ABSTRACT
Social theory, and the Industrial Revolution in Britain, are both very broad themes: to attempt to relate them within the compass of a single paper is either extremely presumptuous or excessively foolhardy. In either case I shall not be able to avoid the charge of superficiality. The very recent nature of the work in this field by Hagen and others has allowed little time as yet for comfortable digestion, and one of the peculiar difficulties of this no-man's-land between complementary disciplines is that many of its propositions are not susceptible to the normal processes of historical verification. Moreover, I take it to be the function of a seminar paper to offer for discussion some tentative speculations rather than to put forward a thesis from which every unprovable assertion has been quietly eliminated, or in which every generalization is so fully proven as to admit of no further discussion. Any conclusions suggested in this paper must necessarily, therefore, be more than usually tentative.
