ABSTRACT
To economists, a general equilibrium is theorized independently of time and place, whereas to most sociologists an equilibrium would only make sense in terms of a specific social era. When sociologists have attempted to emulate economists, they have usually gone wrong. Modernization theory and functionalist sociology of stratification are examples of ambitious, and ultimately unsuccessful, general equilibrium theorizing in the sense that both posited trans-historical laws of motion that overpower all else forever. But when sociologists have focused on temporal equilibria, they have often made insightful contributions that aid hypothesis development and invite empirical scrutiny. Postwar leitmotifs such as the “era of welfare capitalism,” “industrialism,” Lipset’s (1960) “democratic class struggle,” or the era of “Fordism” all contributed to the making of exciting research agendas. Unlike Parsons’ (1951) AGIL scheme or Davis and Moore’s (1945) principles of stratification, these were typically not meant as theories of eternity but as a way to synthesize the essence of an epoch. Good sociology is sensitive to variation rather than constants, and so it did not take long before we discovered varieties of Fordism or of welfare capitalism.
