"I believe that what may be called classic social analysis is a definable and usable set of traditions; that its essential feature is the concern with historical social structures; and that its problems are of direct relevance to urgent public issues and insistent human troubles.  I also believe that there are now great obstacles in the way of this tradition's continuing--both within the social sciences and in their academic and political settings--but that nevertheless the qualities of mind that constitute it are becoming a common denominator of our general cultural life and that, however vaguely and in however a confusing variety of disguises, they are coming to be felt as a need"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 21).