I should like to thank Martin Bulmer of the London School of Economics for his comments on an earlier version of this article, which does not cover works published since 1984.

¹ See Smith, Dennis's recent review article, “Norbert Elias—Established or Outsider?” Sociological Review, 52:2 (1984), 367–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Smith himself is one of several younger British sociologists originally trained in history. J. A. Banks should also be mentioned as a senior British sociologist who has done noteworthy historical work (see Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning among the Victorian Middle Class (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954)Google Scholar; and Marxist Sociology in Action (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1980)Google Scholar.

² No doubt the geographic remoteness of these studies has contributed to their compartmentalization. A large number focus on peasants; see, e.g., Shanin, T., The Awkward Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

³ Except for Elias, none of Abrams's major exemplars of historical sociology is a British sociologist; American sociologists and British historians loom large in his account. Similarly, Skocpol, T., ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a very helpful recent survey of major lines of work in the field, finds no British sociologist worthy of attention, though it shows how the work of several British historians and both Continental and American scholars has contributed to the emerging research tradition.

⁴ See Barnes, J., “Professionalism in British Sociology,” in Abrams, et al. , Practice and ProgressGoogle Scholar.

⁵ See Sklair, L.'s review of “Sociologies and Marxisms: The Odd Couples,” in Abrams, et al. , Practice and ProgressGoogle Scholar. As Abrams himself notes, “it is difficult now to appreciate just how remote from one another sociology and Marxism were until the 1960s. (“The Collapse of British Sociology?” in ibid., 65).

⁶ See Stacey, M., “The Division of Labour Revisited or Overcoming the Two Adams,” in Abrams, et al. , Practice and ProgressGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Carr, E. H., What Is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961)Google ScholarPubMed.

⁸ See Burke, P., Sociology and History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980), 23–27Google ScholarPubMed.

⁹ Especially at Oxford and Cambridge, politics departments have played something of a similar older-sibling role, sheltering an immature sociology (providing jobs for some sociologists when there were no sociology departments) but inhibiting the formation of an autonomous identity for the younger discipline. See Heath, A. and Edmondson, R., “Oxbridge Sociology: The Development of Centres of Excellence?” in Abrams, et al. . Practice and ProgressGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ John Urry argues that this presumed failing is in fact sociology's central virtue. See “Sociology as a Parasite: Some Vices and Virtues,” in Abrams, et al. , Practice and Progress, 25–38Google Scholar.

¹¹ This partial slander is perhaps developed most famously in Bradbury, Malcolm's novel The History Man (1975; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976)Google Scholar. See also the venomous, if largely uninformed, comments of Elton, G. R. in his Cambridge inaugural lectures: The History of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, where the invective is extended to the social sciences en masse.

¹² Anderson, P., “Components of the National Culture,” New Left Review, no. 53 (1969), 7Google Scholar; Hickox, M. S., “The Problem of Early English Sociology,” The Sociological Review, 32:1 (1984), 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is arguable, of course, that neither did American sociology, though it developed a thriving profession on the shoulders of lesser giants.

¹³ It is interesting to compare the role of the New Left Review during the 1960s and 1970s, when it set itself the task of bringing the British Left into a European Marxist discourse.

¹⁴ P. Abell remarks on the “calamitous” state of postgraduate sociological studies in Britain, where, in his opinion, an enormous disproportion of Ph.D. students is distracted “into the second-order activity of criticising established theorists/ methodologists rather than trying to solve empirical problems for themselves” (“Whither Sociological Methodology?” in Abrams et al, Practice and Progress, esp. 123–24). The critiques, I think it is in the vein of Abell's argument to say, tend to be of epistemological premises and abstract concepts, not of substantive empirical analyses, a more frequently productive enterprise.

¹⁵ “The Social Construction of ‘Positivism’ and Its Significance in British Sociology, 1950– 80,” in Abrams et al., Practice and Progress.

¹⁶ The phrase is borrowed from the title of the article by M. Cain and J. Finch. See also those by C. T. Husbands (“The Anti-Quantitative Bias in Postwar British Sociology”), P. Abell, and J. Platt.

¹⁷ British sociology never rivaled American, it should be said, in production of purely trivial and theoretically irrelevant research. But understanding “large” as a matter of analytic scale, not profundity, one notes that ethnomethodology (though of American origin) and related broadly phenomenological approaches found a place nearer the center of Britain's sociological stage. They have been complemented by an active, often philosophically oriented, tradition of research on language. See Phillipson, M., “Sociological Practice and Language,” in Abrams, et al. , Practice and ProgressGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Mills, C. Wright, The Sociological Imagination (London: Macmillan, 1959)Google Scholar. See also the argument for “middle range theory” developed by Mills's Columbia colleague Merton, Robert K.: Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Smelser, Neil, Social Change and the Industrial Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968)Google Scholar.

²⁰ See Skocpol, T. and Somers, M., “The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22:2 (04 1980), 174–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Skocpol, T., “Emergent Agendas and Recurrent Strategies in Historical Sociology,” in Vision and Method, Skocpol, , ed., on this “illustrative” use of history in sociological theory buildingGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Bellah, Robert N., Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Eisenstadt, S. N., The Political Systems of Empires (Glencoe, I11.: The Free Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Dore, R. P., Education in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965)Google Scholar, is a distinguished British contribution to this literature.

²² Asked whether historical research might not contain answers to some of the questions he and Hindess, Barry were raising at the time (Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975)Google Scholar, Paul Hirst once told an Oxford seminar that history was only so much story-telling, good for bedtime reading and as well written by Jean Plaidy as by the professors. To their credit, Hindess and Hirst soon abandoned most of the Althusserian orthodoxy they had helped to popularize in Britain.

²³ Fogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L.: Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: Little, Brown, 1974)Google Scholar; Tilly, C., Tilly, L., and Tilly, R., The Rebellious Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

²⁴ The Cambridge historical demography group is a major exception. Alan Macfarlane, one of its younger members, also notably crosses the boundary I have artificially constructed between anthropological and statistical approaches.

²⁵ Cohn, Bernard, “History and Anthropology: The State of Play,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22:2 (04 1980), 198–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ See Selbourne, D., “On the Methods of the History Workshop,” History Workshop, 9 (1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Even where the value of theory was remembered, many of the new social historians in Britain had a much more antipathetic relationship to sociology than did their American counterparts. See Jones, G. S., “From Historical Sociology to Theoretical History,” British Journal of Sociology, 27:3 (1976), 295–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Samuel, R. and Jones, G. S., “Sociology and History,” History Workshop (1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, for an extreme case, Thompson, E. P., “Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context,” Midland History, 1:3 (1972), 41–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Giddens, Anthony, Central Problems in Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Abrams, Philip, Historical Sociology, xviiGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Giddens, , Central Problems in Social Theory, 230Google Scholar.

²⁹ Braudel, Fernand, On History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), 69Google Scholar.

³⁰ Jones, , “From Historical Sociology to Theoretical History,” 295–305Google Scholar. Hobsbawm, Eric makes a somewhat similar argument, though with more optimism, in “From Social History to the History of Society,” in Essays in Social History, Flinn, M. W. and Smout, T. C., eds. (1971; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 1–22Google Scholar.

³¹ Abrams never cites The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Primitive Classifications, The Moral Education, or even Suicide—all of which, in varying ways, approach the issues of subjectivity, if not always as the world of individuals. His treatment of Durkheim is still more subtle than Tilly's use of the great French sociologist as a stand-in for 1950s and 1960s functionalism—and only in caricature at that. See “Useless Durkheim,” in Tilly, 's As Sociology Meets History (New York: Academic Press, 1981)Google Scholar. Difficulties with Durkheim seem to be one of the ideological legacies of historical sociology's roots in reaction against functionalism and modernization theory. See also Ragin, C. and Zaret, D., “Theory and Method in Comparative Research: Two Strategies,” Social Forces, 61:3 (1983), 731–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ragin and Zaret divide sociology more or less completely into a Durkheimian majority and a Weberian minority, with the latter including all of the “good guys” of historical sociology. As Skocpol objects, that claims commonality for some very diverse lines of work, and dismisses a great many of the longstanding central concerns of sociology (“Emergent Agendas,” 360–61).

³² Skocpol, and Somers, , “Uses of Comparative History”; Weber, Max, Economy and Society (1921; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

³³ Though note Skocpol and Somers' argument for a cycle in which historical research is used first inductively to construct or expand and then later in various fashions to test or illustrate abstract theories (“Uses of Comparative History”).

³⁴ Even a theorist who attempts to base his work on formalization and abstraction as completely as Blau, Peter in Inequality and Heterogeneity (New York: Free Press, 1977)Google Scholar must induce the substantive definition of the “parameters” of his theory, either explicitly or implicitly, from empirical research or experiential hunches. Of course, sociologists do attempt explanation rather than description, and use deduction rather than induction more than do historians. The difference, however, is one of degree, not categorical distinction.

³⁵ Weber, , Economy and Society, I, 19–20Google Scholar.

³⁶ Cf. Skocpol, T.'s (Stales and Social Revolutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 39)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Abrams, 's (Historical Sociology, 187–89)Google Scholar suggestions that it can.

³⁷ There are also differences within each discipline as great as those between them, as Bulmer, M. (“Sociology and History: Some Recent Trends” Sociology 8:1 (1974), 138–50)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and others have observed.