it is conventionally assumed that the 1914–18 War was in Europe as decisive a turning point as the revolution of 1789. It perhaps marked the clear beginning of the end of pure industrial capitalism as both its apologists and Marx had described it, and yet also the beginning of institutionalised communism as virtually no-one (not even Lenin) had quite imagined it. It marked the beginning of the refutation of all the progressive social theories of the nineteenth century. But this is hindsight. It would have been remarkable if in 1918, or in 1920 or even in 1930 many had realised this, and few did. Accordingly, social theorising between the wars displays a greater continuity with the pre-war period than does the history of the societies themselves, a continuity not only in its most general assumptions (which one would not anyway expect to change so suddenly) but also in its intentions and expectations.

Nowhere was this more marked than in England, victorious in the war and not seriously threatened by revolutionary socialism. Sociology there, such as it was, like sociology in France and Germany, had before the war been a stalking horse of those whom one can now see as ‘modernists’, men who wished to solve the problems of capitalist change as they revealed themselves in the particular social and political disjunctions of their society without resorting either to irrelevant reaction or to revolutionary change.