Abstract
There has been much recent debate within sociology regarding academic versus applied approaches, as well as how to integrate these during a career. Sociologists interested in such issues might find both inspiration and an exemplar in social psychologist Gordon W. Allport. Well known for his leadership role in both personality and psychological social psychology, Allport has still not gained widespread recognition for his sociological contributions, especially his “public sociology.” As an undergraduate, Allport embraced the tradition of “social ethics” as taught at Harvard, which focused on social problems and social policy, and on individual engagement. Over the first two decades of a half-century career, Allport adapted to his “hard science” organizational and professional contexts and earned a tenured position primarily by building up a naturalistic psychology. But beginning in the early 1940s, he increasingly re-engaged with social ethics and overt reform efforts, with a focus on the social psychology and sociology of rumor, prejudice and racial and religious discrimination. Though a key architect of the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations, he came to see that project as excessively value-neutral and he lobbied to revive a clear ethical commitment. Fittingly, Allport ended his career as the first incumbent of the Richard Clarke Cabot Professorship of Social Ethics. In this way, he bridged naturalistic psychology, sociology and social ethics in order to create an integral science oriented toward social justice.
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Notes
All quotations from the Gordon Allport Papers and the James Ford Papers are courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
Fortunately for Murray, he did not need academic tenure, as he came from a wealthy family. Conant also softened his decision by agreeing to keep Murray at Harvard on “soft money” from foundations. Following wartime service, Murray returned to Harvard as a member of the newly created Department of Social Relations, and he contributed a chapter to the programmatic volume, Toward A General Theory of Action, edited by Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1951). More recently Murray gained notoriety for two very different reasons. The first was the revelation of his long-term love affair with Cristiana Morgan, who had worked at the Harvard Psychological Clinic and who developed the Thematic Apperception Test along with Murray in 1935 (see F. G. Robinson, Love’s Story Told, Harvard University Press 1992). The other reason was Murray’s involvement in controversial human-subject experiments in the late 1950s and early 1960s at Harvard, one of which included a student named Ted Kaczynski who later become a terrorist known as the “Unabomber” (see Alston Chase, Harvard and the Unabomber, New York: Norton, 2003).
It is very interesting that Allport was willing to align himself with Sorokin, whose major work, Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937) had not been well received by much of the sociological profession in the United States. Sorokin had likewise lost favor at Harvard under the administration of President James B. Conant and Dean Paul Buck. At the department level, in 1944, newly appointed chair Talcott Parsons actually proposed moving Sorokin into an alternative position as a philosopher of history. In 1948 Sorokin broke completely with the earlier naturalistic and “hard science” approach that built his reputation in the 1920s by publishing The Reconstruction of Humanity, a programmatic work that called for an urgent altruization of society. At the same time, he introduced an undergraduate elective on “interindividual and intergroup solidarity” which he taught for several years. In this way, Sorokin began building a public sociology that departed from the mainstream of his discipline, eliciting criticisms that he had abandoned science for prophecy and utopianism.
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University for the recent sabbatical leave during which archival research for this article was conducted.
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Nichols, L.T. Toward an Integral, Professional-Public Sociology: The Example of Gordon W. Allport. Am Soc 50, 315–332 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-019-9409-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-019-9409-5