ABSTRACT
A Subject like "The Future of America" is an invitation to utopian dreams or Doomsday nightmares. Even supposedly sober social scientists have recently created yet another specialty in "futurology", the study of the future. The most certain thing that can be said about America is that it will resemble America as it is today in a far greater number of particulars than otherwise. Yet social scientists have not been very successful in the past at making even limited, short-run predictions, though they have not done any worse than others. Within the more restricted sphere of academic sociology, there have been calls for a New Sociology, a Critical Sociology, a Radical Sociology, and even a Transcendental Sociology, all of which define themselves by a rhetorical rejection of the bad old sociologies. In sociology, a highly sophisticated theoretical perspective that bridges the gap between understanding social reality and political engagement has recently become popular.
