Conclusion: Sociology as Critical Theory

Abstract

In this book I have sought to introduce the reader to a conception of sociology at variance with modes of thinking which have for a long period been dominant in the subject. Those who have wanted to model sociology upon natural science, hoping to discover universal laws of social conduct, have tended to sever sociology from history. In breaking with such views, we have to go further than simply asserting that sociology and history — or, more accurately, the social sciences and history — are indistinguishable, provocative though such a claim may appear to be. We have to grasp how history is made through the active involvements and struggles of human beings, and yet at the same time both forms those human beings and produces outcomes which they neither intend nor foresee. As a theoretical background to the social sciences, nothing is more vital in an era suspending between extraordinary opportunity on the one hand and global catastrophe on the other.