SOURCE: "Introduction: Sociology as a Discipline," in On Cities and Social Life, by Louis Wirth, The University of Chicago Press, 1964, pp. ix-xxx.

Sociology, for Louis Wirth, is a more or less organized body of knowledge about human behavior—"What is true of human behavior by virtue of the fact that always and everywhere men live a group existence?" Like others from the "Chicago school" of sociology, he held that the discipline of sociology consists of three divisions, loosely defined: demography, ecology, and technology; social organization; and social psychology.

The field of demography, ecology, and technology is concerned with the physical, biological, and situational base of human living, and the techniques and tools that man evolved which affect his environment. These circumstances or factors constitute the preconditions of existence at particular times. They are materially ascertainable conditions. At the other pole is social psychology, a field concerned with personality and collective behavior. It constitutes the study of the "subjective aspect of culture," the psychic states, attitudes, and sentiments of persons as well as communication, public opinion, consensus, ideas, and collective action. The main field is social organization, concerned not only with systems of social life but all their constituent elements, such as groups, associations, communities, institutions, and classes.

Sociology is to be regarded as both a general and a special social science:

Sociology .. . is a general social science in the sense that the questions it asks about human nature and the social order are of a kind that cut across different specific contexts and accent the group factor in human behavior ... sociology is a specific discipline in that it focuses on the nature and genesis and forms of the human personality and attitudes (social psychology); in that it is also concerned with the structuring of group life. . . .¹

As a special discipline, Wirth at times characterized sociology as the "science of left-overs," a collection of special subjects discarded by the other social sciences, e.g., social problems, the family, and rural sociology. These special concerns he felt hindered the development of a genuinely comparative sociology.

Of his own entry into sociology, he said:

I was enthusiastic and radical in those days in a sense that I believed a science of human behavior not only possible but indispensable. What I read in the course of my studies impressed me as rather disappointing. Through the inspiration and the help of . . . teachers .. . I was impelled to go on and do what little I could to make our knowledge in the field perhaps a little less disappointing to others.²

Wirth's papers stand as partial evidence of his success. Though what sociologists do may often be disappointing, sociology is an intellectually challenging subject matter.

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY AND METHODOLOGY

Louis Wirth regarded himself as a sociological theorist, though it is not possible to characterize his own sociological theory. He firmly maintained that sociology had not developed a body of knowledge that merited formulation as a theory. What he offered to others—both to students in classes and in his writings—therefore, was an analysis of sociological writings and of social reality as he saw it, and a strategy for the development of sociological theory. To students, his penetrating negative and critical stance generally emerged as contributing more to their own development than any positive one. This is not surprising perhaps since his own analysis remained essentially unsystematized. The essays in this volume thus do not provide an introduction to the work of a systematist, as that word is generally used. He would have been the first to deny that he was one. Rather, what the reader finds is a number of essays that illuminate several aspects of social life as he defined it, molded by a general perspective of consensus as the basis of social order.

Whether Wirth might have developed a more systematic sociological theory had he lived is perhaps a matter of idle speculation. Yet several things are worth noting in this connection. Though interested in questions regarding formal properties of any theory, what is called metatheory, he was skeptical of the possibilities for a systematic sociological theory. He had the humanist's regard for the central role of values in shaping and reshaping human events, and of history in the unending social drama. Though a political activist, he was disinclined to tackle the problems of politics theoretically. He approached such problems primarily through action research, research that is intimately tied to changing the social order rather than to a theoretical formulation about what that order is like.

The first step to be taken in developing a sound sociological theory Wirth maintained was to develop a coherent set of assumptions and a conceptual framework consistent with the group character of social life.

By theory, I mean the definition of interests of scholars, the assumptions with which they start, the conceptual framework in terms of which they analyze their materials, and the types of generalizations which they develop as they are related to other generalizations in the field as a whole or knowledge as a whole.³

He was rarely sympathetic with attempts to develop deductive sociological theory, speaking of all such endeavors as "mere exercises" in theory construction. As Bendix points out, Wirth contested the validity of most sociological theory on grounds that it was but proof of what had already been assumed.⁴ "Most sociological theories," he would say, "ignore the most obvious and obscure thing about human beings, what it is they take for granted." He was especially disenchanted with theories based on a rational means-ends framework, since they failed to treat nonrational behavior as important determinants of behavior.

Theories of social action were generally dismissed on grounds that they focused only on people doing things, i.e., actually behaving, when failure to act was in his judgment an equally significant fact about human social life. Wirth steadfastly refused to limit sociological inquiry to the study of overt behavior or action, contending that values, ideas, attitudes, and motives are equally viable concepts in sociology:

.. . in the study of human social life generally, while it is desirable to concentrate on overt action—of which language itself is one form—it is not so irrelevant, as some have thought, to take account of what people say. For despite the deflections, distortions, and concealment of their verbal utterances, men do betray, even if they do not always accurately and completely reveal in them, their motives and their values.⁵

Yet he was clearly dissatisfied with most theories of motivation and values. He was particularly critical of psychoanalytic theory, opposing it on grounds that it was incompatible with the group nature of social life and personality in the context of a cultural milieu. Despite his admiration for the Scottish moral philosophers, particularly Adam Smith, he contended that Smith failed to utilize the fundamental insight developed in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, that motivation arises through the sharing of common sentiments, for his analysis of the market economy in The Wealth of Nations. Notwithstanding his criticism of specific theoretical formulations in The Polish Peasant, he was perhaps more sympathetic to Thomas and Znaniecki's basic concerns in developing a theory of motivation resting in values and attitudes than were most of the critics of that work.⁶ Though rejecting Thomas and Znaniecki's formulation of the "four wishes," he nevertheless expressed the view that critics had failed to provide viable alternatives for their formulation. For he steadfastly maintained that ".. . if we do not have an understanding of . . . motives and values, we do not know men as social beings."⁷

Values are for Wirth an important concern in sociology for two reasons. They are data of sociology necessary to know men as social beings. But, they are also forces acting upon the sociologist in his study of human behavior. His own position on the sociologist's dilemma regarding facts and valuations in social science is closer to that recorded in Myrdal's American Dilemma⁸ than that of Weber,⁹ as the hitherto unpublished piece, "On Making Values Explicit," in this volume makes clear. Writing to Myrdal in 1939, he said: "Without valuations we have no interest, no sense of relevance or significance, and, consequently, no object."¹⁰ Summarizing his view of values in sociology for Howard Odum, he wrote:

we are, of course, as scientists, or would-be scientists, interested in understanding what is, rather than what ought to be. But it has been my experience that almost everything we do is tied up with the problem of values. Values determine our intellectual interests, the selection of problems for analysis, our selection and interpretation of the data, and to a large extent also our generalizations and, of course, our application of these generalizations. Therefore, I believe the sociologist, like other social scientists, must make greater efforts than physical and biological scientists to make explicit the value premises from which he proceeds.¹¹

Wirth's theoretical position on values is therefore intimately tied to a methodological position. Even the critical examination of another man's contribution to sociology requires a knowledge of the theorist's background and perspective, an examination at the level of the sociology of knowledge. At the Social Science Research Council conference on Herbert Blumer's appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant, Wirth remarked:

.. . I would say one way to begin the analysis of a given theory is to inquire into the particular perspective which prompted this particular author to arrive at these particular conclusions or hypotheses. Having discovered that, i.e., what he took for granted, I would say, "Now suppose we take something else for granted, at what conclusions would we arrive?" . . . it might result in two opposing theories. Then I would ask, which one requires the most assumptions and which one is more consistent with what we already know?¹²

Just as it is difficult to characterize Wirth's scholarship in terms of a theoretical position, other than to say that he sought a body of verified knowledge for sociology, so it is not easy to characterize his methodological stance in terms of a recognized position or unified school. Close to the skeptics in his approach to any question, he would have been among the first to question such a procedure, delighting in questioning the assumptions and presuppositions of any and all schools of thought. Given to phenomenological empiricism as was Robert Park, he argued against the pitfalls of "getting too close to the data." Perceiving the relational character of all knowledge, he advocated an assault upon the problem. "Knowledge of the unstated assumptions and premises of our own and other people's premises comprises the foundation of our intellectual house." For him, the sociology of knowledge, or of intellectual life, vied with established schools of epistemology in getting at truth—"a version of reality compatible with reality." He sensed a "real" order to the world, the way things are to human beings, but regarded the nominalist-realist controversy as a straw man.

Apart from the basic methodological position inherent in his sociology of intellectual life, Wirth advocated a union of intimate acquaintance with social life and sociologically contrived conceptions of that reality. He continually emphasized the importance of William James's distinction between knowledge of things and acquaintance with them. Acquaintance with things was most likely to stem from actual experience and involvement with reality. "In my work in theory, especially through my ears of teaching it to graduate students, I have tried to emphasize that theory is an aspect of everything they do, and not a body of knowledge separate from research and practice."¹³

He was unimpressed with most cross-cultural work as a basis for the development of a scientific sociology. Such comparison, in his view, was essentially sterile, since it ignored the most important facts about human life—the changing course of human history and the ways in which societies are changed by civilization. A genuinely comparative sociology must be based in history.

Wirth had a predilection for typological classification, believing it to be the single most important prerequisite to the development of sociological theory. The ideal types of "urban" and "rural" ways of life developed in the essay on "Urbanism as a Way of Life"; of pluralistic, assimilationist, secessionist, and militant minorities in "The Problem of Minority Groups"; of hegemony, particularistic, marginal, and minority nationalism in "Types of Nationalism"; and of social types of Jews in "Some Jewish Types of Personality" reflect both his concern for the development of ideal types to facilitate theoretical analysis and his insistence that these types be grounded in experience and observation of social reality.

He rejected the basic methodological distinction of German sociologists between causal and meaningful relationships, suggesting it is a contradiction in terms. Undoubtedly Max Weber's critique of the German school of Verstehen, together with Weber's reformulation of it, and his discussion of ideal type analysis and causal imputation influenced Wirth's thinking. Skeptical of Weber's analysis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he nonetheless sympathized with the method Weber used to approach the problem. Weber's treatment of causal imputation, by construction and verification of a historical individual—the thing to be explained—was of special interest to him. He insisted on viewing social reality in terms of "what would have happened if an event had not taken place," or "what would happen if we altered or changed these conditions." To understand social institutions, he regarded it as important to know what would be altered or disrupted if the institution were taken away. This, for him, was the clue to its function. "We get an institution when we know that its removal will slow up sets of behavior and understandings among people in a society."

Wirth readily questioned what other social scientists take for granted. Students and colleagues alike were aware of his critical skills. Educated men were not necessarily speaking intelligently nor were they intellectuals. He was generally as impatient with the grand theory as with the trivial empirical investigation with precise measurement. Both were usually seen as pretensions that disregarded the nature of social life. If anything could be said to be characteristic of his highly perceptive and usually insightful commentary on social life, it is that it arose from what he liked to term a healthy skepticism, a continuous questioning of what is known or of how things come to be known. "Nothing is ever self-evident; it is not even evident." "The hardest thing to know is what people take for granted." "To say something is a law of nature is to confess ignorance, especially when it is applied to the realm of social life." "Our generalizations can be no more valid than the precision with which our concepts are formulated." "The more precise and unambiguous concepts in social theories become, the less valuable they are." Such statements convey both his impatience with assumptions or generalizations that are accepted without question by sociologists, and the way in which he tried to imbue others with a healthy skepticism.

CONSENSUS

Wirth's theoretical writings center around the problem of consensus as the basis of social order. He defined a society or social group by its capacity to act together, or to take collective action. Collective action rests in "a set of common understandings, a system of reciprocally acknowledged claims and expectations." His presidential address to the members of the American Sociological Society emphasized that collective action rests in consensus.

I regard the study of consensus as the central task of sociology, which is to understand the behavior of men in so far as that is influenced by group life. Because the mark of any society is the capacity of its members to understand one another and to act in concert toward common objectives and under common norms, the analysis of consensus rightly constitutes the focus of sociological investigation.¹⁴

The most important thing to know about any aggregate of people belonging together, he contended, is "what they take for granted." The first task for sociology, therefore, he held, is to learn the unstated assumptions of people, the credo by which they live. These are the elements upon which there is consensus, a consensus which does not "rise above the level of consciousness." To know these things about organized entities, he insisted, requires that "we enter into their life." He often paraphrased Kant's dictum: "one should not believe everything that people say, nor should one suppose they say it without reason."

That for Wirth the study of consensus was the central task of sociology is apparent from the way he treated the ends-means (ideological) problem. Although he viewed human beings as essentially goal-directed animals, the crucial fact about them, for him, was their collective pursuit of ends. Only rarely is behavior an individual pursuit. Goal-seeking requires organization and collective action which derives from consensus on ends to be pursued. The paradox this created for Wirth is that while ends cannot be pursued without organization, organizations may monopolize one's loyalties and the very conditions for freedom. He was deeply concerned with the establishment of consensus by democratic means in the mass society. He wanted to know not only what consensus is necessary for individual freedom to be realized but how much freedom is necessary to achieve a genuine consensus resting in voluntary agreement.

Wirth's concern with the analysis of consensus was by no means an interest in some static equilibrium, for consensus is treated as problematic in the social order. Yet he never probed the different meanings of consensus, formally regarding it in only two senses: (1) as a sufficient understanding of the symbols of others to permit communication rather than "talking past one another" and (2) as sharing of the same values. Consensus in the first sense might involve only "an agreement to disagree." A minimum condition for it he thought is tolerance, which in his elfin manner he described as a "suspicion that the other fellow might be right." Following Robert Park, he contrasted consensus in the second sense with symbiosis. "Symbiosis" was defined as a condition in which "men live together by virtue of sheer existential dependence upon one another" while "consensus" is that condition in which men agree with and mutually identify with one another.

His failure to explore the dimensions of consensus is readily apparent in the kind of questions he raised about consensus in the mass society. "The fundamental problem for modern society," he would say, "is how can so many people live together if they have so little in common in the way of moral values or sacred beliefs? How can a mass society exist with so little consensus?" This manner of stating the problem led him to ignore the possibility that there may be more consensus in a modern mass society than in any previous ones, given the myriad consensually legitimate groups within it.

Wirth was particularly critical of simple explanations of the conditions for consensus. He did not regard contact and interaction as necessary and sufficient conditions for consensus. Though he regarded contact as a necessary condition for consensus, since only through confrontation with alternatives could choice be made, he argued that with contact one is as likely to get confusion and conflict as well as friendship and harmony.

Like Robert Park, Wirth saw society as resting on three main types of order. There is first a kind of equilibrium in which people compete with and struggle against one another, what Hobbes termed a bellum omnia contra omnes. This is the symbiotic order. Society is also a set of symbols or communications resulting in common understandings, a cultural order. Finally, society is a group of people accepting a set of common norms, rules of the game, common goals, and agreement upon the achievement of these goals. This was termed the moral and political order. For Wirth, these were different orders of social cohesion. They exist and grow up, one upon the other. A political order rests upon a cultural order, and there can be no political order without a competitive system. In his lectures, he often remarked, "If we look at a society as being a symbiotic system, a set of common understandings, mutual claims and expectations, and a system of norms, we can say that society exists wherever consensus exists among men. A society is as large as the area over which consensus prevails." Reference to the consensual base of society as the moral or political order was by no means a fortuitous choice of words. Wirth, unlike Park, saw the problems of consensus as political problems. The democratic selection of political means and the mobilization of people for a consensual order resting in a democratic creed or ideology was his idea of the "good society."

At times he approached the problem of consensus by first asking what were the bases for concerted action. "On what bases do people coexist?" he would ask. His answer was that they coexist first of all in terms of physical contact and interdependence, an ecological community. A second basis for collective action is the division of labor and the struggle for a livelihood, an economic base. A consideration of different or common interests arising from needs that are incidental to living or working together is a third basis for collective action. The pursuit of interests gives rise to a fourth basis for collective action, the normative basis, or the moral area of life as it is regulated by common values. The realm of tradition, a culture, provides a fifth basis for collective action since it provides a common framework of language, ideas, sentiments, and the like. Although he argued that these account for man's coexistence, he concluded they do not deal directly with the problem of how men, although they are different beings, can act concertedly—how consensus is achieved. He emphasized that there is an important difference between the kind of order that arises from the fact that people have similar or parallel aims and that arising from their co-operation to achieve a common end which is seen and shared by everyone. Organizations based upon these two kinds of bonds were fundamentally different for him. In the one case he held that people act alike because they are and think alike while in the other, people work to implement commonly accepted goals even though they are not necessarily alike and may think and act differently as they work to achieve them.

Few issues were as confused in sociology, he thought, as that between "similarity" and "commonness" or between "parallelism" and "shared circumstances of living." He emphasized that people often live similar lives without common goals; they are culturally and socially distant, though spatially and economically interdependent. "A mere aggregate of people does not constitute a social entity," he would say; "Unless people recognize they have the same goals or position in life and act accordingly, unless they develop a consciousness and a capacity for collective action based upon the consensus, they do not have a group life." Perhaps because of this artificial distinction between symbiosis and consensus and his own definition of widespread consensus as the basis for collective action, he was led to underestimate both how much social life is possible without consensus and how much the mass society is organized through consensually legitimated institutions.

For Wirth, the main problems in achieving consensus in modern societies arose from the segmentation of values and interests and their lack of integration with one another, and from the failure of men to participate together in reaching common decisions. He viewed the modern world as atomized into a multiplicity of interests with people failing to communicate meaningfully with one another and to participate in common decision-making, and concluded that the main task of anyone who would forge a democratic consensus is less one of reconciling conflicting interests than of generating participation in common decisions. A main difficulty, he felt, in generating participation in the mass society is the fact that people are generally excluded from participation in decision-making. He often remarked: "Even if there is a socalled common man by virtue of the fact that as Lincoln said, 'God made so many of them,' there is no discounting the fact that they have little to say in making common decisions; today the common man has no power of original decision, judgment, or initiation." It seems clear that for Wirth democratic consensus lay less in consensually legitimated institutions that make decisions than in mass participation in making them.

Wirth viewed the dissociation of men from full and intimate participation in community life then as an integral aspect of the mass society. The problem of democracy in a mass society for him was how to encourage people to share in decision-making. He argued that today there is only a "superficial" consensus based on similarity and concentration of power whereas a "genuine" consensus is necessary, one based on communication and common participation in making common decisions. Like Dewey, he emphasized that society exists not only through communication but in communication. Central to an understanding of consensus, therefore, is an understanding of communication and its organization in societies. He was particularly concerned that communication through the mass media is a one-way process, with the media controlled by a small group of men, since he viewed the mass media of communication as a potential means of generating mass participation in common decisions in the mass society. His presidential address, "Consensus and Mass Communication" was devoted to this question.

Openly critical of those who nostalgically advocated a return to the "simple life," he maintained that such a situation is possible in modern societies only on the condition of terror. At the same time he was frankly skeptical about the possibility that men can be integrated in a common life in mass societies, emphasizing that the bases for agreement are ever-shifting. To what extent can we enlist the masses of men to participate in some functional activity when we have segmental interest groups, he would ask. In reply, he would say that uncoerced consensus requires some kind of constitution, minimal consensus to arbitrate our differences and a maximum communication of ideas and values. Above all he contended there should be competition in the marketplace of ideas if democracy is to survive. "Ideas and Ideals as Sources of Power in the Modern World" is an essay reflecting the importance that Wirth attached to them as a basis for building consensus for a world community.

Wirth never attempted any systematic theory which might be brought to bear on the problem of consensus as the basis of social order. He brought rather a point of view and illuminating discussion of the problem of achieving a democratically based consensus in the mass society. Analytically, he was disposed to view consensus in terms of several main questions: (1) How widely does consensus extend for a given universe of discourse? (2) What is the penetration of consensus? How pervasive or thoroughgoing is it? (3) What is its degree of integration? Is it segmental or comprehensive?

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

Wirth approached the analysis of social organization from a dual viewpoint: (1) that of social structure or form resulting from social interaction and (2) that of social process or dynamic qualities underlying any more or less enduring structure. A central task of sociology he contended is to understand how structure and process are interrelated in all social phenomena. He conceptualized social structures as forms of human activity. This led him to reject most current theories of social structure on the grounds that they dissociated structure and process. He suggested that, for example, if the concept of "association" were looked at as a verb rather than as a noun, one would ask with whom do people associate, and why, rather than what kind of associations do they form. Social organization for Wirth was both structure and equilibrium, and process and interaction.

Wirth emphasized also that an understanding of social organization required that it be compared with other "conditions," those of unorganization, disorganization, and reorganization. Like W. I. Thomas, he viewed such conditions in terms of social process. Much human activity he suggested is unorganized. A main task of sociology, therefore, is to investigate how organization comes into being. He asserted that under unorganized conditions, parts are readily observed but there is no order, regularity, or continuity—no organized relationship among them. He implied that the field of collective behavior in its concern with crowds, mobs, social movements, and related phenomena is generally concerned with this problem of how organization comes into being, although he did not limit the study of unorganized activity to these phenomena.

The concept of social disorganization, like that of social organization, was given a normative basis.

. . . The degree to which the members of a society lose their common understandings, i.e., the degree to which consensus is undermined, is the measure of a society's state of disorganization. The degree to which there is agreement as to the values and norms of a society expressed in its explicit rules and in the preferences its members manifest with reference to these rules, furnishes us with criteria of the degree to which a society may be said to be disorganized.¹⁵

Like Durkheim and W. I. Thomas, Wirth did not regard all deviations from norms as prima facie evidence of social disorganization. He asserted that in a society there could be both wide differentiation in norms and deviation from them without disorganization, for in Thomas's terms "Social organization is not coextensive with individual morality, nor does social disorganization correspond to individual demoralization."¹⁶ Societies were viewed as having the capacity to reconstruct and reorganize following disorganization. A focal concern in Wirth's own writing is the reconstruction of modern societies as literate and democratic ones.

Since Wirth viewed social organization and disorganization in terms of norms, he concluded that a main task of social organization was to discern those norms upon which consensus rests. In a Socratic vein he would inquire, "if it were not for norms, values and consensus, would there be mutual understanding, claims and expectations, or communication among men?"

"What we are after when we talk about social organization," he would say, "is something like a set of processes of interaction by means of which social entities retain their structure." To this he added, "There are as many kinds of social organization as there are varieties of human interests that can be expressed in an organized way." Interests for him, were irretrievably bound up with historical situations from which they emerge and are organized. There was for him, therefore, no study of social organization apart from a study of history.

He protested against sociological attempts to develop theoretical schemes in terms of some basic unit. Those who say a social act is the basic unit were reminded that there is no act apart from interaction and that means become ends and ends, means. Those who attempted to define a basic unit of social organization such as the family were brushed aside with the comment that any social group is a basic unit by virtue of its being a group. Nor would he regard persons as the basic unit of social organization: "Insofar as human beings are persons, they are always members of some kind of group; men are persons only by virtue of the fact that they are incorporated in some kind of social structure."

Discontented with much of the empirical work on social structure, he insisted that investigators failed to distinguish structural categories based on people having certain traits in common, such as income or opinion aggregates, from groups as collectivities based on a sense of belonging or solidarity and in sharing common values, claims, and expectations. He firmly maintained a distinction between social aggregates and social groups; groups were not "mere aggregates" but "corporate bodies moving toward common ends."

Wirth suggested that a main task of social organization is to develop a theory which orders and differentiates organized units or groups from one another. Although he never evolved such a theory, he addressed himself to the main criteria which might be used to differentiate types of organized units. In his lectures on social organization, he stressed the following criteria, which he did not see as mutually exclusive: (1) the social bond that holds people together; (2) their stratification or rank as a product of common interests or the roles people play in collective action oriented toward some common end; (3) the amount of difference in human behavior which may be attributed to the role the group plays in the life style of members; (4) the chronological priority the group has upon the formation of, or change in, personality; (5) the permanence of the group and the devices it has to insure or disrupt activity; (6) the transitory or permanent character of its organization; (7) size of the group; (8) the original raison d'être for the group, and whether forces other than these must reinforce it; (9) criteria for membership, particularly whether it recruits by appeal or ascription and the exclusiveness or selectivity of membership; (10) whether it is a Gemeinschaftliche or Gesellschaftliche group.

SOCIOLOGY OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE

A substantive area of considerable interest to Wirth was the sociology of knowledge. He liked to remark that it is ".. . a field which is misnamed and with the misnaming of which, unfortunately. I have had something to do. . . . It should rather be called the sociology of intellectual life."¹⁷

Wirth did little writing in this field, although he offered annually a course in "The Sociology of Knowledge" at the University of Chicago. His preface to Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia discusses the major problems involved in the relationship of intellectual activity and social existence and concludes with a tentative outline of the major issues of the field.

For Wirth, the sociology of intellectual life ".. . historically and logically falls within the scope of general sociology conceived as the basic social science."¹⁸ When systematically developed, the sociology of intellectual life should deal with a series of subject matters " . . . in an integrated fashion, from a unifying point of view and by means of appropriate techniques."¹⁹

The leading issues with which the sociology of intellectual life must concern itself, he thought, are these: (1) an elaboration of the theory of knowledge itself, particularly of knowledge as a social product, or of how the context of thought is socially determined by social conditions—the relational character of knowledge; (2) the discovery of the styles and modes of thought characteristic of historical-social situations, particularly the role of belief systems and ideologies, and their comparison across historical situations; (3) the effect of thought upon social life, including examination of whether we can intervene in the world and make a difference, and of how society allocates its resources for the cultivation of types of knowledge; (4) the study of the intellectuals, those whose special function it is to "accumulate, preserve, reformulate, and disseminate the intellectual knowledge of the group"; (5) the social organization of intellectual life, especially an analysis of its institutional organization.

SOCIAL ACTION

Louis Wirth began the quest for sociological knowledge with a fundamental question, "can we do anything about social life, or do we live in a matrix of social forces that elude understanding?" Or, in another vein, "What are the paths open to us in society for intelligent self-direction?" He once concluded his course on social organization with these words:

We must stay close to the reality of our own life in our own day. We must reshape our technical investigations to consider its problems and to provide the understanding that is needed for the formulation of an enlightened public policy.

Wirth belonged to a cohort of social scientists at the University of Chicago that contended the social sciences are policy sciences: Research without action or policy implications is sterile. Action based on social science knowledge is amenable to intelligent direction.

The central problem of sociology for Wirth, as already noted, is to understand consensus as the basis of social order. The analysis of consensus he argued requires not only an understanding of the conditions generating and stabilizing it but also of the bases for its manipulation. Time and again he emphasized that there is a distinction between knowing how a thing works and knowing how to put such knowledge to work—to know enough to act upon the basis of what is already known. Nowhere did he address himself more eloquently to this problem than when he spoke of the "suicide of civilization in the face of the new physical power":

There may be some among us who feel that we already have the knowledge to prevent disaster but that we lack the power to put that knowledge into effect. Such a claim, however, is a confession that we lack perhaps the most important knowledge that we need, namely the knowledge to unlock the power requisite to put our existing knowledge usefully to work.²⁰

Wirth not only emphasized that some of the most important knowledge sociologists might gain was the knowledge of how to make things work, but also that this kind of understanding could best be gained by involvement in action to change things. Though value and fact might to a substantial degree be separated from one another, he counseled against the separation of social action from either one. Out of the myriad of problems to which sociologists might address themselves, they should, he felt, address themselves to those which are relevant to the social life of man in contemporary societies. There was no room for "knowledge for the sake of knowledge" in his view of the world of social science. Wirth's "competent sociologist" was one who experiences the reality he investigates and assumes the full role of citizen as well as the role of scientist qua scientist. The professional sociologist he recommended should be a scholar in action.

Perhaps it is a temperamental trait rather than an orthodox turn of science to turn in a period of turmoil away from the problems of the world to the problems of science, and as we customarily say, to take the long view and devote oneself to the building up of a body of knowledge which may or may not be relevant to the problems of life but which satisfied one's intellectual curiosity. It is curious that the reputation of a realist goes to one who never thinks about reality and that the reputation of a social scientist goes to one as far away from the actual problems and aspirations of society as he can get.

Happy are those who can find this refuge. . . . The student of society will be plagued by the difficulties of achieving "objectivity," by the competition with common-sense knowledge, by the limits of his freedom and capacity to experiment, and by other serious and peculiar handicaps which trouble the natural scientist not at all. But the social scientist, whose very subject matter is the social world, can avoid studying the processes and problems of man in society only by pretending to be something he is not, or by lapsing into such a remote degree of abstraction or triviality as to make the resemblance between what he does and what he professes to be doing, purely coincidental.²¹

The interplay of scholarly interest, citizen role, and sociological expert or investigator are exemplified in Wirth's case both in his writing and in his public and professional life.

The main answer that Wirth gave to the question of what avenues are open to us in democratic societies for intelligent self-direction is that of planning. He regarded the planning process very much in Mannheim's sense as a technique of social organization. His own personal commitment to the central function of planning in mass societies is evident not only in his many writings on cities, regions, intergroup relations and tensions, unemployment, housing, and a broad range of social problems, but it is evinced by his active participation in planning programs and organizations. He founded the Chicago Community Inventory at the University of Chicago to gather information that could be equally useful to action agencies and social scientists. During Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration he served as a member of the Committee on Urbanism of the National Resources Planning Board and wrote a number of their reports. Much of the research and writing in their volume, "Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy" is his. He served as Director of Planning for the Illinois Post-War Planning Commission, an organization he was active in founding and promoting. At the University of Chicago, he was actively involved in founding an interdisciplinary graduate program in planning and taught several seminars in planning.

His many writings on the urban community reflect his deep involvement in studying and influencing social life. Central to these concerns was an active interest and involvement in planning cities and the urban civilization. The now classic "Urbanism as a Way of Life" is a formulation of a sociological framework for the analysis of urban phenomena developed while a consultant to the Committee on Urbanism of the National Resources Planning Board.

Wirth's writings on minorities included in this volume reflect his interest in minority problems and race relations, which he spoke of as his first and main love. He was a founder and director of the American Council on Race Relations and was active in preparing material presented to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of pleas to declare racial restrictive covenants unconstitutional and to desegregate the nation's schools. His "Problems of Minority Groups in War Time," "The Problem of Minority Groups," and "The Present Position of Minority Groups in the United States" are among the essays which reflect both a scholarly and a citizenly interest in these matters.

His interest in belief systems, nationalism, and ideology centered around the generic problem of how they undermine consensus as well as build it. Yet he wrote about these topics in terms of the contemporary world, their effect on achieving a "democratic social order and a society of nations." In "Ideological Aspects of Social Disorganization," he tried to show that "through the analysis of ideologies we may be able to discover the clues that indicate the disintegration of our social structure and to spot the areas of life where disorganization threatens to occur."²² In "Types of Nationalism," he examined the effect of national interest on the possibilities for a unified Europe. Deeply concerned with the problem of establishing a minimum consensus for the basis of world order in the face of mass destruction, he not only wrote upon these topics but became involved with others in their resolution. He was particularly interested in the role which the United States might play in the contemporary world. The essay, "Freedom, Power and Values in Our Present Crisis" deals with the effect of the discrepancy between American ideals and reality upon its leadership role in a world polarized by the two great concentrations of power, the United States and the Soviet Union.

He was deeply concerned with maintaining conditions for free exchange in the marketplace of ideas and promoted exchange among intellectuals. For a good many years he participated frequently in the public broadcast discussions of the University of Chicago Round Table. He was influential in the establishment of the International Sociological Association following World War II and served as its first president.

Though he firmly believed in social action he was not altogether optimistic about the prospects for bringing about the kind of consensus and change he sought for democratic societies. To the fraternity of democratic liberals, he observed that "it is almost impossible to live in either a revolutionary society or a reactionary one and be a liberal."

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In preparing this introduction, I have relied heavily upon a variety of sources including Wirth's published papers, course notes, and memories of discussions with Wirth. I am particularly indebted to Bendix's excellent paper, "Social Theory and Social Action in the Sociology of Louis Wirth," American Journal of Sociology, LIX (May, 1954), 523-29 and to Wirth's autobiographical statements in Howard Odum, American Sociology: The Story of Sociology in the United States through 1950 (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1951), pp. 227-33. Unless otherwise stated, direct quotation is from transcriptions of his lectures made by students in his classes, 1945-52. All page references to Wirth's essays are to this volume, unless otherwise indicated.

NOTES

¹ Howard W. Odum, American Sociology (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1951), p. 228.

²Ibid., p. 229.

³Ibid., p. 230.

⁴ Reinhard Bendix, "Social Theory and Social Action in the Sociology of Louis Wirth," American Journal of Sociology, LIX (May, 1954), 525.

⁵ Louis Wirth, "Ideological Aspects of Social Disorganization," p. 59.

⁶ See Part Two, "Transcript of the Conference Proceedings," in Herbert Blumer, Critiques of Research in the Social Sciences: I, An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki 's, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Bulletin 44, New York: Social Science Research Council, 1939).

⁷ Louis Wirth, "Ideological Aspects of Social Disorganization," p. 59.

⁸ Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944), Appendix 2, pp. 1035-64.

⁹Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1949).

¹⁰ Gunnar Myrdal, op. cit., pp. 1063-64.

¹¹ Howard Odum, op. cit., p. 230.

¹²Critiques of Research in the Social Sciences: I, op. cit., p. 154.

¹³ Howard Odum, op. cit., p. 230.

¹⁴ Louis Wirth, "Consensus and Mass Communication," p. 20.

¹⁵ Louis Wirth, "Ideological Aspects of Social Disorganization," p. 46.

¹⁶ W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), II, 1129.

¹⁷ Howard Odum, op. cit., p. 231.

¹⁸ Louis Wirth, "Preface to ideology and Utopia, " p. 142.

¹⁹Ibid., pp. 142-43.

²⁰ Louis Wirth, "Consensus and Mass Communication," p. 18.

²¹Ibid., p. 19.

²² Louis Wirth, "Ideological Aspects of Social Disorganization," p. 58.