ABSTRACT
About twenty-five years ago, Bennett M. Berger, who had been a colleague when the author taught at the University of California-Berkeley in the 1960s, asked a number of sociologists to write essays about how they became sociologists. Many responded, and Berger (1990) published a volume of twenty such essays under the title Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies of Twenty American Sociologists. The author was one of those who responded, and the author's essay appeared in the volume under the title "From Socialism to Sociology". That progress (some would consider it regress) characterized a good number of sociologists at the time and characterizes some—but he believes fewer—today, when sociology has become a long-established and even somewhat stodgy discipline in almost every university and college. This chapter discusses the author's career in sociology, 1963 to the present.
