Science, Class and Society

Science, Class and Society is the first systematic attempt to compare classical sociology and historical materialism–the respective and rival traditions founded by Comte, Durkheim, Weber and Pareto on the one hand, and Man and Engels on the other. Therbom starts with a critique of four major recent 'self-reflective' accounts of sociology from within the modem discipline itself - those of Talcott Parsons, Wright Mills, Alvin Gouldner and Robert Friedrichs. He then turns to the history of the discipline which preceded sociology - the emergent 'economics' in the age of Enlightenment, and furnishes a compelling account of its material and social background, from Smith and Ricardo to Jevons to Keynes. Situated against the ascent of classical economics, sociology is interpreted as the product of a subsequent 'age between two revolutions' - a system of thought that emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and matured on the eve of the proletarian revolution in Russia, in the work of