Biography, Family History and the Analysis of Social Change

Abstract

In his book Historical Sociology Philip Abrams (1982) urged us to think about Sociology and History as essentially the same enterprise and while there are some, particularly in history, who have reservations about this, there are plainly many scholars in both disciplines who, in recent years have followed his prescription. Within History there has emerged a specialism — social history — that at its best combines the theories and methods of sociology with much of the historians’ traditional craft. In Sociology a focus upon long-run changes in the development of capitalism or in the processes of state-making, a concern with momentous events like social revolutions, the desire to make temporal rather than, say, cross-cultural comparisons or simply the ambition to set the actions, beliefs and institutions of particular groups in context has given rise to a distinctive strand of writing — to historical sociology. In Britain, as Calhoun (1987) observes, much of the most interesting and exciting work which meets Abrams’ objectives has been done by the historians but the Edinburgh Conference revealed that within British Sociology there is now a substantial and growing concern with history. The fruitfulness of historical sociology has certainly been well displayed in American sociology in the last decade or so with many writers like Barrington Moore, Skocpol, Hareven and Tilly exploring major processes of change, re-examining classic themes from the founding fathers of social science and bringing to bear a diverse array of techniques of investigation.KeywordsSocial ChangeSocial MobilityFamily FormSocial HistoryOral HistoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.