Sociology and Scientism by Robert C. Bannister

Author:Robert C. Bannister [Bannister, Robert C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781469616230
Google: YLATBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2014-02-01T05:42:27+00:00

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Chapin’s transformation from an open, friendly, and concerned chairman to the austere autocrat of later legend was the other half of the story of his conversion to a rigid scientism. Although local speculation on the matter has become part of university folklore, no single factor explains the change. One probable factor was Chapin’s increasing involvement in foundation work, where rigorous definitions of social science were clearly in favor. Chapin apparently sensed as much when, applying for funds for his pet project, the Social Science Abstracts, he wrote to the Rockefeller Memorial: “If a plan of systematic study of social investigations could be put into operation, we would be in a position to discard ineffective methods and to concentrate on the methods which get us the facts.”39

Another factor was a personal crisis that occurred in 1925, when Chapin’s wife died suddenly of peritonitis at age thirty-six—a chilling replay of his earlier loss of his mother. Their fourteen-year marriage had produced three children, and was by all accounts uncommonly happy; their relations with the world were outgoing, informal, even “democratic.” His remarriage two years later—so colleagues reported—was another matter. Socially ambitious, his second wife was extremely protective of her husband’s reputation. Reporting local opinion, a junior colleague wrote that the new Mrs. Chapin had “a mind like a steel trap, a tongue like a rapier and the instincts of a tigress protecting her cub.” Chapin, on being saddled with the sole care of his three children, had begun to show his autocratic instincts even before his remarriage; but his new wife certainly did not improve the situation.40

The collapse of the Abstracts after three years, and his return to Minnesota from New York, put the finishing touches on the new Chapin. Despite his enthusiasm, the Abstracts project had been shaky from the start. A close colleague later claimed that neither he nor the staff had had a clear idea as to its objective. Leaving aside the question of reviewer objectivity, many social scientists felt that scholars should do their own reviewing of the literature. By the summer of 1933, the S.S.R.C. concluded that the project was not worth the expenditure of increasingly scarce funds.41 To add to his disappointment, Chapin’s department had virtually collapsed in his absence: Sorokin and then Zimmerman had left for Harvard; Sutherland had accepted a new chair in criminology at the University of Chicago, created with S.S.R.C funds.

Whatever the precise cause, Chapin in this period became the formal, austere, and intensely private person that colleagues remembered in his later years. As one associate put it: “. . . he was not the sort of person whom you would stop off to see on a Sunday morning, and even see some morning and say it was a fine spring day for a walk to the river. . . . There just was no really personal association or even worse, any desire for it.”42

At the level of theory, Chapin’s austerity translated into a methodological asceticism that increased in severity as the years went on.

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