ARCHITECTS OF U.S. SOCIOLOGY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

a work in progress

by David Weiner

copyright© 2004, by David Weiner

revised 2003, 2004,2007, 2008

Austin, Texas

INTRODUCTION

The house of physics is not as neatly structured as logical positivists would like it to be (see Kuhn ). Some of its rooms are larger than others for no apparent reason, some of its hallways are crooked. And so forth and so on. But at least it looks like a house, and the entire edifice is cleaned and maintained by custodians on a regular basis. When new furniture arrives, each piece is carefully unwrapped, inspected and placed in the room where it belongs.

The house of sociology is bizarre looking. Only a tiny part is visible at all. It consists of a narrow tower divided into a few tiny rooms. The sparse furniture that occupies these rooms is uncomfortable -- in fact barely usable at all. These little rooms are cleaned daily and diligently. This part of the house is quantitative sociology.

The bulk of the house lies buried underground, where rooms are spacious and contain a good deal of furniture -- much of it ancient, though of excellent quality. It is almost always covered by a layer of dust since the custodial staff rarely visit this part of the house. When occasionally a new piece of furniture arrives the custodians refuse delivery during daylight hours. It must be brought in the dead of night and without the least fanfare. This part of the house is qualitative sociology.

On the rare occasions that custodial staff do enter the basement they enact a strange ritual. They select a particular piece of furniture and construct a simplified papier-mâché model of it. This model they paint in garish colors and transport from the basement to the front lawn. The next day, passers by gaze at it, aware, judging by their expressions, that it resembles furniture familiar to them --more or less (as even the most simplified model of furniture in the tiny visible rooms would not). The lawn display represents the sociology depicted in sociology textbooks and often in popular media.

Below the basement of qualitative sociology lies another basement, always heavily padlocked. Its rooms are empty. The furniture belonging in them is heaped in a a pile beyond a fence enclosing the back yard -- barely on the property. This furniture, and the rooms where it belongs, are the critical theories of sociology -- some of which deal with how society can change even if those in power don't want it to.

Some of the architects who designed the house of sociology are considered by its custodians (who represent mainstream sociology) to be proper residents, and some are not. Both kinds are included in the sketches below -- by no means all, certainly, and perhaps some should not have been included; I'm extremely open to discussion concerning my selections. This means that some of the sketches are of people who never possessed a doctoral degree in sociology, or published in a sociology journal. Nevertheless, they have indeed contributed significantly to the structure that is sociology and when someday the basements are excavated, and the fake furniture discarded, and the excluded furniture placed where it belongs, it will be clear that this is so. Then the structure of sociology will look like a real house. However, no one will ever confuse it with the house of physics.

Each entry below begins with a bolded name and the date of the owner's first important publication, or other contribution. With few exceptions, little information is provided concerning anyone's social origins --not even when they were born and died. Evidence indicates that if sociologists have biases these are not so much the result of their religious or cultural background as of other forces which act upon them (see my doctoral dissertation, Sociologists Orientations to Sociology, University of Texas, 1968). These other forces and their effects tend to be understated in textbooks hence they receive special focus here.

This, then, is a kind of essay in the sociology of knowledge. It is both an impressionistic and an empirical effort, and a work in progress. Above all it is an attempt to contribute to what Jurgan Habermas calls "real" communication. It is appropriate, therefore, for me to offer evidence of my own biases to those who wish to evaluate this presentation, and to solicit reactions, responses and arguments from readers. Bibliographical information can be found in a manuscript entitled Deep Photographs: The Education of a Sociologist, and elsewhere on my website at http://sdweiner.home.texas.net/d/DW.htm -- and responses will reach me at dweiner@austin.rr.com.

Those I have chosen to present as architects of the house of sociology in the United States, and the dates indicating the order in which they are presented, are listed alphabetically as follows:

Acuna, Rodolfo: 1972

Addams, Jane: 1889-1920

Alinsky, Saul: 1940-1972

Allport, Gordon: 1954

Arendt, Hannah: 1951

Bell, Derrick: 1973

Benedict, Ruth: 1934

Berger, Peter: 1966

Blau, Peter: 1964

Blumer, Herbert: 1969

Boaz, Franz: 1911

Bowlby, John: 1969-1980

Bourdieu, Pierre: 1987

Chomsky, Noam: 1988

Coleman, James S.: 1966

Comte, Auguste: 1838

Cooley, Charles Horton: 1902

Cooper, Anna Julia: 1892

Coser, Lewis: 1959

Cox, Oliver: 1948

Dahrendorf, Ralf: 1959

Davis, Angela. 1981

Dewey, John: 1900

DuBois, W.E.B.: 1896

Durkheim, Emile: 1893

Fanon, Frantz: 1961

Foucault, Michel: 1965

Frazier, E. Franklin: 1932

Friedan, Betty: 1962

Fromm, Erich: 1941

Galbraith, John Kenneth: 1958

Giddings, Franklin Henry: 1896

Goffman, Erving: 1959

Gramsci, Antonio: 1891-1936

Habermas, Jurgen: 1971

Homans, George: 1950

Husserl, Edmund:1962

Kuhn, Thomas: 1962

Lazarsfeld, Paul: 1949

Le Bon, Gustav: 1895

Le Play, Frederic: 1855

Lewin, Kurt: 1935

Lynd, Robert Staughton: 1929

Lynd, Helen Merrell: 1929

Malinowski, Bronislaw: 1914-18

Mannheim, Karl: 1929

Marcuse, Herbert: 1964

Martineau, Harriet: 1853

Marx, Karl: 1848

Mayo, Elton: 1933

Meade, George Herbert: 1892-1931

Merton, Robert K.: 1957

Mills, Charles Wright: 1956

Myrdal, Gunnar: 1944

Ogburn, William F.: 1922

Pareto, Vilfredo: 1916

Park, Robert Ezra: 1920-1936

Parsons, Talcott: 1937

Redfield, Robert: 1930

Ross, Edward: 1900

Simmel, Georg: 1893-1910

Small, Edward Albion: 1892

Sorokin, Pitirim: 1937

Spencer, Herbert: 1876-96

Stouffer, Samuel: 1949

Sumner, William Graham: 1907

Tarde, Gabriel: 1890

Thomas, William I.: 1918

Tonnies, Ferdinand: 1877

Veblen, Thorstein: 1899

Ward, Lester F.: 1883

Wallerstein, Immanuel: 1974

Weber, Max: 1920-1930

Whyte, William F.: 1943

Wilson, William J.: 1978

Wirth, Louis: 1925

Znaniecki, Florian: 1918

THE ARCHITECTS

Auguste Comte: 1838 Cours de philosophie positive ( tr. The Course of Positive Philosophy, 1896). A modern French philosopher, Comte studied under Claude Saint-Simon. Both were products of the Enlightenment. In order to understand Comte’s contribution to sociology, it is essential first to grasp the historical context in which he thought and wrote.

The Age of Enlightenment in Europe, beginning in the late 1600s, had established two basic understandings: (1) that knowledge of physical reality would henceforth be arrived at by means of the scientific methods established by Galileo and Newton and no longer according to the theological dictates of the papal Scholastics; and (2) that how humans should interact with one another in the construction of society was subject matter altogether appropriate for philosophers as well as for theologians to discuss. In 1651 Thomas Hobbes had published Leviathan, arguing that man was incapable of creating stable society unless subject to powerful, controlling leadership. Without such control society would invariably deteriorate into self-destructive conflict. A few decades later John Locke challenged this assumption, arguing that people choose leaders not to control them, but to express the community’s drive to create cooperative social structures through which to satisfy their common needs. How appropriately to construct mechanisms of social control was the first challenge to the new breed of social philosophers.

Members of a group called The Philsophes, which included Voltaire and John Jacques Rousseau, agreed that social control was necessary, but that the source of control, the State, could easily become corrupt. Like Saint. Simon, they advocated for benevolent control under the auspices of an elite selected by the entire bourgeois class. They mistrusted the leadership of feudal nobles or the monarchs who replaced them, or the favorite statesmen of either. However, none of these thinkers, including Saint. Simon, envisioned the inclusion of the lowest members of society -- those without property. Rousseau insisted that a social contract must exist between the bourgeoisie and the State, but this contract need not include the masses. While Saint Simon did not advocate for greater inclusion of the masses in the design of society, he argued more vigorously than either Rousseau or Votaire (whose greater sense of inclusiveness still did not include people of color) that while an elite managed State was necessary, even the most common of humans could eventually be led to full enlightenment and maturity -- could be raised up by a bourgeois ruling class that was itself enlightened.

Evidence that the new ruling class fell far short of Saint Simon’s ideals was in ample supply during the early 1800s. Throughout most of Europe people were actually worse off than they had been during either feudalism or the monarchies that replaced it for a brief period. Critiques of Capitalism became harsher as it appeared that the new ruling class might be simply the old oligarchs in a new disguise. Under feudalism people were often abused by masters who gave them no option but to conform or be killed. But they also cared for their subjects. Now the masses had complete freedom of choice to seek employment, but the choices available often left them with no opportunity to earn a living. No longer the property of feudal lords or kings, they became powerless cogs in the machinery of the new technological age, fully expendable unless useful.

Exposing the logical implications of these conditions was a new group of thinkers. They embraced Saint Simon’s insistence that society must serve all of its members, including the lowest in status, but extended Rousseau’s suspicion of the State's ability and willingness to do this. The anarchists, such as Mihail Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and the socialists, notably Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, advocated for the total elimination of the State on grounds that it could never be other than an exploitative governing body serving a Capitalist ruling class. Anarchists sought revolution with no purpose other than the obliteration of all state government. Marxists proposed that an enlightened group must first gain control of State governmental apparatuses and convert these into non-abusive (but still authoritarian) bases from which people could be gradually socialized to accept and function in a stateless society. This interim state, sometimes called the dictatorship of the proletariat, would eventually whither away, leaving ownership of the means of production -- including virtual ownership of people themselves --- in the hands of the entire citizenry.

Saint-Simon viewed both approaches as impractically idealistic. He felt that the task of building a decent society could only be accomplished through the application of empirical analysis to the study of social phenomena by people of superior intellect and experience.

Auguste Comte, St-Simon’s student, fulfilled his vision through the invention of a new analytical methodology called positivism. This method required that social phenomena be researched in the same way that physical phenomena are researched -- empirically. Thus only a phenomenon's properties which could be discerned by one of the five senses could be included in analysis. Preferably, these properties should be quantifiable, as in physics. Excluded were people's feelings, motives or intentions because these could not be directly observed -- and any quality identified through intuition. In brief, Comte insisted that all of nature, including social phenomena, could and should be studied by trained scholars using techniques similar to those of Galileo and Newton. Comte named the new field of inquiry framed by this extension of scientific reasoning, sociology.

Comte’s first application of his revolutionary analytical method was to seek understanding of how human society develops from more primitive to more complex. He assumed a direct correlation between man's ability to reason toward satisfaction of his basic physical needs, and man's ability to create complex yet functional society. He proposed that modern society emerged out of a specific process of intellectual evolution involving three distinct phases, or stages, each generating its own type of social structure. (1) The theological stage, when man explained events in terms of supernatural forces; (2) the metaphysical stage, when natural phenomena were assumed to result from fundamental energies or ideas; and (3) the positive, or present stage, during which natural phenomena are explained by observation, hypotheses, and experimentation.

Comte further proposed a schema for addressing the challenges of what he assumed to be the final stages of social evolution. Classifying disciplines according to their degree of complexity and narrowness of application, he placed sociology at the apex, followed in order by biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and mathematics. Each depended in part upon the discipline preceding it. Thus sociology depended on all of the others. Every effort should be made to feed information into sociology where it could finally be analyzed and fully understood. Comte was convinced that through such an organization of inquiry and analysis a truly positivist sociology would lead the way to the kind of society he sought to achieve.

While he proposed that society be studied empirically and objectively, therefore, Comte's own theory of society as essentially a healthy organism led to maturity by its most enlightened members, over time, was essentially subjective. It assumed, rather than proposed the essential functionalism of society, ignoring rather than testing the proposition that powerful leaders might mold society to fill their needs rather than to enhance the general citizenry -- and this optimistic assumption was to have great impact upon the future of sociology (see especially Durkheim, Parsons and Mills) (see especially Marx, Dubois and Marcuse).

In the final analysis, Comte turned entirely from realism to idealism as the ultimate basis for a moral society. In Le Système de politique positive (1851-54; tr. System of Positive Polity, 1875-77) Comte placed religion above sociology in his ranking of disciplines, stipulating, however, that this must be a non-metaphysical religion whose primary object of worship was humanity. See A General View of Positivism (1957) for a modern version of Comte's work. Other important writings are Catechisme positiviste (1852, tr. 1858) and Synthèse subjective (1856). Comte's Testament (1884) and letters (1902-05) were published posthumously.

Karl Marx: 1848 The Communist Manifesto with Frederich Engels and 1867 Capital. A German social philosopher and economist, and a student of Hegel, Marx applied his teacher’s theory of cultural development in a way that Hegel would not have anticipated. Hegel viewed man’s understanding of truth and the essential meaning of things to be the result of a grand dialectic, or debate, enabling her to approach but never attain a full understanding of reality. He expected human society to remain fairly static, however, always limited by the inability of people to grow emotionally and intellectually beyond a certain degree.

Marx adopted Hegel’s method, but not his focus. He theorized that social change did indeed constitute a dialectical process, but that humans were far less limited than Hegel perceived. When people lived in new ways, for example as farmers rather than as hunters and gatherers, and later as manufacturers rather than as farmers, their thinking changed. They did not tend to remain stuck in old traditions (see Max Weber below for a different view), unless blocked from growth. In modern times, people’s inability to develop their full potential was less a consequence of their inherent inability to perceive their true situation than of their control by powerful economic forces within a structure that poisoned their ability to perceive in ways more powerful than ever in history..

This structure was nothing less than the capitalist society that engulfed Europe following the Industrial and French Revolutions. Living in capitalist society people became free of the constraints of feudalism, and in many cases better off materially, but powerfully alienated from themselves. Essentially, they became commodities in a great, sterile process in which their labor was transformed from self-actualization and self-expression into something merely to be bought and sold. Society divided itself into great economic classes based precisely on how people fit into this process. The owners of the means of production, those who bought and sold both human labor and what it produced, constituted the capitalist, and ruling class. Workers in factories, those whom Marx felt must lead the movement for revolutionary change, were the proletariat. Once capitalism was overthrown, and replaced by a different kind of economic structure, called socialism, human culture would evolve rapidly and achieve its full potential. Better still, with this change, humankind’s pre-history would have ended. Never again would people allow themselves to be alienated. Finally, human society would realize its full potential and flourish.

Like Auguste Comte, Marx felt that society must be studied empirically, rather than philosophized about from an ivory tower (see Comte ). He acknowledged positivism's potential in this regard, however he rejected both Comte's theory of intellectual evolution and his idea that a cadre of bourgeois intellectual leaders could be trusted to lead the masses to enlightenment.. Marx also rejected functionalism, the theory that society functioned like a huge organism, all parts working in concert to produce healthy social stability (see Comte, Durheim, Spencer and Parsons). On the contrary, Marx viewed capitalist society to be singularly unhealthy, it’s “nucleus,” or ruling class constituting no less an oligarchy than the feudal aristocracy it had displaced. A proper theory of society, Marx proposed, must place conflict between oligarchs and populace at the center of analysis, not render it invisible by ignoring it, as the functionalists tended to do.

In what is universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest intellectual achievements of all time, Marx’s Capital endeavored to prove that because of the built-in economic effects of capitalism, working classes must find themselves loosing compensation for the labor they produced to an ever-increasing degree. Marx predicted that urban factory workers, the proletariat, would be those first to become disillusioned with this state of affairs. They would rebel not only because of their increasingly painful impoverishment, but because bourgeoisification had caused them to envision a better life than they could have imagined under feudalism -- a condition they would rather die than return to.

On the surface, Marx’s theory was a set of sociological propositions about pragmatic power relations in society explaining the tangible control of productivity and therefore wealth. His fundamental assumptions, however, included a vision of people as psychological beings. Marx perceived that all people crave love, connectedness and self-actualization (see Fromm and Bowlby) which needs capitalism devalued. Moreover, in sharp disagreement with Hobbsians, Marx assumed that all people possess the ability to behave rationally, and thus to create rational society. (See Comte and Bowlby especially, however nearly every essay in Architects touches on this issue.) Unfortunately, living as capitalist wage slaves had damaged people's ability to reason clearly and this was partly the result of systematic manipulation by those intellectuals in service of the oligarchy whom Comte so trusted (see Gramsci, Tonnies, Mills, Marcuse, Habermas and Foucault). Religion, which Marx called “the opiate of the people,” also played a powerful role in keeping the masses of people ignorant and afraid. In the face of this social pathology, plus the resistance of groups especially sycophantic to the ruling class, Marx felt that it would require the leadership of a particularly enlightened vanguard segment of the proletariat (the Communist Party) toinsure that the revolution led to socialism rather than to a new oligarchy. He called this theoretical interim process effecting the transition from capitalism to socialism the dictatorship of the proletariat. Another group powerfully committed to the overthrow of capitalism, the Anarchists, found such a mechanism utterly unacceptable, and the arguments between anarchists and socialists have waxed unabated until the present day (see Chomsky).

Through the impact of fairly unstructured but very large conferences called Internationals, Marxism began to exert a strong influence in Europe of the late 1800s. Lenin and Stalin established a modified form of Marxism firmly in the Soviet Union, and Mao Zedong another modification in China during the early 1900s. Marxism's influence began to wane with the rise of fascism in Benito Mussolini's Italy in 1922. Soon Stalinism degenerated into totalitarianism in Russia. In spite of the pragmatic failure of socialism, however, many feel that the defining schism within sociology to the present day is between those who find power in Marxian theory and those who denigrate it. Many critical social scientists and postmodernists, moreover (see Tonnies, Mills, Marcuse, Habermas, and Foucault ), feel that while social change seems unlikely to come about exactly as Marx predicted, people may have the ability to employ his idea of praxis while still embedded in capitalist society. For such people the proper goal of the activist intellectual is not the construction of abstract theory, but engagement in a process of thinking and doing; thinking becoming modified as the result of doing and finally generating effective strategies of social change.

Some accessible introductions to Marx's extensive writings are Basic writings on politics and philosophy, (edited by Lewis S. Feuer, 1959), Marxism: Karl Marx, by David McLellan (1978 ); and Marxism After Marx by David McLellan (1979).

Harriet Martineau: 1853 The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. An English journalist, Martineau's early articles focused upon religious subjects. Her prominence as a social analyst, unique for a woman of her period, was established with Illustrations of Political Economy (9 vol., 1832-34) and Illustrations of Taxation (1834). In 1834 she visited the United States and joined the movement to abolish slavery. In this capacity she wrote Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838). Both of these studies were critical and even disparaging of the culture she observed. Works of great insight and professionalism, they boded well for the development of a young discipline committed to the honest inquiry of social institutions. Briefly, Martinueau lit up the scholarly landscape of the new sociology. Unfortunately, the role of women in sociology, and the role of the sociologist as hardheaded analyst of social reality, were both soon to fade. Tragically, Martineau became been best known for her Positive Philosophy, which became widely used as a text introducing students to the ideas of sociology's conservative founder, August Comte (see Comte ).

Nevertheless, Martineau established what was to become arguably the fundamental dialectic in the development of sociology itself: that between the orthodox or mainstream, and critical sociology (see Tonnies, Ogburn, Homans, Mills and Habermas). Orthodox sociology took the position that positivist rules of procedure and modeling should define how the discipline dealt with its subject matter. Early orthodoxy included Comte's functionalist assumptions (see Spencer, Durkheim, Parsons, and Mills in addition to Comte) as the basis for acceptable theory. Critical sociologists held that orthodox positivism excluded most of the meaningful subject matter of sociology, rendering the discipline, as Marx had predicted (see above), a buffer against real social analysis rather than its champion and implementer.

Pierre Guillaume Frédéric Le Play: 1855 Les Ouvriers européens --the European workers -- (condensed and republished as Réforme sociale en France in 1864). A French sociologist and economist, Le Play traveled throughout Europe gathering data on how working-class families budgeted their resources. His wanted to know how successfully they adapted to their economic environment. Le Play was the first to employ social-surveys as his primary methodological tool. This enabled him to collect a great deal of data which could be analyzed statistically -- a powerful incentive among the rising elite of quantitative sociologists in the United States. The dissemination of questionnaires, in lieu of the traditional face-to-face interview or direct observation of group behavior, gave him access to much larger population samples than had been studied in the past. His trailblazing effort had profound influence on the focus of sociological research in the United States. Young sociologists were encouraged to formulate research projects, which could employ the new tool (see Ogburn ). Among his other works is La Constitution de l'Angleterre, the constitution of England, (1875).

Herbert Spencer: 1876-96 The Principles of Sociology (3 vol.) An English philosopher, Spencer is considered to be another of the founding fathers of sociology. Like Comte, he felt it essential to apply scientific method to the study of society (see Comte ). He also viewed society as an evolving process, but in a manner very different than Comte. He possessed no faith in the rationality of the common man, sharing Hobbe's assumption of man's essential savagery. Spencer agreed that only through strong social control in the hands of the most competent could society exist at all. For Spencer this did not imply strong government, however. His attitude toward government differed little from that of anarchists such as Proudhon (see Comte ). The ideal ruling class would consist of artisans, craftsmen and small businessmen committed both to restrain mass uprisings and the development of big government (see The Man Versus the State, 1892).

The way to understand society, Spencer felt, was to view it as exactly analogous to a biological organism (see Comte). In order for the social organism to function it must possess a brain (government) and working organs (social institutions). Organs and institutions do not share the duties of the brain and government, nor do they participate in planning or design decisions. Organs and institutions do what they are required to do. Just as the fittest organisms were those which survived during the natural selection process described by Charles Darwin (Origin of the Species was published in 1881), so too did the fittest societies thrive and prosper. If this process was ruthless, it was natural and essential both as regarded the jungle of nature and the jungle of social competition, according to Spencer. Modern European society was both more advanced and superior to the primitive societies that it exploited.

Spencer's functionalism shared Comte's assumption of social stability provided by the governance of a bourgeois elite, but it rejected his vision of eventual full citizen participation in all aspects of social life. A Spencerian functional society was a society of rigid classes, the lower classes remaining always boorish and subservient, and utterly incapable of the kind of growth Comte envisioned. Social evolution did, however, provide people with a kind of freedom by liberating them from the authoritarian controls of tribal life. Thus was the modern citizen able to participate without fear in the opportunities and pleasures that a sophisticated society had to offer. This by no means implied that it was appropriate to challenge the fundamental institutions or the established policies of society, however. The proper study of society involved identifying these functional institutions and policies and facilitating their proper operations. Implicitly, the role of the sociologist was to serve and advise the managers of the social order in their effort to govern efficiently and effectively – which did mean to Spencer benevolently rather than ruthlessly, so far as was feasible. Not surprisingly, Spencer was much favored by the growing business class in the United States. Ssociologists willing to follow his lead found ready funding for their projects.

In The Principles of Ethics (2 vol., 1879-93) Spencer proposed that a fully functional -- what he called a utilitarian society -- depended upon universal morality. What he meant, essentially, was that everyone conformed happily to social norms. The utopian model system he created had great popular appeal but little scientific influence. However it did much to establish sociology as a discipline that could be useful to policy makers, especially during the coming age of imperialism.

Ferdinand Tonnies: 1877 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaf (tr. Community and Society, 1957). A German sociologist and political scientist, Tonnies agreed with Spencer that society could usefully be viewed as analogous to a living organism (see Spencer ). While Tonnies found it logical to evaluate social institutions in terms of their contribution to the well functioning of the social organism, he was far less sanguine than Spencer about assuming the functionality of his ruling class. Tonnies was also unconvinced that modern societies were more functional than primitive societies. Where Spencer simply assumed the superiority of modern society, Tonnies sought empirically to describe the fundamental ways in which modern and pre-modern society differed.

His most powerful insight was that each had a fundamentally different worldview, or Weltanschauung. For example, pre-modern society was more spontaneous, stressing mutual aid and trust; in modern society pre-meditation and self-interest predominated. On the other hand, pre-modern society was less flexible than modern society -- less innovative, less capable of developing new technologies or affording opportunities for exploration and invention. Through his investigations Tonnies established the method of comparative analysis in sociology, which opened functionalism to challenges of its basic assumptions -- particularly its elitist assumptions. (see Comte, Spencer and Durkheim).

This line of inquiry lay essentially dormant until the blossoming of the movement loosely labeled critical-sociology, established in parallel by C.Wright Mills and the sociologists of The Frankfurt School during the 1950s and '60s (see Mills, Marcuse and Habermas ). Critical-sociologists, some of whom embrace postmodernism as well (see Habermas and Michel), challenge what they call mainstream or consensus sociology (see Young, T.R. and Bruce Arrigo, The Dictionary of Critical Social Sciences, 1999). Critical-sociologists argue that mainstream, or orthodox sociology uses functionalism less as a way to frame inquiry than as a way to limit inquiry to issues that promote elite social structure. The orthodox prioritization of quantitative sociology over qualitative sociology plays a similar role, they perceive. The former prioritizes issues of measurement over issues of meaning, thus rejecting many studies that deal with important but fairly intangible social phenomena, such as racism and power relations in society. Critical sociologists, therefore, offer a modernist critique of orthodox sociology which interprets Comte's logical positivism (see above) in rigidly empiricist terms. Postmodernists reject both orthodox and modernist sociology, insisting that no basis exists for predicting that systematic knowledge is possible at all in sociology. On the contrary, they find all efforts to create such knowledge to be false, serving goals of politics, not goals of inquiry (see Habermas and Foucault ). .

. Among Tonnie's other works is The elements of law : natural & political (1928) Also see Ferdinand Toennies on sociology: pure, applied, and empirical. Selected writings (edited by Werner J. Cahnman and Rudolf Heberle, 1971).

Lester F. Ward: 1883 Dynamic Sociology. The first prominent American sociologist, Ward was trained and renowned as a botanist. He taught at Brown University. Ward's perception of society as analogous to a biological system was more intense even than Spencer's (see above). Ward's pessimism concerning common-man’s ability to “function” as other than lower order, highly controlled elements of the social organism was, however, less extreme than Spencer’s.. In fact, Ward proposed an elaborate project in social engineering, a process of self-education and reflection through which every common-man might grow and win increasing participation in social control and governance. He called this method telesis. Through Telesis, man need not be at the mercy of his irrational nature, but could take control of his own social evolution.

Ward rejected Marx's view of the bourgeois elite as corrupt -- and discouraged young sociologists who took their inspiration from Marx -- in favor of the more utilitarian views of Comte and Spencer. The proper task of the sociologist, Ward felt, was to fine-tune what was already an essentially sound, functional social order, thus to improve the quality of life for all citizens within its framework. Although his work waned in importance later on Ward was a highly regarded intellectual of his day and had considerable influence on the early development of sociology in the United States. He was the first president of the new American Sociological Association.

Jane Addams: 1889-1920 Hull House. Social work as a profession in the United States began when two upper-middle-class Illinoians, Jane Addams and her colleague, Ellen Gates Starr, studied Samuel Barnett's university settlement houses in England and using these as a model founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889. Hull House took in mainly destitute women, many of them prostitutes, whom Addams treated more as friends than as objects of pity. Her coworkers included a number of superb female sociologists including Emily G. Balch, Florence Kelley, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Ida B.Wells-Barnett, an African American sociologist. Their deep understandings of their subjects' lives and culture remained virtually unpublished by mainstream U.S. journals of sociology. Gradually, Hull house became a center for social reform activism in Chicago, strongly influencing other settlement projects throughout the country.

Meanwhile, much of the well-published research done by the white male social scientists at the newly founded (1892) University of Chicago also studied Addam's Hull House subjects. They viewed its tenants less as individuals struggling to overcome obstacles, than as dysfunctional cogs within the machinery of society. It was their work rather than that of Addams and her colleagues that received substantial recognition within the young field of sociology. Nearly all of the men of what became know as the Chicago School became prominent social scientists, and with the decline of French sociology during WWI (see Durkheim ) it reined for several decades as the most prominent institution of social science in the world. The often-superb analyses of Addams and her Colleagues received little attention from mainstream sociology then, or later.

A leader in the woman’s suffrage and pacifist movements, Jane Addams was co-recipient of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize. Her books on social questions include The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909), A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912), and Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922).

Gabriel Tarde: 1890 The Laws of Imitation (tr. 1903). A French sociologist and criminologist, Tarde disagreed with the prominent Cesare Lombroso that criminals were inflexible products of their genetic code and therefore incapable of being reformed. Tarde argued that criminals were no different from other citizens. Like everyone else they learned their behavior from people they regarded as superiors. When these people provided good role models, society produced fewer criminals. In essential agreement with Spencer, Tarde theorized that in every well functioning society, in every epoch, an elite few were inventors and creators (see Spencer ). The masses of people imitated their social behavior if not their innovation. Anticipating the even deeper conservatism of Vilfredo Pareto, Tarde rejected socialism as naïve idealism.

Tarde, however, disagreed with Spencer's simplistic organismic view of society. He anticipated the eventual demise of functionalism to the scientifically more defensible interactionist approach preferred by many sociologists today, including many of the mainstream. (see Tonnies, Mills, Blumer and Habermas). Interactionism rejects a-priori assumptions concerning how society operates. Instead, it attempts empirically to infer patterns of interactions among people and institutions, and upon this basis eventually to build a robust theory of social structure. For many years, however, functionalism dominated both U.S. and European sociology. Somewhat ironically, in retrospect, Tarde was humiliated at the hands of Emile Durkheim, a committed functionalist (see below, and Comte and Spencer) who publicly exposed many of Tarde's unfounded assumptions concerning the non-viability of democracy in society. Functionalism, which Durkheim did probably more even than Comte and Spencer to establish, has been considered by critical-sociologists (see Tonnies, Mills and Habermas ) to constitute a bastion of conservatism. Durkheim, however, was very much a liberal of his day. Tarde also wrote Penal Philosophy (1890, tr. 1912).

Antonio Gramsci: 1891-1936 The Prison Notebooks. An Italian journalist and activist, Gramsci was a committed socialist. He perceived that Marx and Engels had underestimated the ability of the ruling class to establish its hegemony -- its ideological control of society -- using techniques of persuasion and propaganda (see Marx ). Lenin had employed the concept of hegemony to indicate how the revolutionary proletariat must strategize to achieve first public acceptance and then the dominance of its own ideas. Following Lenin, Gyorgi Lukacs (see History and Class Consciousness, 1971) emphasized the role that manipulation of culture through the selective reification of chosen objects played in creating and reinforcing ruling class hegemony -- for example, the reification of expensive acquisitions as a more salient indicator of success, than a reputation as a caring friend, may strengthen capitalist ideals in our own culture. Gramsci greatly extended this analysis and proposed strategies for undermining capitalist hegemony. Contrary to the views of early Marxists, who considered such a focus to be unnecessary, both Lukacs and Gramsci doubted that economic crises alone would bring about revolution.

The Frankfurt School philosophers including Jurgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse and other critical-sociologists (see Tonnies, Mills, Habermas and Marcuse ), and Critical Race and Critical Legal theorists (see Bell ) leaned heavily on Gramsci in an effort to improve not so much upon Marx's theory of class relations as upon his theory of activism. Posthumous compilations of Gramsci's work are Selection from the Prison notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (1971), Letters from Prison (1973), Selections from Political Writings (1978).

Edward Albion Small: 1892 Established The Chicago School of sociology. An American sociologist, Small founded the first sociology department in the United States, at the University of Chicago. Internationally known simply as The Chicago School, the department led the development of the discipline from WWI (which devastated the great institutions of European sociology) until the mid '40s. Embracing positivism, functionalism and Ward's utilitarianism, Chicago sociologists studied how the social organism functioned and how to fine-tune it. If societal dysfunction was addressed at all, it was from the point of view of how to help one or another subculture overcome its internal deficiencies in order to better adapt to the (a-priori) presumed healthy social order described by Emile Durkheim and Lester Ward (see Durkheim and Ward). When one of the most prestigious members of the department, W.I. Thomas, stretched this boundary only slightly -- he made un-published comments concerning how discrimination against polish immigrants was both socially unproductive and unjust -- he was forced to resign. While the quality of Chicago School research was in general unsurpassed, it was also narrowly focused. The department's prestigious male sociologists (see Addams ) systematically neglected research into power relations in society or the disenfranchisement of women and people of color. The Hull House researchers who did so were regarded as reformers rather than as professional sociologists. The possibility that certain groups might be systematically victimized in the United States was not considered much less argued. The Chicago School operated within a Comteian-Spencerian framework and no one, not even W.I. Thomas, proposed Marxian hypotheses (see Comte, Spencer, Marx , and Thomas )..

In 1895 Small established and edited the American Journal of Sociology, the first professional sociology journal in the United States, and still one of the two leading journals in the discipline (the other is The American Sociological Review, followed closely by Social Forces). Small's primary academic contribution was as a historian of sociological thought, his major work being General Sociology(1905).

George Herbert Mead: 1892-1931 lectures eventually published as Mind Self and Society (1934). An American psychologist and sociologist at the University of Chicago, Mead was a close colleague of John Dewey and Charles H. Cooley (see Dewey and Cooley ). One of Mead's primary goals was to construct a socio-psychological theory of emotions capable of forming a fit with Dewey's philosophical utilitarianism. Dewey felt that social science research should be prioritized less in terms of how scientific it was than in terms of how useful it might be to society. Logical positivists, of course, strongly rejected such a teleological approach, claiming that the only force driving inquiry should be sociologists' unbiased quest for knowledge within a strict empirical framework (see Comte ). Like Tarde (see above), Mead focused upon concrete human interactions, particularly the interactions between individuals and groups, in an effort to understand how a socialized person is formed. He concluded that through the influence of significant others (one's closest friends, role models and family) a person changes from an I, all primitive ego, into a socialized me, as s/he learns that one is not essentially different from other members of society. Through the mechanism of an internalized generalized other one is able to empathize and interconnect productively with his/her peers. On the other hand, the interaction between I and me constitutes a constant dialectical struggle as an individual strives to become a part of society without sacrificing too much of his/her spontaneity and unique personality.

Mead discovered that symbolic communication was often far more meaningful than verbal communication in unraveling people's interaction patterns, thereby creating the sub-field of theory called symbolic interaction. This sub-field has developed into one of the richest areas of sociological inquiry through the work of W. Lloyd Warner, C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman and Herbert Blumer, among others (see Mills, Goffman and Blumer ). Mead published little during his lifetime and his major work, a compilation of lecture notes, was not published until after his death, by some of his students. Unlike most of his male colleagues, Mead worked actively with Jane Addams and others at Hull House, not as dispassionate researcher but as activist and progressive reformer. He perceived that people have the capacity to reflect upon their own thought processes and thus to learn to respond to life challenges proactively rather than only reactively. His activism did not, however, extend to exploring the social forces that created the conditions which victimized many of those he tried to help.

Anna Julia Cooper: 1892 A Voice From the South. An American sociologist, Cooper extended the analysis of Ida Wells Barnett and her colleagues at Hull House (see Addams). Predating W.E. B Dubois and Oliver Cox (see Dubois and Cox ), Cooper exposed how racial history is distorted in U.S. media, literature, and text books, and proposed that U.S. capitalist society systematically oppresses people of color and women. Black women, she noted, received a double dose of oppression. Later, Angela Davis stressed the importance of this duality of oppression, which she felt feminists in the '70s still neglected adequately to acknowledge and embrace (see Davis ). The seminal works of Cooper, Wells Barnett, Dubois and Cox (see Dubois and Cox ) continue to be ignored by mainstream sociologists. However, they receive significant recognition from modern critical-sociologists (see Tonnies ), by a group who call themselves Liberation Sociologists, and by a particularly dynamic intellectual-activist movement called Critical RaceTheory, pioneered during the 1970s by the legal scholar Derrick Bell (see below ).

Emile Durkheim: 1893 The Division of Labor in Society ( tr. 1933). A French sociologist, Durkheim ranks along with Comte, Spencer Marx, Simmel and Max Weber (see Simmel, Weber, Comte, Spencer, and Marx ) as one of the founding fathers of sociology. Durkheim taught at the University of Bordeaux where he founded the first sociological journal, the powerful anee sociologique, and at the Sorbonne. The anee became the nucleus of a brilliant group of French sociologists who dominated the field until World War I and established Durkheimian functionalism as sociology's model for the future.

In Division of Labor, Durkheim theorized that like any functioning organism society must generate a bonding force capable of producing organic integration. He called this force "social solidarity" and assumed it to constitute the basis for individuals in society to behave as moral, ethical beings. In primitive society, where all members engaged in nearly identical tasks -- e.g. all men hunted, all women made clothing, etc. -- Durkheim proposed that social solidarity operated through the autocratic imposition of rules and traditions which applied equally and identically to all members. In modern society, where people's occupations were divided into many crafts and trades, their social groupings also became divided and separated. Each group retained the cultural identity of the larger society yet developed its own mini-traditions. Durkhem conjectured that the basis for social solidarity in such a multi-sub-cultural society must be very different than in primitive society. During the course of comparing the normative systems of several modern and pre-modern cultures, he arrived at the insight that the mechanism enabling social solidarity -- a set of values that all members commit to -- in modern society was an intangible force emanating from no specific individual or group. It was a fundamental property of modern society itself. He called this force the collective conscience of a society.

Durkheim never attempted to apply logical positivism -- which he pioneered and applied expertly to other issues he examined -- to analyzing how this strange cohesive force came into being. He assumed a-priori, along with Comte and other modern thinkers of his day, that Charles Darwin's laws of evolution applied appropriately to societies as well as to biological beings. Thus, the development of a collective conscience was one of the ways in which human society adapted to changes wrought by technology. Replacing the rigid bounds of pre-modern society, the collective conscience allowed people great opportunity to imagine and invent, to express spontaneity and even dissent, yet somehow constrained them to interact constructively rather than chaotically and cooperatively rather than divisively. Where the social solidarity of primitive society operated through uncodified and rarely examined mores based on rigid religious traditions, the collective conscience found its expression through a society's system of rationally developed laws constantly improved and updated by expert, logical and benevolent managers -- the modern capitalist elite.

Durkheim's a-priori explanation of social solidarity was persuasive at the time, and collective conscience continues to constitute a compelling if elusive hypothesis in sociology. However, his application of it extended the idea of organic society beyond what mainstream sociologists would consider to be scientifically acceptable. They agreed with Simmel and Tonnies that while society-as-organism may be a useful analogy, and functionalism a powerful theory, evidence failed to support defining society as a kind of Darwinian super-being. Critical-sociologists have insisted that modern functionalists' efforts to improve their approach, furthermore, remains inadequate (see Mills ). Whether even during his own time Durkheim's fundamental assumption concerning man's ability to construct cooperative society was essentially liberating or elitist is still debated. Was his theory merely a thin apology for plutocracy or an argument for reduced social controls as everyone came under the benevolent, functional spell of the collective conscience?

Division of Labor involved the content analysis of historical documents, but no original empirical research. Durkheim's second project, Suicide (1897), required the extensive collection of raw data. His goal was to test his theory that the division of labor in society undermined traditional forms of social solidarity and therefore required the development of collective conscience in order for society to retain a moral base. He hypothesized that where this transition was most successful, society would be most stable -- and vice versa. His operational definition of social stability was a society's suicide rate. He set out to discover the conditions under which suicide rates apparently waxed or waned in Europe.

Systematically testing and qualifying one after another potential correlate of suicide, Durkheim concluded that an individual's connectedness to his peers in present-day society was indeed more problematic than in pre-modern society --.as he had predicted. He coined the term anomie to indicate when the stresses resulting from this disconnectedness became pathological. His evidence was not adequate, however, to show whether suicide rates fell as societies became more successful at creating institutions expressive of the collective conscience. Durkheim's other important works include, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895, tr. 1938), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912, tr. 1915).

Georg Simmel: 1893-1910 journal essays resulting in Sociology (1908). A German philosopher and sociologist, Simmel taught at the University of Berlin. Simmel took exception to the organic-functionalist assumptions of Comte, Spencer and Durkheim, agreeing with Tarde that such processes must be inferred from the analysis of systems of social interaction among individuals and groups. His particular goal was to discover the fundamental forms of human interaction, as distinct from merely describing the content of interactions. He noted, for example, that triads obey similar rules of interaction whether involving individuals or nations. His analysis of social conflict as a kind of fundamental human interaction gave rise to a wealth of later research in sociology concerning how social change occurs within a society -- without necessarily involving the class conflicts identified by Marxians (see Dahrndorf, Blau and Homans ).

Because of his focus on the form as well as the substance of interactions, Simmel, rather than Tarde, is viewed as the father of interactionism as the second major theoretical approach of sociology. Simmel proposed that sociologists abandon all a-priori models of society -- including the biological organism model and the class conflict model -- and simply describe the ways in which people and groups of all sizes and types interact. From these descriptions, patterns and models would emerge. He viewed interactionism not as a theory of society, therefore, but as a methodology of theory.

In his own work, Simmel favored introspection over empirical data collection as a source of sociological knowledge. This approach was formalized by Max Weber (see Weber ), who labeled it verstehenism, meaning, in German, to acquire deep-understanding. It was firmly rejected by the founders of the Chicago School (see Small ) and their followers. These sociologists preferred to collect survey research data which could be analyzed statistically. They acknowledge that their approach tended to define variables superficially, but pointed out that they were able to produce information that met criteria of scientific rigor -- like the natural sciences. They were, therefore, elevating sociology from the low status of being a merely descriptive discipline to the status of a true social science. During the 1950s, Verstehenism was resurrected by C. Wright Mills and other critical-sociologists (see Mills and Habermas ) on grounds that a sociology incapable of dealing with "real" issues had little value. The claim that mainstream quantitative analysis would eventually produce deeply probing studies they felt to be utterly unsupportable. (See Tonnies for a comparison of quantitative and qualitative analysis.)

Simmel also wrote The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1892). Also see The Sociology of Gerog Simmel (edited by Kurt Wolff, 1950) and Conflict: The web of group-affiliations (tr. Kurt Wolff and Reihhard Bendix, 1964).

Gustav Le Bon: 1895 Psychologie des foules (tr. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1897). A French psychologist and sociologist following the revolutionary period of the mid 1800s, Le Bon viewed the failure of the Paris Commune (1871) with extreme disappointment. The Commune was a desperate but inadequate attempt by the impoverished of Paris to gain representation for themselves, and those like them who had fought valiantly for the Revolution, in the new bourgeois state which it had established. In the final analysis, however, the ideals of democracy and equality did not apply to the poor masses of the new France. Le Bon's initial optimism concerning the possibility of democratic social institutions turned to pessimism. In agreement with Tarde, he concluded that the masses of people were simply too irrational and too easily manipulated for democracy to work.

Le Bon's superb studies of crowd psychology enriched Hitler's propaganda program during WWII, and the U.S. advertising industry during the prosperous post-war years. He authored numerous social psychological studies supporting arguments of the ethnic and racial superiority of Anglo-Saxons and their nations. His extreme conservatism concerning the social psychology of crowds, and people in general, strongly influenced Robert Park, who chaired University of Chicago social science following Small. The Park years significantly molded this powerful department which in turn set the course of U.S. sociology for at least half a century (see Park ).

Franklin Henry Giddings: 1896 The Principles of Sociology. An American sociologist, Giddings taught at Columbia University where he was known as a brilliant teacher. His major contribution to the new discipline of Sociology was to encourage students to adopt empirical analysis. This meant emulating as closely as possible the objective analytical processes of physics, chemistry and biology in their approach to sociological research. He shared Ward's belief in social telesis, the idea that people can improve themselves, and supported Small's cautious reformism (see Ward and Small ). This meant helping people adjust to a social order assumed a-priori to be essentially sound and beneficial. He was far more interested, however, in Small’s insistence that sociology must strive to develop along the lines of the natural sciences. Toward this end, Giddings contributed significantly to establishing the now universal use of statistical analysis in sociological research projects.

Giddings received wide recognition for his concept consciousness of kin -- an individual's innate sense of belonging to her/his family and other primary and reference groups. The effects of such awareness, Giddings felt, determined one's development as a social being. This effort to create a grand theory of social behavior had little impact on the discipline, however. Among Gidding's other works are Democracy and empire; with studies of their psychological, economic, and moral foundations (1900), Inductive sociology; a syllabus of methods, analyses and classifications, and provisionally formulated laws (1901), Civilization and society; an account of the development and behavior of human society (1932), and The scientific study of human society (1924).

W.E.B. DuBois: 1896 The Philadelphia Negro. An American social scientist and activist, DuBois taught for a time at Atlanta University. Marginalized by a mainstream sociology that discouraged analyses critical of elite political-economic leadership in the United States, DuBois's body of work is today considered among the finest in the discipline. The Philadelphia Negro remains unsurpassed for its scope, elegance and rigor in describing the life and culture of African Americans seeking to become citizens of post slavery urban America, and the barriers they faced. The Negro (1915) was the first study to analyze the slave trade in historical perspective, revealing structural elements of imperialism only gradually acknowledged by main-stream social scientists and historians.

DuBois received his doctorate from prestigious Harvard University (the first African American to do so), however no major university would hire him. His most famous work was The Souls of Black Folk (1902), an eloquent plea to Whites for humanity and understanding and an exhortation to black people not to define themselves according to the pathological norms of the society that victimized them. DuBois co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP) in 1909, serving as director of research and editor of its magazine, "Crisis," for more than two and a half decades. Hopeful that social science might contribute significantly to undermining the virulent institutionalized racism he perceived in the United States, DuBois finally became disillusioned and moved sharply to the left. In 1961 he joined the Communist Party and emigrated to Ghana, where he spent the remainder of his life. Other works by DuBois are The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (Harvard Ph.D. thesis, 1896), Atlanta University's Studies of the Negro Problem (1897–1910), John Brown (1909), Quest of the Silver Fleece ( 1911), The Negro (1915), Darkwater (1920), The Gift of Black Folk (1924), Dark Princess (1924), Black Reconstruction (1935), Black Folk, Then and Now (1939), Dusk of Dawn (1940), Color and Democracy (1945), The Encyclopedia of the Negro (1931–1946), The World and Africa (1946), The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois (1968), The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906–1960 (Edited by Herbert Aptheker–1973).

Thorstein Veblen: 1899 The Theory of the Leisure Class. An American economist and social critic, Veblen taught at the