From Socialism to Sociology

A young scholar, Douglas Webb, has been at work for a few years on a book he proposes to title From Socialism to Sociology. I hope he does not mind me appropriating it for this memoir, for I am one of those—we seem to be legion—who has followed that trajectory. There are different variants of those of us who have managed the passage. I am tempted to construct one of those fourfold tables beloved of sociologists with the horizontal axis reading “strong or weak final commitment” and the vertical reading “strong or weak initial commitment.” The upper left-hand