Abstract

The publisher’s blurb states that the book is neither a text-book nor a treatise presenting a new theory. ‘Its aim is to extract what is of most value from contemporary theories and from the sociological classics…’. However, in the Introduction D G MacRae contends that the book is an excellent text-book which will prove useful as a text to students of the social sciences, ‘clear, swift-moving, austere and critical, but also sympathetic and remarkably unified’. It is also, according to him, an original contribution to sociological thought and as such the most valuable feature of the work which, unfortunately, the uninitiated may fail to perceive and appreciate. The author himself is laudably humble: his avowed aim is not to present to the world an original treatise—in his judgment there are already too many of these —but to evaluate critically certain ideas which have been formulated and developed by a number of writers on sociological themes. In his scrupulously fair examination of the various contributions to the field of social studies he buries what is dead and salvages what is living and valuable in them and paves the way for a genuine synthesis of seemingly irreconcilable concepts and theories. This is in itself an achievement of a very high order.