A group of renowned sociological theorists analyze why the attempts to make sociological theory formal in the 1960s and early 1970s failed. This becomes not only an unusual and interesting analysis in the sociology of knowledge, but several of the articles move to the level of analyzing the entire discipline, explaining why positivism did not take hold and what are the distinctive characteristics of sociology as a discipline. Anyone interested in sociology as a discipline and more specifically sociological theory will find interesting analytical models.