II. The quest for unity:
the foundation of the Institute of Sociology (1927-34)

 

 

By 1926, both the non-academic and academic trends had independently reached an academic standstill and had come to terms with the necessity of a cooperation between the philosophically arid sociology at the LSE and the non-academic scientific method. To convince academics that sociology was more than ‘mere propaganda’ or ‘nothing definitely scientific’, it was necessary to merge an abstract approach with a practical method into a scientific sociology. The institutional reconstruction of sociology was to follow its intellectual reconstruction after WWI: from an impossible intellectual compromise in 1911, sociologists moved towards a quest for institutional unity in the 1930s.

 

The original impetus came from V. Branford who despaired of the situation in which sociology was so ‘unfortunately split up’, as he wrote to Ginsberg, hinting for the first time at a possible cooperation with the LSE in 1927. Despite a common interest in sociology, the divergence between both schools had been sharpened in the 1920s due to their incompatible definition of it either as ‘the science of social institutions’ or as study of ’the evolution of cities and their regions’.[1]

 

When A. Farquharson, one of the most active members of the Sociological Review and proponents of the survey method, brought up the idea of a brand new cooperation with the LSE more directly to M. Ginsberg, he was hardly surprised by his conditions:

 

He answered with equal clarity and definition that they are not ready to do so unless a radical reorganisation, involving the retirement of Geddes and yourself [V. Branford] to purely honorary positions should take place.[2]

 

But if they did agree on cooperating with the LSE, Branford and Farquharson did not agree on Geddes’ retirement from the activities of the Sociological Society. As Farquharson repeated to Branford, this was necessary in order to sever the survey method away from its specifically Geddesian apparatus, and to promote it as the scientific method of sociology:

 

It is essential to sweep aside all this hackneyed treatment of the Place, Work Folk theory [by Geddes]. […] Many of our members tell us that they are thoroughly tired of the vain repetition of those terms and get no meaning out of them.[3]

 

This was all the more important since the cooperation scheme with the LSE could turn out to be particularly interesting for the Regional survey movement:

 

We have already secured some recognition as authorities on surveys in connection with the early stages of the [Sheffield] scheme. If we retain our hold, and negotiate a sound scheme of co-operation… we shall I think have taken a decisive step in securing our position with regard to the further development of the survey movement.[4]

 

A cooperation scheme was not only important for sociology itself but also for the promotion of the non-academic sociology as ‘authorities of the survey movement’, thanks to the academic endorsement provided by the London School of Economics. On behalf of Hobhouse, Ginsberg seemed inclined to support the refurbishment of the Sociological Society as ‘he further thought it would be good to extend and make known [their] survey activities, which he thinks useful and on lines which the LSE is unlikely, indeed unable to touch’, to comfort the academic position of sociology as a clearly scientific discipline.[5]

 

The cooperation scheme would satisfy both sides: it would provide academic credentials to the survey movement which, in return, would provide an opportunity to the LSE to secure a definite method for sociology. The idea that the amateur force’s activities could rely on the professional support of the discipline at the LSE, and vice versa, to yield a convincing sociology, was slowly gaining ground.

 

To achieve this promising plan, Alexander Farquharson dealt with tense negotiations between 1927 and 1930 inside the Sociological Society and outside with the LSE to found an Institute of Sociology.

 

P. Geddes, who then devoted much of his energy to the Collège des Ecossais he had founded in 1926 in Montpellier, accepted to retire as an Editor in Chief from the Sociological Review and be replaced by a new Editorial committee of 5 members (including Branford and Farquharson).[6]

 

Following this first step, V. Branford put forward an official proposal to amalgamate the three bodies existing under the LePlay House in London – the Sociological Trust, in charge of the finances, the Sociological Society and the LePlay House – into an Institute of Sociology in December 1927. The original constitution of the new Institute almost exactly retained the Sociological Society’s original aims, except that it could now assert the scientific value of the survey method and stress the distinct existence of a pure sociology – both working together towards a common scientific discipline:

 

1. Pure sociology – as distinct from applied – should retain the central position in the work of the Institute.

2. Surveys as now undertaken by LePlay House are definitely within the sociological field, and these should be continued and developed. […]

3. It is proposed to define the aim of the Institute as the promotion of Sociology, both pure and applied […] For the purpose of this Institute the science of sociology may be taken as : (a) the philosophical basis laid down by August Comte ; (b) the development of scientific method in application to social fact and tendency [which] may be called that of Regional Surveys. [7]

 

The new body was carefully named an Institute of Sociology to inspire continuity and respectability although interestingly the name British Institute of Sociology was dismissed at a subsequent meeting, on the ground that members thought that ‘the shorter the name of the Institute the better’. It is likely that the Institute implicitly did not feel it was in a position to claim for such a title yet, being still deprived of a national monopoly over sociology, not least of an international presence. The definition of sociology was still disputed between various schools, and its existence remained greatly indifferent to universities as Branford remarked in 1927. The University of Cambridge even neglected the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial’s offer to fund a chair of sociology in 1926, owing to a lack of serious interest in the discipline.[8]

 

Ironically, the cooperation scheme in the Institute was precipitated by the successive deaths of L. T. Hobhouse in June 1929 and V. Branford in June 1930. Morris Ginsberg was soon appointed to succeed Hobhouse at the Martin White chair of sociology, while A. Farquharson succeeded to Branford as Acting Editor of the Sociological Review. From 1930, there remained thus little opposition remained to the furtherance of an institutional cooperation between the official and the non-academic branches of sociology.

 

This excludes Geddes’ ultimate attempt to counter this move. As persona non grata from the Institute, he decided to found a new body misleadingly called the Le Play Society in January 1932, even though it no longer had anything to do with the original Le Play House. The news seemed to threaten the new plan at first by diverting membership from the new Institute, although his attempt quickly died out.[9]

 

Heading both the Sociological Review and the Institute as its Secretary, A. Farquharson was now in a position to approach R. R. Marett, then already a famous social anthropologist in Oxford, to ask him to become its President. The aim, he wrote, was ‘to help [them] to re-establish close relations with sociologists outside the Le Play School’.[10]

 

Apart from playing a symbolic role, the President was expected to deliver an annual address before the Institute. In return, the President would provide the Institute with his academic respectability and, more important, with his invaluable academic connections for the further inclusion of sociology into universities. Marett, whose interest in sociology possibly came from a remote acquaintance with the Durkheimians and more likely from a close friendship with A. Farquharson, kindly (albeit casually) accepted the proposition at the end of 1931.[11]

 

His presidency, although only lasting between 1931 and 1934, turned out to be absolutely crucial in helping the sociological movement to reach an institutional unity. However, his commitment to the non-academic sociologists seemed quite surprising at first. Indeed, one finds him quite distrustful of the survey method, wondering if the members of the Institute ‘were right in pinning their faith so exclusively on the method of Le Play [i.e. that the survey]’. Marett actually started his presidency by challenging the Institute ‘to see what they could make of [his] island of Jersey in their conjoint efforts to envisage it as a whole’, the result of which the Le Play House Press published in 1932.[12]

 

From this first test, he concluded that ‘whereas the old sociology was apt to lose itself in vague generalities, the new sociology of my friends of the Institute did its best to get down to the concrete, and … sought to do justice to the actual complexity of human life’. If not entirely satisfactory yet, at least the Survey method was novel in sociology: ‘I concluded that in principle their procedure was right enough’, he said, although it ‘still needed a certain delimitation of the subject’.[13]

 

On numerous occasions Marett seemed to pay particular attention to the definition of the subject, and claims, of sociology. What he was especially concerned with was ‘the mixing up of the scientific and practical interests’ in sociology, something he thought was not conscious enough among actual sociologists at the time. In sociology’s ongoing quest for admitted scientific principles, he was its ideal touchstone.[14]

 

As the President of the Institute of Sociology at the time, Marett repeatedly told Farquharson, for instance, that ‘we [in the Institute] don’t subscribe to a creed, and have to be very careful not to cooperate too closely with the social reformer, whose outlook is practical, not scientific, and therefore fundamentally different’. If sociology were to obtain a legitimate place as a science in academia – something he was committed to obtain – then it should avoid everything that was ‘tendentious or confessional’, against what had prevailed in the past under Hobhouse’s and Geddes’ leaderships in the 1920s.[15]

 

Against the vested interests of any school to impose its definition of sociology, ‘coming as I do to the whole thing from outside and without any bias’ as he told Farquharson, Marett managed to foster the unification of the sociological movement with an unexpected dedication, ‘merely trying to get everybody into line for the greater glory of our Institute’. In exchange for that, Marett continued to use the Sociological Review as an indirect platform for his own academic discipline, promoting some of his works in social anthropology in the sociological journal.[16]

 

With his academic connections, Marett was able to bring a dramatic support to Farquharson in his attempt to secure the cooperation of A. M. Carr-Saunders, Charles Booth professor of social science in Liverpool since 1927 who was also a successful author since the publication of his Population Problem in 1922, and of M. Ginsberg, now Martin White professor of sociology at the LSE, to promote sociology’s image as a rigorously scientific, academic work.[17]

 

Giving Farquharson an account of the situation, Marett unveiled the last obstacles remaining to their fuller cooperation:

 

I had an interesting talk the other night with Carr-Saunders. He seemed quite ready to help with the Institute if, and only if, it turned over a new leaf and ceased to be associated with the Branford and geddes outlook. What that was, he did not clearly say, but he evidently wanted something more scientific and less bound with a particular policy or creed. [18]

 

For the Liverpool trend, the Geddesian outlook on sociology was, as explained earlier, too much associated with town-planning propaganda to be considered worthy or reliable. At the LSE, Marett was met with a similar reserve but with more enthusiasm for cooperation too:

 

Something of the sort, too, was said to me at the LSE by Ginsberg and others when I tried to recruit them. They all expressed the greatest admiration for and confidence in you personally… and they would welcome our journal [The Sociological Review] being turned into an organ of fairly “pure” and entirely scientific sociology. Such an organ is needed and we have an established position that would cause serious thinkers to rally us. [19]

 

For the LSE, the main problem of sociology was that it was not regarded as pure enough, i.e. as entirely scientific, to be worthy of serious attention from academics. But in his answer to Marett, Farquharson suggested another interesting lead to account for the ongoing contempt for Branford and Geddes:

 

I am inclined to think that their emphatic way of presenting their views had a good deal to do with it. Apart from that, their science and scientific method were not orthodox, but this orthodoxy is a changing thing, is it not ? and I am afraid that I distrust it in science just as much as in other fields. [20]

 

As Farquharson suggested, perhaps it was their manners and not so much their methods which were unpalatable and declared unacademic. The fact that they neither embodied scientific nor perhaps political orthodoxy did not necessarily imply that their sociological work was not instructive in any way, though. The major problem of British sociologists since the foundation of the Sociological Society resurfaced: they did not embody academic orthodoxy in the eyes of the well-established academics.[21]

 

Although the reluctance to consider sociology as a serious discipline had to do with a widespread Idealist distrust of social sciences in universities, it was reinforced by a certain institutional snobbery prevailing against sociologists themselves. It was felt that their ranks were then mainly filled with ‘wealthy amateurs with careers elsewhere, academic deviants, or very old men’, indeed generally not issued from the most prestigious centres of British intellectual life.[22]

 

Owing to Marett’s patronage of sociology though, the fate of sociology slowly evolved towards more academic respectability. Scientific cooperation in sociology was effective since the successful setup of Monthly Discussion Meetings in London in 1930s, thus ‘providing an open platform for sociologists of all school of thought’. Their audience varied but could sometimes reach up to 200 people. The most important effect was to bring the Institute to the attention of many academics as a serious organisation, given the prestigious members who delivered speeches sometimes – R. R. Marett on ‘Fact and Value in Sociology’ or B. Malinowski and M. Ginsberg on Social Psychology in 1934, to name a few.[23]

 

The cooperation became even more formal in 1933 when a common Editorial Board was set up for the Sociological Review, whose rebirth as ‘a fully representative organ of sociology in Great Britain’ was felt long overdue, and now possible. After a difficult period for the Review under Geddes’ leadership in the 1920s, it seemed high time that a new constitution for the Review was put forward. This was done by February 1933, when the proposals for the future of the Sociological Review stated that

 

(a)     The Review should be re-established as the central and fully representative organ of Sociology in Great Britain.

(b)    It should in future open its pages to contribution by serious social students whatever their point of view or school or thought.

(c)     It should be placed under the editorial control of a Board whose names would secure confidence among both academic and non-academic students of Sociology. [24]

 

 

In the wake of Marett’s unfailing dedication to the Institute since 1931, a unity was finally found among sociologists since, the document concluded, ‘the Council of the Institute has asked Professor Morris Ginsberg (Professor of Sociology in the University of London) and Professor A. M. Carr-Saunders (Professor of Social Science in the University of Liverpool) to join with Mr Alexander Farquharson (the present Acting Editor) in forming the future Editorial Board’ for an initial period of three years from 1^st January 1934. [25]

 

The new policy of the Review started to bear fruits as soon as 1934. The first immediate result of this was that collective rules were agreed on, and applied, to all sociological works published among the Review. Neither Ginsberg nor Farquharson would now hesitate before recasting a paper which did not abide by the new editorial policy, arguing that the Review was now ‘a sociological rather than a biological journal’. These rules not only ensured reliable standards for academic works in sociology, but also managed room for the field of sociology, no longer defined as a mere residue of biology, geography or philosophy. The new editorial board even started to recruit some academics away from competing disciplines, such as L. Hogben in 1934 from social biology, who ensured Ginsberg he was quite keen ‘to cooperate with [them] in making the Sociological Review a journal of high academic status’.[26]

 

The new cooperation was probably most successful in fostering the common participation of the London School of Economics, the University of Liverpool and the Institute of Sociology, under the latter banner, to the International Congress of Sociology of Geneva in October 1933. Thanks to Farquharson, a serious ‘British participation’ for the Congress on ‘Predictions in Sociology’ emerged, as indicated in his draft scheme of papers in May, truly giving the impression that the Institute could now fully represented British sociology:

 

Scheme of Papers

A. General Papers

1.       The Conception of Social Development – Pr Morris Ginsberg

2.       Sociological Methods in Relation to the Discovery of Trends – Mr Alexander Farquharson

B. Special Papers

3.       Changes in Economic Structures

4.       Population Trends

5.       Changes in Family Life – Pr. Carr-Saunders

6.       The Future of Legal Institutions – Pr Maurice Amos

7.       Prediction in Political Institutions

8.       Business Forecasting

9.       The Future of Religion – Mr Christophe Dawson

10.    ? – Mr G. Spiller.[27]

 

A general conception (paper by Ginsberg), a particular method (paper by Farquharson) and problems to tackle (paper by Carr-Saunders): it seemed that sociology, by 1933, had found an unprecedented harmony, and merged all three initially severed components of a science (see p. 9). Sociology was not only evolving into a reliable discipline nationally into the Sociological Review but was increasingly taking definite traits internationally as British sociology.

 

With this new unity, sociology was no longer an intellectually floating discipline but could rely on safe – and scientific – discipline as enforced in the pages of the Sociological Review. It was no longer an institutionally floating discipline either, since it was gathered together around the Institute of Sociology and securing a membership of over 500 in 1934. It still remained surprisingly remote from universities, in which no expansion of sociology was noted. By 1934, after a tiresome quest of unity eventually budding into the Institute, sociologists still had to secure an institutional attachment.[28]