A Question of Priority: Small at Chicago or Blackmar at Kansas?

Abstract

The goal of this paper is twofold.The first is to point out that American sociologists, as indicated in textbooks and published scholarly papers, often confuse the history of sociology as a profession with the history of social though~so that the first is totally absorbed in the second with detrimental effects to both.The second goal concerns demonstrating thot our understanding of sociology's growth in the U.S. during the late 19th century is not as accurate as it might be were documents of the period examined more carefully than has typically been the case.As an example of this faulty historiography, the widely held contention that the University of Chicago sociology department was "the first" to be founded in the U.S. is shown to be untrue.A case is made for Frank Blackmar's efforts at the University of Kansas as prior to Small's, and in some ways equally fascinating regarding the scope and definition of the discipline in its earliest days.The point, then, of the paper is to help reinterest American sociologists in the history of their profession as distinct from the history of its ideology or theory.Sociologists whose major interests are not social psychology, methodology, statistics, mathematical sociology, or demography, typically harbor considerable interest in "the history of sociology" and the history of social thought.This is the conclusion Jones and Kronus (1976, p. 8) drew from their survey of 792 ASA members (Full, Associate, and Foreign) in 1974 (with 445 usable returns).And since specialists within those four subfields of-the ... discipline amount to only a minority of ASA membership, it is fair to assume that most American sociologists care a 'good deal about sociology's past.For example, fully 96.2%(428) •of the respondents believe Durkheim is."still worthwhile reading," with 424 for Weber, and 406 for Marx.Perhaps more amazing given the drift of contemporary graduate training, 282 (63.1%) believe Comte still warrants first-hand study, and 313 (70.3%) say the same of Tonnies.Put another way, a statistically insignificant 10 respondents (2.2%) categorically denied that any of the 29 social theorists listed were worth reading today, cl~arly a case of extreme deviance.