Continuing in a path worked on by Horowitz in the 1950s in The Idea of War and Peace in Contemporary Social and Philosophical Thought, expanded upon in the 1970s with Foundations of Political Sociology, this summing up in the late 1990s is an effort to extract and evolve the "canon" of political sociology.

The result is a reevaluation of the intellectual sources of the present day divisions between Statists and Socialists, Welfarists and Individualists, advocates of dictatorship and democracy, mandated rules and voluntary association, hard realists and soft utopians, advocates of a world without States and those desiring a world with a single State.

Horowitz does not offer the usual evolutionary notion of doctrines, but a canon embedded within the societies they aimed to serve or overthrow in the present as in the past. The result is a major recasting of the theory and practice of social science and its normative frameworks.