'Even those of us who have come to reflect more soberly on the spirit of 1968, and also on what went before, recognising the naivety and foolishness of much that we believed then, can probably never shake off its influence. Certainly, it propelled me into sociological research, and my struggle with the political ideas of the 1960s, and against those of the 1980s and 1990s, has not only shaped my life but also propelled me onwards. To use a word that would not have passed our lips in the 1960s, except in jest, it gave me a vocation, in precisely the sense that Max Weber speaks of science as a vocation. Weber, too, was not well regarded in the 1960s, among my generation, but some of us have come to realise that he was ahead of the game: not just post-Marxist but also post-Enlightenment; facing up to, and trying to understand, the bleak terrain of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.'
Martyn Hammersley
