{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025500910746812388, 'fraction_numerical': 0.002276867030965392, 'mean_word_length': 4.781578947368421, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
What Is Historical Sociology?

The latest and, unfortunately, also the last book to come from Philip Abrams is a general study of, and plea for, historical sociology. Like some other contemporary British sociologists from Anthony Giddens to W. G. Runciman, Abrams argues that there is no substantial difference between history and sociology, on the grounds that both disciplines are equally concerned with the relationship between personal experience and social organization. Unlike Giddens and Runciman, however, he pays considerable attention to what historians are currently doing: as a member, for more than 20 years, of the editorial board of the leading British historical journal, Past and Present, he was unusually well informed about the state of the historical profession. The author of a fairly short book on a subject as large as this one could easily bog down in generalities. Abrams successfully avoids this danger by treating each chapter as a review essay on a book or group of books, looked at from a particular angle as exemplifying a distinct problem or trend. Thus he deals in turn with Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber by concentrating on the manner in which each tackles the problem of the transition to industrialism. From these classics he moves on to evaluate the work of Talcott Parsons, whom he presents as a synthesizer of the ideas of the first three writers (he does not specify what he thinks Parsons learned from Marx). In this chapter too he focuses on the concept of industrialization and in particular on the "convergence debate." After this, Abrams comments on a cluster of works which he takes to exemplify "the difficulties and the promise of long-range theoretical sociology" (p. 187). The authors range from S. N. Eisenstadt and the late Stein Rokkan to Barrington Moore and Perry Anderson. Despite major differences in method and, indeed, in attitudes and values, these authors are united in their concern with the problem of the formation of states-the "problem of design," as the chapter's title puts it. From changes in structures over the long term, Abrams turns to the problems of "explaining events. " The examples he cites are from the work