Absent or Forgotten? Recovering British Social Theory

Abstract

It is now well-established that a strong and vibrant tradition of empirical social research developed in Britain (see Kent, 1981; Goldman, 2002). Charles Booth (1901–02) and Seebohm Rowntree (1901) built on earlier statistical investigations and adopted an approach that emphasised the determining role of class relations and the environmental conditions that underpin them. Their research, in turn, spawned a tradition of class, mobility, and locality studies that continued through the 1960s and beyond with such classic studies as those of Young and Willmott (1957), Jackson and Marsden (1962), Goldthorpe and colleagues (1969), and Townsend (1979). In respect of social theory, however, British sociology is often felt to be weak. It has tended to be seen as an exclusively hard-nosed and abstracted empiricism that rarely, if ever, pursued theoretical generalisations. Specific discussions of social thought in Britain have generally been limited to a consideration of moral and political philosophy, though allusions to various fossilised forms of social evolutionism are sometimes made. Perry Anderson (1968) famously pointed to the absence of anything that could be described as a classic sociology in Britain, seeing this as a reflection of the weakness of the British bourgeoisie and of its failure to build a strong class consciousness and understanding of its own role in the social world. Social theory developed in Britain, Anderson argued, only through the work of overseas migrants, who invigorated the study of history and anthropology but produced no generalised theoretical systems to explain the processes that they described.