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I. An impossible compromise:
The rise and fall of the Sociological Society (1911–26)

 

 

It was not until the successful foundation of the Sociological Society in 1904 that sociology was thought to be of academic interest, i.e. entitled to an autonomous department in universities. For the first time a national Society brought together academics (and no longer amateurs) from various disciplines with the view to founding a common discipline, i.e. rules to follow for sociologists, and the boundaries of a new science. [1]

 

As the then newspapers’ opinion reflected, hopes for successful achievement were all but legitimate and the Society relied on a membership of close to 400. However, the initial harmony only lasted until 1907, and by 1911 a major crisis left the Society in a inchoate state. What happened in between? [2]

 

The main challenge the Society faced was to provide an answer to a very simple question: ‘what do we mean by sociology?’, as Hobhouse put it, if not simplistically ‘a body of truth which would illuminate social understanding’. A consensus prevailed over the necessity to tackle the issue ; but not yet over the answer: there started the disharmony. [3]

 

All social specialists among the Society were expected to start a dialogue from which a pure social science should arise. The first challenge of the Sociological Society was ‘the organisation of the several specialisms into an adequate working system’ under ‘the unifying influence of a common idea or ideal’ : to ensure the effective co-operation of all disciplines which do not share a common language. That was all the more a challenge since it appeared that ‘there was at the time [when the Sociological Society was founded] no unitary tradition of sociological investigation ; no pre-emptive definition of the subject matter of sociology ; no common way of proceeding’. [4]

 

Although a consensus was found under the unanimous belief in man natural and biological evolution, no consensus prevailed over the definition of sociology  as a method, and as a practice. Three schools were actually competing to carry over the definition of academic sociology in the Society: [5]

 

- The Eugenic School was led and founded by Francis Galton, an eminent statistician at the time. Eugenics stressed the importance of heredity, through the use of the statistical tool. As he defined it, ‘Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race ; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage’, with an explicit focus on the improvement of the ‘stock’ of population. Institutionally, the Eugenic school was trying to secure ‘the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important study’ and its commitment to the Society was essentially strategic. [6]

 

- The Regional and Civics School was led by Patrick Geddes, a professor of Botany at the University of Dundee, who had founded the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh in 1889 to promote ‘civic sociology’. His school stressed the importance of geography and cities, rather than heredity, through the Regional Survey method:

 

This department of sociological studies [Civics] should evidently be… concrete in treatment… It is important that the methods advocated for the systematic study of cities… be not merely the product of the study, but rather be those which may be acquired in course of local observation and practical effort. My problem is thus to… crystallize from the experience of any moderately-travelled observer of varied interests ; so that his observation… should gradually develop towards an orderly Regional Survey. […] Applied Sociology… may be defined as the application of Social Survey to Social Service. [7]

 

Institutionally, Geddes’ hope was to use the Sociological Society to sensitize public opinion to local observations. He developed a greater interest in town planning and ‘civic betterment’ than in the foundation of an academic discipline, leaving most of the theoretical work to his closest friend V. Branford, a Scottish banker who had helped founding the Sociological Society in 1903 with the hope it would serve him best. [8]

 

- Opposed to them was the Ethical School, spearheaded by the work of the social philosopher Leonard Hobhouse, who although originally educated in Oxford had turned to journalism for a while in the 1890s. Against both latter interpretations which emphasised the role of the natural (heredity) and physical (geography) environment as shaping individuals, Hobhouse put a particular emphasis on individuals and wrote that ‘at no stage of human evolution could it possibly be correct to say that the physical environment of itself determines the social structure. […] It is man with his desires, his knowledge, his powers of organization… to which the physical environment sets a problem’. His interpretation of sociology was entirely different both in methods (philosophy v. survey or statistics) and in conception (individual v. nature). Institutionally, Hobhouse seems to have been committed to the idea of an academic, rather than practical, sociology. [9]

 

Each school’s interest and methods diverged: Eugenics expected to become an autonomous science whereas Geddes hoped to enlighten the public outside universities ; as for Hobhouse, he argued that sociology was to be academic and philosophical. The Sociological Society was the result of a temporary alliance between the three trends of town-planners, eugenics and academics, each with their own interests and incompatible definition of sociology. [10]

 

Because of the permanent competition between schools of sociologists, under the scrutiny of academic members from competing disciplines whose interest was to avoid too wide a definition for sociology, if not to discard its possibility, the Sociological Society collapsed unsurprisingly rapidly, leaving sociology in an appalling state by the end of WWI. [11]

 

In 1907, Eugenics secured enough interest to claim an independent branch of study from the Society and so Francis Galton’s movements left it to found the Eugenics Education Society on an independent basis. After three years of peaceful coexistence into ‘a common ground on which workers from all fields and schools [could] profitably meet, contributing their results towards a fuller Social Philosophy’, the departure seemed to intensify conflicts inside the Society between the two branches remaining, that of Geddes and that of Hobhouse. But it also deprived sociology from a significant institutional asset, given that Eugenics was the only trend gathering the academic support of upper-class influential academics. [12]

 

In spite of this, hopes for a stronger, academic sociology still seemed high when the same year a Department of Sociology was created in the University of London thanks to an endowment from J. Martin White, the man who had also funded the Society since 1904. Leonard Hobhouse secured the chair of Sociology created there, the first one of its kind in Britain, and then took the editorship of the newly founded successor to the Sociological Papers, the Sociological Review, in 1908. Although sociology had lost a significant institutional asset with the departure of Eugenicists in 1907, it seemed to secure another possibly decisive point of entry into academia at the LSE.

 

The result of this first crisis was to leave the Sociological Society more or less under the sole influence of Patrick Geddes’ Civic School of Sociology. Hobhouse, whilst still in connection with it through the editorship of The Sociological Review, was increasingly dedicated to his work at the LSE. In 1911, partly because of overwork and partly too, as Branford wrote it in his obituary, ‘on account of criticisms that… his general line of editorial policy tended to depart from the scope and aims of the Society’, the resignation of Hobhouse from the editorship of the Review seemed to entrench the division existing between an academic school of sociology at the LSE and a non-academic Society gathered around P. Geddes and V. Branford, both interested in giving a definition to sociology. [13]

 

This crisis put a final halt to what the Society had originally hoped to be: a neutral common ground working towards an academic discipline. The original aims were impossible to reach in the actual state, and, if not a general integrated discipline, at least a peaceful coexistence between incompatible definitions of sociology was to be expected in the immediate future. [14]

 

But then Hobhouse’s initial question remained unanswered: what do we mean by sociology? By 1911, no scientific practice agreed on as being Sociology in Britain had originated from the confrontation of competing definitions in the Sociological Society.

 

Not that this was a failure. Each school carried part of a wider definition of sociology: Eugenicists were aware of concrete problems among the population, whereas the Regional Survey/Civics school was providing a practical method, the survey. Finally, the Ethical school was focused on the conceptual discussion necessary to found a general sociology. All these attempts were converging towards the same goal but found it still impossible to strike an intellectual compromise between incompatible modes of practicing sociology and of defining its field. A theory, a method and problems and yet by 1914, sociology was left without a discipline. [15]

 

After WWI, the Sociological Society could no longer claim to be representative of sociology in Britain, for all major trends now diverged between the Department of Social Science in Liverpool, the Department of Sociology in London and the Sociological Society. Dr. Rivers, then a renown psychologist in Oxford [16] , took stock of the inchoate state in which sociology was left in 1918 and sketched out the sociologists’ program for the years to come to counter it: to establish a full-fledged science on a clear method and definite principles.

 

It is now our task to establish methods and principles by means of which these facts may be used to build up one of those systematized and coherent bodies of knowledge which we call science. How little has been done towards the construction of such an edifice is shown by the widely divergent directions of the attempts which have been made to this end and by the absence of generally accepted principles comparable with those upon which other science are based. [17]

 

According to him, sociologists would only be able to become academics if they found a common unity besides their ‘widely divergent directions’, therefore a scientific consensus over their discipline. This was important because, he added, ‘this absence [of agreed principles] is so conspicuous that it has been possible, not merely to deny the existence of a science of sociology, but even to deny the possibility of such existence’. [18]

 

The absence of a clearly agreed scientific basis among the profession was certainly not different from the absence of academic development: in order to penetrate universities, sociology had to overcome internal dissensions about its principles and methods first. In the 1920s, it was with this in mind that each ‘school’ tried – but failed – to devise a scientific basis for sociology independently.

 

The Sociological Society did manage to sustain a distant, but persisting, interest within universities thanks to Branford’s connections especially. As he wrote to Pr J. Arthur Thomson, who as a Professor of Human Anatomy had campaigned for the creation of a Diploma in anthropology in Oxford, in 1922 ‘the Sociological Society has just been holding a week-end conference at New College, Oxford, to discuss the co-relation of social sciences. We had papers or speeches from many of the ‘big wigs’ – Hobhouse, Marett, MacKinder, Graham Wallas, A. J. Carlyle, Lynton Myres, etc.’. He added, ‘the scientific result was rather negative, but I think the Conference brought home to most of those there the importance of co-relation and the character of the Problem’. [19]

 

No result was obvious, but the co-operation between social sciences (Marett was a social anthropologist, MacKinder a geography, Wallas a psychologist, etc.) and the academic interest in sociology was maintained in universities. V. Branford was aware that the academic interest in sociology was increasingly remote, especially because of Geddes’ failure to promote the Sociological Society as a scientific organisation.

 

Thus, he gave quite a different account of the same conference to J. M. White, as he was aware of the apparent failure of the Sociological Society to fulfil its original purposes, i.e. to promote correlation between social sciences: ‘in the minds of the representative philosophical and specialised workers who attended it [the Oxford conference], there is no correlation.’ Branford wrote that the main problem was that by 1922 – that is, almost 20 years after the original foundation – sociology remained a floating discipline divided between competing schools, giving the impression that the Society stood for nothing definitely scientific:

 

After a decade of varying editorship under Slaughter, Hobhouse, and Radcliffe, the [Sociological] Review came to stand for nothing but a tedious bundle of essays […] ; and the membership of the Society fell from nearly 500 … down to 200. The job of building up again is far more difficult since we have against us the dead weight of all those years of failure and futility, when the Review stood for nothing definitely scientific. [20]

 

Sociology was not yet a science in 1922 and would remain so if the absence of common principles and methods prevailed. It seemed obvious, even among the Geddesians, that the Society had stopped being a common ground open to all sociologists. Its association with Geddes especially undermined the Society’s original academic respectability and turned it into mere propaganda, as Farquharson repeated to Branford:

 

The chief reason for the present weakness of the Sociological Society is that no reputable student, outside the ranks of the Geddesians, will take any active part in its work, and this state of things cannot be remedied by further Geddesian propaganda. [21]

 

Geddes’ incapacity to abide by the boundaries and conventions of academia was notorious and the association of sociology with his unconventional ‘style’ did probably not help its furtherance as an academic subject. Its reputation of being ‘a quasi-philosophic discourse which leaves nothing in the mind but shadowy points of view and hazy abstraction’ and his forays into educational projects in London, summer schools for workers in Edinburgh and urban planning in India added to the colourful, but academically unpalatable, figure. Branford and Geddes were seen as mavericks, whose elliptic careers prior to turning to sociology, the former as a banker and the latter as a biologist, seemed particularly suspicious to well-established milieus. This probably in turn undermined the claims of their discipline for academic respectability. [22]

 

R. R. Marett, one of the few academics directly connected with the Geddesians, later wrote about him that ‘Victor Branford… was too warm-hearted and eager to reform the world to be quite a typical man of science’. His reserves were not only personal but also scientific as he wondered ‘whether they were right in pinning their faith so exclusively on the method of Le Play’, i.e. the Survey Method. [23]

 

The definition that A. Farquharson gave of the Regional Survey as a presumably scientific method at the time seemed rather convincing indeed:

 

[1)] Sociology, like all other sciences, must be based on factual observations, methodically made ; and these must be systematically arranged by the aid of verifiable hypotheses.

 

2) The student’s observations may best begin with field investigation of the geographic facts of his own region. […] Thus from physical geography we reach the complementary perspective of social geography, in other words of concrete sociology. From this ‘Regional Survey’ the student passes on to a comparative study of Nation & Empire... He thus passes from sciences to art, by a national transition from pure to applied sociology, from social survey to social service. [24]

 

But the Survey Method suffered from one major shortcoming, according to R. Worms’ criticism of the method: it tended to accumulate masses of facts without determining their scientific importance for research:

 

The two methods introduced by Le Play, the Monograph and the Survey [then practiced by the Geddesians],… far from being in themselves sufficient to constitute social science, do not solve its and initial problem, i.e. to determine the important facts to which research should be directed. Far from doing this, they even tend, by accumulating masses of facts, to increase the difficulty of the problem. [25]

 

The conclusion that ‘the author of a monograph depends on the statistician to arrange his facts in the order of their importance’ was all the more distasteful to the Geddesians since it had tried its best ‘to throw off that yoke of statistical and abstract philosophy which the past and present generation of sociologists has too much inherited from the pre-revolutionary tradition’. [26]

 

What the Survey Method lacked to become a sociological discipline of its own was an academic outlook, but also a statistical criterion to identify real problems. Without the statistical tool, the survey was on its own an essential but powerless method which failed to grasp the ‘complexity of human life’. As Marett would sum up about the inter-war Geddesians: ‘they came, they saw, and, if they did not exactly conquer, it was merely because the universe invariably prove[d] too big to lick’ for their survey method, which remained all but an academically acknowledged practice. [27]

 

The only academically acknowledged form of sociology was the one at the London School of Economics’ department of sociology, which represented the ‘professional’ face of the discipline. Independently from the Regional Survey Movement, the ‘official sociology’ led by Leonard Hobhouse was adopting a more abstract, theoretical approach based on philosophy with a conscious view to creating a general sociology. [28]

 

At the LSE, Hobhouse was assisted by Edward Westermarck, a Finnish fieldworker who had secured a part-time lectureship in Ethnology in 1904, and by a young philosopher from Lithuania, Morris Ginsberg, who became his part-time assistant in 1914. The success of his joint publication with Hobhouse of The Material Culture of the Simpler Peoples in 1915 had established their names as official references in sociology. In 1924, Ginsberg successfully applied to a readership in sociology created at the LSE in 1924, although the school did not secure a great deal of interest from students, with merely three dozens of students studying sociology as their main subject in the 1930s for the whole of Britain. [29]

 

Hobhouse never managed to gather a genuine ‘school’ of pupils around him, and thus to spread the subject into other universities. Hobhouse had had a non typical career for an academic educated as a philosopher in Oxford, which left him with few close academic connections he could use to further his topic. Finally, his leadership was admittedly too poor to be of any asset to press sociology academically by diverting students away from competing disciplines, an asset A. Marshall for instance had also used to force the emergence of new discipline (political economics) in reluctant Cambridge. [30]

 

Just like Geddes, Hobhouse had turned to sociology quite late after a long career, a surprising move that looked suspicious in the academia. His connections with the Labour Party were so notorious that he was considered a ‘state-socialist’ by his philosophical opponents – something that only increased suspicion towards his work after WWI. [31]

 

As Hobhouse was allegedly constantly ‘pulled back from philosophy by his excursions into politics’, according to E. Barker, a Professor of Political Theory in Cambridge, his attempt at founding a general, pure sociology was often disregarded academically as more characteristic of politicians than of men of science:

 

Hobhouse was not the first to seek for social justice, or to be torn… between Philosophy and politics. […] If we call these things sociology, then Hobhouse … was the ardent professor of a subject which is old in Human history. If we look at the matter in this way, we need not greatly concern ourselves with any technical examination of the scientific sense of sociology. It is just what an eager soul makes of its own passionate interest in the tangled problems of humanity. [32]

 

The alleged excursions of sociology into politics undermined its scientific claims. Sociology, in Barker’s opinion and probably in the general academic opinion, was the individual man’s passionate quest for social justice, not a serious or unbiased science. The suspicion that sociology was actually supporting socialism, through Hobhouse’s discussion of the Elements of Social Justice in 1921, for instance, was reinforced by the Sociological Society’s own claims that sociology should be called socialism. Due to this association with socialism, sociology’s claims were simply reduced to political commonsense. [33]

 

Hobhouse himself actually acknowledged many dissatisfactions with a definition of sociology he was unable to clarify and presumably sever from politics, and it seems that he even indicated some thought of resigning the chair of sociology existing in Britain on that ground. It was not until his landmark article on Sociology defining his topic in 1916, that, according to V. Branford, Hobhouse finally hit a sane foundation for his sociology. [34]

 

Hobhouse’s struggle to secure the academic autonomy of his field at the LSE continued well into the 1920s, against the growing claims of competing disciplines such as social psychology and social biology. In 1926 he considered with some reluctance W. Beveridge’s proposals to create a chair in social psychology and in social biology, as he thought this would threaten the precarious boundaries of his sociology:

 

I am afraid most biologists would simply give biology in general with a very faint and grudging recognition of… any branch of sociology as barely having a claim to a place in science. They think… that social progress is not a matter of education but of gametes… As to Psychology, I have taught it at the School all these years. […] Sociology as developed by the School is the attempt to correlate these things – the psychological and biological conditions of human society… to form a Social Philosophy. Our methods and definition of subjects are largely the result of the experience of nearly 20 years. [35]

 

Against the threat of seeing sociology reduced to a mere residue gathering together whatever biology and psychology had not already appropriated between them at the LSE, Hobhouse could only argue that, albeit still unclear, his academic definition had at least evinced an unprecedented continuity that had lasted for almost 20 years since 1907. The argument was probably not convincing enough for the direction of the school, which later founded both chairs to the detriment of the department of sociology, Ginsberg being replace by T. Marshall as a Reader in Sociology in 1930. [36]

 

Hobhouse, just like P. Geddes, failed to provide universities with a scientific sociology, distinct from competing disciplines such as biology and psychology and avoiding to fall into the ‘metaphysical’ trap that would bring sociology ‘back into the ivory tower’ of philosophy. The latter was precisely the cause of his failure to expand sociology as an academic subject, according to Harper’s analysis of the LSE’s sociology in 1933:

 

In the very… comprehensiveness of such a conception of sociology lies, perhaps, one of the explanations why it has failed to expand as an academic subject in England. Minimizing rather than accentuating its differences from the older sciences and concentrating on its more philosophic and integrative functions it [the definition of sociology under Hobhouse & Ginsberg] has not succeeded in gaining for itself any wide acceptance as a distinct scientific technique. […] Students undertake no ‘projects’ and do no ‘field work’. [37]

 

And field work was precisely what made sociology so successful in America, according to him. General (or pure) sociology as defined by Hobhouse still needed a specific sociology, i.e. a practical method to enquire about reality and to gather data. Theory and practice were both needed. This appeared to Morris Ginsberg clearly in the late 1920s, as he foresaw the difficulties of general sociology:

 

It is extremely difficult… to separate form from matter at all clearly […] I doubt, therefore, whether sociology in this [abstractional] sense can ever be an independent science. It may have use as one method among others, but its conclusions will always have to be tested by appeal to the concrete facts of social life, and this surely necessitates a sociology in the second sense [as a practice]. [38]

 

To become an independent science, sociology did not only need a specific subject-matter, i.e. ‘the science of institutions’ as Ginsberg defined it in the same article, but also a specific method to deal with it concretely. The survey seemed particularly apt for that.

 

By 1929, Branford would thus play down the divergence remaining between both schools. These ‘two schools, an academic one, and an extra-mural one represented by the Sociological Society’ had, according to him, ‘the same large view and… differ essentially only in method. The academic school… which pursues the science on the lines of Hobhouse proceeds mainly by an abstract and dialectical method’ adhering to the tradition of moral philosophy, while the extramural school ‘represented by the Sociological Society… proceeds more by the method of observation in the concrete (and open air observation so far as possible)’. [39]

 

There was thus no reason why they should not complement one another, all the more given the persistent academic indifference towards sociology:

 

At the best we are few and of no great strength confronting a resistant world, which is anti-sociological when it is not unsociological [in universities] ; and leavened by a slender margin of thinkers, writers and publicists to whom we can appeal. By long years of labour we have increased that margin, I fear, by only an insignificant percentage. In view of the work still to do, we need surely more than ever to show a united front. […] Can we not all work together now as we did at the beginning of the movement? [40]