Editorial Introduction

Abstract

As British historians have got on with research into the years since 1945, the history of social science has become increasingly salient. Social scientists now loom large in histories of politics and policy (they have long been important to histories of empire, of course).1 And historians have followed the lead of qualitative social scientists in re-analysing research materials archived by sociologists of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The pivotal figure here has been Mike Savage, whose 2010 book Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940 furnished a powerful narrative of sociology’s place in post-war culture, and whose revisiting of the field notes and surveys of classic sociological studies has served as both a model and a foil for historians such as Jon Lawrence, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Natalie Thomlinson, Selina Todd, Charlotte Greenhalgh, and David Cowan.2 This is a body of scholarship that speaks to an enduring historical...