Conclusion

 

 

Just like the Sociological Society before war, the Institute of Sociology was a temporary alliance between social anthropologists, political scientists, psychologists and sociologists from all shores who, as long as they remained deprived of their own academic discipline, found a haven within the ranks of marginalised sociologists: this was conspicuously the case with R. Marett and E. Barker who found the Sociological Review quite handful as an alternative platform for their own ideas in the 1930s, when the ‘orthodox’ academic institutions would not yet hear their voice, but who would later forget what they owed to the sociological movement itself.

 

Between 1911 and 1929, sociology remained an intellectually floating discipline itself, divided between an academic school around Leonard Hobhouse at the LSE and an extra-mural one around Patrick Geddes at the Sociological Society. Until the creation of the Institute in 1930, sociology suffered from the want of any clear boundaries, usually being associated with Geddesian propaganda or ‘political gibberish’.

 

In the 1930s, M. Ginsberg as the only full-time professor of sociology in Britain was the professional face of the discipline whereas A. Farquharson, as Secretary of the Institute, represented a considerable and active amateur force. Both joined with A. Carr-Saunders into a new Editorial Board in 1933 to successfully enforce a common scientific discipline into the pages of the Sociological Review. The peak of this cooperation was probably their participation to the International Congress of Geneva in October 1933, where for the first time British sociology seemed to be on a par with foreign sociologies.[1]

 

After 1935, however, despite its success at promoting a scientific version of sociology, the Institute failed to secure any further academic attachment. This was essentially due to the sociological movement lack of any institutional entry into the academic debate surrounding the emergence of social sciences at the time. Sociologists always suffered from a reputation of practicing an ‘unorthodox’ discipline, from the reluctance to acknowledge the existence of a ‘science’ of society and also from being mainly staffed by opportunist competitors coming from Political Science, Social Anthropology or Psychology.

 

The emergence of social anthropology countered any furtherance of sociology as an autonomous and scientific disciplines in the late 1930s, leaving the Institute with no choice but to move back to the country, where it had apparently long belonged in the mind of the well-established disciplines.

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Bibliography and references

 

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Private papers of Ernest Barker, Peterhouse College, Cambridge

Private papers of Morris Ginsberg and Leonard Hobhouse, London School of Economics

 

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