Sociology and Idealism in Britain 1880–1920

Abstract

It is something of a commonplace in the history of sociological theory that during the classical period of the development of the subject, when Weber and Durkheim and others were formulating the stock of ideas upon which subsequent theory has so largely drawn, no significant contribution was forthcoming from Britain. Parsons' The Structure of Social Action was probably the most influential single source of this view, and it is one which was subsequently popularized by Hughes, Annan and others. It is now sufficiently well established to have been taken as the explanandum in several recent essays. Where the explanation has been looked for in intellectual terms, this has generally involved some variation on the theme of the ‘curious strength of positivism’ in British thought. The gist of this claim is that the intellectual climate in Britain was (and is) marked by a tradition of empiricism in philosophy and individualism in social thought which was unreceptive to the abstract theory and the social-structural concepts which are integral to classical sociology. The significance of the British empirical tradition in philosophy has been particularly insisted upon. This makes it all the more important to point out that it was precisely during this period that what is generally referred to as Idealism was the dominant philosophy in Britain, a philosophy characterized by its thoroughgoing rejection of nominalism and empiricism in favour of the metaphysical tradition derived mainly from Kant and Hegel, a philosophy, I shall argue, which was potentially a fruitful basis for the development of sociological theory.