I should not want to leave the impression that the work of the American masters can be blithely consigned to historical oblivion. It should be read, and not only for its historical interest. It was written with intellectual excitement, imagination and verve. It is full of insight; some of it, particularly Park and Burgess’s observations on the management of information, has a strikingly modern ring to it, if not the enduring contemporaneity of Weber. But theoretically and methodologically, it has been left behind by the paradigm shifts in social science, and by the accumulation of ethnographic experience. But the wheel carries on turning, and their day may come again. However, it has been our contention that they did considerably muddy the waters in which the classical masters swam, and it is their heritage which bears most upon us. Students must read Durkheim, if they are to grasp contemporary approaches to symbolism and to oppositional modalities in social process; Simmel, for our concern with micro-social process; and Weber, to grapple with the problems of meaning and interpretation with which we are now so deeply (and, perhaps, neurotically) engaged.