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While accounts of human action may be strengthened by the addition of a biological component we should be careful not to replace "hard core social constructionism" with oversimplified evolutionary narratives in which human traits are "explained" as the product of natural selection. Narratives have inherent weaknesses as explanatory accounts and evolutionary narratives share these weaknesses. In addition there is no consensus amongst biologists on the target of natural selection and human natural history was anything but a gradual step-by-step process of progressive advancement. Work in the cognitive sciences on the nature and function of human cognitive architecture should be integrated into accounts of human social action. Such integration should be done not by reducing human behavior to its biological prerequisites but by conceives of human biology as the basis for the almost unlimited variety of meaningful interaction characteristic of human culture and social life.

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This paper traces the historical development as well as the analytical and ideological uses of "industrial society" as an object of knowledge. The binary opposition traditional society/industrial society and the latter tripartite division traditional, industrial, post-industrial society have been central to the development of sociology as a discipline. Like all analytical concepts "industrial society" is both a way of seeing and not seeing. It focuses attention on some social attributes and processes rather than others. The first objective of this paper is to evaluate whether or not this object of knowledge focuses attention on crucial aspects of social life, or whether, instead, it shrouds and distorts more than it reveals. The second objective is to evaluate the ideological import of the concept. Did it, and does it still, provide a realistic and achievable model of the way we ought to live together?

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