The Genealogy of a Positivist Haunting: Comparing Prewar and Postwar U.S. Sociology

Abstract

This essay asks two related questions about the discipline of sociology in the United States during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The first of these questions is historical and comparative, and relates to the dominant epistemological orientation in U.S. sociology in the two decades after World War II. What accounts for the postwar narrowing of sociology’s epistemological and methodological diversity, or more precisely, for the shift from a relative balance between nonpositivist and positivist orientations in the interwar period to a clear positivist dominance of the discipline? A second and related problem is a counterfactual one and concerns U.S. sociology’s substantive geographic focus, its emphasis on the United States to the relative exclusion of the rest of the world. Why did U.S. soci-