ABSTRACT
This book addresses the uses of history in sociology from a position informed by the methods of Michel Foucault and his project for a ‘history of the present’. The prominent names here, Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Anthony Giddens, Jurgen Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Fernand Braudel, as well as Foucault himself, suggest the terrain investigated is somewhat larger than a sub-discipline of sociology or a hybrid of sociology and history. I hope the reader will grant me the liberty of calling this terrain ‘historical sociology’. As she or he will find, however, it is marked out here not only by sociology and history, but also by social philosophy and political thought, by cultural and intellectual history as much as the history of ‘economies, societies and civilisations’ (to quote the title of the journal, Annales) and by pursuits and projects that seem to ignore all of these divisions and pursue an unexpected path not mapped out in advance within disciplinary territories.
