Influence On Academic Sociology
Despite Ward's impressive and ground breaking accomplishments he has been largely written out of the history of sociology. Why? Paradoxically the thing that made Ward most attractive in the 19th century, his criticism of laissez-faire, made him seem dangerously radical to the ever-cautious academic community in early 20th century America. This perception was strengthened by the growing socialist movement in the US, led by Eugene V. Debs, the Marxist Russian Revolution, and the rise of Nazism in Europe. Ward was basically just replaced by Durkheim in the history books, which was easily accomplished because Durkheim's views were similar to Ward's but without the relentless criticism of laissez-faire and without Ward's calls for a strong central government and "social engineering". In 1937 Talcott Parsons, the Harvard sociologist and functionalist who almost single-handedly set American sociology's academic curriculum in the mid-20th century, wrote that "Spencer is dead", thereby dismissing not only Spencer but also Spencer's most powerful critic.
Read more about this topic: Lester Frank Ward
Famous quotes containing the words influence on, influence, academic and/or sociology:
“I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country’s God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The question of place and climate is most closely related to the question of nutrition. Nobody is free to live everywhere; and whoever has to solve great problems that challenge all his strength actually has a very restricted choice in this matter. The influence of climate on our metabolism, its retardation, its acceleration, goes so far that a mistaken choice of place and climate can not only estrange a man from his task but can actually keep it from him: he never gets to see it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)