In this work I have argued that the distinctive conception of the social dimensions of human psychology and behavior and of the discipline of social psychology recognized by early theorists such as Wundt, James, Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel and developed by early American social psychologists such as Ross, McDougall, Dunlap, Judd, Kantor, Schanck, Wallis, Bernard, Bogardus, Ellwood, Faris, Thomas, and Young was progressively neglected from the 1930s onward and virtually abandoned by the 1960s, to such a degree that scarcely a trace of the social remains in contemporary American social psychology. I have charted this decline and suggested a variety of explanations for it.

However, it might be objected that while this account may apply with some justice to much of the period beginning in the 1930s, things have considerably improved in the past fifteen years or so. There appears to have been a recent revival of interest in the social within social psychology, as evidenced by a spate of books with titles like Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition (Resnick, Levine, & Teasley, 1991), What's Social About Social Cognition? (Nye & Brower, 1996), and Group Beliefs (Bar-Tel, 1990). American social psychology now appears to be recognizing and embracing the contribution of the more distinctively social tradition of European social psychology, particularly the important work of Moscovici and his colleagues on “social representations” Farr & Moscovici, (1984; Moscovici, 1961, 1981) and of Tajfel and Turner on “social identity” theory (Tajfel, 1978, 1981; Tajfel & Turner, 1986; Turner, 1987).