Sociology and Statistics in Britain, 1833–1979 by Plamena Panayotova

Author:Plamena Panayotova
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030551339
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Barbara Wootton

T. H. Marshall’s 1946 lecture on ‘Sociology at the Crossroads’ was first delivered as an inaugural address when Marshall became a professor in Social Institutions at the LSE in 1944. Competing against him for the post was Barbara Wootton (1897–1988), an economist by training, who, by the mid-1940s, had widened her academic interests to include the broader spectrum of social science. In her biography of Wootton, Ann Oakley describes in detail the 1944 competition for the LSE professorship, concluding that ‘Had Barbara got the LSE post, the future of sociology at the LSE might have been quite different […]’ (Oakley 2011: 190). This is not an unreasonable suggestion, given that Marshall and Wootton differed significantly in their social scientific outlook even though neither of them held extreme views about what was the ‘right’ path for social science. As Oakley puts it, Marshall was ‘the man with a theoretical disposition’, while Wootton was ‘the woman whose mind turned on the empirical usefulness of the social sciences’ (Oakley 2011: 189) after she became disillusioned with economics.

Wootton remembered that at the time she graduated in 1919, almost all of academic work in economics was of deductive, rather than inductive character and that her degree had left her unfamiliar with the simplest techniques of social empirical investigation (Wootton 1967: 210–211). Over the years, her dissatisfaction with economics grew even stronger—in 1938, she published Lament for Economics, which marked the end of her career as an economist and ‘the beginning of her identification with the ranks of those who had come from the cold [of economics] to the relative warmth of sociology’ (Oakley 2011: 166).

What people expected from the burgeoning social sciences in the early post-war period were some new, fresh and potent alternatives for the solution of humankind’s problems. In her book Testament for Social Science (1950), Wootton argued, in a similar vein to Beveridge whom I cited earlier, that the most effective way to achieve this was to employ the scientific method in the study of humanity’s most pressing social problems:It is no less obvious that this method, which has been so brilliantly successful in the natural sciences, is not normally applied to the field of our most disastrous failures. […] we ought seriously to ask whether the tool that has worked such wonders in the one job could not be used for the other. (Wootton 1950: 1–2)

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