Abstract
This paper examines the participation by sociologists in several major conferences, mostly held in New York, that focused on issues related to science, democracy and faith between the late 1930s and the early post-World War II period. These events offered sociologists an opportunity to showcase the discipline to leading scholars, public figures, and other intellectuals and public audiences outside the discipline. Amidst widespread uncertainty and a quest for answers to significant social and economic problems, sociologists revealed that they were no more adept than other intellectuals to provide definitive pathways out of potential catastrophe. At the same time, the conferences and related events demonstrated that sociologists had analytical tools and insights that could be useful in framing questions and orientations that were of interest not only to scholar bodies, but also served as potential reference points for social policy and community development. These activities, in helping to legitimize the discipline and reinforce the boundaries within which it operated, did so in a manner that also separated and privileged sociologists, as professionals or experts, from broader publics in ways that narrowed the discipline’s main foci and lessened its capacity to adopt more democratic public roles.
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Notes
The academic accomplishments of both Pitirim Sorokin and Robert MacIver were only part of the remarkable personal trajectories experienced by each of these scholars. Both served terms as President of the ASA (though long delayed in Sorokin’s case) and played active roles in guiding the sociology departments they chaired, at Harvard and Columbia universities, respectively, to positions of national and international prominence. They shared a skepticism of modernity, at least with respect to particular claims to legitimacy and authority associated with modern institutional structures. Sorokin (1889–1968) emigrated to the United States in the early 1920s after periods of imprisonment and commutation of a death sentence for his criticism of the Communist regime (with growing disaffection despite his active participation in revolutionary activity and service as a cabinet minister of the provisional government immediately after the 1917 revolution), arriving at Harvard in 1930 and serving as first chair of a separate Department of Sociology the following year. Among the graduate students that he and Parsons, who also joined the Department at the time of its inception, worked with and influenced were Robert Merton, Kingsley Davis, Wilbert Moore, Charles Tilley, and Edward Tiryakian. Sorokin was not hesitant to criticize scholars, politicians and other whom he saw as insincere or disingenuous in their work and claims, but he is also remembered for his generosity and commitment to many of those with whom he worked. He integrated his sweeping knowledge of diverse traditions of sociological work, along with historical work, literature, religious texts, and his own personal experiences, pioneering developments in fields such as criminology, rural sociology, and social theory, as well as in his best known work, especially in Social and Cultural Dynamics, his four volume analysis of the cyclical nature of social change published between 1937 and 1941, and his later focus on altruism and caring relationships (Coser 1977: 465ff.; Johnston 1995).
MacIver (1882–1970) began his career as a political scientist in his native Scotland and later Toronto; while in Canada, he also served a term as vice-chair of the national War Labour Board. He accepted a position at Columbia as head of the department of economics and sociology at Barnard College in 1927, also taking on two years later the role of chair of the university’s Graduate Department of Sociology and professorship in Political Philosophy and Sociology. Like Sorokin, he was highly literate and well-read, integrating interests in philosophy of science and knowledge with critiques of positivism with analysis nonetheless informed with empirical work from diverse methodological orientations. In addition to his sociological scholarship in areas ranging from community studies and juvenile delinquency to sociological theory and social change, he contributed extensively to the field of political science with his critical examinations of the state, government organization, and power relations (Halas 2001; MacIver 1968).
Sidney Hook (1902–1989) was closely associated with Dewey, who had been his graduate supervisor at Columbia and whose biography he would later write. However, his advocacy for pragmatist philosophy was also aligned with his own fiercely independent political and scholarly stances. Affiliated with New York University between 1927 until 1969, serving for over three decades as chair of the philosophy department, he was also highly engaged politically as well as in intellectual circles associated with the new left. Atlhough influenced by Marxism in his early philosophic and political orientations, he spoke vehemently against the dangers of the kind of communism he saw emerging with the rise of Stalinism in the mid-1930s and the blind adherence he associated with some of its supporters in the United States. His dedicated commitment to secularism and rationalism was reflected in stances against all forms of authoritarianism, including those associated with religion or political movements of the left and right grounded in absolutist principles (Hook 1987).
Harry Elmer Barnes (1889–1969) was another immensely influential scholar whose legacy has been obscured or resurrected mainly in the context of subsequent representations of his work in relation to controversies over holocaust denial. His quest for understanding based on unbiased empirical knowledge, shared with many of the key figures associated with the conferences, encouraged him to draw insights from sociology and several other disciplines that resulted in challenges to prevailing beliefs or myths about the development of western societies. He adopted a highly synthetic approach to his analysis, covering an extensive range of themes that included criminology and penal reform, religion, warfare and world events, American foreign policy, political institutions and thought, social change, and sociological theory among many others. In his analyses of Christianity and other topics, as well as his endorsement (along with that of Dewey and 32 other prominent figures) in 1933 of the Humanist Manifesto, he expressed his commitment to social reconstruction through responsible human action (Goddard 1968; Widmann 2009).
The New York Times appeared to concur with this assessment; in its coverage of the day’s sessions it was noted that the “often abstruse exchanges” concerning “Cybernatics” [sic] “crowded consideration of a dozen other subjects off the day’s program” (New York Times 1949: 27).
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Wotherspoon, T. Knowledge and Salvation for a Troubled World: Sociology and the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion. Am Soc 46, 373–413 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-015-9267-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-015-9267-8