Introduction

Abstract

The history presented here relates in a specific way to the history presented in The Impossible Science. That was a history of the attempt to make sociology a science. This history wraps around it: it begins with pre-disciplinary reformist social science and moves on to the problems of making the intellectual side of a movement of reform into an academic discipline. It bears on the present, with its emphasis on public sociology and the idea of sociologists as organic intellectuals. The book will trace the changes in the discipline from the start, and especially from the period immediately after 1945, with its vision of sociology as a behavioral science, and emphasize the similarities between present sociology and pre-disciplinary sociology.