ABSTRACT
American sociology has been criticized for having departed from the historical concerns of its nineteenth-century European founders. A significant source of the renewed interest in historical and comparative sociology has been the emergence of the body of inquiry which has been called the sociology of development. The re-emergence of historical and comparative sociology does not reflect any general feeling on the part of sociologists that the emphases on quantitative techniques, rigorous methodology, and systematic theory, which have characterized the work of the discipline. The efforts of sociologists to differentiate a number of stratification dimensions and to suggest that incongruent positions, high in one, low in another, would affect behavior in determined ways have been applied in various analyses of different events in American history. Many scholars, both historians and sociologists, despair of the value of introducing the methodological approaches of sociology or the other social sciences into historical work.
