ABSTRACT
The theory of social life is worthy or unworthy across the board: the notion of small range, middle range, and large range to meet the need of small scale, middle scale, and large scale events is largely gratuitous. What we need is a unified theory of social science that accounts for and explains variations and consistencies in the modernization of social life. To imagine that "hypotheses about the facts" may serve "as challenges to the data which may some day be collected" is to deny the empirical, inductive basis of sociology as such. But sadder still, it is to equate a general theory with an oracular vision. On general theory, as Marion Levy makes clear in many ways: by turning over huge chunks of the work to studying "the structure of relatively modernized and relatively non-modernized societies", with subsections on "aspects of any relationship", and further, "aspects of any society".
