ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that many of the most serious problems faced by sociologists need to be solved historically. And they suggest that many of the supposed differences between sociology and history as disciplines do not really stand in the way of such solutions. In the past thirty years the gap between history and sociology appears to have narrowed dramatically. If one attends seriously to the problematic of structuring as a way of formulating fundamental issues of social analysis all the proposed boundaries seem to me to collapse. The estranged symbiosis of action and structure is both a commonplace of everyday life and the unbudgeable fulcrum of social analysis. By many devious routes sociology seems to have spent its time rediscovering the dismal paradox Dawe ascribes to Weber, 'human agency becomes human bondage because of the very nature of human agency'.
