Per Ardua ad Florida. Stephen P. Turner and Career Contingencies in a Harsh Environment

This article discusses Stephen P. Turner’s book Mad Hazard. A Life in Social Theory (2022) in relation to the theme of contingency and chance, as addressed by social theorists from Montesquieu to the present. It also examines the role of the ‘1968 generation’, the rise of social theory and the rediscovery of the sociological classics in the 1970s, and subsequent developments in the US, the UK and continental Europe, in which interdisciplinary initiatives in social theory compete with a drift towards disciplinary specialisation.