(1) My colleague, L.J. Sharpe, has pointed out to me that most of them had taken the B.Sc. (Econ.), i.e. a degree in the social sciences generally, and in that sense were not graduates in sociology.

(2) Abrams, Philip, The Origins of British Sociology 1834–1914 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

(3) Ibid. p. 4.

(4) Ibid. p. 103. Hobhouse, Westermarck, and Geddes all owed their chairs to Martin White's benefaction. Hobhouse was an academic deviant who left an Oxford career as a college tutor in philosophy to work as a journalist for the Manchester Guardian before going to London where he took the L.S.E. chair in 1907.

(5) There was a small recruitment to sociology in this period from Bloomsbury— T.H. Marshall, Charles Madge, and W.J.H. Sprott. The resulting connection of sociology to upper-class aestheticism and the Communist Party is a minor, unexplored, element of the history of the subject.

(6) A competitive examination for state school children before 1944 giving a minority free places at grammar schools.

(7) I.e. private. These quasi-charitable or commercial schools were boarding institutions for the sons of the metropolitan and bourgeois classes.

(8) Cf. George Orwell's essay of that title is reprinted in his Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1970), vol. I, pp. 587–92, and vol. III, p. 55.

(9) A British scheme similar to the American G.I. Bill which gave studentships to servicemen who had, or were willing to say they had, university intentions frustrated by the War.

(10) Shils, Edward, Encounter, V (1955), 25.Google Scholar

(11) The Education Act which abolished fee paying in grammar schools.

(12) Hoggart, R., The Uses of Literacy (London, Chatto and Windus, 1957)Google Scholar.

(13) Tynan, Kenneth, Encounter, IX (1957) 19Google Scholar. The implicit emphasis on the status rather than the class structure of Britain was shared by the L.S.E. group with the difference that sociology gave them an explicit vocabulary in which to discuss it.

(14) A notorious L.S.E. Labour Club activist of the day who later became a Labour M.P., was involved in spectacular scandal, and finally jailed.

(15) Marshall, T.H., A British sociological career, British Journal of Sociology, XXIV (1973), 339–408Google Scholar.

(16) Marshall, T.H., Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1950)Google Scholar.

(17) Even so, I would not want to overemphasise the difference. I remember one member astonishing me in the mid 'fifties with the confidence that he thought my voice deep and individual, whereas he heard his own as a squeaky Cockney and wanted to modify it!

(18) For a more extended appreciation of Ginsberg by his admirers (especially Professor Maurice Friedman and Professor Ronald Fletcher), see Fletcher, R. (ed.), The Science of Society and the Unity of Mankind (London, Heinemann, 1974).Google Scholar

(19) For an appreciation of Glass and his crucial importance in the drive towards meticulous analysis of social inequality, see Westergaard, John, In Memory of David Glass, Sociology, XIII (1979), 173–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(20) Tom Bottomore was also a Marxist, but it is significant that he came to be seen after ‘1968’ as tainted with the reformist empiricism of the group discussed here. Thus Shaw, Martin (Sociology, X (1976) 3, p. 519)CrossRefGoogle Scholar disparages his ‘neutral commentary’ style and the use of sources ‘rather tilted in the direction of early twentieth-century reformism’. Shaw is shocked to find that ‘Bottomore is also capable of statements such as that “Marxism has brought into existence political oppression and cultural impoverishment”—which might have come straight out of The Open Society and its Enemies. He obviously feels that Marxism would be better off without its socialist political commitment’.

(21) Anderson, P., Components of the National Culture, New Left Review, No. 50, 07–08 1968, pp. 3–59.Google Scholar

(22) To the point where one wag modified his book title to The Open Society by one of its Enemies.

(23) Anderson, P., Components of the National Culture, New Left Review, No. 50, 07–08 1968Google Scholar.

(24) For an informed account see Martins, H., Time and theory in sociology, in Rex, J. (ed.), Approaches to Sociology: introduction to major trends in British sociology (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 246–294Google Scholar.

(25) Lockwood, D., Some Remarks on The Social System, The British Journal of Sociology, VII (1956), p. 22Google Scholar.

(26) (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1958).

(27) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 3 volumes, 1968/69).

(28) (Henley-on-Thames, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959).

(29) For a recent and thoughtful review of Dahrendorf's writings see Hall, John A., Diagnoses of Our Time, chapter 5 (London, Heinemann, 1981)Google Scholar.

(30) Social Class and Educational Opportunity (London, Heinemann, 1956)Google Scholar, and Education, Economy and Society (Glencoe, Free Press, 1961)Google Scholar.

(31) (London, Heinemann, 1956).

(32) (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955).

(33) Prosperity and Parenthood (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954)Google Scholar.

(34) Olive Banks' fundamental interest in feminism and inequality gained some expression here, but this was not fully realised until the late 1970s.

(35) Dennis, N., Henriques, F., and Slaughter, C., Coal is our Life (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1956)Google Scholar.

(36) C.f. Banks, J.A., The British Sociological Association—The first fifteen years, Sociology, I (1967), 1–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

(37) The personal networks became attenuated and spasmodic. But they were real enough. I bought a car in 1956 in Palo Alto, California, which subsequently passed through the ownership of Dahrendorf, Bryan Wilson, Nathan Glazer, and S.M. Lipset.

(38) In 1970 (New Society, n° 387) Donald Macrae asserted: ‘Empirical research is easy, as well as quite often being genuinely useful. Most of it, like most natural science, could be done by wellattenuated designed mechanical mice’. Peter Marris at the Institute of Community Studies replied satirically. Geoffrey Hawthorn (then of the University of Essex) provided the candid and crushing reposte that ‘only someone who has never done any can think that empirical research is easy’.

(39) It was written in 1971 in response to enquiry from the Review Body set up under Jo Grimond's chairmanship to enquire into the organisation and government of the University of Birmingham.

(40) Homans, George C., Sentiments and Activities (Henley-on-Thames, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 113Google Scholar.

(41) Ibid. p. 119. When Cambridge created a chair of sociology in the 1960s it went to a social anthropologist (J.A. Barnes), and when I was given a chair in Oxford in the 1970s it was under the rubric of ‘social and administrative studies’.

(42) E. Shils, loc. cit.

(43) Halsey, A.H., Sociological Imagination, Universities and Left Review I (1959) 5 [07], p. 30Google Scholar.

(44) Bendix, R., Max Weber: an intellectual portrait (New York, Doubleday, 1960), p. 30Google Scholar.

(45) It was Dahrendorf who wrote: ‘We have to look for the ruling class in those positions that constitute the heads of bureaucratic hierarchies, among those persons who are authorised to give directives to the administrative staff’.

(46) Dennis, N. in Oxford Review of Education, VI (1980) 2, p. 114Google Scholar.