Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880-1940

During the 1920s a new generation of American sociologists tried to make their discipline more objective by adopting the methodology of the natural sciences. Robert Bannister provides the first comprehensive account of the emergence of this “objectivism” within the matrix of the evolutionism of Lester Ward and other founders of American sociology.

Objectivism meant confining inquiry to the observable externals of social behavior and quantifying the results. Although objectivism was a marked ...