Efforts to identify the moral and political implications of sociological thought and practice have foundered on the shoals of the dissonances and heterodoxies of its practitioners, no less than have the grand designs to define the scope, theoretical content, and methods of the discipline itself. No Sociology of the upper case emerges from the analyses of the historical and contemporary products of those who have worked in the name of so? ciology; and, despite valiant efforts, no theoretical "paradigm" has plausibly established its parameters as a science. Likewise, all programmatic attempts to configure for the discipline what it politically must "do," "stand for," or "stand up for" (or, alternatively that it should resist all these temptations) have yielded to the exigencies of politics itself?if only of the academic and organizational kind?with typically ironic and often embarrassing re? lationships to competing substantive definitions of the field. It is not surprising, therefore, especially in an era in which the intellectual tools of deconstruction and postmodernism have given privileged place to the devo? tees of skepticism, that some students of the history of sociology have called for both greater forbearance and a more discerning modesty among soci? ologists in their attempts to describe the scientific and political and ethical potentials of the field. One of these, Stephen Turner, has joined with Dirk K?sler in editing a volume of studies that documents sociology's failures to either understand or to engage in a politically effective way the rise of fascism during the interwar period, not to speak of the blatant moral ab?