One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of - and hence be able to control - the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker

It is the political task of the social scientist - as of any liberal educator - continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issue…

A (world) society in which all men and women would become people of substantive reason, whose independent reasoning would have structural consequences for thei…

[O]ne could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.