ABSTRACT
The social significance of ignorance and ignoring may have important latent functions which are as revealing of the social structure (and hence of social relationships) as positive knowledge.2 I wish to present a simple but intriguing fact about the intellectual history of our discipline, one which I consider sociology’s own prize detective story. The fact is that Durkheim and weber, to the best of my knowledge, never refer to one another’s writings or mention the other when every circumstance would seem to indicate that they should have had full awareness of each other.
