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Publishers scurry to reprint material from earlier decades all in soft covers and each projected by a hard-sell campaign calling it a classic in the fields. The National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the Russell Sage Foundation and the recently created National Institute for Balanced Behavioral Life Ecological Studies report a huge surplus of funds as sociologists cease their search for grants and awards. The worth of a sociologist became based more on some one's perception of his future prospects than on the record of his past performance. Thus the phrase publish or perish lost its peril, and the phrase circulate or suffocate came to supplant it. More recently students of the history of sociological knowledge have identified factors other than this self-seducing process that may have contributed to grinding the discipline to an intellectual halt. Their contention is that in the late 1960's sociologists were so obsessed with the organizational structure of their profession that little energy remained either for scholarship or for collective deliberation to unlock the vice like grip of personnel demands.