The Tradition of the Chicago School of Sociology

Luigi Tomasi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351881050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

The value of the book lies in its reassessment of the distinctive features of the Chicago School, of its contributions in the theoretical and methodological fields and of its influence on the growth of sociology throughout the world and in America in particular. The book pays particularly close attention to the eclectic nature of the research methods used by the Chicago sociologists as they sought to integrate subjective and objective aspects of human life. It demonstrates that this eclecticism formed an integral part of their theories but also emphasises that empirical observation, too, was important, although not as an end in itself. While, for example, they were working on the concepts of organization, marginality and interaction, they did not consider these as ends in themselves but as additions to the development of a more general theoretical approach. Often in the past, and wrongly, Chicago's theoretical contribution has been restricted to the urban sector. The book clearly and unequivocally reveals how the tendency to see the Chicago School as a 'theoretical' is the result of misinterpretation and of a failure to realize that, for the sociologists of the period, understanding the social dynamics of the city of Chicago was tantamount to interpreting the central tendencies of modern society itself. The book analyzes how empirical observation was important but not an end in itself. The Chicago School developed a profusion of sociological theories in many areas of inquiry and never opted for any one particular approach. The various essays in the book also make it clear that the School decisively contributed to the development of qualitative and quantitative techniques.

Part I
Theoretical Problematic

1
The Gothic foundation of Robert E. Park’s conception of race and culture¹

1 This essay draws on materials presented in Stanford M. Lyman, Militarism, Imperialism, and Racial Accommodation: An Analysis and Interpretation of the Early Writings of Robert E. Park (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991).

STANFORD M. LYMAN

1. Capitalism, imperialism, and Gothic sociology

Sociology - the discipline which Robert E. Park (1864–1944) had studied under the guidance of Georg Simmel - owes its origins to the Enlightenment, to the aftermath of the French Revolution, and to the epoch in which Reason began to flourish in the Occident. However, at the very time (ca. 1880–1914) that social science began to compartmentalize itself into separate disciplines in Europe and America, there also occurred a new “sleep of reason” in literature and journalism and in the style of the essay.² Out of this sleep came dreams and nightmares, the fantasies that metaphorized a Manichean world in which the positive claims of progress were but shrouds and shibboleths of a hidden atavism and banal evil that were together creeping over the modern world. The Gothic perspective seemed to capture this mood most clearly. Park’s early sociology drew on this outlook.

2 See Derek Jarrett, The Sleep of Reason: Fantasy and Reality from the Victorian Age to the First World War (New York: Harper and Row, 1989).

A Gothic sociology had been given an unintended impetus by Max Nordau’s (1849–1923) mordant recognition of its penetration into the social scientific and humanistic discourses.³ Influenced by Italy’s biosocial criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, Nordau sought to extend the latter’s studies of the constitutional degeneracy of “criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics” so that they would also apply to “authors and artists…, [those] degenerates in literature, music, and painting…[who] are revered by numerous admirers as creators of a new art, and heralds of the coming centuries”.⁴ Railing against the intellectual philosophies of the fin-de-siècle, Nordau sought to allay the desolate and debilitating fears that, he insisted, had “arisen in more highly-developed minds…” These apprehensions included “vague qualms of a Dusk of the Nations, in which all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world”.⁵ Nordau diagnosed these shadowy but powerful ideas of his age as symptoms of a biosocial degeneration that could be combatted by a conscious critical, religious, and somato-scientific intelligence.

3 Citations are from Max Nordau, Degeneration, popular edition, translated anonymously from the second German edition (London: William Heinemann, 1913). The first German edition appeared in 1892.

4 Nordau, Degeneration, pp. vii–viii.

5 Ibid., p. 2.

“The Gothic novel”, George E. Haggerty tells us, “finds its most fruitful mode of evocation in delineating an imaginative response to the objective world that is grounded in the emotions”.⁶ A Gothic sociology, by contrast, expresses itself in depicting the architectonic paradox of the supposedly objective world - viz., the natural pretematuralism that has contributed to its construction. Where Gothic fiction instructs its horrified readers in the unreal horrors attendant upon a realistically imagined fictional world, Gothic sociology teaches its readers about the actual horrors that produce and prevail in the social construction of modernity. Where Gothic literature offers “scientifically objective terminology and clearly empirical observation as a means of establishing intensely private, subjective experience”,⁷ Gothic sociology employs preternatural imagery and occult fantasy to evoke in the reader a moral understanding of practices in the actual world and to inspire a praxeological response to them. In what is an apt conclusion to a piece of his Gothic sociological writing, written for Booker T. Washington, whom he served as a ghost writer, Park, having detailed the atrocities committed by the native mercenaries employed to enforce Belgian King Leopold’s “humane and noble” Congo project, closes circumspectly: “Certainly the whole subject demands careful investigation and swift action”.⁸

6 George E. Haggerty, Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 17.

7 Haggerty, Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form, pp. 16–7.

8 Booker T. Washington, “Cruelty in the Congo Country”, Outlook 78 (October 8, 1904). Reprinted in Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock (eds.), The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol. 8: 1904–1906 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 90.

2. Robert Park’s Congo. A Gothic analysis of capitalist imperialism

“Everywhere in the nineteenth century”, observed Park (and Burgess) in 1921, “we find a double preoccupation with the past and with the future… The imagination of the age was intent on history; its conscience was intent on reform”.⁹ In 1905–6, when he wrote his four essays on the Congo, Park was working as an investigative reporter for the Congo Reform Association (CRA), whose American chapter he had helped to found, seeking to awaken the conscience of the public, to make it rise in opposition to Leopold’s oppression of the natives of the Congo. To succeed in his endeavour, Park employed a rhetoric that resonated with Gothic horror and with the demonological vampire’s war against Christianity. For Park, who would later attest to the importance of arousing non-rational beliefs as springs to action,¹⁰ employment of the fantastical imagery of the Gothic imagination, especially as that imagination pitted the forces of religiously inspired virtue against the powers of preternatural satanic evil, served the purpose for which his reformist writing was intended - to expose the dark and unconscionable activities of a real-life human vampire masquerading as a civilized and Christian monarch.

9 Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, third edition, revised (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 983. This work was originally published in 1921.

10 Park and Burgess, Introduction, pp. 796–811, 816–46, 970–79.

Park’s Gothic rhetoric is indicative of its threefold purpose: to remove from the imperial ruler of Belgium the mask of Christian piety with which he cloaked his nefarious crimes against Congolese humanity; to expose to the destructive rays of factual light the real-life vampire-king who literally and figuratively was sucking the life-blood out of the hapless natives of Central Africa; and, lastly, to show how the modern devices of the entire modern enterprise of capitalist imperialism worked. As a new figure on the land and seascapes of the world, the “strange, fantastic and ominous” Belgian monarch seemed to require a new kind of analysis: one that would be responsive to the conditions of his appearance and serve as a warning of its world-endangering consequences.

True to his task of ripping away the layers of masquerade that covered Leopold’s most horrific villainies, Park tears off Leopold’s veil of virtue, revealing the monarch’s - and by extension, modernity’s - true nature. With five bold strokes - first, with Leopold’s formation in 1877 of the International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Central Africa in 1877; second in 1881, by sponsoring Henry Morton Stanley’s explorations of the region through another cover group, The Society for Studies of the Upper Congo; third, by engineering his own appointment as international guardian of the neutral Congo territory at the Berlin conference of 1884; fourth, by taking advantage of loopholes in the international agreements made at the Brussels Antislavery Conference of 1890 to revoke free trade and levy import duties in the Congo; and, fifth, by supplanting Congolese trade with taxation and parcelling out the territory of the anomalously named Congo Free State “among stock companies, who pay fifty per cent of the profits to the state for the privilege of assessing and collecting these taxes”¹¹ - Park shows that Leopold had put himself at the head of “the most unique government on earth, a commercial monopoly farmed by an autocrat”.¹² Hidden behind the persona of a religious and progressive royal captain of industry, Leopold had succeeded in obtaining absolute and cruel sway over the Congolese people, and, as Park indicates, he had done so with the support of most of the heterogeneous elements - Catholic and Protestant, Germanic and Gallic - who made up the business-minded Kingdom of Belgium. And the dénouement of this drama of deviltry was an unexampled reign of ruin disguised as civilizational progress and justified by capitalist gains. “Leopold”, Park notes, “says that the results are civilization. The missionaries say they are hell. But everybody admits that they are profitable”.¹³

11 Robert E. Park, “A King in Business: Leopold II of Belgium, Autocrat of the Congo and International Broker”, Everybody’s Magazine, 15 (November, 1906), pp. 631–2.

12 Ibid., p. 632.

13 Ibid.

An unfeeling bureaucratic control over and a callous oppression of dependent peoples for the purpose of garnering ever-greater profits constitute the elementary forms of Gothic capitalist imperialism. Precisely by interposing a soulless corporate being - i.e., the firm - between themselves and their objectives, imperialist capitalists had imparted a banality to their evil practices that would both cloak and characterize their atrociousness. Belgium, Park points out, had become a country immersed in business in the early years of capitalist development. But, Park notes, when Leopold, who in the beginning was expected by the Powers merely to reign rather than rule, ensured that the Congo stocks earned enormous dividends on the Antwerp market, took the lead in the formation and aggrandizement of the country’s foreign concessions, and opened up Africa and Asia for Belgian manufactures, he virtually converted what would ordinarily be regarded as a pre-capitalist monarchical role into that of a business corporation’s general manager and turned his Continental subjects into his loyal national stockholders. The king had become both the personification and the chief executive officer of the imperial corporation. The cruel usurpation of the Congo people’s land, Park indicated, had been followed by a murderous exploitation of their labour. It was Park’s point that it was the supposedly progressive practices of modern civilization, justified by a wedding of commercialism to Christianity - and not Africa’s alleged heathenism or the atavistic practices attributed to the Congolese people - that had brought all this about. It was, Park pointed out, the civilized world, “shocked and startled into protest by tales of the atrocities of the Portuguese slave-trade along the Congo and in the adjacent territories” that had convoked the Brussels convention of 1876, and, he went on to show, it was his manipulation of that meeting that had started the wily Leopold on the course that led to his present position as a most heartless autocrat of the Congo.¹⁴

14 Robert E. Park, “The Terrible Story of the Congo”, Everybody’s Magazine 15 (December, 1906), pp. 763–4.

It is in the second essay, “The Terrible Story of the Congo”, that Park employs a full-blown Gothic discourse. The horrors committed in the name of Leopold’s version of civilization more than match those envisioned by the writers of macabre fiction. Pointing out the awful fate of a Congolese village that had failed to meet its State-imposed quota in taxes, rubber, or copal, Park observes, “The offending village is raided by the [King’s] soldiers. Men, women, and little children are either dragged aw...