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The Sense of the Past and the Origins of Sociology
Philip Abrams
Past and Present, No. 55. (May, 1972), pp. 18-32.
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THE SENSE OF THE PAST AND THE ORIGINS
OF SOCIOLOGY *
SOCIOLOGY IS AN ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND THE DIRECTION OF CHANGE.
More emphatically, it is a science of social development. This is
not just amatter of its early entanglement with evolutionism. If one
asks what sort of project sociology was for Max Weber or is for
Talcott Parsons, if one seeks the underlying significance of the mass
of apparently disconnected empirical work,-or the common concerns
of, say, Theodor Geiger and Raymond Aron, one discovers a diverse
but sustained and remarkably coherent effort, first to identify industrialism as a type of society in contra-distinction to a pre-industrial
type or types, and second to tell industrial man where industrialization
is going. Every so often this main commitment of sociology appears
to go underground, as when Durkheim thought he had buried Comte
and Spencer by constructing a non-historical science of social facts.
But on each occasion what was taken to be a grave turns out to have
been only a tunnel, as when Durkheim himself reverted to a rampant
historicism in order to explain the social functions of religion. In
1937 we find Professor Parsons firmly repudiating evolutionary
interests in the opening sentences of his manifesto for a new, nonhistorical sociology: "Who now reads Herbert Spencer?" But by
1967 it is apparent that Parsons himself has been busy reading
Spencer and is devoting his energy to just the old Spencerian quest
for evolutionary universals and stages of deve1opment.l Certainly
Comte and Spencer would have felt quite at home in the plenary
sessions of the 1970 World Congress of So~iology,~
in which the
effort to understand the future by extrapolating tendencies from
relationships presumed to exist between abstract models of past and
present was taken as seriously as it had ever been in their day.
What the discipline is after, in other words, is not just explanations
of social behaviour, but tendentious explanations of social behaviour :
"a science to teach the laws of tendencies", as Buckle put it."
* This paper is based on my paper to the 1970 Past and Present Conference
on "The Sense of the Past and History". Since then some of the material it
contains has been used in my inaugural lecture, Being and Becoming iiz
Sociology (Durham, 1972).
T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Actio~z(New York, 1937); Societies:
Evolu~ionaryand Cotnparative Perspectives (New Jersey, 1970).
= V I I t h World Congress of Sociology, Varna, 1970, Transactions (International Sociological Association, 1971).
T. H. Buckle, History of Civilisatio~zin England, i (London, 1857), p. 27.
THE SENSE OF THE PAST AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLOGY
I9
Whether such an enterprise is, in principle, philosophically or
empirically viable is a matter for debate. Personally I think it is,
and that it is just this emphasis in sociology which gives the
discipline its importance, or at least its seriousness. Still, it can be
argued that the ways in which sociology has so far gone about the
explanation of tendency, or transition, have been flawed by a radically
unsound methodology. And it can be argued that much of this
unsoundness is rooted in the manner in which sociologists conceive
of the past.
some conception of the past is inescapable. Sociology proceeds
in its most typical forms by way of the typing of structural systems for example, industrialism, feudalism, legal-rational authority.
But if structuralism of this kind is to explain anything it must be by
advancing explanations in terms of the principles of structuring, or
of what Piaget in a stronger phrase calls the transformation laws of
s t r u c t u r e s . ~ o wit is plainly not the case that all structuring is
chronological structuring: this would not be so for linguistic or
mathematical structures for example. But it is necessarily the case
in the fields of history, sociology and anthropology, the social sciences
for which the idea of action in time is the essential element in
exp1anation.j Analysis of the mechanics of historical transition is the
proper basic activity of the practitioners of these sciences. T h e only
reference the idea of structural transformation can have here is a
reference to historical process. Far from detaching social analysis
from chronology, structuralism in the social sciences entails historically grounded explanation. I would agree with Gellner that the
resonance and appeal of sociology in recent years springs from the
impression the subject gives of dealing directly with the mechanics
of the transition that rightly concerns us most - indu~trialization.~
But I am not as confident as he seems to be that sociology has been
attacking this problem in any particularly useful way. What seems
to have happened, rather, is that structural types have been put
together in a generally impressionistic and historically casual manner
' J. Piaget, Structuralism (London, 1971): "Were it not for the idea of
transformation structures would lose all explanatory import, since they would
collapse into static forms" (p. 12).
TOthis extent I would agree with W. G. Runciman (Sociology in its Place,
Cambridge, 1970) that there can be no serious distinction between history,
sociology and anthropology. But by the same token I disagree with his further
claim that all three disciplines can be reduced to some sort of ~ s v c h o l o w . I t is
just their central emphasis on historical structuring that mikes th&n nonreducible. "Men make their own history, but they make it in spite of
themselves" (Marx) -it is their effort to understand the "in spite of" that gives
these disciplines their autonomy.
E. Gellner, Thought and Change (Chicago, 1964).
20 PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
55
- consider the way in which bureaucracy and anomie were identified
as emergent properties of industrialism by Weber and Durkheim for
example. And secondly, logically ordered contrasts between structural types have been treated, quite naively for the most part, as
though they effectively indicated chronologically ordered transitions.
On this basis a sociological past has been worked up, a past which is
linked to the present not by carefully observed and temporaily
located social interaction but by inferentially necessary connections
between concepts. Discussions of the decline of community, of the
traditional working class and of the problems of modernization in the
context of contrasts between "developing" and "modern" social
systems are among the better known contemporary examples of the
application of this mode of thought. In each case a perspective on
present social experience is gained by postulating a tendentious
relationship between what is observed now and a structural type
associated firmly but unspecifically with the "past". The function
of the sociologist's past in other words has not Seen to provide a frame
of reference for empirical studies of the mechanics of transition but
instead to furnish a rationale for side-stepping such tedious historical
chores and moving at once to the construction of predictive interpretations of the present. We have the odd spectacle of a discipline which
claims importance just because it takes the problem of the temporal
transformation of structure as its central analytical issue, but which at
the same time appears committed to a sense of the past which actually
directs attention away from the need for analyses of structural
transition as a temporally and culturally situated process. Parsons's
influential and representative essay "The Institutional Framework of
Economic Development" is perhaps our best recent example of both
sides of this ambivalence in s o c i o l o ~ v . ~Unlike Rostow, Hoselitz
and a number of others%ho can be said to use the idea of stages of
development in a fairly mechanical way in producing scenarios of
development policy, Parsons displays a good deal of refinement and
subtlety in applying his model of industrialization to the predicament
of the underdevelo~edcountries. He allows for examule that the
actual present of these countries is importantly unlike the past of the
European countries as a result of the intervening history of the latter.
evei it he less, when all his refinements and modifications are made, the
-.
T . Parsons, "The Institutional Framework of Economic Development", in
Structure and Process in Modern Society (Glencoe, Illinois, 1960).
Cf. \Xi. W. ROS~OW,
The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1962);
B. Hoselitz, Sociological Factors in Economic Development (Glencoe, Illinois,
1960).
THE SENSE OF THE PAST AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLOGY
21
problem of development remains one of adjusting the history of the
underdeveloped countries to a model of structural transformation
abstracted from European and American experience. Although he
sees that, as a result of the time lag in industrialization, political
institutions will be relatively more important in the underdeveloped
countries than they were in Europe, the trajectory of industrialization
remains essentially the same; the point of departure (traditional
society) and the destination (industrial society) are treated as conforming in all important respects to a common model. For such a
procedure to make any sense at all it must be assumed, as it is, that the
pasts of the developed and underdeveloped countries are basically
similar and basically unproblematic.
Robert Nisbet, criticizing what he calls the metaphor of development in Social Change and HistoryYgand Andre Gunder Frank,
criticizing what he calls the ideal-typical index approach to the study
of transition in "The Sociology of Development and the Underdevelopment of S o c i ~ l o g y " , ~have
~ exposed some of the more
startling consequences of this state of affairs. In this paper I want
to consider causes rather than consequences, however. H O W is it
that sociology has remained so unregenerate in its commitment to
a sense of the past which we have been told again and again contributes
more to ignorance than to knowledge? The paper is not meant to
provide yet another occasion for historians to feel superior at the
expense of sociology. The attempt to understand the mechanics of
transition involved in structural change seems to me unquestionably
more important than the sort of thing that normally goes on in most
Departments of History. We have, too, enough examples of success
in this sort of enterprise to know thzt the work is not in principle
futile: the best example, I suppose, is the first volume of Capital.
So it becomes a question worth asking why sociologists have been so
unsuccessful in striking a fruitful balance between the typing of
structures and the empirical analysis of transition - why they have
for the most part felt that the need "to order structural types and
relate them sequentially is a first order of business" - and have in
proportion neglected the business of using structural concepts to
inform historical investigation.
The ordering of structural- types
is a relevant heuristic setting for the analysis of change. It cannot
Tublished Oxford, 1969.
l o A. G. Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (New York,
1964). The essay cited is also published separately, New York, 1968.
" T. Parsons, Societies, Evolutionary and Conzparative Perspectives,. p.
- III ;
and see Nisbet, op. cir., ch. 8.
PAST AND PRESENT
22
NUMBER
55
be a substitute for it. How did sociologists come to adopt an idea of
history which so directly implied the opposite?
We may start from John Burrow's observation that the social
sciences were in the first instance a response to anarchy: "social
anarchy as a fear, intelletcual anarchy as a fact".12 More importantly
perhaps the social and cultural confusion of the time was understood
not as an effect of wickedness (as a comparable disorder had been
understood in the seventeenth century), but as an effect of history.
The sense of disorder was ubiquitous and acture. Its intensity was
such that many felt unable to say, at even the most modest level of
abstraction, what was going on. The predicament was well described
by Lamartine in his account of wht it was like to live through the last
months of the July Monarchy:
These times are times of chaos; opinions are a scramble; parties are a jumble;
the language of new ideas has not been created; nothing is more difficult than
to give a good definition of oneself in religion, in philosophy, in politics. One
feels, one knows, one lives, and at need one dies for one's cause, but one cannot
name it. It is the problem of the time to classify things and men. The world
has jumbled its c a t a l o g ~ e . ' ~
But the collapse of meaning had in addition a specifically historical
content. Eric Hobsbawm has drawn attention to the propensity in
all societies to use the past as a resource for either anticipating or
prescribing the future.14 I t was precisely the possibility of such
thought that the pace and scope of change in the mid-nineteenth
century seemed to undermine. The sense of the meaninglessness of
the present was felt as a matter of the lack of relationship between
present and past. The generation that gave birth to sociology was
probably the first generation of human beings ever to have experienced
within the span of their own lifetime socially induced social change of
a totally transformative nature - change which could not be
identified, explained and accommodated as a limited historical
variation within the encompassing order of the past. One faced for
the first time a situation in which the idea of historical action or
accident - conquest, revolution or plague - could not begin (so it
seemed) to account for the ways in which the present differed from the
past. T o act effectively in the present, a frame of reference which
allowed one to identify the structure of one's situation, and so to
anticipate the consequences of one's actions, was essential. But such
a frame of reference could not be derived directly from the study of
J.,Burrow, Evolutzon and Society (Cambridge, 1966), p. 93.
C ~ t e dby C. Geertz "Ideology as a Cultural System" in D. Apter (ed.),
Ideology and Discontent (New York, 1964)~p. 43.
l 4 E. J. Hobsbawm, "The Social Functlon of the Past", above pp. 3-17.
la
l3
the present - the world had jumbled its catalogue. Nor could it be
derived naively from knowledge of the past because the nature of the
historical connection of past and present had become obscure, the
conventional categories of historical thought could not grasp it.
Hitherto the past had provided the pattern for the present in quite
straightforward ways. History had been an unproblematic matter of
recording duration and succession. Neither duration nor succession
had appeared to bring the nature of the principles of social organization into question. But that was just what happened in the midnineteenth centurv.
One did not need to be very sophisticated to feel that the present
when considered in relation to the past was deeply enigmatic. The
merchants and landlords who joined together to form the Bristol
Statistical Society in 1838 were driven to an interest in social research
by motives not very different from those which were to inspire
Durkheim or LePlay.
I n a simple state of society [they noted] a man may know tolerably well what
his duties to the poor a r e . . but what shall be said of that artificial and
complicated state of things when a nation manufactures for half the world and when the consequence unavoidably is the enormous distance between
the labourer and his virtual and sub-divided employer?15
.
The rapid and amazingly ramified extension of the division of labour
was the beginning of the problem. But layer upon layer of complication had been heaped upon it until all effective sense of historically
anchored process was lost. Even Bagehot, the least flappable thinker
of his generation, sensed the dilemma. "The greatest living
contrast". he was moved to remark in 1861. "is between the old
Eastern and customary civilizations and the new Western and
changeable civilizations". l 6
What resources were available for making sense of the experience of
living in a changeable civilization? Only knowledge of the past.
Somehow that knowledge had to be used to yield up a new understanding of what was happening in the present. G . H. Lewes
expressed the problem very clearly. Like most of his contemporaries
he found himself in "an age of universal anarchy of thought", an age
"anxious to reconstruct . . . but as yet impotent" - impotent because
the anarchy was historically induced and historically incomprehensible. "In this plight", he concluded, "we may hope for the
future but can cling only to the past: that alone is secure, wellgrounded. The past must form the basis of certainty and the
.IJ"'
l6
of the Statistical Soc., ii (1839). W. Bagehot, Physics and Politics (London, 1872), p. 114. 24
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
55
materials for peculation".^^ In turning to the past, then, the
intention was somehow to transcend mere history. Here the
emerging social sciences faced a fundamental strategic choice. Was
the past to be understood as a structural system or as a field of history?
Because the most urgent issue was to identify the general organizing
principles of industrial society and the general principles of change
involved in industrialization, it was perhaps natural that the
historical character of the past should in the first instance have been
ignored, that the first response should have been a set of attempts to
reify both the past as a structural type and history as a developmental
process. What was not so natural, but nevertheless happened in
almost every case, was that this intitial elaborate construction of ideal
types did not lead social scientists back to substantive investigations of
historical transition in particular settings but was allowed to stand as
being in itself a theoretically and empirically adequate alternative to
such investigations. Even Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism,18 the nearest thing to an example of good historical sociology which the founding fathers of the discipline were to
produce, was astoundingly casual about the detailed historical validation of his argument. One of the things which makes it so difficult for
students to answer the standard examination question which invites
them to compare Weber's account of the development of capitalism
with that of Karl Marx is that Marx is simply a much better a historian
than Weber.
Marx was, of course, always primarily interested in the mechanics
of transition, the relational basis of industrialization. By comparison
the construction of developmental types has a second-order, even a
background, importance in his thought. Nevertheless it is strange
that sociologists in general should not have been led as Marx was from
the reification of the stages and processes of development to the sort
of empirical historical sociology hlarx himself achieved. We can
hardly explain the failure by suggesting that the sociologists were
work-shy. On the contrary the important nineteenth-century
sociologists were at least as industrious as Marx. It is possible that
Spencer accumulated more data than any other scholar has yet done.
Nor were the early sociologists disinclined to handle historical data Weber for one seems to have had an inexhaustible interest in such
l 7 G. H. Lewes, "The State of Historical Sciences in France", cited in
Burrow, op. cit., p. 94.
l 8 M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published
in Archiv fur Socialwissonschaft und Social politik, vols. xx and XXI (1904-s),
English translation by T. Parsons (New York, 1930).
THE SENSE OF THE PAST AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLOGY
25
material. Generally it was through the reinterpretation of historical
materials that they hoped to achieve an understanding of the meaning
of the present. What is odd is that they remained committed to ways
of using historical materials that were both ahistorical and
historicist. I t is this ahistorical historicism of sociology that needs to
be explained.
The ex~lanationseems to have two main elements. First there
was the intellectual ascendancy of evolutionism. Second one must
recognize the apparent power of the analytical paradigm produced by
the treatment of the past as a structural type. I t did permit as,
Marxism apart, nothing else did, a generalized account of the
structure and tendency of industrialism. An exhaustive explanation
would also have to consider the im~ortanceof some cluestions of
academic convenience and convention. In establishing its own
academic credentials, sociology had above all to differentiate itself
from history. Since it, too, dealt in historical materials and
problems, the differentiation virtually had to be in terms of sociology's
special methodology. Once methodology became the hallmark of the
discipline at this level it was surprisingly easy for it to prove an
obstacle to the adoption of new ways of dealing with the problems as
well. I t is bizarre but not unrevealine that we should observe
attempts to demonstrate that Stanley Elkins is "not really" a historian
or that Barrington Moore Jr. is "not really" a sociologist.1g But this
is bv the wav.
As an empirical science of the laws of tendency, sociology sprang
directly from the sense, pervasive and disturbing as it was, of a
changeable civilization. Either changeability made civilization
unpredictable - a prospect not even Herbert Spencer was sanguine
enough to embrace - or it was scientifically ordered in ways which
appropriate contemplation could reveal. Appropriate contemplation
in turn was felt to involve three things: first, the discovery of a
conceptual language capable of differentiating between present and
past, of marking out the-trajectory of change; then a
structural
characterization of the present as distinct from the past; and finally
the identification of the processes of change or growth in terms of
which past, present and future were bound together. For each of
these purposes it was not historical action but objectified historical
.,
l 9 S . Elkins, Slavery (Chicago, 1959) and Barrington Moore Jr., The Social
Origins ofDictatorship and Democracy (Benson Press, Boston, 1966) are among the
better known recent studies to have created intra-disciplinary soul-searching by
demonstrating the unavoidably inter-disciplinary nature of explanation in the
social sciences. For current examples of pedantic boundary disputes of this
kind, see The American Sociologisr, vi (New York, 1971).
26
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
55
process that was of interest. The idea that process could be
ascertained only through careful observational studies of action
occurred to very few people.
In passing we might note that the problem of putting together a
suitable language of concepts was itself an acute one. Few things
are as evident in early nineteenth-century social analysis as the want of
appropriate terms to specify the variations in social experience that
observers wished to discuss. The vocabulary that served to
describe traditional social relationships simply could not grip the
experience of the present with any precision. Compare the vigour
of the first part of this statement by Cobbett with the limpness of the
end: "When master and man were the terms everyone- was in his
place and all were free; now in fact it is an affair of masters and
Now of course it was not really an affair of masters and
slaves. But Cobbett's repertoire of concepts simply could not get
him any nearer. Nor was it sufficient to see the present simply as
a negation of the past: Shelley's string of negatives - "sceptreless,
uncircumscribed, unclassed, tribeless and nationless, exempt from
awe, worship and degreeyyz1
- was a good intuitive response to the
situation but no basis for analvsis.
I n the event the vocabulary problem was solved under the
umbrella of the general attempt to characterize the present as a type
of social order, and to infer from the supposed typological
properties of types of social order supposed laws of tendency or
principles of social development. The overriding necessity was to
obtain an objective, abstract yardstick outside the flux of the present
situation - the complicated and artificial state of things - to which
the present situation could be referred and in terms of which it could
thence be known. T o this end the emerging social sciences seized
hold of history in two ways. First in the form of a series of bold
conceptual polarities, explicit antitheses between past and present
which Nisbet has called the unit ideas of sociology. Second in the
form of a set of ambitious descriptive theories of the stages of social
development. The effect of both procedures was to turn history into
an object. 2 z
20
21
W. Cobbett, Political Register, lxxxvi (London, 1835) p. 767.
P. B. Shelley, "Prometheus Unbound", Act 111, Scene iv, T h e Complete
Poetical Works (Oxford, 1907).
R. Nisbet, T h e Sociological Tradition (New York, 1966). If one were
disposed to accept the argument that the principal property of the culture of
capitalism is a process of reification in which all secondary relationships tend
increasingly to be perceived as relationships between things, one could then
add to Engels's analysis of the way in which the real connectedness of man and
(conr. on p. 27)
The attempt to formulate laws of development as a matter of
explicit historical process was of course a conspicuous failure. Its
empirical difficulties were quickly apparent to most observers. Thus
Henry Sidgwick observed in 1885 how:
With equal confidence history is represented as leading up, now to the nai've and unqualified individualism of Spencer, now to the carefully guarded and regulated socialism of Schaeffle, now to Comte's dream of securing seven- roomed houses for all working men . Guidance, truly, is here enough and to spare; but how shall the bewildered statesman select his guidance when his sociological doctors exhibit such portentous disagreement? .. .
Not surprisingly Sidgwick ended by begging his audience "to take
no steps calculated to foster delusions of this kind".23 The more
important epistemological difficulties of evolutionary sociology were
no less effectively exposed, first by would-be evolutionists such as
Hobhouse and Ginsberg, then definitively by Popper.Z4 Two years
after Popper's first onslaught on sociological historicism Parsons
proposed the repudiation of all interest in diachronic analysis and the
reorientation of sociology around the synchronic investigation of
systems of action in terms of formalized ahistorical proper tie^.^^
What actually happened at this point, however, was that, although
the discrediting of the overt intellectual strategies of evolutionism was
acknowledged, the infrastructure of evolutionism remained embedded
in sociological thought. I t was here that the conceptual polarities of
sociology's unit ideas were important. Status and contract,
community and association, organic and mechanical solidarity,
traditional and legal-rational authority, the folk community and the
all these double concepts were ways of trying to
urban community
apprehend and identify the changes in the structural format of
society associated with industrialization. More or less explicitly the
changes indicated in the conceptual antitheses were treated as
necessary concomitants of industrialization, an idea which surfaced
from time to time (most recently in the work of Clark Kerr and his
colleagues in the 1960s) in the notion of the "logic of industriali~m".~~
There could be and was wide-ranging dispute as to the exact nature of
-
(note 22 cont.)
his history is "lost for fair" in the veils of fetishism spun by philosophers,
political theorists and jurists the observation that the peculiar contribution of
the sociologist to this process has been, as a final ironic transformation, to turn
history itself into a thing.
British Association for the Advancement of Science, Proceedings (London,
1885).
" L. T. Hobhouse, Social Development (Allen and Unwin, London, 1924)
and Morals in Evolution (Macmillan, London, 1901); M. Ginsberg, The
Diversity of Morals (London, 1956); K . Popper, The Poverty of Historiczsm
(London, 1957).
T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (Glencoe, Illinois, 1937). 2
' C . Kerr, er al., Industrialism and Industrial Man (London, 1962). 28
PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER
55
the logic of industrialism but the salience of the idea as a governing
focus of thought remained strong. Not all of the early sociologists
adopted the device of conceptual polarization in its fullest form.
Often the polarity was merely implied in the assertion of some
distinctive processual property of industrialization: the emergence of
chronic anomie, urbanism as a way of life, bureaucratization,
secularization, the isolation of the conjugal family. But the
procedure is really the same. It is a matter of abbreviating history.
It involved the observation of key structural differences in the
constitution of the present as distinct from the past. But it did not
necessarily involve any need to show how, historically, the differences
had been effected. It was the observation of contrasted moments of
development that mattered. Having characterized past and present
as states of being in terms of some key properties, one could go on to
infer laws of tendency by logical rather than historical procedures.
Whatever the difficulties of the method, its sheer economy was among
its principal attractions. Quite simply, there was no quicker method
of producing a theoretical account bf where society was going or of
what were its significant structural components.
It did matter, of course, to show that the past postulated by
sociology - the world of the extended family, of community and
corporation, of folk culture and traditionalism - had been really there
in some concrete sense. But to see how this was done is to see still
more clearly how profoundly unhistorical the whole enterprise really
was. The point after all was not to know the past but to establish an
idea of the past which could be used as a comparative base for the
understanding of the present. Cnce the flood of ethnographic data
became available and once it became clear that the Iroquois, the
ancient Picts and the Irish in Manchester were. analvticallv,
,- the same
thing, the essential irrelevance of history in the construction of this
past was revealed. This did not, of course, at all reduce the
importance of calling it the past. That importance was irreducible.
But it sprang from the sociologists' concern to achieve a theory of
modernity, and if possible of modernization, not from any interest in
the mechanics of historical transition. As J. F. McLennan put it in
a general rubric for the social sciences with which most of his coworkers seem to have been thoroughly sympathetic:
T h e first thing to be done is to inform ourselves of the facts relating to the
least developed races. . .their condition, as it may be observed today, is
truly the mcst ancient condition of man. It is the lowest and simplest. .
a n d . . in the science of history old means not old in chronology but in structure. That is most ancient which lies nearest the beginning of human
progress considered as a development."
'; T. F. McLennan, Studies in Arccie?zt History, 2nd ser. (London, 1896),
p. 16.
.
.
There are few clearer statements of the central strategy of the social
sciences - and few more indicative of their indifference to anything
that could be called, strictly, the historical past. Long after
McLennan's hopeful involvement with overt notions of progress and
development had been abandoned, the conceptions implicit in the
idea of systems being "old in structure'' reniained rooted in
sociological method.
Some consequences of this method are worth noting. It is not
just that it directs attention away from the need for propositional
theories about the organization of change in particular historical
contexts; or that it permitted people like Bagehot to regard the
~ ~economy, elegance and apparent
working classes as " p r i r n i t i ~ e " ; its
effectiveness in differentiating past and present have encouraged a
state of affairs in which a high proportion of sociological research is
in fact research on myths which sociologists have invented. The
sociology of the family provides some lovely examples of this process.
Family sociology has until quite recently been dominated by the idea
of the classical pre-industrial family, or, as W. J. Goode puts it,
"a pretty picture of life down on Grandma's farm". With reference
to this construct, assembled by rneans of McLennan's brand of
structural history and the skilful extrapolation from it of ideal types,
a whole series of quite detailed myths were formulated about what
happens, and has to happen, to the family in the course of industrialization. Goode, who has been more involved than anyone else
in the dismantling of this particular body of myth, now concludes that
no determinate relationship can be established either way between
This, however, is not so
family patterns and industriali~ation.~~
much a definitive finding as a statement that the ground is now clear
for the sort of research that ought to have been done in the first
place. Meanwhile an expensive research unit in Cambridge has
devoted several years to proving the non-existence in pre-industrial
England and elsewhere of a type of family which no-one familiar with
the historical evidence ever said did exist." This sort of thing is the
least of the costs of sociology's hidden ahistorical historicism. The
higher costs are paid in the terms of reference embodied in whole
strategies of sociological thought. A case in point would be the use
'"~agehot, op. cit., pp. 82-5; cf. Kisbet, Social Change a ~ l dHisistory.
2 8 \V. J. Goode, "Industrialisation and Family Change" in B. F. Hoselitz
and \V. E. Moore (eds.), Industrialisatiorz and Soc~ety(New York, 1963),
PP. 237-59.
'"T. P. R. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London, 1965), pp. 81-106.
3O
PAST AND PRESENT
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55
that has been made of Professor Parsons's influential proposal to
analyse social action in terms of a scheme of pattern variable^.^^
The pattern variables appeared as an integral part of Parsons's
manifesto for a new sociology twenty-five years ago, the attempt to
reconstitute sociology as an analysis of the structure of social action
dissociated from the study of tendency. In pursuit of this object
Parsons proposed that orientations to action could be investigated
schematically in terms of a limited number of pure types. He
recommended that these types should be organized in four or five
pairs of opposities. The four pairs of pattern variables (variable ways
of patterning action) for which he found most use were identified as
follows : particularism versus universalism; affectivity versus affective
neutrality; ascription versus achievement; and diffuseness versus
specificity. This set of variations is offered as encompassing, if not
the full range of possible modes of action, at least such a large field
that effectively all systems of action can be brought within the scope
of sociological analysis. The merit claimed for the pattern variables
as analytical tools in other words is precisely that they are
independent of, they rise above, any particular historical context.
They are quite simply value-free tools. Yet the use that has been
made of them, in part by Parsons but more especially by some of his
followers, makes this hard to believe. It turns out that they do have,
again in the structural sense, a reference to history or at least to the
difference between past and present, traditionalism and modernity,
after all. Thus Sutton. Hoselitz and manv others have identified the
difference between modern and pre-modern social systems as a
polarity of universalism, affective-neutrality, achievement orientation
and functional specificity on the one hand and of particularism,
affectivity, ascription and functional diffuseness on the other.32
Whether Parsons intended his polarities to serve the turn of sociological historicism in this way i s not clear. His categories plainly
are anchored in quite familiar contrasts between the presumed
properties of industrialism and pre-industrialism, however, and the
use that has been made of them is in this sense legitimate. They
do serve as one more device enabling sociology to theorize about
3 1 T. Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Illinois, 1951).
Parsons's constructs are of course an explicit extension of Weber's distinction between the
properties of "traditionality" and "rationality" : M. Weber, The Theory of Social
and Economic Organisation (New York, 1947).
3 2 Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution, discusses this
procedure at some length. F. X. Sutton, "Social Theory and Comparative
Politics" in H. Eckstein and D. Apter (eds.), Compararive Politics (Glencoe,
Illinois, 1963).
THE SENSE OF THE PAST AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLOGY
31
the course of development without reference to the mechanics of
transition.
Consider a final example. The literature of contemporary
sociology is full of general characterizations of advanced industrial
society - as mass society, the acquisitive society, the affluent society
and most recently the chaotic society. Most particular research
projects proceed under the intellectual auspices of one or other of
these characterizations. None of the characterizations is the result
of scholarly historical analysis. All of them depend, however, on the
actuality of an assumed historical process. Daniel Bell's account of
the theory of mass society provides a good example of what is
involved :
T h e revolutions in transport and communications have brought men into
closer contact with each other and bound them in new ways; the division of
labour has made them more interdependent; tremors in one part of society
affect all others. Despite this greater interdependence, however, individuals
have grown more estranged from one another. T h e old primary ties of family
and local community have been shattered; ancient parochial faiths are
questioned; few unifying beliefs or values have taken their place. Most
important the critical standards of an educated elite no longer shape opinion
or taste. As a result mores and morals are in constant flux, relations between
individuals are tangential or compartmentalized rather than organic. At the
same time greater mobility, spatial and social, intensifies concern over status.
Instead of a fixed or known status symbolized by dress or title, each person
assumes a multiplicity of roles and constantly has to prove himself in a succession of new situations. Because of all this, the individual loses a coherent
sense of self. His anxieties increase. There ensues a search for new faiths.
T h e stage is set for the charismatic leader, the secular messiah, who by
bestowing upon each person the semblance of necessary grace and of fulness
of personality supplies a substitute for the older unifying belief that the mass
society has d e ~ t r o y e d . ~ ~
Whether or not this type of characterization, which is quite prevalent
in sociology, is based on good history or not is not immediately
relevant. The important feature of such thinking is that in it the
characterization of historical process and the characterization of
present structure are totally interdependent. Each pervades the
other and the conception as a whole is inconceivable without both.
All questions of how the various transformations entailed in the
movement between structural types were effected are, however,
firmly set aside. The point is not to focus investigation on the social
organization of historical process but to set up a frame of reference for
research on a thing called the social structure of the present. And
yet structure is defined in terms which have meaning only in
terms of conceptions of process. We are faced with the same paradox
3 3 D. Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, Illinois, 1960).
Professor Bell is
not, of course, espousing the theory of mass society in this passage. His exposition of it is nonetheless well-taken for that.
32
PAST AND PRESENT
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55
as before: the identification of structural types, the formal differentiation of past and present, is effected with such tlan and internal
cogency that it ends up by apparently making unnecessary any further
study of the intervening structuring through which the past presumably became the present. Yet, of course, it is only such work that
will tell us whether our structural concepts make sense, let alone
whether they explain anything.
The academic and intellectual dissociation of history and sociology
seems, then, to have had the effect of deterring both disciplines from
attending seriously to the most important issues involved in the
understanding of social transition. Many current accounts of the
historian's past, requiring as they do a wholesale rejection of any
form of structural analysis, strike me as no better suited than the
normal version of the sociologist's past to deal with these issues. This
is not the place to consider what changes of heart or shifts of emphasis
would be needed to produce a more fruitful and sociological history.
What I have tried to do is to show how one could begin to move
towards a more penetrating historical sociology. The essential step
is not to abandon the structural typing of past and present but rather
to recognize that the function of structural types is not to allow us to
by-pass history by inferring logically necessary tendencies, but on the
contrary to direct attention to those kinds of historical inquiry which
we should expect, theoretically, to explain phenomena of structural
transformation.
University of Durham
Philip Abrams