to say that the history of sociology in Europe to 1870 or so is the history of attempts to secure a comprehensive morality and a moral polity upon the principles of social life, rather than upon theological precept or an abstracted human nature, is correct, but of course far too simple. Unqualified, it suggests that neither religious tradition nor a priori notions of man played any part, whereas it is the parts that they did play, and their connection to various social and political circumstances and purposes, which explains both the nature of each attempt and the differences between them. As I have already suggested, the most striking difference is that between English and German thinkers, both insisting upon the constructive powers of the individual yet producing what have come to be seen, as they were at the time, as an asocial individualism in the one case and an anti-individual holism in the other. The common insistence doubtless derives from the Protestantism that they shared, the assumption of the spiritual, moral and cognitive autonomy of the individual. The difference, however, derives from the wholly opposed social and political conditions in the two countries. England was established, Germany was not. In the one, the social structure was so clear that it could be taken for granted. In the other there was not merely no clear structure but really no structure at all, simply a pathetic chaos of local arrangements.