Sociological tradition

This book is an effort to set forth what is conceptually fundamental and historically distinctive in the sociological tradition. Although it covers some of the same ground that one would find in a history of sociological thought, it is far from that. What I have written is at once narrower and broader: narrower in that I have excluded more than a few names that would ordinarily be dealt with in a formal history of sociology; broader in that I have not hesitated to emphasize individuals who were not, either nominally or substantively, sociologists but whose relation to the sociological tradition seems to me vital. Central to any intellectual tradition is the nucleus or core of ideas that gives the tradition its continuity from generation to generation and its identity amid all the other disciplines that make up the humanistic and scientific study of man. For reasons set forth generally in the first chapter and explicitly in the main body of the book, I have chosen five ideas as the constitutive elements of sociology: community, authority,
status, the sacred, and alienation. These, I believe, are the ideas which, in their functional relation to one another, form the nucleus of the sociological tradition.