ABSTRACT
England has not provided fertile soil for the development of sociology. In the first place, in the country par excellence of capitalist economic development it was bound to be the case that economics or political economy would be the premier social science. But, second, even when the Fabian Socialists led the intellectual revolt against bourgeois individualism, the type of administrative socialism which they pro posed involved the administration of individuals rather than the study and re-creation of social relations. Thus, the primary orienta tion of British sociology up to 1939, if one sets aside the attempts of Westermarck, Hobhouse and Ginsberg1 to arrange the reported customs of Britain’s imperial subjects in some type of evolutionary order, was the collection of data which described the statistical distribution of individual characteristics and life chances amongst the population. It was to studies such as these that British sociologists referred when they talked about ‘social structure’. Nothing is more significant in the history of British sociology,
however, than the fact that the revised edition (which came out in 1957) of the book, A Survey o f the Social Structure o f England and Wales, was called, A Survey o f Social Conditions in England and Wales.1 ‘Social Structure’ and ‘Social Conditions’ are intellectually distinct concepts and, with this change of title, the social statisticians of the London School of Economics had given up their claim to be concerned with the former. But why had they given up this claim and to whom had they surrendered the field? Probably, the book which did most to undermine British statistical
empiricism was Durkheim’s Suicide.3 This may seem paradoxical in that this book was often hailed as the first serious attempt by a European sociologist to come down from the theoretical clouds and to concern himself with exact statistical evidence and proof. But the paradox is only apparent, for the difference between the statistical
tables of Social Conditions in England and Wales and those of Suicide is that the latter were concerned to test explicitly formulated and argued hypotheses about forms of social solidarity and of social relations. The simplest data with which the sociologist could deal, as
Durkheim saw it in his Rules o f Sociological Method4 were those readily accessible restraints on human behaviour described in codes of law. But, manifestly, such codes of law describe the ongoing patterns of social relations, and even social relations of a normative kind, as little as the organisation chart in a manager’s office describes the actual social pattern of his workshop. What had to be grasped were those forms of social patterning of behaviour which were not ‘fixed’ as were codes of law, and which might even be unknown to the participant actors whose behaviour they affected. Thus, the real importance of Suicide lay in the fact that it used statistical tables as indicators of differing patterns of behaviour, but then went on to look at what lay behind these differing patterns. What lay behind were the typical forms of social relations, for instance, amongst men of different faiths and occupations, or between men in times of social stability and in times of rapid social change. Durkheim, of course, never would or could have argued that the
sociologist should confine himself to social statistics as the source of his data. His last work, The Elementary Forms o f the Religious Life,5 shows this quite clearly. What he did do, however, was to show that, sensitively used, social statistics could point to, though they could not describe, the more subtle and interesting facets of social relations which were indicators of social change. This task was one which required both an intuitive sensitivity and a knowledge of theoreti cal sociology which few social statisticians possessed.. Thus, the need for a genuine theory of the structure of social relations amongst men arose out of the very attempt to use statistics sensi tively.
