ABSTRACT
When Daniel Bell was first appointed to a full-time academic post at Columbia in 1969 American sociology was mainly divided between two hostile camps. On one side were ranged the big battalions of grand theory, sociologists who sought to mobilize highly abstracted, formalized and generalized batteries of interconnected concepts to unify sociological thought about society. The leading grand theorist was Talcott Parsons of Harvard University who had sought not only to unify sociological theory but to integrate within his paradigm of structural-functionalism the theoretical cores of anthropology and psychology as well. Parsons’ ‘general theory of action’ was a theory not only of the social system but also of culture and personality. Indeed, he was later to extend his theory to encompass the biological organism, the physical environment of action and even the supernatural realm of ultimate values. The opposition to grand theory consisted of the mobile, fact-mongering and rationalistic forces of positivistic empiricism that sought to reject not only grand theory but any theory at all, particularly any theory constructed in terms of value-
relevance. In line with the strategies set out by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and George A. Lundberg, and armoured by the philosophical legitimations established by Carl G. Hempel and Ernest Nagel, such figures as Hubert M. Blalock and Otis Dudley Duncan could harry and undermine grand theory by hurling at it a limitless arsenal of correlation co-efficients, significance tests and null hypotheses, all accomplished within an anxiety-free technicism. As Alexander (1982) shows, grand theory succumbed to the vandals of positivism and American sociology entered a barbaric period.
