Franklin Henry Giddins, 1855-1931: Some Aspects of His Sociological Theory

Abstract

Of the four men who founded American sociology, Giddings most nearly based the inductive science on the newer statistical methods. Accepting Spencer's evolutionism unreservedly, he made social evolution a part of cosmic evolution, thus placing society within the realm of natural history. Social phenomena are due to three orders of stimuli-physical nature, human aggregation,and culture-with constant interaction between them. The function of social science is to disentagle the web of causal relations and to assign to these three their respective roles. He regarded all causal relations as basically mechanistic, but distinguished between machine-like reactions and those that areballistic. His determinism did not, however, lead him to deny volition as a true social cause. An important omission in Giddings' theory was his failure to analyze conscious motives. His consciousness of is too general and too passive in character to serve as universal motivation in society. Consciousness of kind is defined as...