The First Sociology ‘Departments’

Abstract

In The New Machiavelli, a novel first published in 1911, H.G. Wells’s protagonist ruminates:

I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. (Book I, Chapter 2)

This was probably Wells’s own, doubtless ironic, view being applied to the evolution of the British system of state education, but it would apply equally to sociology if the subject as taught in British higher education is accepted as a social institution. The history of how sociology evolved from a ragbag of direct and indirect origins — including anthropology, ethics, ethnology, eugenics, moral philosophy, social statistics, and charity-based social work — has been frequently told.² This, however, raises the difficulty of what one is now to regard as early sociology and how one is to interpret the several discipline descriptors — besides sociology, social science, social studies, social study, social administration — that were often loosely used at the time. No definition of sociology at that time would have been uncontested, even if there was an attempt by Benjamin Kidd³ to arrogate his own view — marginal as he may have been (Collini, 1991, pp. 243–7) — into the general definition in his entry on ‘Sociology’ in the 1902 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Kidd, 1902).