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SOCIOLOGY in AMERICA A History
The University of Chicago Press Copyright © 2007 The American Sociological Association
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ISBN: 978-0-226-09095-5



Chapter One Sociology in America: An Introduction

Craig Calhoun

The word sociology was invented (in its French spelling) by Auguste Comte in the 1830s. One of America's first great sociologists, William Graham Sumner, found the compound of Latin and Greek so inelegant that he tried to replace it with the more etymologically consistent societology. Had he succeeded, perhaps Americans could have claimed the field originated in the United States. But terminological origins are not much to go by. In intellectual terms it would make at least as much sense to say that sociology is much older-as old as systematic inquiry into the nature of social life or, at minimum, as old as the early modern interest in what besides political rule knit together distinctive peoples or nations. In institutional terms it would make equal sense to say that sociology is somewhat newer-that it dates from the formation of an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century.

On the latter account, the United States was in the forefront. Sociology grew in prominence as the new PhD-granting research university developed in the late nineteenth century. Its first great institutional base was at the University of Chicago, itself a new institution receptive to new approaches to knowledge. Indeed, the heterogeneity as well as the growth of U.S. academic institutions facilitated the formation of a new discipline. Sociology gained a disciplinary basis at Chicago in 1892 and at Columbia in 1893, some twenty years before Durkheim succeeded in transforming a chair of education into a chair of sociology in Paris.

Of course to privilege only the institutional and not the intellectual would be senseless. Sociology could become a discipline in Chicago and New York-and in Paris and Berlin and for that matter in Lawrence, Kansas, and New Haven, Connecticut (other claimants to the pioneering role in America)-because it could draw on a wealth of intellectual resources established in previous generations. It drew, of course, on social thought and philosophical inquiries into the nature of human relationships, groups, communities, publics, and polities that stretch back into the ancient world. But it also drew on a number of protean thinkers who helped to establish distinctively sociological reasoning as part of their rebellions against or innovations in other lines of work. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau-and for that matter Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft-all appealed to accounts of social life in order to resolve problems in political philosophy. Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith pioneered the notion of self-organizing civil society and developed a sociological approach to key issues in political economy (and Smith would presumably be recognized more clearly as a central figure in the sociological tradition if he were not so emphatically claimed by economics). Both Smith and Jeremy Bentham sought what might be seen as sociological solutions to problems of moral philosophy, an approach that would influence Hegel among many others. Edmund Burke and Joseph De Maistre helped create modern conservatism by appealing not only to tradition but to more organic social processes that underpinned it.

In the wake of the French Revolution and in response to industrialization, a variety of Europeans examined social institutions, conditions, and change in new ways. By the time Auguste Comte first used the word sociology in 1839, utopian socialists, social reformers, and conservative social critics were all contributing to the rise of a notion of society and social organization as distinct from government. This distinction was prominent in explorations of natural law, pivotal to histories of civil society, and influentially linked to the development of nationalism. Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and the Old Regime and the French Revolution were among the highlights. Conceptualizations like Ferdinand Tönnies's distinction of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft were efforts to understand this change in relation to the nature of social order. From contrasting ideological perspectives, both Marx's critique of political economy and Le Play's social economics helped to establish "the social" as a concern for economic as well as political debate. By the mid-nineteenth century a variety of organizations focused the attention of less radical and less conservative-and for the most part less famous-thinkers on the practical pursuit of a scientific approach to social policy.

Sociology was from the outset marked by both an engagement with projects of social reform and an understanding of society as quasi-natural, even organic-and by the tension between the two. This grew more pronounced during the nineteenth century. New inequalities, industrialization, the squalor associated with rapid urbanization, intensified fear of immigrants, crime, and challenges to idealized family life all brought forth privately organized ameliorative projects, incipient welfare states, and challenging social movements. Sociology took shape trying to inform each in America as in Europe. Anxieties over immigration loomed larger in the United States, and concern over race was enduringly prominent. Religion loomed larger in the United States, shaping approaches to social problems as well as to social order.

And concern for social order-the social whole-was enduringly central. Attempts to reestablish social order after revolutionary disruptions were basic in Europe. In the United States, social science grew in the wake of the Civil War and in a context of economic booms and recessions. Rural to urban migration, black migration from South to North, and the westward movement of the U.S. population all figured alongside international migration as sociological concerns. Rural sociology was initially and until World War II one of the field's largest branches. Thinking about social order was shaped less than in Europe by ideas of tradition and focused more on the achievement of community. But in the United States as in Europe, concern for both social order and social change flowed into the deep channels of evolutionary theory-which formed in social thought as in biology. Herbert Spencer was a key influence. In the 1850s, indeed, Spencer addressed these topics in Social Statics (launching his long-term engagement with social morphology) and, famously, Progress: Its Law and Cause. And through the rest of the nineteenth century, American sociology would be deeply engaged with both social organization (and disorganization) and with progress.

Progress was a fundamental theme for the emerging field of sociology and the broader social context of its reception. In the United States, if anything, it was more central than social order (though the two were closely related in most formulations). In Europe, the problem of order was focused centrally on political stability (versus revolution) and clashing economic interests. Class conflict, and indeed socialism, figured more prominently for early American sociologists than is sometimes thought. But in the United States, the problem of order became to a large extent the problem of integration-how to assimilate immigrants, how to overcome (or at least deal with) racial division, and how to nurture self-improvement and strong families among the poor. For many sociologists, these became matters of psychological "adjustment" as well as social change. At the same time, when the term social integration came to indicate a general theoretical concern with questions of social cohesion, it became to some extent abstracted from the concrete questions about race, immigrants, political minorities, the working class, and the rights of women that preoccupied reform-oriented sociologists.

Social Change and Evolution

Evolutionary and "progressive" thought dominated in the nineteenth-century context of early U.S. sociology. Some American sociologists embraced evolutionary accounts enthusiastically, engaged them deeply, and made contributions to them. Others drew on the common rhetorical framework they provided for discussing social change without an equally close grappling with specifics. Spencerian arguments that sociology was part of a holistic, evolutionary natural science commanded widespread tacit acceptance. The prestige of the biological sciences added to the attraction of an evolutionary synthesis (though this was still resisted by many religious thinkers). Like Spencer himself, Lester Frank Ward-the first great American sociologist-contributed to biology as well as sociology (not to mention what were then called "cosmic" theories of the general evolution of everything). Franklin H. Giddings and William Graham Sumner too offered evolutionary syntheses. But this revealed also that evolution was a broad framework. Sumner followed Spencer more closely, not only in matters of evolutionary theory proper but in advocating laissez-faire; he was the original social Darwinist. Giddings, by contrast, stressed social organization rather more and biological determinism much less, and was more liberal and supportive of state action than was Sumner.

Not everyone was equally convinced of progress or evolution. Indeed, the word sociology was first used in the United States in 1854 by George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes. Both were Southerners who found a Comtean version of sociology-in Hughes's case augmented by Fourier-helpful in giving an account of an organic society threatened by socioeconomic change and the growing abolitionist movement. Fitzhugh was not alone in defending local community and more organic understandings of society against liberal economics and industrial transformation. Similar ideas informed other sociologists of different ideological commitments, including several influenced by utopian socialism. In general, though, Comte did not catch on as fast in the United States as did Spencer, and most American sociologists shared the pervasive individualism of their national context.

Sumner married evolutionary theory to economic liberalism and arguments for a minimal state, and thus contributed to the popular stereotype of social Darwinism as a rationalization for the market competition of the Gilded Age. But Sumner's major work Folkways focused more on cultural evolution. He approached folkways as habits and customs developed by individuals in order to meet needs and reproduced in social relations and social learning mainly where they proved effective in doing so. By mores he intended the elevation of folkways to the status of beliefs and practices held to be not merely convenient but good and/or true and thus the objects of religious or philosophical commitments. Note that the units of selection are not, in the first instance, persons or groups but practices and ideas. Folkways and mores may be mistaken, though the more firmly they are woven into a fabric of cultural commitments, the harder they are to replace.

Sumner experienced something of this phenomenon personally when he assigned Spencer's The Study of Sociology as an undergraduate text and suffered a sharp attack from Yale's president, Noah Porter, for doing so. Though in other contexts evolutionary sociology drew prestige from biology, teaching evolution meant taking up a controversial new perspective that existed in tension with the still powerful if no longer completely dominant clerical leadership in academia. The issue was not only evolution but the claim to move beyond theology in putting science on positivist foundations. Sumner's turn to sociology was deeply influenced by Darwin and Spencer, but it was also broader. As he wrote in the middle of the controversy, "four or five years ago my studies led me to the conviction that sociology was about to do for the social sciences what scientific method has done for the natural and physical sciences, viz: rescue them from arbitrary dogmatism and confusion."

Neither social Darwinism nor liberal doctrines were unique to Sumner, who was simply one of their strongest proponents. A wide range of sociologists (and others) in the late nineteenth century took up these themes, not simply to describe competition but to explain progress. At the center of their concern were large-scale and disruptive processes of social change; the social Darwinists were at the center of interpreting these processes as necessary to social improvements-that is, to progress. In this they drew on Spencer's famous essay, Progress: Its Law and Cause, which was published in 1857-two years before Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

The importance of evolutionary theories for nineteenth-century American sociology lay partially in establishing the idea that sociology could be a science in the same sense as the natural sciences-since evolutionary theory was potentially a unified theory. It is instructive, for example, that Robert Merton's classic (1942) account of the ethos of science references Sumner for the idea of "ethos." Sumner saw an ethos as the totality of cultural traits that individualized a group and its members and differentiated them from other groups. Merton was interested in what rendered science and scientists distinctive. But Sumner and Merton were also interested in what connected tradition to progress-in the case of science, for example, in what connected the learning of accumulated knowledge to innovative breaks with such tradition in the production of new knowledge. Sumner himself was greatly interested in the balance between tradition and innovation and saw science as crucial, since it combined a method that had proven highly productive with an ethos of its own, a specifically professional ethos of discipline, denial, and detachment-which produced the equivalent of public virtue (without depending as heavily as moral teaching typically did on appeals to individual character).

Sumner, in other words, engaged science in general and evolutionary theory in particular in order to pursue virtue. His goals were not altogether different from what they had been when he was the rector of an Episcopal parish. Sumner shared a strongly religious-and indeed clerical-background with many other sociologists of his era. But whereas he was drawn to scientific positivism, and the bundle of doctrines associated with social Darwinism and laisser-faire economics, this was not equally the story of all. Other leading sociologists were evolutionists and indebted to Spencer, but they were also moralists-a stance Sumner sharply rejected. Although they shared a version of individualism with Sumner, they were far more concerned with the motivation and capacity for autonomous judgment.

Despite Sumner, most leading nineteenth-century sociologists challenged laissez-faire doctrine. They did this as individualists convinced that Spencer's (and Sumner's) account was too deterministic to do justice to individuals and their potential; in this most drew on religious vocabularies of interior life (whether or not they remained active Christians). Most also saw a greater role for human intelligence in shaping the course of social change.

Lester Frank Ward, perhaps the most influential of nineteenth-century U.S. sociologists and near the end of his life the first president of the American Sociological Society, was exemplary in this regard. His first career was that of a paleobotanist, and he worked for many years for the U.S. Geological Survey. He thought it contradictory to assert the virtues of human control over nature by means of science and at the same time to suggest that human affairs should be governed by the blind necessity of nature. Rather, he suggested, biology gave human beings intelligence, which in turn offered them the capacity to shape nature to their own purposes. Where Spencer approached biological and human "association" without distinction of kind, Ward emphasized the centrality of purpose to human social life. This notion informed the strong interest in social psychology that was characteristic of much early American sociology and also established the limits of a completely naturalistic theory of human evolution. "My thesis," wrote Ward, "is that the subject matter of sociology is human achievement. It is not what men are but what they do. It is not the structure but the function."

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