Restructuring the Past: Toward an Appreciation of the Social Context of Social Science*

The recent surge of interest in the history of the social sciences reflects the unsettled conditions which obtain within these disciplines. Historical analysis may prove an aid to the resolution of these conditions, but only if it does not fall into the genre generally called "whig history"—mythologized history which functions to legitimate contemporary practices by assimilating all previous developments to a stylized narrative of continuous, inevitable "progress." Because "whig history" is intrinsic to the "scientific ethos," its rejection entails a reconsideration of the nature of the scientific enterprise in general, and of social science in particular.     

A "Scientific Revolution": Sociological Theory in the United States, 1930–1945

Between 1930 and 1945 the sociological profession suffered an identity crisis. Its origin and resolution were compounded of both academic realpolitik and theoretical dilemmas: generational conflicts and university power blocs on the one hand, and persisting intellectual obsessions on the other. Contemporary sociologists may find our current situation to be both derivative and parallel.