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Existing accounts of American sociology’s founding years during the early twentieth century assume that the discipline was ‘metrocentric.’ They assume that it was only interested in processes occurring within the United States; that American sociologists fell prey to state-centrist thought; and that, therefore, contextualizing America sociology’s emergence necessitates understanding relations, events, and processes within the confines of US territorial boundaries. By contrast, this paper shows the imperial and hence global aspects of early American sociological thought. Early American sociologists were interested in imperialism and, therefore, in cross-societal, transnational, and global processes and relations. Implicitly or explicitly they approached imperialism as a process by which social groups, not least ‘races,’ interacted and conflicted. They also saw it as a route towards new global forms. Early American sociology thus articulated a sociological imagination that looked beyond American society and to the wider world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The idea of a social (or general) mind was prevalent in early American sociology from the 1880s through about the 1910s. As a concept, the social mind served as a proxy for what would later be defined and understood as culture and other collective phenomena such as social movements, crowd behavior, organizational behavior (e.g. ‘corporate actors’), and so forth. In the early stages of the development of sociology in America, sociologists such as Lester F. Ward and Franklin H. Giddings (1855-1931) were struggling to establish sociology as a legitimate science, and they needed to ground this new science of society in an object or reality that existed above the level of the individual members of society (for not doing so would bring the charge that sociology was nothing more than a watered-down version of psychology). In this paper I examine specifically Giddings' writings on the social mind, for they illustrate how subjectivist or idealist elements can be incorporated into an overtly positivistic or naturalistic theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Charles Sanders Peirce contributed significantly to the founding of American sociology, doing so at the level of philosophical presuppositions or meta-sociology. I emphasize two of his ideas. One is semiotics, which is virtually the same as the anthropologists' concept of culture. This latter concept in turn was essential to clarifying the sociologists' idea of the social or society. Peirce also created the modern theory of the dialogical self, which explained the symbolic character of human beings and proved foundational for social psychology. Politically Peirce was a right-wing conservative, but his ideas eventually contributed to the egalitarian views of cultures and sub-cultures. In addition his ideas contributed, by way of unanticipated consequences, to the 20th-century human rights revolutions in the American legal system. Thus he was both a founder of sociology and a founder of American political liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is a thriving industry of classical sociology within the discipline of sociology, not much attention has been focused on the early American sociologists. This paper offers a six-fold typology of the uses of the classics within sociology, and argues that the neglect of early American sociology among contemporary sociologists requires correction. For reasons delineated, Lester F. Ward is the overlooked early American sociologist most deserving of renewed attention and study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]