ABSTRACT
Ideas are treated as extensions or shadows of single individuals rather than as the distinguishable structures of meaning, perspective, and allegiance that major ideas so plainly are in the history of civilization. What are the essential unit-ideas of sociology, those which, above any others, give distinctiveness to sociology in its juxtaposition to the other social sciences? There are five: community, authority, status, the sacred, and alienation. Each of these ideas is commonly linked to a conceptual opposite, to a kind of antithesis, from which it derives much of its continuing meaning in the sociological tradition. The major sociologists of the century, from Comte and Tocqueville to Weber and Durkheim, were caught up in the currents of the three great ideologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: liberalism, radicalism, and conservatism. Major ideas in the social sciences invariably have roots in moral aspiration.
