G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation

This book explores G.D.H Cole’s significant yet often overlooked role in the history of British Sociology from 1920-1960. Eager to achieve a sense of scientific legitimacy following its institutionalisation in the early 1900s, British sociology had no space for a scholar like Cole, who saw sociology as an innately normative and political project which, in his case, was dedicated to the development of socialism. Conceptualising Cole's relationship to sociology as one of semi-alienation - suggesting an openness to the principles of the discipline yet disagreement with the form it takes in the current day - Dawson shows how Cole made a number of important sociological contributions which were grounded in an early form of structuration theory, including the production of one of Britain’s first sociology textbooks and an early monograph on the sociology of class. A passionate advocate for what sociology could be, Cole was a promoter of the sociological Marx and interrogator of Durkheim as part of his desire to develop sociology in Britain, including at his own institute of the University of Oxford. Cole also produced a distinctive corpus of public and creative sociology expressed in newspaper articles, poems and songs. Drawing on archival research Dawson reintegrates Cole into the history of British Sociology, and in so doing offers valuable insight into sociology's history and its contemporary form, emphasising a normative, critical and public form of the discipline.