Bannister, Robert C.

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Swarthmore College Works History Faculty Works History 2001 Sociology Robert C. Bannister Swarthmore College This work is brought to you for free and open access by . It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history  Part of the History Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits you  Recommended Citation Robert C. Bannister. (2001). "Sociology". Oxford Companion To United States History. 731-732. https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history/403 Sociology.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195082098.001.0001/acref-9780195082098-e-1433Sociology, the study of society, arose in the United States, as in Europe, in response to theproblem of social order in modern society in the wake of the American and Frenchrevolutions and the rise of industrialization and market capitalism. Whereas Enlightenmenttheorists viewed society in terms of a “social contract” and a convergence of individualinterests, early sociologists sought to identify sources of social order within the forms andstructures of society itself.In the Antebellum Era, the anomaly of chattel slavery in a “free” society inspired GeorgeFitzhugh's Sociology for the South (1854) and Henry Hughes's Treatise on Sociology (1854).These critiques of northern industrial society were the first American works to employ theterm “sociology,” coined by the Frenchman Auguste Comte a decade earlier. Comte alsodirectly influenced various antebellum Utopian reformers in the North. Sociologyreemerged after the Civil War in response to industrial conflict, immigration, andurbanization, drawing again on Comte and on the English social theorist Herbert Spencer. In1875 Yale professor William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) offered the first course titled“Sociology,” assigning Spencer's Principles of Sociology, then appearing in installments. In hisseminal work Dynamic Sociology (1884), a synthesis of Comte and Spencer, Lester Wardcalled for the direction of social policy by state-appointed experts. Sociology also built onempirical and survey work supported by census bureaus, state agencies, and reformorganizations, a tradition represented by Jane Addams and others in Hull House Maps andPapers (1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro  (1899).The first departments of sociology were created at the University of Chicago under AlbionW. Small in 1892, and at Columbia University under Franklin Giddings two years later. Themost important studies written in this period, however, were by professors at Wisconsin,Michigan, and Yale: Edward A. Ross, Social Control (1901); Charles Horton Cooley, HumanNature and the Social Order (1902); and Sumner's Folkways (1906). In 1895, Small founded theAmerican Journal of Sociology, later the official organ of the American Sociological Society(ASS), organized in 1905.Although prewar sociology was a victim of World War I, the University of Chicago led a majorrevival in the interwar years. Initially taking shape around the work of Robert Park (1864–1944) and his students, “Chicago sociology” eventually developed diverse approachesdefined by individuals and generation. These included Park's urban ecology as outlined inAn Introduction to the Science of Society (1921), written with Ernest Burgess; a rigorouslyquantitative sociology, introduced with the appointment in 1927 of William F. Ogburn,author of Social Change (1922) and head investigator for Recent Social Trends  (1932), a reportcommissioned by President Herbert Hoover; and “symbolic interactionism,” so named in1/31937 by Herbert Blumer, building on the work of Chicago philosopher George HerbertMead. Symbolic interactionism continued to flourish into the post–World War II Era, forexample, in Erving Goffman's popular study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).Although the Columbia sociology department declined during the 1920s, its influencecontinued through the work of its graduates at Minnesota (F. Stuart Chapin), North Carolina(Howard Odum), Pennsylvania (James Lichtenberger and Stuart Rice), and Wisconsin (JohnGillin). With Ogburn, also a Columbia graduate, all played important roles in the educationalfoundations that funded much of interwar sociology, including Robert and Helen Lynd'sMiddletown (1929), an investigation of Muncie, Indiana, and Gunnar Myrdal and others’ AnAmerican Dilemma (1944), a classic study of race in America.The Depression of the 1930s shifted sociologists’ focus from the assimilation of immigrants(the Chicago school's specialty) to unemployment and poverty. The Depression also causeda decline in academic funding, jobs, and graduate enrollments. A revolt within the ASS in themid–1930s effectively ended Chicago's domination of the profession, shifting the balance ofpower to the East. In 1931 Harvard belatedly created a department of sociology, with PitirimSorokin as head and Talcott Parsons as an instructor. In 1941, the arrival at Columbia ofParsons's student Robert Merton and the German émigré Paul Lazarsfeld laid thegroundwork for an informal but powerful Harvard-Columbia postwar alliance. Otherdevelopments meanwhile sowed the seeds of a revival of sociology under Americanleadership: increased opportunities for government service; the articulation of the“classical” European sociological tradition in Parsons's The Structure of Social Action  (1937);and the arrival of many distinguished émigré sociologists.From 1950 through the mid–1960s, American sociology was dominated by Parsonianfunctionalism and “systems theory,” a modification of Parsons's earlier “action theory” moresuited to the consensus mood of the Cold War. Recognizing the weakness of Parsonianismfor practical research, Robert Merton in Social Theory and Social Structure  (1949) called fortheories of “the middle range,” effecting an influential theory/method compromise. Issuesarising from World War II inspired such collaborative efforts as Dorothy S. Thomas et al., TheSpoilage (1946), a study of the forced evacuation and detention of West Coast JapaneseAmericans during the war; Samuel Stouffer et al., The American Soldier (1949); and TheodoreAdorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Sociology reached a wide audience inthree critical examinations of the postwar social and economic order: David Riesman's TheLonely Crowd (1950), White Collar (1951), C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), and William Whyte's TheOrganization Man (1956). As the discipline's influence spread, “status,” “norm,” “role,” andother sociological terms entered the American vocabulary.Parsonian hegemony, although never unchallenged, was shattered by the mid–1960s asMerton's compromise gave way to a politically charged humanist/positivist divide. Conflicttheorists, notably Mills in The Sociological Imagination (1959) and Alvin Gouldner in TheComing Crisis of Western Sociology (1970) attacked Parsons for ignoring the reality of force2/3and repression. Symbolic interactionists, phenomenologists, and exchange theorists,meanwhile, took aim at Parsons's rigid model of human behavior and his allegedobliviousness to the complexities of cognition and reality construction. A new breed ofpositivists, armed with computers and mathematical sophistication, insisted that Parsons'stheories be tested empirically—thereby creating new power and influence for themselves.Feminists charged that functionalism reinforced existing gender roles. Outside sociology,sociobiologists raised a specter of biological determinism that most sociologists believedhad expired long before. By the end of the 1970s, many within the profession lamented thefragmentation of sociology and spoke of an “interregnum” in the discipline's development.Despite proposals for a postmodern sociology, for example in Zygmunt Bauman'sIntimations of Postmodernity (1992), these laments continued two decades later.See also Anthropology; Boas, Franz; Education: The Rise of the University; Feminism; Fifties,The; Professionalizaton; Sixties, The; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.BibliographyNicholas C. Mullins and Carolyn J. Mullins, Theories and Theory Groups in ContemporaryAmerican Sociology, 1973.Robert Bierstedt, American Sociological Theory, 1981.Robert C. Bannister, Sociology and Scientism, 1987.Stephen Park Turner and Jonathan H. Turner, The Impossible Science, 1990.Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 1991.Robert C. Bannister3/3

Sociology

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