Introduction

Abstract

In 1985 the prominent American sociologist Edward Shils, Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and winner of the prestigious Balzan Prize, looked back at the ways his discipline had developed since its inception a little over 150 years earlier. ‘The sober attempts of a small group of dourly upright reformers and administrators in the nineteenth century to describe in a reliable way the real “condition of England” were among the first of their kind’, he wrote. The reason was that ‘for the first time men and women sought to arrive at a judgment of their own society through the disciplined and direct study of their fellow citizens’. However, Shils went on, after a ‘great surge’, which lasted from the Poor Law Commissioners of the 1830s until the surveying work of Charles Booth and Beatrice Webb in London during the 1880s and 1890s, ‘British sociological powers seemed to exhaust themselves’. In early twentieth-century France and Germany, Shils declared,

powerful and learned minds thought about the nature of society and tried to envisage modern society within the species of all the societies known to history. In America, sociologists busied themselves in villages and in the city streets, carrying on the work of Booth, finding illustrations of the ideas of [Georg] Simmel, [Ferdinand] Tönnies, and [Emile] Durkheim and developing under the guidance of Robert Park, a few of their own.