Introduction

The decade after the financial crisis of 2007/08 saw many societies surprised by themselves: surprised by the return of apparently fading attitudes; surprised by anger and distrust; and surprised by the rise of new political forces.

These phenomena are social ones. But most of the leading commentators in many societies have struggled to make sense of them. They are reasonably proficient in economics, and can talk meaningfully about GDP or exports, inflation and unemployment. But they have little if any grounding in sociology or, for that matter, anthropology.

The public perception of sociology (in the UK, at least) was cruelly summed up a few years ago by an advertisement in which the actress Maureen Lipman talks on the phone to her grandson. He has just done his exams and tells her that he's failed. When asked if he's really failed everything, he says sheepishly: ‘Well I did pass sociology’, and she says, ‘Oh an ology, you must be clever’.

The idea that sociology is too easy, too flimsy and too irrelevant has become commonplace. But many of the most compelling issues we now face can be understood only through a sociological lens; and the lack of sociological literacy among many decision makers has become a major impediment to effective policy.

Sociology's past and future became particularly pressing for me when I took over at the Young Foundation in the mid-2000s. Fifty years before that, Michael Young and a small band of colleagues including Peter Wilmott and Peter Townsend had set up the Institute for Community Studies (ICS), the Young Foundation's precursor, in London's East End. Sociology was even then still something of an insurgent outsider, except in a few enlightened places like the London School of Economics, and was still excluded from older universities like Cambridge.

Young and his colleagues had a strong sense of mission for sociology. They felt even then that the universities were succumbing to jargon, turning inwards and failing to engage with the huge changes underway – including some of the unintended consequences of a new welfare state and the flawed urban planning that was displacing people to soulless estates on the edges of cities.