Why Is Classical Theory Classical?

The familiar canon embodies an untenable foundation story of great men theorizing European modernity. Sociology actually emerged from a broad cultural dynamic in which tensions of liberalism and empire were central. Global expansion and colonization gave sociology its main conceptual framework and much of its data, key problems, and methods. After early‐20th‐century crisis, a profoundly reconstructed American discipline emerged, centered on difference and disorder within the metropole. The retrospective creation of a “classical” canon solved certain cultural dilemmas for this enterprise and generated a discipline‐defining pedagogy, at the price of narrowing sociology's intellectual scope and concealing much of its history.