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As the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the American Catholic Sociological Review approached, the leadership of the Association for the Sociology of Religion decided to dedicate the last issue of Volume Fifty of Sociological Analysis to analyzing the various scholarly concerns involved in the change from the American Catholic Sociological Society into the Association for the Sociology of Religion. The special issue contained not only four major articles but also seven notes by former presidents that dealt with the sociological aspects of this transformation. With the exception of an article by Peter Kivisto, all of the analyses, explicitly or implicitly, endorsed the organizational move and its intellectual implications. The paper is an effort to provide some balance to the historical record as portrayed in the special issue and to make a contribution to a renewed attempt to construct a Catholic sociology as well as an association of Catholic sociologists. While the concerns that are found within the anniversary issue deserve a full-length treatment, what can be realistically offered here are only a short historical background and a few reactions to the arguments of its contributors.

The article presents information on the work of sociologist George Simmel in relation to American sociology. The history of sociology is in need of a new historical narrative, a story that reflects and reinforces the contemporary transition in sociological thought from a celebration of scientific autonomy to a demonstration of social relevance. Whether they are accomplished through critical analysis of sociological discourse, historical analysis of sociology's changing publics, or pragmatic proposals for change, sociology's aspirations to professional and intellectual self-sufficiency have been pronounced a failure. This article reexamines the American Simmel reception in light of the conception of sociology as a conversation on America rather than a conversation sociologists have with themselves. It views sociologists as creative figures, like poets and novelists who help to shape America's future by molding how people think about it. To recognize this feature of the American reception of Simmel's work is not to deny that there were, intellectual reasons for an interest in Simmel. One can and must examine the historical and contemporary interest in Simmel from both points of view. Indeed, it is probably an error to consider theoretical reason and practical life as polar terms. A pragmatic and phenomenologically informed study of social theory, its production and reception, would the links between lifeworld and social thought.

The elucidation of explanatory relationships between individuated life experience and articulated thought is perhaps the least precise of all scholarly endeavors. It is the most susceptible to the subjective loadings of the explicator and the most likely to be exploited for non-scholarly ends. Scholarship on Thorstein Veblen is rife with examples. David Riesman, who relied uncritically on Dorfman for the biographical elements that informed his infelicitous foray into psychohistory, carried the search for a psychological explanation of Thorstein Veblen's irreverent assault on the mores and mechanisms of power and wealth to its height. Even while protesting that "it does not help determine the truth of a doctrine to penetrate into its personal and psychological sources in its originator," Riesman proceeds with great determination to do precisely that; to reduce Thorstein Veblen to emotionally crippling origins on the margins of Yankee society, which, despite genuflexions to Veblen's intellectual stature, in effect seeks to neutralize his most penetrating criticisms of the prevailing societal order.