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157 Introduction Considering that the Rockefeller-endowed University of Chicago looms large in part 2 and that the focus herein remains on the initially porous boundary between sociology and anthropology, there is less need to elaborate on the intellectual and institutional bases of early American sociology than there was for the compressed tour of pre-Columbia history of American anthropology I undertook at the start of part 1. Anthropologists sometimes claim Heródotos as “the father of anthropology .” In that the comparative morphology of Aristotle’s Politics is less prescriptive and more systematic than the Republic and Laws of his teacher , Plato, I’m surprised that American sociologists—at least from Albion Small (1926), longtime chair of the Chicago department and editor of the American Journal of Sociology, through functionalist-turned-Marxist Alvin Gouldner (1965)—root study of the logos of society in the very prescriptive and proscriptive Plato rather than in the more descriptivist Aristotle (though it should seem “natural” to me in that my own introduction to the history of sociopolitical theory began with The Republic). Both the words sociologie and positivisme were coined by the French antimetaphysician Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who promoted a Newtonian , verifiable science of society and social change, especially the changes wrought violently by the French Revolution’s totalizing central state’s assault on “organic” social institutions and lifeways, in particular (see Nisbet 1943, 1966). Alexis de Tocqueville and Émile Durkheim brought a comparative perspective to bear on societies, social institutions , and social change (evolution for Comte and Durkheim, continuities even across la revolution for Tocqueville). The founders of sociology programs in U.S. institutions were more directly influenced by analogies from biological to social evolution than were Tocqueville and Comte, both of whom were dead before The Origin of Species was published in 1859. 158 Part 2 Introduction The first president of the American Sociological Society (1895), the “American Aristotle” (Chugerman 1939), Lester Frank Ward, was the resident evolutionary theorist for Major John Wesley Powell and his Bureau of American Ethnology. As noted in the introduction to part 1, Ward offered an alternative to the “social Darwinism” of Herbert Spencer while pioneering notions of social control. The founder of the sociology program at Yale—who also was the first person to teach a course called “sociology,” one focusing on the program of Comte and the claims of Spencer—William Graham Sumner “married evolutionary theory to economic [classic] 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” (Calhoun 2007:5). Mores, Sumner’s most enduring notion, were for Sumner “beliefs and practices held to be not merely convenient but good and/or true” (5), which in German Romantic guise was the particular “genius ” of a particular people (Völk). Sumner is also credited with coining ethnocentrism, which he saw as a “natural” rejection of the ways of other peoples by those enculturated in a worldview and particular lifeways. The founder of the sociology program at Columbia, Franklin Giddings , “staking a position between Ward and Sumner, emphasized that mere gregariousness among animals was not the same as [purposive] human association because it was not mediated by speech and consciousness of kind” (9). Giddings was hired to provide a scientific background for education of social workers and for social reform(s). Though hoping that knowledge about society would be applied to bettering social arrangements, Giddings and Small, like Franz Boas, were scientistic in clearing out competition in researching and theorizing culture and society. Giddings (and his prize student, William F. Ogburn) championed quantitative work on, among others, immigrants (on whom research was also done by Boas [1903, 1912]). As Sica (2007:718) wrote of Small, “Despite his own theological background and his passionate belief that sociology should ultimately serve some meliorative societal purpose, he was married to the idea of ‘objectivity’ as the distinguishing trait of ‘true’ sociological research.” Small (1916:748) wrote of the American sociological “movement” in terms of the “demand for objectivity in social science which found voice in Adam Smith” (emphasis in original). (Giddings’s “consciousness of kind” was rooted in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759], conceptions from which also foreshad- [3.236.18.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:26 GMT) Part 2 Introduction 159 owed some of Sumner’s ideas [not least the operations of the market’s “invisible hand”]. As Calhoun (2007:2) noted, “Adam Ferguson...