It is quite clear that the crisis in sociology announced boldly by Alvin Gouldner in the 1970s never took place. His urgent pleas for values, engagement, and moral concern were buried by the roller coaster economies of the 1980s, the resurgence of positivism, and the further marginalizing of extant critical views. I include here postmodernism, feminism, queer theory and the like, all claimants to the center, yet ill-conceived, ahistorical, atheoretical, and philosophically rootless. For a while, the nimbus surrounded us. It was as if examples of surrealism, dadaism, fauvism, and the worst of Dali's paintings were posted for a final, fatal exhibit. These critical views, of whatever merit, are the ghosts of the past, not harbingers of future work. Nevertheless, the present state of affairs in sociology is quite clear-logical positivism rules: statistically driven, technologically sophisticated modes of analysis and theorizing have conquered all competing variants. But, who now reads the ASR? Consider the failing offshoots of the past 40 years: the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism, Humanistic Sociology, Marxist-Critical Sociology (all groups to which I belong or once belonged). Only the two sociologically relevant societies, the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, largely empirically driven, problem-oriented groups, have grown. The once fruitful challenge to logical atomism launched by Wittgenstein, which incorporated mysticism, intuitivism, and a profound distrust of words and theorizing, was summated in his elegant and puzzling Philosophical Investigations ([1953] 1968). Ironically, earlier, later rejected, versions of his ideas were mooted, incorporated, and reshaped in the Vienna Circle's conversations, sliced and diced into a procrustean bed by Popper, and transported to America by 6migr6 scholars. The mathematically inspired empiricism of post World War II sociology drove nails into the coffin of richly obscured meanings. American sociology, for better or