Chicago Sociology, by Jean-Michel Chapoulie, translated by by Caroline Wazer (introduction)

CHICAGO SOCIOLOGY

JEAN-MICHEL CHAPOULIE FOREWORD BY WILLIAM KORNBLUM

Introduction

We say “How did sociology start?” instead of asking what were those men doing, those particular men in that historic setting in the world they had inherited, but which they were also creating by interaction with one another.

—Everett C. Hughes1

There was, to be true, a considerable unity of thought between such figures as Thomas, Park, Burgess, Faris and, later, Wirth, Hughes, and myself.

But there were many, many threads of difference that are ignored by those scholars who are seeking to develop the idea of a Chicago sociology.

—Herbert Blumer2

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ho were the sociologists collectively referred to as the “Chicago tradition” (or “school”)? What did they discover, and how did they work? How were their analyses linked to the social, political, and intellectual environments in which they carried out their research? What do they have in common with successive generations of researchers in a tradition that proclaims a degree of continuity between the end of the previous century and the beginning of the 1960s? And, more generally, what can we learn about the achievements of social science, and about its knowledge, by examining more than half a century of one of the great traditions in empirical research?

These are the questions to which this work attempts to offer some degree of response.

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They were not, per se, the questions that I had in mind when I began this book.

Convinced that contemporary readers would have difficulty understanding the spirit of the studies conducted by the Chicago sociologists, I initially intended to offer an historically informed general presentation of them. Of the dozen or so works dedicated to this subject, some were excellent—notably the biography of Robert Park by Fred Matthews3 and the book by Martin Bulmer on the institutional conditions of the development of sociological research at the University of Chicago.4 But it seemed to me that a presentation of this strain of research would benefit from expanding more broadly than Martin Bulmer’s work does upon the fieldwork that lies at the heart of Chicago sociology (and that was much less well-known in France at the time, fifteen years ago, than it was in Great Britain).

It also seemed to me that the importance of the Chicago sociologists’ legacy through the 1960s, as well as the advantages of a broader temporal perspective, demanded the inclusion of the research generated over the course of the 1940s and 1950s by the group led by Everett Hughes and Herbert Blumer.

Like any research project, this one has metamorphosed over the course of its execution. One reason for this has been the extent of accessible documentary resources. In effect, I rapidly discovered the richness of available works on the history of the social sciences in the United States, as well as the works on social history that use the city of Chicago as their setting, or one of their settings.

Since the beginning of the 1970s, the history of the social sciences has ceased to be a domain reserved only for researchers linked to their specific fields. Researchers with the objective of neither identifying their own predecessors within the discipline, nor passing judgment as to whether specific research was “good”—i.e., achieved posterity or ought to have done so—or “bad,” have collected evidence about the recent past of the social sciences. Following a historical approach, they have exploited the archives of academic institutions and foundations. Among other merits that they owe to the diversity of the available archives, these works draw attention to the diverse dimensions of the contexts in which social science research has been generated. They also expand, by means of the comparisons that they suggest, the list of questions that can be posed regarding a group of researchers. Certain works deal with aspects that interest me directly: for example, the reaction against Darwinism in the social sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century, the politics of foundation funding, the relations between the University of Chicago and the city, and the extensions of research carried out at General Electric’s Hawthorne factory. Because they approach these questions from a different line of inquiry than mine, including these works could help to prevent the errors of perspective to which the exclusive focus on a particular object inevitably gives rise.

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In addition to these works on the history of the social sciences, we can add another precious documentary source: a wealth of autobiographies and biographies about the researchers, even those who achieved only moderate name recognition. This reflects the breadth of the audience for English-language publishing as much as it does the relative success of the disciplines of the social sciences. Thanks to these biographies and the personal archives of scholars that have been preserved in diverse repositories, it is frequently possible to complement testimonies with the activities of the different researchers that I have studied, and sometimes even to gain access to the subjective dimension of their own perspectives on their activities.

Works of social history about Chicago offer, among other things, resources that can help us to understand the contexts in which these researchers worked.

For the period from 1880 to 1960, certainly, no other city served as the setting for so many studies on such a large range of subjects: the labor movement; interethnic relationships; local political life and municipal associations; philanthropic foundations and cultural institutions; the university; and the biographies of philanthropist-businessmen, eminent women, or other actors in local life. Not all studies likely to be illuminating for the analysis of sociology were centered around Chicago, but the importance of this city in the United States between 1880 and 1960 has given it an essential place in the history of the innovations and transformations that affected American society. There are certainly also more material explanations for the large number of works set at least partially in Chicago, including the importance of the city’s universities and cultural institutions and the richness of its archives (linked here to financial wealth), as well as the political dynamic of the publishing activity carried out by the University of Chicago Press over the course of sixty years.

Curiously, the resources offered by historical studies of Chicago have been used only rarely in previous work on the sociologists of this city.5 Nobody has, for example, sought to integrate the work of sociologists of past eras with the later work of historians studying the same subjects (using their own documentary resources and their own methods). This approach, however, shines an exterior light on sociological works, which can help us to understand the researchers’ methods. One such discovery that surprised me (which, in retrospective, seems naive), regarding W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant, was that the lasting success of a sociological study can be completely independent from the merits of its starting point.

The possibility of relatively quickly achieving a precise understanding of the different dimensions of the social environment of the sociologists of Chicago has, surely, contributed to drawing my attention toward evaluations of sociological research from outside the discipline. For an observer who is not from North

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American culture and who has the advantage of a half-century’s remove, the similarities and differences between the sociological analyses and public debates of the same epoch, or from the period in which their intellectual formation was carried out, are certainly more apparent than they would be for an observer from the same culture and era. I was also driven to consider the nature of intellectual accomplishments in the social sciences, or, rather, the relationship between practical investigations that take place in a historical moment and scholarly analyses.

In order to explore this question, a diversified ensemble of studies certainly constitutes a more appropriate corpus than does the body of work of a single author.

In order to connect the content of social science works with the context of their production, limiting the history of Chicago sociology to the narrow framework within which it is generally inscribed—that of the establishment of sociology as a discipline—seems insufficient. Moreover, due to the absence of the critical spirit that is part of the historical profession, this type of history can lead to numerous factual errors repeated in book after book. To give only a few examples, the University of Chicago was not the first in the United States to open a sociology department; Thomas was not a sociologist in terms of his intellectual references (or his training), but rather an anthropologist; the idea of a collective undertaking of research on the city was not an original idea of Park’s, but the adaptation to a favorable climate of an idea regarding the rural world tested elsewhere; the intellectual differences among sociologists, social reformers, and social workers were not large in 1920, but grew between 1900 and the mid-1930s, the result of an effort among sociologists to distance themselves from their rivals; the decline of the Chicago Department of Sociology following Park’s retirement was not a sign of the triumph of quantitative sociology over more qualitative approaches, nor the simple result of a “conspiracy” of opponents of the political dominance Chicago held over the American Sociological Association; and so on.

To be sure, most inaccuracies in the history of sociology concern minor points.6 Their accumulation, however, leads to a sort of garbled history, the barely concealed objective of which is to celebrate the hero-founders of sociology or part thereof, to restore glorious ancestors who have been supplanted by usurpers, to discover disciples or deserving successors. This was also, in a less academic form, one of the objectives of the Chicago Irregulars, the group of young researchers, trained for the most part at Berkeley, who were devoted to fieldwork—which is to say an ethnographic approach—in reaction to what seemed to them, at the beginning of the 1970s, the orthodoxy of American sociology (see chapter 6).

Its predetermined finality, however, is not the only failing of the type of internal history through which Chicago sociology is, in part, known today. By resorting, fundamentally, to native categories currently in use in the discipline—for example,

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the opposition between qualitative and quantitative methods and to rifts that have manifested between intellectual orientations, such as interactionism and functionalism—this type of history omits an essential factor: the critical explanation of the categories of thought, judgment, and action that structured the activities of social science researchers during the period in which they worked. One must recall that an appreciable part of intellectual work is writing against “adversaries”—some work of the previous era, or some trendy mode of thought—who, while they are not always designated as such, are crucial elements that structure the generation of new work. Rendering these adversaries visible, and more generally reconstituting the different elements of the intellectual, institutional, and socio-political context in which these works were generated, constitutes a necessary stage in approaching an exact and nuanced understanding of all social science research endeavors.

This type of understanding necessitates the adoption of a properly historical approach, which is to say, crucially, not only the establishment of institutional or biographical facts, but also the rendering explicit of categories of thought in action, and the connotations of actions, in their historical contexts. We should, however, set aside, if only temporarily, value judgments of research based on the standards of today’s social sciences, since these judgments can only render unknowable the meaning that these works held in their own time. Similarly, we should not pay attention only to successful works, but also to those that did not make it past a draft or hypothetical stage, and we should take note of the apparent inconsistencies of practice of research and intellectual positions, of individual idiosyncrasies, and of the particular circumstances in which they produced research. In brief, we must pay attention to the full array of social arrangements, even relatively contingent ones, into which were inscribed the collective actions that produced the research in question. Finally, and perhaps most difficult, we must reveal not only the characteristics positively possessed by intellectual works or actions, but also those characteristics that they lacked but could have had in other times or places.

Supported by this approach, this book aims to offer a history of the development of sociological research at the University of Chicago centered around its relationships with diverse environments—a history with an aim toward understanding the uniqueness of this research rather than the designation and the celebration of its posterity (or rather, in this case, one of its posterities) in current-day sociology. I shall now present some of the initial choices that determined the orientation of the book.

First of all, it is necessary to observe that the limits that have come to define the appellation “Chicago sociologists” result from a lengthy initiative undertaken by their would-be successors, their adversaries, and observers who were more or less detached but reliant upon the intellectual interests established in the period in

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which they themselves worked. Any a priori definition of the subject—whether it was based on previous work or on the application of an objective criterion, such as the nature of one’s affiliation with the Chicago sociology department or some aspect of the intellectual content of one’s work—largely predetermines the results of the investigation. The a priori adoption of such a definition relies inevitably on a univocal characterization based on a small number of attributes of Chicago sociologists that are explicitly or tacitly considered essential (some aspect of their intellectual orientation, some documentary method used, some relationship with the founders, etc.). To the contrary, it is as a concrete group—or, more exactly, as a series of concrete groups—that I here consider the Chicago sociologists. I have therefore used many different definitions of these groups, according to the issue under discussion.

The activities of these concrete groups constitute the center of this study, along with their relationships with other groups through analogous activities, sometimes outside the academic world or in the context of other social science disciplines. Among these activities, a central—but not exclusive—place has been accorded to those which gave rise to texts in the social sciences. The functions of teaching have not been neglected, as they could contribute to the common orientation of a group of contemporary works of research. The activities of these concrete groups have been positioned in relation with their antecedents (rather than their successors), as have the texts that frequently resulted from these activities.

At least in part, these antecedents—other texts and perspectives—are implicit, and a reconstruction of the universe in which this intellectual work originated often retains a somewhat hypothetical character.

The prominence of works and their ultimate diffusion within an area of study have not been considered here as anything more than one characteristic among others, and a place has been accorded to unpublished texts and works that never had more than a private audience, as long as their examination elucidates an important aspect of this collective enterprise.

In a general sense, the production of scholarship is subject to a certain number of constraints that contribute to determining its shape. The simplest of these are, of course, material constraints (which always have an intellectual counterpart), especially those that pertain to financing possibilities and access to the field of inquiry. Another group of constraints corresponds to the institutional conditions of the production of scholarship, which involve both interdisciplinary conflicts over fields of study and internal power structures. (A typical example in this case is the production of dissertations in a department in which prevails an antagonism between or among those in charge of directing them—an antagonism that often tends to have a character that is at once methodological and theoretical, both personal and political.)

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Next, we must consider the more concrete aspects of scholarly production: documentary resources and ways of handling resources that were practical in the places and times considered. Employing the methodological transformations of research in sociology as an analytical guideline allows us to free ourselves from part of the ordinary and considerably vague reasoning that drives the history of ideas in its traditional form that has until recently constituted what passed for the history of sociology, as Martin Bulmer and Jennifer Platt have already shown.7 The analysis of the intellectual constraints that conditioned the production of scholarship, such as we see in the history of ideas in its traditional sense, in fact suffers from serious failings. We cannot accept without critical examination the patterns of reasoning used in this analysis, now or in the past, to qualify the affiliations between scholarly works or between researchers. The borrowing of one author’s ideas by another is never an immediately obvious operation, even for the individuals implicated. Proclaimed or denied relationships between “master” and student, citations (or the absence thereof ) in publications, and avowed intentions are all essentially ambiguous, since they are used strategically by the interested parties: the claiming and denying of affiliations constitute, as we know, instruments of acquisition of scientific credit in the field here considered.

Finally, we must pay attention to the constraints on scholarly production that result from argumentative rhetoric and writing styles permissible within a given period and group. These relate to documentary sources as well as to the patterns of reasoning admitted into the group, but are not limited to these.

Some of the main features of the description of the Chicago tradition found in this book follow from this quick characterization of the line of questioning that I have adopted. The limitation of the subject in fact draws more attention to its heterogeneity than to its homogeneity. The devotees (and the detractors) of the Chicago School will undoubtedly be chagrined not to find in these works the intellectual unity that they expect. I can only defend this as the price of restricting the corpus of works taken into account, when historical comprehension would instead necessitate that we expand that corpus. The role of contingencies in the production of intellectual work that concrete study inevitably makes apparent will do similar damage to the convictions of those who always hope to reduce things to a formula or paradigm, condensed to a small number of principles. One could justly consider that the emphasis placed on the heterogeneity of works is the inevitable consequence of the adoption of a true historical approach, which is to say comparable to that which is implemented, or should be, in studying education, religion, or work.

This point of view also leads to a detachment from the studied case that is perhaps greater than would be expected when dealing with works that have gained and

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maintained substantial reputations. I certainly never would have decided to write this book if I did not feel a sympathy for at least part of this intellectual enterprise.

This sympathy aroused my initial interest, but, after this preliminary stage, the historical investigation was inevitably caught up in a dialectic between the familiar and the strange—the position of the researcher to his object oscillated between that of a Martian and that of a convert, to paraphrase Fred Davis, one of the heirs of the tradition considered here.8 In a historical approach, it is the comprehension of the “facts” most alien to the observer that most deserves his attention and requires his best efforts, and it is also here that the researcher can expect a widening of his perspective. The same applies, I believe, for the reader, and I have therefore frequently emphasized those characteristics of the intellectual works which are no longer part of the common culture of researchers in the social sciences.

Detailed familiarity with the relevant currents in research—especially those of the final generation whose works are examined here—implies, however, that my adopted approach is probably not very different from that which these researchers themselves would certainly have employed had they studied the same subject.

Parts of the epigraphs at the beginning of this chapter underline this similarity, which we should not hide.

This book is composed of two parts. The first outlines the history of the development of researchers situated around the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago chronologically, from the foundation of the university to the beginning of the 1960s. The emphasis here is placed on institutional aspects as well as the layers of sociopolitical and intellectual background that, for this period, prove relevant. The second part consists of three essays, partially independent from each other, that are dedicated to domains of research—work, delinquency, and the relationships between race and culture—and one further essay on the careers and research of two sociologists who found themselves at the frontiers of the Chicago tradition and the academic world. Throughout, brief supplementary discourses are set in a visually distinct style, indented from the left margin, in order not to distract the reader from the main argument.

For this second edition, I have substantially revised chapter 2 on W. I. Thomas, which suffered from insufficient interpretive rigor, and added discussions in chapters 1 and 3, sometimes to account for analyses published after the first edition, and sometimes to specify what I have uncovered through later investigations. Certain justifications for these critical additions are presented in an appendix, Remarks on Research Methods. I have also corrected, in all chapters, reference errors and some clumsy phrasing. Not having conducted new archival research, I have preserved the references that correspond to the state in which I consulted them, which sometimes differs from their current state in cases where they have been supplemented and their classifications modified.

“Jean-Michel Chapoulie is one of France’s most distinguished scholars of the history of sociology. I am sure that Chicago Sociology will be a classic contribution, read by all those who care about the Chicago school tradition. Chapoulie’s afterword on how to write the history of sociology is essential in its understanding that all such accounts must begin with self-reflection.”

G A R Y A L A N F I N E , Northwestern University

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nown for its pioneering studies of urban life, immigration, and criminality using the “city as laboratory,” the so-called Chicago school of sociology has been a dominant presence in American social science since it emerged around the University of Chicago in the early decades of the twentieth century. Canonical figures such as Robert Park, Everett Hughes, Howard S. Becker, and Erving Goffman established foundational principles of how to conduct social research.

This groundbreaking book on the development and influence of the Chicago tradition, first published in 2001, became an immediate classic in France, where Chicago sociology has exerted significant appeal. Drawing on deep archival research and interviews with members of the tradition, Jean-Michel Chapoulie interrogates evidence with a historian’s eye and recognizes the profound effects that culture, society, and the economy have on individuals and institutions. Now revised and available for the first time in English, Chicago Sociology provides a unique perspective on the history of social science in the twentieth century. A foreword by William Kornblum places Chapoulie’s work in context and addresses recent critical challenges to the Chicago school and its origins.

J E A N - M I C H E L C H A P O U L I E is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

W I L L I A M K O R N B L U M is professor of sociology at the City University of New York. He is coauthor of International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 Train (Columbia, 2017).

C A R O L I N E W A Z E R is a writer, translator, and editor living in New York City.

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