Abstract The purpose of this opening chapter is to describe and explain an anomaly: in a period when the fields of social science—from the policy sciences to social planning, from public administration to demography—are expanding, one area, sociology, with a distinguished lineage and tradition, is suffering hard times. Indeed, sociology threatens to join phrenology as a pseudoscience and to share the fate of occult studies in being viewed more as a privileged lan­guage of dedicated elites than as a field of investigation broadly reflective of public needs.