The present title "Social Theories and Modern Society" outline even the main currents of the sociology of knowledge in brief compass is to present none adequately and to do violence to all. The diversity of formulations–of a Marx or Scheler or Durkheim; the varying problems–from the social determination of categorical systems to that of class bound political ideologies; the enormous differences in scope–from the all encompassing categorizing of intellectual history to the social location of the thought of Negro scholars in the last decades; the various limits assigned to the discipline–from a comprehensive sociological epistemology to the empirical relations of particular social structures and ideas; the proliferation of concepts–ideas, belief-systems, positive knowledge thought, systems of truth, superstructure etc.; the diverse methods of validation–from plausible but undocumented imputations to meticulous historical and statistical analysis–in the light of all this, an effort to deal with both analytical apparatus and empirical studies in a few pages must sacrifice detail to scope.
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