It is, of course, an almighty cliché that sociology, like the Owl of Minerva, only takes flight at dusk. Sociology – of the kind that focuses on power distortions, social conflicts, inequalities, the fragility of social order – only ever seems to find its vocation alongside political science and law when things are falling apart and the centre cannot hold. Brexit!? Good Lord! How did that happen? … Send in the clowns.

During the golden years of the European Union (EU) – the heyday of Jacques Delors, the expansive drive after the Single European Act (1986), and even more after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and Maastricht (1992) – sociology was, as George Ross has said, signally absent from the EU studies party. The study of the EU was dominated by theoretically minded political scientists and lawyers concerned with explaining and justifying the emergence of a complex post- national political/ legal system, grounded mostly in rationalist economic reasoning and/or the Kantian vision of a kingdom of ends. In writing about a Europe of high- flying politicians, bureaucrats and lawyers and their institutions, the everyday mass of European society was invisible. What sociology there was, came across as baldly utopian, and barely sociological: the 1990s flowering of cosmopolitan social theory led by the ungrounded speculations of Ulrich Beck and Jürgen Habermas. Nobody was interested in whether there needed to be an actual European society underpinning the political/ legal construction, at least, not in what empirical evidence there might be found for it.

As the clouds then gathered over the EU, political science and international relations (IR) theory in particular started to edge towards sociological- style claims.