The Place of Sociology

Abstract

One theme that has run through this study has been the undermining of traditional disciplinary barriers by structuralist and post-structuralist modes of thought. We have seen how philosophy, literary criticism, linguistics, history, and psychoanalysis mingle in the key texts of the period, to produce what Richard Rorty has described as the ‘new genre’ of theory.¹ Almost entirely absent hitherto, however, has been the field of sociology — a surprising omission considering that in Britain (at least until theory made its major impact on literary and media studies, in the mid–1970s) it was propably the most important area of left-wing intellectual activity. Why has its influence in France, until recently at any rate, been so much less?