John Goldthorpe is one of Britain's most eminent sociologists and a strong advocate of quantitative sociology. In this concise and accessible book, he provides a new rationale for recent developments in sociology which focus on establishing and explaining probabilistic regularities in human populations. Through these developments, Goldthorpe shows how sociology has become more securely placed within the 'probabilistic revolution' that has occurred over the last century in the natural and social sciences alike. The central arguments of the book are illustrated with examples from different areas of sociology, ranging from social stratification and the sociology of the family to the sociology of revolutions. He concludes by considering the implications of these arguments for the proper boundaries of sociology, for its relations with other disciplines, and for its public role.

John H. Goldthorpe is Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

Introduction; 1. Sociology as a population science: the central idea; 2. Individual variability in human social life; 3. The individualistic paradigm; 4. Population regularities as basic explananda; 5. Statistics, concepts and the objects of sociological study; 6. Statistics and methods of data collection; 7. Statistics and methods of data analysis; 8. The limits of statistics: causal explanation; 9. Causal explanation through social mechanisms; Conclusion.