A near total breakdown in old assumptions about authority and social order followed the Enlightenment and the Industrial and French Revolutions, a breakdown which called for a reconstruction of the social order. Piecemeal reconstruction was seen as inappropriate, according to Fletcher (1971), when the ‘entire fabric of institutions was falling apart’ and a need for a ‘body of knowledge about society as a totality of institutions’ became apparent. It was this need that the founders of sociology were to try to meet. The key concepts or ‘unit ideas’ of sociology, Nisbet (1970)argues, were all developed as part of an attempt to achieve a ‘theoretical reconsolidation’ of the various elements on which social order had once rested –kinship, land, social class, religion, local community and monarchy–but which had now been ‘dislocated by revolution’ and ‘scrambled by industrialisation and the forces of democracy’.