What was ‘Grand Theory’? Sociological Inquiry between Scientism and the Philosophy of History

This article asks how the label ‘grand theory’ has been used in the history of sociology and uses its findings to offer an argument about the nature of sociological inquiry. It discusses two episodes, which involve a demarcation against ‘grand theory’ on strikingly similar terms: The term was initially used to reject Parsons’ structural functionalism after World War 2 and was also applied to Marxism in this period. These arguments were anticipated in reactions to Comte and Spencer and to the philosophy of history in the founding of German sociology in the late nineteenth century. I argue that the patterns underlying the meanings ascribed to ‘grand theory’ enable a better understanding of the instability (or unique pluralism) often attributed to sociology: The rejection of a range of internal tendencies as ‘grand theory’ provides a foundation to the discipline, but one that requires constant navigation between different ‘others’ of open-ended inquiry.