Introduction : preliminary reflections on the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu

Unsurprisingly, the Second World War had separate and distinctive consequences for different national traditions of sociology. After the War, the dominant and arguably most successful of the Western democracies emerged in North America, and its sociological traditions assumed a celebratory and often triumphalist perspective on modernisation. The defeat of the fascist nations – notably Germany, Italy, and Japan – seemed to demonstrate the superiority of Western liberal democratic systems, and North American sociologists took the lead in developing theories of development and modernisation that were optimistic and forward-looking. The examples are numerous, but we might mention Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society (1958) or S. M. Lipset’s The First New Nation (1963). At the centre of this post-war tradition stood The Social System of Talcott Parsons (1951), which involved the notion that systems could continuously and successfully adapt to environmental challenges through the master processes of differentiation and adaptive upgrading. In many of his short essays, he analysed the problems of German and Japanese modernisation and saw the United States of America as a social system that had successfully adapted to the rise of industrial modernisation. In its assessment of modern society, Parson’s sociology avoided the pessimistic vision of early critical theory – epitomised in Adorno’s analysis of mass society – because he looked forward to America as a ‘lead society’ in large-scale social development (see Holton and Turner, 1986)