Abstract
If this book has any single overall message, it is that early sociology, as taught and practised at the London School of Economics, failed this test of Plato; its early practitioners did not set down any sort of marker to be followed by most of what followed and UK sociology of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries is hardly any sort of successor of LSE’s approach to the subject one hundred years earlier. LSE was, even then, merely one of several players in the story of early UK sociology, but, if one is willing to use a contemporary understanding of ‘higher education’, as education leading to a conventional university degree, it is indeed true that LSE may claim to have offered the first taught course in sociology in UK higher education, even if it was only a small part of that degree’s overall syllabus. Uninformed posterity can be remiss in its memory and construction of its past; there had been several, less well-known, earlier sociology courses in other environments, some affiliated to higher-education institutions, and LSE’s course was certainly not the ‘point zero’ of British sociology or of its teaching.
‘Then are you aware, that in every work the beginning is the most important part, especially when dealing with everything young and tender? For that is the time when any impression, which one may desire to communicate, is most readily stamped and taken.’
Plato, The Republic, Book 2,
Trans., J. L. Davies & D. J. Vaughan (1852)
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Notes
- 1.
For a revisionist view of Kidd claiming that he has been misconstrued as a nineteenth-century racist as many had previously claimed, see Crook (1979).
- 2.
I have translated myself all quoted materials from foreign languages presented in this book, except those for which there was already an out-of-copyright English translation.
- 3.
This is the year for this work attributed by the British Library and I have used it for that reason. However, the work itself is undated and the inclusion of Durkheim ’s name, described as a university teacher devoted to sociology (‘un professeur d’Université adonné à la sociologie’) suggests that the actual year of publication may have been slightly later. Durkheim’s first proper university appointment at the University of Bordeaux began only in 1887, although it was not titularly devoted to sociology. The tone of the text suggests that Durkheim was personally consulted in the drafting of the full definition.
- 4.
See Husbands (2019, forthcoming) for a fuller account of sociology and sociology-type courses taught in the UK before the LSE first-taught course.
- 5.
Derived from earlier institutions, including the Warrington Academy, this college was founded at Manchester in 1786. It moved from Manchester to York in 1803, then back to Manchester in 1840, later to London in 1853, then in October 1889 finally to Oxford as Manchester New College. Later, after an endowment, it became known by its present title of Harris Manchester College.
- 6.
Lancashire Independent College, founded in 1843 from the earlier Blackburn Academy, was located in Whalley Range in Manchester and at that time was a Congregational institution affiliated to the University of London and later to Owens College and the Victoria University of Manchester. It was geared to the production of those wanting to enter the non-Anglican ministry, though not all its graduates did so (Anon. 1943). Its existence continued till 1958 when it became the Northern College and then the Congregational College, which it remained into the 1970s. Its impressive structure later became the Conference Centre of the GMB trade union and is now in turn the British Muslim Heritage Centre.
- 7.
The indication that the religiously challenged paterfamilias of Rose Macaulay’s satirical novel Told by an Idiot had lost his faith (yet again) was the complaint from his intolerant High Church daughter was that he had been ‘reading Comte all day in his study instead of going out visiting and. .. [had been] poring over an article in the Examiner about a “Clergyman’s Doubts”’. Mackintosh apparently survived reading Comte without any similar loss of faith.
- 8.
In 1895–96 Bosanquet was also an examiner in philosophy at the Lancashire Independent College (Lancashire Independent College, Calendar for the Session 1895–6, p. 8). The academic year 1895–96 was also when Alfred Cort Haddon, the anthropologist, taught a course at Cambridge University in the Lent and Easter Terms of 1896 on ‘The Elements of Sociology’, although its subtitle of ‘The Pastoral Peoples and Related Societies’ suggests that it would be better classed as in anthropology or ethnology as then understood rather than in sociology. However, this was not a course that gave academic credit towards a conventional university degree.
- 9.
Details of these posts have been taken from Manchester College, Oxford (1900, p. 5).
- 10.
Although the Annual Report describes this post as being in sociology, the Minutes recording the invitation say that Muirhead was being asked to lecture on ‘Political Theories from Rousseau onwards, the exact subject to be arranged later’. There is no mention there of sociology, nor in Muirhead’s entry for this in the staff compilation in Manchester College, Oxford (1900, p. 5).
- 11.
On the newspaper proprietor and philanthropist, John Passmore Edwards, see Morris (2009).
- 12.
What may be seen as an American version of this is perhaps to be regarded as ‘laissez-faire social meliorism’; Lester Ward, a devotee of evolutionism, said that ‘the subject matter of sociology is Human Achievement’ (Ward 1903, p. 49).
- 13.
The Times, 11 January 1902, p. 12; I have sought without success to locate this original report and have been obliged to rely for its content on this report in The Times. Unfortunately, the press report does not give the detail necessary to infer which streams of sociology at the time may have been favoured in each particular case.
- 14.
On the London Ethical Society, see Gordon and White (1979, pp. 114–21), where there is also a brief discussion of the School of Ethics and Social Philosophy, although a remark about Urwick (p. 120) suggests that the authors are confusing the School of Sociology and Social Economics (discussed below) with the School of Ethics and Social Philosophy and may have been misled by a somewhat odd description of Urwick’s professorship in his Who’s who entry.
- 15.
The absorption of this School in 1912 into LSE’s Department of Social Science and Administration is described in Husbands (2014, p. 162).
- 16.
Westermarck’s early period in London has one memorial, a blue plaque erected by the Anglo-Finnish Society on a wall on the east side of the University of London’s Senate House in Bloomsbury; its inscription says, ‘Edward Westermarck, 1862–1939, Finnish pioneer of social anthropology, lived in a house on this site, 1897–1900’. There is no mention of his employment by the University of London.
- 17.
Patria potestas, paternal power; dolus, deceit; culpa, fault; deodand, an English legal concept till its abolition by the Deodands Act of 1846 for a thing that caused a person’s death and was then forfeited to the Crown for a charitable purpose.
- 18.
Agenda item of LSE Professorial Council, 6 June 1905 (LSE Professorial Council, Agenda and Minutes, 1902–1914; LSE Archives, LSE/Minutes/7/1/1).
- 19.
The author of these notes was Hilda Amelia Lake, later Hilda Amelia Lake Barnett, who was a regular student at the School from 1908 to 1912 and an occasional student till 1919. She received a BSc(Econ) degree in 1915. She was later for many years involved in the Folklore Society and was a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
- 20.
Dahrendorf’s history of the School (Dahrendorf 1995, pp. 102–3) avoids the same error by noting that Hobhouse held the first permanent chair in sociology.
- 21.
The ancillary issue of how Patrick Geddes, the initial front-runner for the first permanent LSE chair and once White’s favoured candidate, fell – like many front-runners – before reaching the winning post was once subject to much incorrect speculation and competing claims but has now been pretty conclusively settled to the satisfaction of most by Renwick (2012, pp. 165–9).
- 22.
Ahmad (1987, p. 182, Note 27) gives a wry summary of the ‘confusion’ about these appointments and even how many there were, several erroneous statements having been made by authors who ought to have known better.
- 23.
Hobhouse was a semi-public figure by 1910, partly through his journalism but also because of his intervention in a number of contemporary issues, such as anti-slavery. However, he would have been far less well-known than his elder sister, Emily Hobhouse, a welfare campaigner who had gained public prominence for her exposure of concentration camps and conditions in them in South Africa during the Boer War. Indeed, her campaigning gave her a high level of contemporary notoriety to many; Kipling, for example, described her as ‘the unspeakable’ (Lycett 2015 [1999], p. 455). She even receives a mention for her work, though a neutral one, in Rose Macaulay’s novel, Told by an Idiot.
- 24.
Papers relating to the endowment of lectureships, 1911–13 (University of St Andrews, Department of Special Collections, Ref. UY246).
- 25.
Letter from Westermarck to White, 25 January 1919; Letter from White to Pember Reeves, 20 March 1919; Letter from Pember Reeves to White, 24 March 1919; Telegram from White to Pember Reeves , 25 March 1919; Letter from Pember Reeves to White, 27 March 1919 (LSE Archives, LSE/CENTRAL FILING REGISTRY/408 (Box 0386), J. Martin White Esquire).
- 26.
Letter from White to Sir Sydney Russell-Wells, 13 January 1922 (LSE Archives, Edvard Westermarck’s staff file).
- 27.
Letter from Carr-Saunders to Rector of Åbo University, 25 September 1939 (LSE Archives, Edvard Westermarck’s staff file) . For sympathetic considerations of Westermarck’s contributions to the history of sociology, see Ginsberg’s obituary account (Ginsberg 1940) and that offered by Westermarck’s great-nephew (Pipping 1984). Pipping argues that Westermarck’s writings were eclipsed by the increasing enthusiasm for the theoretical ideas of Durkheim.
- 28.
Unawareness of Westermarck’s role as the first, and then one of the first two, professors of sociology in Great Britain is remarkably widespread; see, for example, Banks (1989), who said that the first two professors of sociology were Hobhouse and Ginsberg.
- 29.
LSE Director’s Reports, 1922–23 to 1936–37, Appendix to the Report for the Session 1925–1926, p. 3 (LSE Archives, LSE/UNREGISTERED/27/1/1).
- 30.
The process of establishment of the relevant trust fund is described in Chapter 8.
- 31.
See his ‘A Memorandum of Some Things I Have Done for Education’ (University of St Andrews, Department of Special Collections, Undated but about April 1911, Ref. UY246).
- 32.
One biography of Geddes contains several references to White, but none to the fact that White ever considered him for a Chair of Sociology at LSE, though there is a mention of the mixed reception to three lectures given by Geddes in 1904, 1905 and 1906 at LSE under the auspices of the Sociological Society (Kitchen 1975, esp. pp. 218–19).
- 33.
Not Dundee, as Dahrendorf (1995, p. 94) wrongly claims.
- 34.
For further details of White’s artistic activities in Dundee around this period, see Macdonald (2000).
- 35.
In Celtic myth the Sidhe were fairies who were supposed to ride forth each year on Midsummer Night.
- 36.
Letter from White to Sir James Donaldson, Principal of the University of St Andrews, 19 July 1912 (University of St Andrews, Department of Special Collections, Ref. UY246).
- 37.
A full account of his unhappy experience with the St Andrews lectureship in sociology is given in Husbands (2014, pp. 175–7).
- 38.
The image of the portrait may be viewed at: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/portrait-sketch-104683/search/keyword:portrait-dundee-arthur-melville Note, however, that it has been established this image is incorrectly dated; it should be dated about 1897, not 1877. It is described as a portrait sketch (possibly a study for the portrait of Martin White). No such later portrait is known; this painting was donated by White himself in about 1911 to the Dundee Art Gallery.
- 39.
It has not been possible to establish where this bronze now is or indeed whether it still exists, despite enquiries to both the Royal Academy and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
- 40.
Later, in 1942, she became Beveridge’s wife.
- 41.
Letter from White to Beveridge, 29 October 1920; Letter from Beveridge to White, 1 November 1920 (LSE Archives, LSE/CENTRAL FILING REGISTRY/408 (Box 0386), J. Martin White Esquire).
- 42.
Table W1.1 gives details of all recipients of Martin White Scholarships from 1924 to 1939.
- 43.
Letter from Jessy Mair to White, 27 February 1928 (LSE Archives, LSE/CENTRAL FILING REGISTRY/408 (Box 0386) , J. Martin White Esquire).
- 44.
Oliver Martin died in 1975, leaving a rather modest estate of £11,833, though Joan Mary, who had married Basil Ivory in 1928 and died in 1977, left an estate valued at £141,152.
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Husbands, C.T. (2019). Early Sociology and the State of ‘Sociology’ in Britain in the Early Twentieth Century. In: Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1904–2015. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89450-8_1
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