Marxism in their work on housing,
structural concepts of class are central to their analysis of housing policy in Birmingham: Once
we understand urban society as a structure of social interaction and conflict, prejudiced behaviour may be shown to fit naturally into or even be required by that structure (Rex and Moore
1967, 13). With some obvious exceptions like Michael Banton, the sociology of race in Britain
from the late 1960s to the 1980s was often conducted within a class framework with racial and
ethnic conflict being understood as a manifestation of structural economic contradictions.

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structure and agency. Like the BCCCS, Giddens recognized the potential of
collective action but was unable to theorise it adequately. In this, structuration
theory exemplified the post-War crisis more widely. Like the state itself,
structuration theory was trapped by its adherence to obsolete categories and
concepts which social reality consistently denied.
The 1970s and 1980s may have indeed constituted a crisis of British
sociology as they were for the British state. Yet, as with many crises, the 1970s
stimulated great creative energy in sociology which produced diverse new
lines of investigation. Certainly, many of the texts produced in this era may
now appear problematic and even crude. There was also a high level of
dissension and debate in the discipline at the time. However, it is inappropriate for Halsey to dismiss British sociology in this period by broad swipes
at Marxism and feminism. Although his personal regret at the lost era of his
youth is understandable, a genuine sociology of British sociology demands
a more engaged approach to the work conducted in this era. It is a shame
that Halsey did not explore these new lines of research more.

Post-Fordist Sociology: 1985 to the Present

It is perhaps significant that The Constitution of Society was published
in 1984, the year of the miners strike in Britain. Although it is easy to
reconstruct Thatchers premiership as the inevitable triumph of political logic,
in fact, Thatchers reforms were furiously contested in the early 1980s. The
year 1984 marks the watershed after which a post-Fordist and liberal rgime
was established as the new political paradigm in Britain. After this date, no
political party in Britain could seriously consider holding power unless they
consented to the tenets of the free market. Crucially, her premiership was
founded on a liberal concept of the individual expressed most famously when
she denied the existence of collective social obligations: there was no such
thing as society, only individuals and families (Morgan 1990, 440). It would
take the Labour Party 13 years to reconfigure itself to this new paradigm.
Thatcher was certainly assisted by the Falklands War but the decisive
conflict of her premiership took place principally on the picket lines of south
Yorkshire. Her triumph over the miners constituted the quietus of the postWar consensus.
Analogously, in sociology, The Constitution of Society might be interpreted, like the miners strike, as the coda of the post-War consensus. This
was the last attempt to sustain a post-War sociological consensus, sustaining
the concepts and approaches in the face of historical change. The path which

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Giddens took after his final time on the sociological picket line, armed with
concepts of structure, system and class, is instructive. After The Constitution
of Society, the concerns and style of Anthony Giddens writing changes from
the dense theoretical cogitations of the earlier period, to the breezier discussions of the defining characteristics of late modernity, which Alexander has
satirically called Giddens lite (Alexander 1996, 135). For Giddens, globalization has liberated the individual; The self is seen as a reflexive project,
for which the individual is responsible. We are, not what we are, but what we
make of ourselves (Giddens 1995, 74). Significantly, the arena in which
individuals establish their identities for themselves is no longer work but
their lifestyles, which Giddens regards as gaining primacy in late modernity
(Giddens 1995, 81). At this point, as he affirms the autonomous, consuming
individual, Giddens unwittingly echoes the neo-liberal, Thatcherite rhetoric
which was congealing as a new political paradigm. Giddens pointedly rejects
Keynesian collectivism in favor of the individuals reflexivity and freedom
to choose their lifestyle (Giddens 1995, 42). Giddens social theory reflects
the seismic shifts in British society. He struggles to conceptualize a fragmenting order in the 1970s and 1980s through the application of compromised
concepts which he subsequently rejected in the mid-1980s. Objectivists
concepts of structure, system, and class are dispensed with in favor of an
affirmation of the individual and consumption. In this, British social theory
was a reflection of the times. It was becoming post-Fordist.
Giddens is certainly the most prominent social theorist in Britain to have
broken with the post-War consensus but he represents a paradigm shift
in the discipline more broadly. It is particularly obvious among the very
sociologists who clung most obdurately to class concepts in the 1970s,
Marxists and feminists. Stuart Hall is an apposite example here. Stuart Hall
has argued for the emancipation of the individual in contemporary society
in manner consistent with Giddens. Thus, in promoting his new times
project, Stuart Hall disparages his former Gramscian structuralism; For a
long time, being a socialist was synonymous with the ability to translate
everything into the language of structures (Hall 1990, 120). In place of
structure, sociologists should focus their attention on the empowered individual agent: One boundary which new times has certainly displaced is
that between the objective and subjective dimensions of change. This is the
so-called revolution of the subject aspect (Hall 1990, 119).3 He is not
alone. According to Scott Lash and John Urry, one of the distinctive features
of the present era is the increasing significance of the individual; Structural
3. Symbolically, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was closed in 2002.

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change in the economy forces individuals to be freed from the structural

rigidity of the Fordist labour process (Lash and Urry 1994, 5). For Lash
and Urry, the individual, freed from structural constraint, has more agency
and autonomy in post-Fordist society.
This accelerating individualization process is a process in which agency is set
free from structure, a process in which, further, it is a structural change itself
in modernization that so to speak forces agency to take on powers that heretofore
lay in social structures themselves. (Lash and Urry 1994: 5)

Critically, the sphere of consumption has been the decisive arena in which
individuals are able to make and re-make their identities. Although Urrys
work on tourism (2002) analyzes the historical development of this industry
very successfully, his concept of the tourist gaze, based on the figure of
the flaneur is resolutely individualist (Urry 2002, 126-7). The experience
of the post-tourist is private and personal rather than collective. Flaneurs do
not engage in collective practice but merely gaze on each other and their
surroundings, internalizing their mutual observations (Urry 2002, 135).
In feminist studies, there has been a similar re-orientation, as scholars
have reacted against the essentialism of patriarchy theory of the 1980s.
Emerging principally out of France with the work of Kristeva and Mouffe,
feminist theory from this period became increasingly dissatisfied with the
concepts of the sex class, the equivalence of women, the universality of
exploitation and the denigration of all female roles including motherhood.
These concepts may have served an important contingent political function
in womens liberation but they were not consonant with the actuality of
womens lives. In the last two decades, British feminists adopted a new
perspective on themselves and their work: We have also recognized that
the idea of a unitary, fixed rational self is not tenable, that it does not match
the complexities and contradictions of our lived experience as women and
feminists (Jackson 1998, 25) Not only were these concepts empirically
inaccurate, reductively unifying all women, but they were manifestations of
precisely the phallocentric culture which feminists abhorred. Patriarchy
theory only confirmed the male-female dichotomy of masculinist, western
culture. In place of perduring essences, post-feminists sought to develop alternative concepts which de-centered female identity into evanescent moments.
In contemporary British feminism, the same move away from structuralism
to individualism is manifest.
Feminists have become aware of the sources of pleasure in womens lives as
well as the sources of pain and deprivation; they are less inclined to dismiss

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pleasure as false consciousness and more likely to take seriously as meaningful

activities the pleasure of watching soap operas or reading romances. (Jackson
and Jones 1998, 7)

It would of course be possible to analyze female leisure as forms of

collective practices, but framed by postmodern conceptions, the growing
interest in feminine consumption has comprehended these practices in individual and personal terms. Feminists have focused primarily on their meaningfulness to the individual, rather than on the way in which these practices are
sustained and developed by groups of women, mobilizing shared understandings. Similarly, the study of race in Britain has moved from its structural
phase in the 1970s and 1980s, to focus on identity politics from an individualist perspective. While Paul Gilroy was central to questioning structural
class approaches to race in this period (Gilroy 1995, 27), he has placed
increasing emphasis on individual agency to subvert old concepts of nationalism and race (Gilroy 2001). Indeed, he disparages all particularistic forms
of social identity in favor of universal identification with the human race as
a whole, each member of which has a unique self-conception (Gilroy 2001,
98-9). Ethnic and racial studies, more generally, now mobilize concepts like
hybridity to analyze how individuals understand themselves and construct
new identities for themselves in changing social environmentsrather than
collectives.
Of these interesting and important developments and their connection to
wider social change, Halsey has almost nothing to say. He bemoans only
the development of postmodern theory and its suicidal tendencies towards
various forms of relativism (Halsey 2004, 122). He recognizes that postmodernism is now in retreat but not before, he implies, it has done great
damage to the discipline. In fact, it is possible to draw the kinds of connections, which Halsey successfully identifies in the middle of the twentieth
century between wider social conditions and disciplinary developments in
the current era. A parallel can still be drawn between society and sociology.
Unfortunately, Halsey does not begin to analyze how or why this quite
profound paradigm shift from the compromised structuralism of the 1970s
to the individualism of the 1990s was possible. He remains a child of his
times, understandably nostalgic about the lost days of his own formative
professional years, but unable to comprehend the transformation of the
discipline he knew or the birth of a new order. He is like a miner who constantly recalls the camaraderie of the pit disparaging its re-branding as a
tourist attraction, even though this facility now provides employment for
his community.

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Conclusion: Toward a Sociology of

the Twenty-First Century
Sociology in Britain emerged partly in response to the dominance of
Darwinian evolution but in its early period it was always overshadowed by
social anthropology. It then went through a Keynesian period focusing on
working class culture empirically, conceptualized in terms of collective
norms at the level of theory. This golden age, when sociology established
itself intellectually and politically in Britain eventually foundered in the
1970s but fascinating new lines of research were explored through the use
of increasingly obsolete structuralist concepts. From the 1980s, British
sociologists rejected the structuralist concepts which had constrained them,
turning to an apparently redeemingbut actually equally compromised
individualism. They moved from structure to agency.
In a curious revanche of history, the social sciences are now once again
threatened by biological imperialism in the form of genetics and a form of
individualism analogous to Edwardian liberalism. The question is: what
kind of sociology will be best capable of defending itself against intellectual
colonization? As Halseys book illustrates, sociology has always reflected
the historical conditions in which sociologists lived. The four disciplinary
periods which he identifies can be related to wider social and historical
circumstances. The four periods respectively reflect the liberalist consensus
of early decades of the century, the rise of Keynesianism in the mid-century,
its collapse in the 1970s, and finally the emergence of a new post-Fordist
settlement in the 1980s. In confronting contemporary challenges, the historicism of sociology is potentially problematic, compromising its intellectual
integrity. If sociology is indeed no more than a superstructural reflection of
the conditions in which it has been conducted, then the discipline lacks
intellectual validity. Like Marxs ruling ideas in The German Ideology
which were nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material
relations (Marx and Engels 1990, 156), sociology would have no critical
or analytical worth. It would play only an affirmatory role, legitimating
contemporary social order. It would be possible to deconstruct the discipline
into a set of historically situated tropes and fictions which reflect only the
dominant values of the society.
It is possible to counter this historicist challenge. Sociologists need to be
self-conscious and to recognize the social origins of their own investigations.
Certainly, British sociology, like artwork, has assumed a certain style and
focused on particular subjects which reflect the circumstances of its creation.

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However, British sociologyand indeed sociology internationallyis also

unified by common concepts and a shared orientation which outlast the historical fluctuations of the twentieth century. In British sociology, for instance,
the working class has been displaced by a focus on new social movements
emerging around sites of consumption. That change is manifestly historical.
Yet, these changing styles and foci are unified by a coherent disciplinary
framework. Underlying the best work in British sociology is a common tradition. It is found in Hobhouses work on the self-realization of human reason
through cultural development in the early twentieth century in Goldthorpes
analysis of working class culture, Halls work on youth culture and the
media, Rex and Moores study of housing (1967), Wacjmans analysis of
male and female managers (1996), Mackenzies work on nuclear weapons
(2000), Bantons work on race (1983), Collins and Pinchs work on science
(Collins 1998; 1991; Collins and Pinch 1996) and, indeed, in Giddens
concept of practical consciousnessas well as many other writings. In these
works, neither structure nor agency is prioritized; abstract theorising is
rejected. In its place, these British sociologists focus on the way in which
social groups mobilize themselves within a specific historical context on the
basis of collective understandings. They examine the way these collective
understandings co-ordinate action within these groups so that they can engage
in specific forms of social practice.
Thus, Elias has rejected the reification of society into a thing which
confronts the individual (Elias 1987a). By contrast, through a rich analysis of
the development of civilized practices among western European elites, he
demonstrates how emergent bourgeois groups began to unify themselves
against the land-owning nobility through new concepts of civility, thereby
orienting themselves to common shared political and economic goals (Elias
1987b, 1982). Similarly, Barry Barnes (1988) has stressed the centrality of
understanding to social interaction. For him, society is a self-referential
reality in which the way a group collectively understands itself constitutes
what it actually is. Once the self-referential nature of society is recognized,
apparently objective forces such as power assume a quite different reality.
Power no longer emanates from a single individual or from structure to
impose on others. On the contrary, power is at every point dependent on the
shared understandings of the social group: We shall not be able to treat
power as independent of knowledge of power, or the distribution of power
as independent of knowledge of that distribution (Barnes 1988, 53). Group
members must collectively defer to designated authority for power to exist;
leaders are given discretion to do certain things by the group which recognizes them. Consequently, power is a collective product sustained by social

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networks on the basis of members shared understanding of themselves

and their relations with each other. Barnes gives the example of the Iranian
revolution in which the Shah lost his power as a result of a transformation in
the way Iranians understood themselves and their social hierarchy (Barnes
1988, 62). The Shah himself was the same person and, indeed, even after the
revolution he was very rich and formally held his title. However, decisive
Iranian groups no longer recognized the discretion they once invested in
him. The power which he seemed to hold was in fact conferred on him by
prominent groups in Iranian society. When critical social groups mobilized
themselves on the basis of alternative understandings, envisaging an alternate
political order pursuing different collective goals, he lost his power. To
be powerful, a ruler has to be recognized as powerful. These processes are
ubiquitous.
At the time of writing, England is competing in the World Cup Finals in
Germany and the entire country is dominated by this international spectacle.
Enduring and transient networks have mobilized themselves around their
collective support of the national team in ways which illustrate the dynamics
of human social life. Thus, in April 2006, Englands best player, Wayne
Rooney, broke his foot in a domestic league match for his club, Manchester
United. Manchester United and the Football Association (FA), which organizes the national team, were locked in a dispute following the injury over
whether Rooney was fit to play in the World Cup Finals or not. The club, who
pay the majority of Rooneys wages and who fear the loss of a multi-million
pound asset, insisted Rooney was not fit. The FA, which has analogous but
opposite interests in ensuring that Rooney played, asserted that his injury
had healed. The dispute was intense before the World Cup and remained
latent while the competition continued. Rooneys foot stands as a useful
sociological example. The institutions Manchester United and the FA are
manifestly powerful. Indeed, in the case of Manchester United, it is one of the
most famous and powerful clubs in the world. Yet, the basis of this power
seems fragile. The might of Manchester United is based on nothing more solid
than the fact that millions of people around the world believe themselves
to be Manchester United fans. These millions follow Manchester United
and support the club financially by paying to watch games at the ground or
on television and by buying club merchandise. This mere act of collective
understanding, realized in moments of effervescent celebration, has produced
a manifest social reality; an economically powerful club capable of criticizing
the FA and questioning the national team as the primary interest of football
fans in England. Manchester United illustrates a critical sociological truth
which is evident in the best work of British sociology.

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Society cannot be understood as the interaction of independent individuals nor in terms of either structural, economic, or biological determination.
On the contrary, human consciousness and understanding are fundamental
to all forms of social life. Humans must orient themselves to shared meanings
because their actions can be co-ordinated only insofar as all have a common
understanding of what they are trying to achieve. These collective understandings are constitutive of their social relations and practices without which
the latter would not exist. Indeed, shared understanding is a self-constituting
act of collective alchemy, creating something concretea groupwhere
nothing existed before. As John Searle has noted, social facts have no analogue among physical facts because the attitude we take toward the phenomena is partly constitutive of the phenomena (Searle 1995, 34). Merely by
believing themselves to be Manchester United fans, attending games, following
the team, and wearing red shirts, millions of individuals have formed a potent
social group. Moreover, once the members of a social group mobilize themselves around shared understandings, humans orient themselves toward the
distinctive collective goals of the group. By co-operating in the pursuit of
shared goals, group members contribute to the production of collective goods
from which they also benefit. Social groups from small subcultures, including
football fans, to professional status groups utilize the mechanism of honor and
shame to enforce adherence to collective goals and exclude outsiders. Group
members who contribute to the collective good are honored and awarded
easy access to shared goods while those who try to free-ride or who fail to
contribute are shamed and eventually expelled from the group.
In each historical era and in each social group, the particular patterns of
this social dynamic are distinctive. Diverse groups engage in alternative
social practices, oriented to particular goals, on the basis of different shared
understandings. These groups are themselves always situated in a unique
social configuration in relation to other groups and institutions which influence
what the group can be. Sociological analysis must always aim to depict
these historical realities. Nevertheless, the most successful sociology whether
the analysis is of sexuality, scientific practice, or of the largest scale organizations is able to demonstrate how the dynamics of the group interaction
informed by shared understandingproduces specific forms of collective
practice at any particular point. Underlying the different schools in the
twentieth century, British sociology is unified by this common understanding
of the human group, however large or small it is. As long as the members
of the discipline adhere to this collective understanding and direct themselves
to common research goals on the basis of it, British sociology will endure.
Whatever the political and commercial interests of genetics, psychology, or

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economics, sociology will remain a viable and, indeed, unassailable part of

the academy.
There is, of course, another future for British sociology. It will forget its
common origins and endeavors; it will forget the distinctive social ontology
on which the discipline is justified. Sociologists will be carried passively
along by contemporary trends, reflecting rather than analyzing the current
era. They will comment loosely on important social themes rather than
mobilizing sociological theory to analyze the precise character of contemporary social developments. Sociology will become merely decorative
(Rojek and Turner 2000). In this debased form, sociology will not be able
to sustain attacks from genetics, nor from the other social sciences, such as
politics, economics, or psychology. Only the current heirs of those exciting
days in the Three Tuns can ensure the legacy of the early pioneers like
Halsey. We must recognize the distinctive character of social realityand
thereforethe special contribution which sociology, as a form of empirical
philosophy, can contribute to the academy. Andrew Halseys book begins to
sketch the trajectory of British sociology. Unfortunately, at critical points it
fails to provide a sufficiently sustained account of the development of the
discipline in Britain. Nevertheless, it may prevent one possible future for the
discipline ever happening. Whatever its shortcomings, Halsey does encourage
that the reader to consider the British sociological community, including
its great figures, as well the role of the discipline in Britain. Moreover,
Halseys despairing asides at the contemporary decline of the discipline
warn what might happen if sociologists fail to abide by the central collective
understandings of the discipline which have endured from Hobhouse onwards.
In this, Halseys book may play a role in preventing British sociology
becoming history.

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Anthony King is a professor of sociology at Exeter University. He has published widely on

football and social theory, including The European Ritual: Football and the New Europe (Ashgate
2003) and The Structure of Social Theory (Routledge 2004), and is currently completing a
research project on the transformation of Europes armed forces. The monograph from this
research will be written next year.

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