ABSTRACT
This chapter inquires why a variety of seemingly supportive American schools of thought in Sociology turned away from PE. Despite its widespread discussion among sociologists and wide recognition as a true classic, PE’s multifaceted theoretical contributions to Sociology have been neglected.
This chapter explicitly calls attention to PE as a theoretical treatise by examining it with reference to four major debates in postwar sociological theory in the United States. PE addresses, for example, the relationships between history and sociology, tradition and social change, economic interests and cultural forces, modern capitalism and values, macro and micro levels of analysis, and individual action and the social pressures by groups upon group members. Although all of these familiar controversies stand at the foundation of central discussions in American sociology, PE scarcely influenced these debates.
Four major controversies are examined in this chapter: the critique of Structural- Functionalism by Conflict theory in the late 1950s and by neo-Marxist theories in the 1960s; the debate between comparative-historical schools and structural functionalist modernization theory in the 1970s; the opposition of the sociology of culture to comparative-historical perspectives in the 1980s; and the controversy that commenced in the late 1980s between rational choice theorists and sociologists of culture on the one hand and structural sociologists on the other.
