ABSTRACT

One central theoretical issue in classical sociology was concerned with the explanation of the bases of social order and stability. It can be argued that sociology was itself a response to the crises of European society which followed in the wake of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Thus, in the sociology of Emile Durkheim, social order was explained as the outcome of new patterns of reciprocity emerging from the social position of labour and a new set of general social values. When Marxists and critical theorists dismiss the growth of social citizenship as mere reformism, their model of history inevitably refers back to the problem of Marxist revisionism in the period since the 1890s when it first emerged in the German Social Democratic Party through the theories of Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein rejected the idea that Marxism could be equivalent to a natural science based upon social laws of development.