Page 30 - DLIS407_INFORMATION AND LITERATURE SURVEY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

Unit 4: Historical Development of Sociology and History Disciplines

4.1 Contribution Made by Prominent Authors in Development of Notes
Sociology

Sociology is a “humanistic” social science even through it aims at objectivity in social observations. It
has to take care of ideas and ideals, values and behaviour, aspirations and achievements, problems and
predicaments of human beings in society. It cannot be seen irrespective of time and place, history and
culture of societies being studied unlike the natural sciences. But sociologists have studied different
human groups’ in particular historical circumstances and drawn generalisations about human relations
from these studies.
The German roots of so many of the reformers help us to explain how the force of Small’s presence at
Chicago critically impelled the particular professionalisation of sociology in America. Not only was
Chicago a model, but Small was editor of The American Journal of Sociology (founded in 1894), the
only professional journal of sociology until 1921. He was senior author of the first textbook in sociology
(written with George E. Vincent), a book which had wide use in America. Finally, along with Ward,
Giddings and Ross, already leaders in AEA, he was one of the organizers of the American Sociological
Society which, in 1905, broke off from the AEA (Silva and Slaughter, 1984: 162).
In his 1907 Adam Smith and Modern Sociology: A Study in the Methodology of the Social Sciences,
Small articulated the main point: ‘Modern sociology,’ he wrote, ‘is virtually an attempt to take up
the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in Adam Smith’s moral
philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in the technique of the
production of wealth (quoted by Becker, 1971: 12). This was an accurate description of the way
Smith was read after Ricardo isolated what Schumpeter and others identified as the ‘analytic core’ of
economics. And it suggested, as Small knew, the substance of the ‘Menger-Schmoller debate,’ which
Small treated extensively in his Origins of Sociology.
There was, however, a serious flaw in his original conception. It was a flaw which he shared with
Ward and which he came quickly to acknowledge: If the social process was the outcome of many
concurrently operating causes, nothing was irrelevant to understanding what was going on. But if so,
didn’t that make sociology an imperialist inquiry, subsuming all the others? As Becker writes: ‘Who
would transact with such a monster: Who would welcome its meetings? Who would be comfortable
with its aims and findings, if these aims and findings were in explicit defiance of what one was doing
oneself?’ (Becker, 1971: 18).
There were some alternative possibilities. One had been realized by Richmond Mayo Smith, who
at Columbia had aligned ‘social science’ with demography and vital statistics, The titles of his two
main books are significant: Statistics and Sociology (1895) and Statistics and Economics (1899). Not
irrelevantly, Giddings had been invited to replace Mayo Smith while he was on leave, and in 1894,
President Seth Low created a chair in sociology which Giddings filled. Giddings seems to have been
deeply method conscious, getting from Lewe’s Problems of Life and Mind the positivist’s idea that laws
were but relations of ‘antecedents and consequences.’ He adopted Mill’s methods, and in the late nineties,
he discovered Mach, and Pearson’s new ‘correlation coefficient,’ tittle. These influences were developed
in his Inductive Sociology (1901), which called for a rigorous quantitative sociology. This found little
favour with Small, not surprisingly. On his view, and perceptively, Giddings vacillated between a
method which was ‘essentially Baconian ‘ and one with stressed ‘first principles,’ ‘a picturesque yoking
together of the scientific ox and the speculative ass’ (quoted by Bannister, 1978: 73).
Gradually, perhaps without conscious design, Small retreated from his original vision. Later, he
explained his imperialist enthusiasm as the ‘sin’ of ‘amateurish ambition.’ By 1924 he had arrived
at the following quite agreeable position: ‘ A sociologist, properly speaking, is a man [sic] whose
professional procedure consists in the discovery or analysis of categories of human group composition
or reaction and behavior, or in use of such categories as means of interpreting or controlling group
situations’ (Small, 1924: 348).

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