“The identity of ‘sociologists’ in the public mind was fixed during this era [the 1950s], and their message was this: differences between people, whether these were differences in suicide rates or rates of coronary occlusion, crime, poverty, and the like vary in relation to ‘social facts’ such as class position and race; therefore, ‘society’ is causally responsible for these differences. The moral of this story … was that the state ought to intervene” (Turner and Turner, 1990, p. 137).
