WHY IS CLASSICAL-THEORY CLASSICAL

The familiar canon embodies an untenable foundation story of great men theorizing European modernity. Sociology actually emerged from a broa d cultural dynamic in which tensions of liberalism and empire were cen tral. Global expansion and colonization gave sociology its main concep tual framework and much of its data, key problems, and methods. After early-20th-century crisis, a profoundly reconstructed American discipl ine emerged, centered on difference and disorder within the metropole. The retrospective creation of a ''classical'' canon solved certain cu ltural dilemmas for this enterprise and generated a discipline-definin g pedagogy, at the price of narrowing sociology's intellectual scope a nd concealing much of its history.