ABSTRACT
This book is where theMorphogenetic Approach was first developed and presented in 1979. Revisiting it gives me the opportunity to repay some debts and also to re-endorse this explanatory framework by replying to some of its critics. Let me briefly revert to the theoretical landscape in which this approach to explaining the emergence of State educational systems was conceived. In the social sciences, those were the days of ‘the two sociologies’,1 when explanations based upon action and chains of interaction increasingly diverged from those that focused upon systems and culminated in the endorsement of systemic autopoiesis without actors. In the philosophy of social science these two sociologies were underwritten by Methodological Individualism and Methodological Holism, in which the ultimate constituents of the social world were respectively held to be ‘other people’ or ‘social facts’.2 Social Origins of Educational Systems should be seen as a howl of protest against this theoretical and philosophical background. The original Introduction shows the importance I attached to resisting both of
these types of approaches, ones I later critiqued as ‘upward conflationism’ and ‘downward conflationism’.3 The following quotation set the terms of the theoretical challenge to which the whole book was the response:
It is important never to lose sight of the fact that the complex theories we develop to account for education and educational change are theories about the educational activities of people : : : [However] our theories will be about the educational activities of people even though they will not explain educational development strictly in terms of people alone.4
