ABSTRACT
There is not, at the present time, any general body of sociological theory which has been validated or widely accepted. The early sociologists believed that they had discovered a number of fundamental ‘social laws’, principally laws of social evolution, which constituted a body of theory capable of guiding both thought and action. Modern sociologists have been, on the whole, more modest in their claims. They have been chiefly concerned to elucidate the character of the sociological approach (i.e. with methodology rather than theory), and to work out more precise concepts and more adequate classifications. In the latter activity they have formulated mainly that kind of limited generalisation which is involved by the activity of classification itself. R.B.Braithwaite,1 makes a distinction between sciences at different stages of development, and says: “If a science is in a highly developed stage, as in physics, the laws which have been established will form a hierarchy in which many special laws appear as logical consequences of a small number of highly general laws expressed in a very sophisticated manner; if the science is in an early stage of development-what is sometimes called its ‘natural-history’ stage-the laws may be merely the generalisations involved in classifying things into various classes.’2
