De voorgeschiedenis van het AST

Samenvatting

The Prehistory of the AST. The first issue of the AST appeared in the spring of 1974. What seems to be the start of something new can also be seen as the outcome of a rather tumultuous episode preceding the foundation of the new journal. Recently appointed teachers at the Sociology Department of the University of Amsterdam, in collaboration with promising students, wanted to create a new forum where 'the Coming Crisis of Western sociology' (as the then Amsterdam-based sociologist Alvin Gouldner had termed it) would be debated. In order to do this, the founders of AST invited Marxist sociologists to join them, but this led to bitter disputes about the aims of the new journal. The Marxist editors wanted to concentrate on the political struggles within the Sociology Department and on the national political debates about university education. Their adversaries favored a discussion about the content of the sociological enterprise in the light of a worldwide debate about the value and relevance of the social sciences. The outcome was that the Marxist editors left the journal, even before the first issue appeared. In a few years, the AST was recognized as one of the three major sociology journals in the Netherlands, whereas the Marxist current in Dutch sociology was submerged in its own provincialism. Adapted from the source document.