Sociology and Scientism

The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880-1940

Robert C. Bannister

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780807843277, 9780807817339
• eBook ISBN: 9781469616230
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

During the 1920s a new generation of American sociologists tried to make their discipline more objective by adopting the methodology of the natural sciences. Robert Bannister provides the first comprehensive account of the emergence of this “objectivism” within the matrix of the evolutionism of Lester Ward and other founders of American sociology.

Objectivism meant confining inquiry to the observable externals of social behavior and quantifying the results. Although objectivism was a marked departure from the theoretical and reformist sociology of the prewar years, and caused often-fierce intergenerational struggle, sociological objectivism had roots deep in prewar sociology.

Objectivism first surfaced in the work of sociology’s “second generation,” the most prominent members of which completed their graduate work prior to World War I. It gradually took shape in what may be termed “realist” and “nominalist” variants, the first represented by Luther Lee Bernard and the second by William F. Ogburn and F. Stuart Chapin. For Bernard, a scientific sociology was radical, prescribing absolute standards for social policy. For Ogburn and Chapin, it was essentially statistical and advisory in the sense that experts would concern themselves exclusively with means rather than ends.

Although the objectivists differed among themselves, they together precipitated battles within the American Sociological Society during the 1930s that challenged the monopoly of the Chicago School, paving the way for the informal alliance of Parsonian theorists and a new generation of quantifiers that dominated the profession throughout the 1950s. By shedding new light on the careers of Ward and the other founders and by providing original accounts of the careers of the leading objectivists, Bannister presents a unique look at the course of sociology before and after World War I. He puts theory formation in an institutional, ideological, and biographical setting, and thus offers an unparalleled look at the formation of a modern academic profession.

1
AN AMBIGUOUS LEGACY

The fact is that [Ward] makes on almost everybody the impression that his sociology is essentially archeologic and static, whereas in his own mind it is essentially dynamic.
Albion Small, 1903

1

Although Lester Ward is the acknowledged founder of American sociology, he set the discipline two different agendas. In the first agenda, the starting point for sociological inquiry is “feeling,” because this alone produces social change. Society being a product of the interplay of social forces, sociology is more than “fact-gathering”: its goal is a radical “sociocracy,” not the palliatives that pass for social reform.¹ In the second agenda, feeling is inseparable from the functions (structures) to which it gives rise. And because dynamic laws can “only be expounded from empirical data of a statical nature,” social science, after all, consists in the collection and classification of “statistical facts.” By the turn of the century, Ward’s dynamic sociology had given way to a division of labor between pure and applied branches of the discipline—the first totally unconcerned with “what society ought to be,” and the second more appropriately the province of social technicians than of sociologists.²

Lester Ward has had several historical lives, and most accounts have fastened on the first rather than the second of his sociologies. During the 1930s he emerged as the hero of a tradition that was both humanist and reformist. In the 1950s, he was both criticized for being too speculative and praised for anticipating the hypothetico-deductive method in science. During the 1960s, he was celebrated for reviving the Enlightenment program of a “man-centered” social science. Although some sixties critics indeed condemned his calls for “expertise” and “social control,” no one has explored the relationship between his two apparently contradictory views of the nature and goals of the discipline.³

A reexamination of Ward’s career with reference to the emergence of objectivism focuses precisely on the antipathies in his thought. Was sociology to study feelings and activities (functions), or institutions and customs (structures)? Was Ward’s sociology “dynamic,” as he himself claimed, or “static,” as Albion Small and others finally saw it? Did “scientific method” mandate classification, statistical analysis, or something else?

An attempt to answer these questions requires a close look at the development of Ward’s thought from the 1860s until his death in 1913, with special reference to his conceptions of “science” and “social science.” From the start, Ward was torn between a radical vision of desire unimpeded by social restraint and a deep—if half-conscious—recognition of the destructive potential of such impulses in the absence of order, organization, and authority. In Dynamic Sociology (1883), the first dominated: individuals crave pleasure for its own sake, and rightly so; feeling, although directed by intellect and checked by nature, is finally subordinate to neither; sociology is dynamic because it is concerned with this creative force. Ward thus opposed positivism, as he understood the term, and defined science in ways that anticipated similar efforts eight decades later.

But Dynamic Sociology was a special product of time and place, in effect combining the Common Sense realism of Sir William Hamilton and British sensationalist psychology with Comte and Spencer, Kantianism, and Lamarckian evolutionism—all with a garnish of German Naturphilosophie. So viewed, Ward’s early career constitutes a pivotal chapter in the breakdown of the Scottish realism and related Baconian view of science that had dominated American intellectual life since the 1830s.

Despite the majesty of the effort, however, troubling questions would not go away. How did mind evolve from nonmind? Would not anarchic “feeling” make society impossible? Was this doctrine an open invitation to the untutored impulses of agitators? By the 1890s, these questions were impossible to ignore. In his later work, accordingly, Ward stressed social structure and social control. He then found himself, willy-nilly, examining the “statical” aspects of society, while at the same time prescribing a “pure” sociology that cared for neither human intentions nor satisfactions.

Because Ward was primarily remembered for Dynamic Sociology, these later developments in his thought had little direct influence on younger objectivists. But his distinction between “pure” and “applied” sociology was nonetheless significant: the first was an early version of the value-free ideal; the second, an anticipation of the methods and assumptions behind the objectivists’ call for statistical studies. So viewed, Ward’s career provides a necessary starting point for the study of the social, institutional, and ideological factors that shaped American sociology in its earliest decades.

2

Born in Joliet, Illinois, Lester Frank Ward (1839-1913) never forgot his humble origins. Since the arrival of the first Wards in Boston in the 1630s, the family had pushed westward in search of riches that never quite materialized. Ward’s father, Justus, was an itinerant mechanic and millwright who moved from New Hampshire to western New York and finally to the Midwest, where he built locks for the ill-fated Illinois and Michigan canal until the coming of the railroad doomed the venture in 1855. Ward’s mother, Silence Rolph, the daughter of a New York clergyman of modest literary attainments, was sensitive, cultivated, and intensely religious. Each left young Ward a quite different legacy. From his father, he inherited a vision of nature tamed to human purpose: the end of sociology was the constructive channeling of potentially destructive social forces.⁴ From his mother, he received an emotional nature, and a belief in the primacy of feeling. “I love so intensely,” he once confessed, “I am like a woman.”⁵

Neither parent, however, left him much in the way of family affection. When Justus Ward died in 1857, Lester apparently broke with his mother, and he rarely mentioned her again. When he later petitioned for a job in Washington, he described himself as an orphan, despite the fact that she was still living. “Pride of ancestry,” he observed on one occasion, “is a mark of degeneracy.” With no past worth mentioning, he sought a future in science, where family background, a classical education, and the right schools were only marginally important.⁶

But what was “science”? Ward’s earliest thoughts on the subject came not in a laboratory, but less directly: in school teaching, in a torrid romance, and in reading a philosophical text—experiences that together brought him face to face with the problems of impulse and reason, freedom and order, that were to occupy him for the remainder of his career.

The teaching was first. During 1860-61 Ward taught school to finance his education at Susquehanna Institute in rural Pennsylvania. There he had his first taste of the Common School creed, now three decades old and showing signs of age. In theory, common school reform combined high idealism, scientific pedagogy, and state controls: teacher training and state accreditation were means to the ideal of universal education. In practice, however, it introduced its own stultifying rituals.⁷

Ward knew both the ideal and the reality. “What great end can a small school of common pupils in an obscure country place bring about?” he once asked his students. The answer was not to gain status or fame, but to be a part of the “grand theme” of universal education, and ultimately to achieve a oneness with all humanity.⁸ But things looked different when he sat for his accreditation examination, or tried to introduce the latest innovations into the classroom. The “people” and the reformers were hopelessly at odds, he told his classmates in one of several sardonic essays on the subject in the college newspaper. In the popular view, the Common School “literati,” armed with their “catalogue of scientific innovations,” were figures of mirth. The “ideal” teacher was one who stuck to the textbook, and wasted no time giving explanations or introducing collateral material. If students preferred lengthier explanations, so much the worse for them. “Learn to think. Pshaw.” “Successful” teachers must have strong rods, a powerful physical frame, and a capacity for anger “to overcome their chickenhearted sympathies during the process of flagellation.”⁹

Although Ward intended this irony as a defense of “scientific innovations,” his tone suggested that he was aware that science and popular opinion could well be at odds. Universal education remained the bedrock of his thought; but the Common School creed clearly needed a sounder basis in theory. This basis his sociology would eventually provide.

Ward’s courtship of Lizzie Vought, the daughter of a local shoemaker, taught lessons less cerebral but no less important. This time the tension was not between democracy and science, but between feeling and reason. His feeling knew no bounds. Chronicling their romance in his diary, Ward strained for words to express his joy. “O bliss! O love! O passion pure, sweet and profound.” But emotion was not enough. Feeling was feminine: like woman, it needed control. The quickening of “mental machinery,” he wrote in one diary entry, raised Victor Hugo’s Marius “from an effeminate and listless youth” to an “enthusiast for principle.” “The manly authority of science,” he explained in a different context, was the antidote to the “effeminate incredulity” that accepts ideas merely on authority.¹⁰

Passion was also risky at a time when birth control was still in the handicraft stage. Consumed by his love, Ward turned for guidance to Hollick’s Physiology, a birth-control manual of the day. After a night together that produced new intimacy (“all that we did, I shall not tell here, but it was all very sweet and loving and nothing infamous,” he wrote), he decided to show Lizzie the Hollick. “How much of it she read I do not know, but she liked it,” he confessed. “After that we became more familiar.” So also, throughout his life, he preached that intellect and passion together increase happiness.¹¹

The Common Sense realism of Sir William Hamilton structured these half-formed conceptions.¹² From Hamilton’s Lectures on Metaphysics Ward learned that the human mind consisted of intellect, will, and the emotions. He especially liked Hamilton’s concept of will, and his image of the human mind as active and striving. From Hamilton he later borrowed the term “conation” (from the Latin conare, to endeavor) to describe “the efforts which organisms put forth in seeking the satisfaction of their desires.” “By this [faculty, man] is enabled to comprehend the truth of Nature and by this he is compelled to admire the sublime, investigate the unknown and wonder at the marvellous,” he wrote in one college essay.¹³

Ward revealed a potential conflict when he referred to nature as both “law” and “unknown.” In one sense, nature displayed “a symmetry, a consistency, and a perfection upon which man may as securely rely as upon the successions of day and night.” But in a second sense, nature and man ultimately were shrouded in mystery: “The three great Kingdoms of Nature [Man, Earth, Heavens] . . . fill the contemplative soul with awe and astonishment,” he wrote. In face of this mystery, humanity would “willingly submit the question [of the nature of things] to the ruler of Eternity.” Nature as perfect symmetry and predictable law; nature as unchartable mystery. The first led to a mechanistic positivism, the second to the quest for “deeper and more general truths” of nature and society. Although this contradiction had profound implications for Ward’s later view of social science, for the moment he ignored the problem.¹⁴

3

The Civil War began a new stage in Ward’s intellectual apprenticeship. After serving in the Union army, and being seriously wounded at Chancellorsville, he joined the many veterans seeking jobs in Washington. Out of work, with a wife and young child to support, he petitioned Lincoln for a clerkship, and was finally rewarded with a position in the auditor’s office of the treasury, the beginning of his career in the federal science bureaucracy. In 1867 he received a B.A. from Columbian University (later George Washington), and four years later a law degree. In 1870, he helped launch the Iconoclast, a Freethought paper he edited for the next two years. In these years he also first encountered positivism, and in the process he began to develop his own ideas of what social science was and was not.

For Ward, and for his associates at the Iconoclast, “positivism” was initially and primarily a weapon against traditional Christianity. Applying the term ubiquitously to thinkers from Comte to Huxley, he lauded this “rising school,” while blasting away at the rock of ages. But Ward’s attitude toward religion was actually more complicated than these attacks suggest. In his early teens, he had apparently undergone a conversion experience. In his college essays he referred freely to “the Creator.” In Washington Ward and his wife attended church regularly, shopping among denominations as suited their fancy. In the end they settled, not for an atheistic positivism, but for Unitarianism—as a compromise between sentiment and reason, tradition and science, similar to that which Ward would seek in his sociology.¹⁵

Philosophically, positivism forced the issue between idealism and empiricism, an issue that Hamilton conveniently blurred. Hamilton claimed that we somehow have direct awareness of the underlying “noumena,” despite the fact that knowledge is relative to phenomena. In maintaining this position, the Scot (like Herbert Spencer after him) had apparently managed to take both sides in the battle between idealism and empiricism: experience was the source of all knowledge, but one could “sense” something beyond it.¹⁶

For Ward, as for many of his contemporaries, John Stuart Mill upset this comfortable compromise. In An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, and in other essays that Ward read in the late 1860s, Mill insisted that Hamilton’s relativism led straight to the very positivism he pretended to eschew. Ward wanted to believe Mill for reasons that had little to do with metaphysics, notably his views on women’s rights. He also shared Mill’s view that happiness was the rightful end of human activity, and, more importantly, the qualification that this end could be achieved only indirectly.¹⁷ But he also feared and distrusted the skeptical implications of Mill’s empiricism. Contrary to the Hamilton he remembered, Mill’s Hamilton seemed to him unfortunately to limit knowledge to “facts” narrowly conceived, and so to deny the active mind.¹⁸

Ward, also like many of his contemporaries, found a way out of this impasse in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In statements such as “Every effect has a cause,” Kant argued, mind imposes order (the “categories”) upon experience, but is itself dependent upon that experience. Without categories such as causation, experience is literally impossible, because our co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Sociology and Scientism
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 AN AMBIGUOUS LEGACY
• 2 THE SOCIAL ORGANISM
• 3 FROM TELOS TO TECHNIQUE
• 4 FIRST PRINCIPLES
• 5 PLURALISTIC BEHAVIORISM
• 6 UP FROM METAPHYSICS
• 7 THE AUTHORITY OF FACT
• 8 AN OBJECTIVE STANDARD
• 9 MISBEHAVIORISM
• 10 THE PATRICIAN AS TECHNICIAN
• 11 A BETTER CODE
• 12 A PILE OF KNOWLEDGE
• 13 REHEARSAL FOR REBELLION
• 14 DEMOCRACY
• 15 DEFEAT
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX