Local ills and Global remedies: Presentiments for European Sociology in the British experience

Abstract

Sociology had a double role in Britain during its post‐ World War II expansion. It reflected the problems of class society and it imported foreign, especially European, ideas, each as a function of the other. The outcome of their interchange over time was a theoretical development paralleling the emergence of a society of cross‐cutting cleavages and a culture disconnected from structure. The porosity of British society and the absorptiveness of its sociology prefigure the new European condition where the deracinated state and the rebirth of histories have to be theorized and where postmodernism threatens sociology with dissolution. Sociology is now obliged to develop, if at all, as a way of reading contemporary history in which the fate of the individual is encoded in the global condition.