ABSTRACT
Representatives of the so-called social sciences burden sociology with much foul talk. They watch with considerable displeasure how their own detailed and hard-won research is forced into a Procrustes bed of large-scale social development hypotheses, most of them based on passionately defended, but scarcely proved, criteria. Sociology threatens to plunge the innocuous activities of science back into the pit of danger where "powers" reign; for it is an adjunct of its inclination toward organizing the future that forces, rather than with mere concepts or forms, must increasingly be reckoned with. But sociology is, on the whole, in steady forward motion. The sociologist is subject to the powers and forces of which he needs to give account. Social scientists are therefore in the right when they protest against this aberration of sociology, this desire to paint pictures taken from nature in order to explain historical social processes.
