Social theory is open to many passing currents. Claims to originality tend to thrive and past achievements are often ignored. In Sociologiocal Theory: What Went Wrong? Mouzelis claims that "problems" currently being isolated are not really problems, and that "achievements" claimed are little more than pretensions. He argues that we have been premature to dismiss thinkers from the late 1950s and early 1960s and that we can build on their ideas to produce a more effective, more relevant social theory.
Written with precision and with clarity, Sociological Theory: What Went...

Theorising in the social sciences today is in disarray. A disarray marked by the relative disconnection between theory and empirical research, the subordination of sociological to philosophical theorising, the abolition of boundaries between social science disciplines and subdisciplines and the conflation of their internal logics.