ABSTRACT
I Sometimes reflect ruefully that nothing else I have ever written has attracted anything like as much notice as ‘The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology.” This situation is familiar enough for authors of a single successful and influential book but has a certain comic, even humiliating aspect when what is involved is a mere article that hit the target with one resonant phrase. Few people seem aware of the existence of a companion article, for it has never been reprinted and is rarely cited. 1 (It was published, to be sure, in a journal with a far lower circulation among sociologists than The American Sociological Review.) “The Oversocialized Conception of Man,” by contrast, has been widely reprinted in several languages; it has contributed a phrase to the vocabulary of sociology; and its major thesis, though inevitably often misrepresented, has by now been virtually absorbed into the conventional wisdom of the discipline. I hope therefore that it will not be thought to be sheer vanity on my part if I attempt a reassessment in light of an intellectual situation in sociology that is very different from the one that prevailed fourteen years ago when the article was first published.
