ABSTRACT
The French mathematician, Henri Poincaré, once referred to sociology as ‘the science with the most methods and the fewest results’. This is an unduly harsh judgment. It is true that the work of sociologists over the past century has produced few, if any, high level generalisations which might form the elements of a body of scientific theory. Nevertheless, as was pointed out in the previous chapter, a good deal has been achieved at a lower level of scientific generalization, in providing a body of concepts, in classifying social types, and in establishing some elementary correlations between social phenomena. Perhaps the principal contribution to date, however, has been that of descriptive sociology (and anthropology). Many societies, institutional forms, and social groups have been exhaustively and precisely described, in a manner which makes possible the establishment of further correlations, and provides a basis both for classification and for interpretations of various kinds.
