ABSTRACT
A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, unfinished at Halévy’s death, begins with the volume England in 1815 published in 1913. Although its title may suggest static analysis its contents reach backward and onward from 1815 to elucidate the forces then at work, and the processes and directions of change. This volume explores more of social structure, and explains change more generally, than do its narrative successors. It may be seen as a complex and impressive structural-functional analysis of a whole society. From it, functional analysts might learn much about the functions of valuation and the uses of models – especially, that a functional analysis of social integration may be organized better by systematic valuation of the system’s detailed potentialities, than by the general model of disintegration which otherwise, consciously or not, has to organize any functional explanation of integration.
