The myth about “myths of the Chicago School”: Evidence from Floyd Nelson house

Abstract

Some important work (Bulmer, Harvey) in the history of sociology questions whether the Chicago School should be identified with qualitative as opposed to more quantitative, statistical, and correlational methods. This paper will examine whether this characterization is a “myth” or whether there was some real basis for this association of Chicago sociology with qualitative research and a broader epistemological stance critical of radical neo-positivism. It does so by utilizing Floyd Nelson Houses (1893-1975) The Development of Sociology (1936) as a primary source for answering these questions. House received his Ph.D. from Chicago in 1924, taught there in 1925-1926, and continued to identify himself as a Chicagoan after his appointment to the University of Virginia. Although his book provides a long historical survey, House paid ample attention to the development of American sociology. He frequently drew attention to the differences between Chicago sociology and that produced by the First Columbia School of Sociology founded by the radical neo-positivist Franklin H. Giddings. These differences focused on methods and epistemological stances. House identified himself as part of a Chicago “Group of Five” (including Park, Blumer, Eubank, and Bogardus) which questioned “concrete sociological research” in the absence of careful conceptualization. The contrast between Columbia and Chicago sociology in both descriptive and evaluative terms is, in fact, a leitmotif of what appears to be on the surface an impartial textbook. This paper concludes that the depiction of the Chicago School as welcoming to qualitative methods and much less inclined to radical neo-positivism than the First Columbia School is not a latter-day construction of neo or “wannabe” Chicagoans but has its roots in contemporary developments of the Chicago School in its heyday of the 1920s and 1930s.