ABSTRACT
Long ago at the beginnings of my discipline of sociology in the mid-to late-19th century in Europe, its procreators had no doubt that they were engaged in a moral enterprise. Suffering human beings constrained by history into class formations or by collective values and a division of labor, by the very facticity of social institutions, were essentially determined. Social actors might dream of a future in which they were themselves creative participants who could learn from their own and the larger pasts in which they were embedded, but this was but dreaming. Dreams were not the stuff of sociology, nor their understanding and interpretation accessible through the methods of science. This despite the later arrival on the social science scene of Freud. But the future of humankind could be dreamt about by the social scientist: and utilizing the tools of proper observation and analysis, truths would be unraveled, enabling expert advice to be offered to the leaders—politicians, educationists, health reformers, and others who would follow this with legislation and the development of appropriate institutional strategies. Thus would human society progress and human suffering lessen.
