Karl Mannheim once stated that one of the principal differences between European and American sociology lay in the concern of the Europeans, especially on the Continent, with the diagnosis of the larger social-political problems of their time, a trait of sociology which connected it with the philosophy of history, while American sociology had been much more concerned with specific and limited empirical studies of phases of our own contemporary society. In this respect the empirical preoccupations of most of these essays clearly bear the imprint of the author’s European training. But in this empirical respect, as well as in respect to type of theory as such, it seems legitimate to think of a process of convergence rather than simply of two separate traditions of thought, and above all I should like to argue that this interest in the larger social-political problems does not mean the assimilation of sociology to the philosophy of history, as Alfred Weber above all has advocated and carried it out. The interest in these broader problems in no way involves the minimization or abandonment of the interest in acquiring for sociology the status of an empirical science with rigorous operational procedures and standards of validation.