Do the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, have an important contribution to make to reflection on the character and role of universities in contemporary society? I believe they do, and I am grateful to the editors of Sociology for, first, devoting a symposium to the review of my book What Are Universities For?, and, second, for allowing me the space for this brief response to some of the points raised by the contributors to that symposium.In a particularly helpful comment, John Holmwood suggests that, by its very constitution as a discipline, sociology entails a focus on 'the "social self" and the critique of the disembedded individual', which in turn encourages an understanding of the social character of publics as opposed to the individualist premise of markets (p. 403). There is certainly a recognisable genealogy for the discpline, in the classics of late 19th-and early 20th-century social thought, in which this identity is prominent, defining itself above all as a repudiation of the atomistic axioms held to be at the root of neoclassical economic theory. It is an interesting question how the present fruits of this tradition of thought might best be harnessed to helping to make the case for universities as a kind of public good, but I do believe that sociological theory of this kind continues to have a distinctive capacity to challenge the kind of everyday individualism that experience of life in market societies can otherwise naturalise as common sense. There is surely a valuable role to be played by such perspectives in debate about the character of the university as a public good. This may be one of the reasons why, as Michael Bailey rightly notes, social scientists have been disproportionately prominent in the activist networks and campaigns that have sprung up in the past decade or so in response to the higher education policies of recent British

In this unusual and important work, three well-known historians of ideas examine the diverse forms taken in nineteenth-century Britain by the aspiration to develop what was then known as a 'science of politics'. This aspiration encompassed a more extensive and ambitious range of concerns than is implied by the modern term 'political science': in fact, as this book demonstrates, it remained the overarching category under which many nineteenth-century thinkers grouped their attempts to achieve systematic understanding of man's common life. As a result of both the over-concentration on closed abstract systems of thought and the intrusion of concerns which pervade much writing in the history of political theory and of the social sciences, these attempts have since been neglected or misrepresented. By deliberately avoiding such approaches, this book restores the subject to its centrality in the intellectual life and political culture of nineteenth-century Britain.

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