Comparative reflections on sociology and conservatism : The contributions of Edward A. Tiryakian

[Extract] Given Professor Tiryakian's long-standing interest in Emile Durkheim and French sociology, such an inquiry into sociology's relationship to conservatism is appropriate to a publication in his honor. In this essay, I will focus on the United States, which emerged, alongside republican France, as a revolutionary society, and England which, after the civil war of the seventeenth century, escaped a revolutionary period during its emergence as a modern industrial society. Its society has consequently often been interpreted as one in which gradualism and compromise were to dominant responses to social change.