 Since the new sociology of science was also heavily based on historical case studies, we find more radical historicisms challenging less radical ones. Although the sociologists often disagreed among themselves, as the philosophers did, the general thrust of their work was that the philosophical historicists had failed to take socio-political context into account and thus were still too much wedded to the old, abstract, acausal ideals of rationality, objectivity, and progress toward truth. Much sociological work was explicitly anti-realist and relativist, at least as a methodology.