ABSTRACT
The relations between sociology and history are indeed problematic. Since its post-Enlightenment beginnings, the development of what is today regarded as sociological thought has been intertwined with historical analyses and schemas for interpreting, understanding, and explaining, history. The focus of this relationship has been the attempt by sociologists and social theorists to comprehend what Karl Polanyi (1944) called ‘the great transformation’, the broad historical movement that led to the characteristic social relations of what is today named ‘modernity’.
