Fifty Years of Sociology in the United States (1865-1915)

This paper will plot some of the principal points of departure from which to map the main movement of sociological thinking in the United States during the period indicated in the title. It will incidentally write into the sketch certain details of a semiautobiographical character. It will serve, further, as an introduction to a subsequent paper to be entitled "The Sociological Categories," and in connection with the latter paper it will attempt to throw light upon open problems of methodology in the entire field of social science. Referring to the second of these items, no excuses will be offered for rather liberal transgression fthe conventionalities ofimpersonal writing. The years which I have spent in studying the social scientists of the last four centuries have lodged in my mind one indelible impression, viz., that nearly every one of these writers might have done more for the instruction of subsequent generations if each had left on record certain testimony from his personal knowledge, which he probably regarded as trifling and which his contemporaries would probably have pronounced impertinent, than