The purpose of this symposium, as I understand it, is to address the implications for the discipline and profession of sociology of their association with various political and social movements. My specific interest in this question centers on how sociology as a teaching discipline and as a professional activity beyond its teaching functions has fared in relation to the ambitions of social science generally. particular, what is the promise of sociology as a teaching discipline and a professional activity within and outside the university? The answer to this last question has been a contentious and interesting subject in recent years (Becker and Rau 1992; Imber 1995; Lipset 1994; Wolfe 1992, 1998). I wish to offer further reasons why the line between an analysis of politics and politicized analysis needs to drawn again, and more forcefully, for the sake of the professional and intellectual integrity of sociology. More than a generation ago, the concept of role was sufficiently consonant with the sociologist's rendering of social reality that Theodor Adorno remarked, In reality, neither in their work nor in their consciousness are people freely in charge of themselves. Even those conciliatory sociologies that apply the concept of'role' like a master key acknowledge this fact to the extent that the concept, borrowed from the theater, hints that the existence imposed on people by society is not identical with what they are in themselves or what they could be (1998: 167). Master keys change. No longer do concepts seem as central to the task of sociological thinking; and conciliatory sociologies those efforts to establish broad and synthetic understandings of the social order have disappeared from the face of the discipline. their place are more pretentious and less understandable theories and methodologies, many informed by explicitly endorsed ideological agendas, whether Marxist, feminist, or racialist. Imagine today a conciliatory sociology of role relations, defined by class, gender, or race, to wit: what William Graham Sumner inquired into in his forgotten classic, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883); what Margaret Fletcher promoted in Christian Feminism: A Charter of Rights and Duties ( 1915); and what Bertram Wilbur Doyle described in his still enlightening The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South: A Sturly in Social Control (1937). Fewer and fewer professionally trained sociologists are taught the history of their discipline, so debates about the canon, with few exceptions, are simply further occasions for polemical overinterpretations of sociology's sinking fortunes (see Connell 1997; Collins 1997). The competition for attention, which is what so much of academic professionalism is now about, has intensified anxieties about the fate of sociology as a viable and enduring subject in higher education. Forgotten are the specific trials and tribulations of establishing the discipline in the first place, and of the many lessons learned in the process. believing, as some sociologists clearly do, that their best bet for gaining attention is holding fast to certain partisan political principles, founded on such seemingly bedrock social movements as civil rights and feminism, the profession has made a bargain with a devilishly unforgiving marketplace of ideas. Nineteen ninety-nine is not 1969, and the status of African Americans and women in America in 1999 is not the same as it was in 1969, despite attempts by myth makers and ideologues to indoctrinate to the contrary. little more than a generation, sociologists' idealism about what is right and wrong in the world has become orthodoxy, without any recognition, especially from its major professional association (the ASA), that a plurality of sociological views competing for attention out of one professional association is far more likely to garner public interest (and respect) than a monolithic assertion of what