ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a particular case, that of British sociologies and Marxisms in the 1960s and 1970s, in an effort to throw a little more light on the blow that the sociologies have been dealt. The formal and explicit links between sociologies and Marxisms before 1960, and particularly before the Second World War, were tenuous in the extreme. The link between Theoretical Practice and Economy and Society was the participation on both of their editorial boards of Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, who later went on to write, individually and collectively, several books in which Althusserian Marxism was brought to bear on a series of problems with which sociologists in particular had been grappling. Althusserian notions of modes of production and social formations are complex and open to a variety of interpretations and, in the case of Hindess and Hirst at least, have changed drastically in a very short space of time.
