Introduction: Early Intellectual History and Definitions of ‘Sociology’
If this book has any single overall message, it is that early sociology, as taught and practised at the London School of Economics, failed this test of Plato; its early practitioners did not set down any sort of marker to be followed by most of what followed and UK sociology of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries is hardly any sort of successor of LSE’s approach to the subject one hundred years earlier. LSE was, even then, merely one of several players in the story of early UK sociology, but, if one is willing to use a contemporary understanding of ‘higher education’, as education leading to a conventional university degree, it is indeed true that LSE may claim to have offered the first taught course in sociology in UK higher education, even if it was only a small part of that degree’s overall syllabus. Uninformed posterity can be remiss in its memory and construction of its past; there had been several, less well-known, earlier sociology courses in other environments, some affiliated to higher-education institutions, and LSE’s course was certainly not the ‘point zero’ of British sociology or of its teaching.
That there had long been a subject called sociology hardly deserves mention. The Oxford English Dictionary records the word ‘sociology’ in English-language usage as early as 1842 to describe in English one part of Auguste Comte’s scientific agenda and, by the 1850s, the word was current in intellectual circles. ‘Sociologist’ is also recorded in English in 1843, though was apparently little used till the later nineteenth-century prominence of Herbert Spencer. Thus, Edvard Westermarck and Leonard Hobhouse, LSE’s first sociology professors, came very late to the game.
Figures in the Scottish Enlightenment such as Adam Ferguson would be considered important predecessors of a formal British sociology but, if one is seeking the first to whom the word ‘sociologist’ might legitimately be retrospectively applied, a promising candidate would be Harriet Martineau. One of her numerous biographers (Hoecker-Drysdale 1991) even called her the ‘first woman sociologist’ and a strong case may be made for calling her the first British sociologist, and certainly the first English one. Martineau was descended from Huguenot origins, was from a Unitarian family, and is now probably best known as the author of the two-volume Society in America (Martineau 1837). This is far from being a simple travelogue, as were so many writings of her time about the United States. It has claims instead to be considered a serious work of sociology, informed by her views of how to study a society as expressed in her book, How to observe morals and manners (Martineau 1838). Martineau was a great believer in practices such as participant observation and informal interviewing of a wide range of informants that would now be considered standard methodological approaches. Moreover, she was the author who brought the views of Auguste Comte, ‘the first sociologist’, to British readers in her translation, The positive philosophy of Auguste Comte (Martineau 1853).
There was no shortage of works in the nineteenth century including or using the word ‘sociology’. Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive was published between 1830 and 1842 and his Système de politique positive between 1851 and 1854, with the former translated into English by Martineau, its second edition being published in 1875. Herbert Spencer’s The study of sociology appeared in 1873 and his The principles of sociology between 1876 and 1882. Charles Letourneau’s La sociologie d’après l’ethnographie was published in 1880, appearing in an English translation only a year later; Letourneau is described by one author (Maus 1980) as a supporter of Spencer’s theory of evolution, although his text is far from universally laudatory about Spencer. Ludwig Gumplowicz’s Grundriβ der Soziologie appeared in Vienna in 1885. In 1886 the Belgian follower of Proudhon, Guillaume De Greef, published his Introduction à la sociologie in Brussels, setting out his scientific case for a hierarchical classification of social phenomena. In the United States Lester Ward’s Dynamic sociology appeared first in 1883 and his Pure sociology in 1903, Franklin Henry Giddings’ The principles of sociology was published in 1896; Albion Small’s General sociology was published in 1905 after a series of articles on ‘the scope of sociology’ in the American Journal of Sociology between 1900 and 1904. Other works, not using the word ‘sociology’ in their titles but about sociology as conceived by many contemporaries, also appeared, such as Benjamin Kidd’s Social evolution, which was published in 1894 and was highly popular in its time.1
Already by the early twentieth century there was a substantial and vigorous international intellectual tradition in sociology, and one that certainly included some developments in Britain. Although there were more observational and anthropological approaches to the subject, the dominant paradigm remained Comtean or evolutionary. Definitions of sociology given in generalist works of reference of the later nineteenth century focus on positivism, perhaps unsurprisingly in the French case. An 1875 definition in Larousse’s Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle begins:2
The Grand dictionnaire’s newly written definition in its later Supplément 2 is even more Comtean, including what must be a very early reference to Émile Durkheim. A significant passage translates:The word sociology is new and has been introduced by the positivist school but the matter [la chose] itself is not new because sociology is the science of society; now, society is humankind itself, and it was a long time ago that human beings began to be interested in themselves. Sociology is identified, at least in part, with the science that certain writers have called the philosophy of history and others a general and philosophical history . (Larousse, Tome 14, 1875, p. 806)
Definitions of sociology in standard German encyclopaedias of the late nineteenth century could be equally Comtean. For example:It [the word ‘sociology’] is used in preference to any other name by all those who hold that social laws are as necessary as physical laws. Those who prefer it and call themselves sociologists see in a nation a natural product similar to an organism or to a plant that is born, grows and develops by virtue of an internal necessity. It is critical of the theorists of classical political science who consider society as a human creation, a product of skill and of contemplation and who assimilate those machines that human beings made and all whose parts are assembled according to a preconceived plan. (Larousse, Tome 17, 1886,3 p. 1852)
[Sociology is the] study of society, but not in the sense of the statistical but of the ‘physical’, or rather the physiology of human society. One such version under that name was first laid down by A[uguste] Comte and after him by H[erbert] Spencer. According to both, sociology formed the pinnacle of a hierarchy constructed by them of positivist sciences in which each one comprised the basis of the following one… . Sociology concerns itself with the individual in so far as he socialized with like others and with living humanity that as such possesses its own special laws of living and development. (Meyer, vol. 14, 1889, p. 1046)
Also to be mentioned, if only for completeness, is Benjamin Kidd’s essay on ‘Sociology’, the first-ever entry of the subject in the Encyclopædia Britannica, appearing in the Tenth Edition; his definition began with the biological analogy:
Kidd wrote a more expanded entry on ‘Sociology’ for the Eleventh Edition of the Britannica, concluding with the grandiloquent claim:In the most inclusive sense sociology may be defined as the science of human society, in the same manner that biology may be taken to imply the science of life. (Kidd 1902, vol. 32, p. 692)
For it is thus not the human mind that is consciously constructing the social process in evolution; it is the social process that is constructing the human mind in evolution. This is the ultimate fact that raises sociology to its true position as the master science. (Kidd 1911, vol. 25, p. 331)
These examples give an indication of the intellectual definition and extent of sociology at the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth; despite the Comtean emphasis, they do not wholly agree on any single theoretical approach or even subject matter, but all in their different ways were regarded at the time as being sociology. As I have described elsewhere (Husbands 2014, pp. 158–62), there were other manifestations of soci...