Two Generations

Abstract

The early 1870s mark a division in the history of social science methodology. On one side of this line is the body of methodological thinking that arose in the dialogue among Comte, Mill, Buckle, and Quetelet and with their critics. Comte and Buckle had died in the fifties. Mill died in 1873. By the time of Mill’s death, A System of Logic had “attained an authority in England that was positively papal” (Collini et al., 1983, p.130), and the views of the four major figures in the earlier conversation had attained considerable public notice, not to say, in the cases of Comte and Buckle, notoriety. Each had acquired disciples who were to prove their loyalty again and again during the next forty years, by giving unstinting and often highly sophisticated defenses of their masters. And each of these writers was to have influence on the earliest graduate students of sociology in the United States, particularly in the first decades of the twentieth century.