The History of British Sociology from the Perspective of its Archived Qualitative Sources: Ruminations and Reflections

Abstract

How do we sociologists understand our own history? This is not an easy question to answer. If we adopt a version of an ‘insider’ view of our development, in which we trace our forebears, our pioneering models, and our intellectual inspirations as a series of steps to where we are now, then how do we square this with the now familiar critique from Foucauldian scholars and sociologists of science who insist on understanding knowledge in its wider epistemic context? As Walter Benjamin (1973, p. 255) so subtly reminds us, ‘as flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history’. How do we both welcome these sociological flowers opening up to our sun, yet also do justice to those which remain out of today’s warmth and remain closed from our sight? And how do we sociologists, who are used to choosing our own research methods in the light of our current research questions deal with the ‘relics’ of our own past studies. John Goldthorpe (1991), famously, has insisted that sociologists should leave such archival relics to historians who are better skilled to deal with archival sources, and we should instead focus on what we do best. But can we rely on historians to properly render our own archival sources? And should we just focus on contemporary research apparently heedless of our past mistakes?