Demography’s British History and its Relation to Sociology

This chapter outlines the history of demography in Britain and examines its links with the development of sociology in the country. There is a particularly strong link in the person of David Glass, a towering figure in British demography and a pioneer in British sociology. Eugene Grebenik is another shaper of the history of demography. Before the start of the twentieth century, demography was mainly the study of mortality. William Farr, who created Britain's system of vital statistics, was primarily interested in mortality. Two very important institutions in the history of British demography are the Population Investigation Committee and the Royal Commission on Population. During the 1950s and 1960s, there was also an upsurge in interest in population history and in the interaction between demographic and economic and social change in the past. This chapter closes with a consideration of the development, since the Royal Commission on Population, of the discipline of economics in relation to the subject areas that overlap with the traditional interests of sociologists and demographers.

What Should be Done about the History of British Sociology?

This chapter deals with the writing of the history of sociology as an activity in Britain. Work on the history of sociology is not usually approached through the study of its institutions, but this chapter argues that they deserve much more attention than they have received. The British Sociological Association has not been merely a mirror or consequence of what was happening elsewhere; it has also been a motor of change and development which has had consequences for the history (as well as being of interest as an institution in its own right). This chapter reviews some of the ways in which the British Sociological Association has played a part in the more general history of sociology, in support of the argument for the value of more work on sociological institutions, leading into a more general discussion of lacunae in what has so far been treated and of some of the problems facing historical work in this field.

The History of Sociology in Britain

This chapter discusses the battle between literature and science for domination of sociology, a topic that has rather been neglected as a theme in the history of sociology in Britain if also perhaps overheated nowadays in exchanges over relativism between the denizens of ‘cultural studies’ and the proponents of a ‘science of society’. The chapter argues that, traditionally, the social territory belonged to literature and philosophy. A challenge was then raised by science especially in the nineteenth century. Then, especially in the twentieth century, social science developed so as to turn a binary contrast into a triangular one. Sociology had three sources in Western thought: one literary (political philosophy), one quasi-scientific (the philosophy of history), and one scientific (biology). It is no accident that both sociology and social policy were placed first at the London School of Economics, the Fabian institution invented and fostered by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1895.

Some Principal Concerns in the Shaping of Sociology

This chapter highlights some of the central themes that are relevant to discussions on sociology and seem to be the principal areas of concern. It examines the issues of disciplinarity, globalization, source material and the division between quality and quantity in research methods. There have been arguments that it is important to distinguish between the intellectual differentiation of scientific activities and the disciplinary divisions through which they are pursued. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which sociology can be distinguished from other social sciences. There is a general framework of ideas about social relations that may be the common concern of the social sciences but is the particular concern of sociology. This centres on the idea of what it is to talk about human ‘society’ in all its complexity.

A View from a French Sociologist

The French are not familiar with British sociology. As a first indicator, British sociology is hardly ever translated into French. In Britain, Anthony Giddens is the most cited and the most widely read British sociologist, along with Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Talcott Parsons. British sociology is not well known and is rather uninfluential in France. On the one hand, its so-called ‘classical’ form, used by the 1950 generation, appears to many to be too rigorous and too marked by ‘positivism’. This type of sociology is therefore the object of criticism both on the continent and among young British sociologists. What is striking when reading British sociology is that British research has often been more rigorous than French research because it is based on fieldwork of an anthropological nature, an approach which French scholars have often been reticent about. Moreover, British researchers are more scathing, when it comes to criticism of their own nation, than their French counterparts.

Not Really a View from Without: The Relations of Social Anthropology and Sociology

This chapter argues that the histories of social anthropology and sociology in Britain have been so closely intertwined and overlapping that they cannot really be seen as external to one another at all. The two disciplines have common origins in the social thought of the Enlightenment. This was an enquiry into the character of the emergent, modern society of contemporary Europe, with a view to realizing the conditions for human emancipation from tyranny, ignorance, and poverty. By the early 1950s, sociology at the London School of Economics started to acquire the coherence and momentum that would power its lift-off in the 1960s. Many sociologists and anthropologists were attracted by the new analytical possibilities offered by structuralism, but they were also drawn by external circumstances to address issues of social change. The resurgence of Marxism, as much a feature of the late 1960s and 1970s as the rise of structuralism, was much more a response to events in the world than a movement internal to the realm of ideas.

Sociology and History: Partnership, Rivalry, or Mutual Incomprehension?

The 1960s was a period of ferment, intellectual excitement, optimism and expansion in all the social sciences, including sociology. It is, therefore, an appropriate starting point for a discussion of the relationship between history and sociology in Britain. The ferment affected different branches of history in different ways: political and diplomatic history hardly at all; social and economic history much more. The impact of the social sciences on economic history came primarily from neo-classical economic theory allied to econometrics. Historians looked to the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s for concepts, theories, and methods which would assist them to reinvigorate the writing of history. There can be little doubt that economic history was much more influenced between 1960 and 1990 by economics than was social history by sociology. However, history since the 1960s has drawn more on the insights and methods of the social sciences than the social sciences in Britain, including sociology, have drawn on history; this is to the detriment of scholarship in the social sciences.

A View from Europe

The history of sociology can be likened to the history of the Habsburg Empire, which claimed to have legitimate sovereignty over the whole of Europe but eventually became a discontented jumble of margins. In the same way, Talcott Parsons tried to claim that sociology was the empress of the social sciences; economics, political science, and the others being allocated their places within its realm. But sociology could not match the tougher, tighter theoretical structures of political science, economics, psychology, and even possibly anthropology. It became an internally divided subject, cultivating the margins. There is a field called neo-institutionalism in which an increasing amount of good research is being done and which is challenging some of the orthodoxies of the neo-classical economics and neo-liberal political science which have come to dominate the intellectual world since the decline of Keynesianism in the 1970s.

Introduction

For many years, sociology in Britain has been pulled in two opposite directions, by those on the one side who want to make it into a branch of science and those on the other side who want to make it into a branch of literature. There is another two-way pull to which British sociology has been, and continues to be, subjected. This is the vertical pull exerted in one direction by those who want to give sociology its autonomy by taking it up into an intellectual space of its own where the irreducibly ‘social’ is safely detached from psychology (let alone biology) and in the other direction by those who think that sociology can be fully established only if it is firmly grounded in psychology or biology (or preferably both). Despite all these disagreements and tensions, British sociology as a recognized academic discipline does not appear to be at serious risk of being undermined by irreconcilable differences of principle or purpose.

A View from Sweden

This chapter discusses sociology in general before comparing sociology in Britain with that in Sweden. If sociology refers to the discipline taught and studied at sociology departments around the world, then it is a divided discipline. Some sociologists regard their intellectual activity as a vehicle for social change rather than as work within an academic discipline. This is not problematic as long as they, in their academic work, stick to the rules of science, use empirical evidence to test their hypotheses rather than to illustrate them, and publish results that are in contradiction to their aims. This chapter also examines the debate on whether sociology is a literature or a science, and whether the British Sociological Association is a professional organization or a learned society.