ABSTRACT
Classical European sociology, as it developed in the century or so leading up to the First World War, presented a profoundly ambivalent stance towards those processes of industrialisation, democratisation and rationalisation which constituted the modern western world. While not joining the conservative opponents of the French and Industrial Revolutions, classical sociology demanded, not release from community and tradition, but alignment with social forces seeking new forms of moral and social community. In this way there remained a strong element of nostalgia in the cultural preoccupations and fundamental categories of classical sociological thought. Compared with the sociologists of the classical period, Talcott Parsons is far less ambivalent about the modern world. The evaluative yardstick of community does not appear in a strong form, whether as utopia or social ontology, as a moral foil to such modern developments as instrumental rationality, or individual achievement-orientation. Parsons is thereby dismissed as a commentator on the modern world.
