Professor Mills on the Calling of Sociology

In: World politics: a quarterly journal of international relations, Band 13, Heft 4, S. 600-621

Abstract

Prosperity brings its own disorders. When American sociology, unregarded and undemanding, was pleased to be allowed an academic existence, it suffered from lack of self-confidence. The other academic disciplines thought little of it and it was unknown to the outside world. Its rustic naïveté and its simple enthusiasm aroused no antipathies within its own parochial confines. When, however, it began to thrive—when its output became more interesting intellectually, as it did in the i930's, and the attention of the great world, of foundations, governments, and publicists, was drawn toward it—it also began to suffer the malaise of the prosperous. Professor Robert Lynd was probably the first of those who found that the subject they had fostered had not kept pace with their own political development toward the radical populism which was one trend in the leftward movement of the 1930's. In Knowledge for What? he accused his sociological colleagues of the evasion of the responsibilities implicit in the potentialities of their discipline. He was strongly for planning, for equality, and above all for radical political engagement; American sociologists—indeed, American social scientists in general—were charged with indifference, academic triviality, and subservience to the reigning authorities of state and economy.