Introduction: Social theorists and the First World War.

This Special Issue examines the ways in which emerging or established social theorists from Continental Europe and the United States were personally and politically involved in and affected by the First the First World War (WWI), and considers how the war shaped their sociological theories. WWI was a pivotal moment that transformed global and historical systems in ways that challenged conventional social scientific assumptions about the supposed shift from "traditional" to "modern" societies and compelled sociologists to reconsider the impact of industry and military affairs on everyday life. The period from 1914 to 1918 has typically been ignored or bracketed by later scholars as a largely inconsequential gap in an otherwise uninterrupted flow of intellectual production.