Robert E. Park's Congo Papers: A Gothic Perspective On Capitalism and Imperialism.

In a recently published personal reminiscence of Robert E. Park that also contains a subtle critique of his place among the master-thinkers of the sociological discipline, Edward Shils asserts that Park's work would have had a longer life if he had been able to draw on Max Weber's certain writings. and if he had studied and pondered writings of other such thinkers. Of course, Park was not unaware of Weber's verstehende sociology--he referred to it in one of his writings in the 1930s--nor was he ignorant of the contributions of other social thinkers. In the social sciences in general and sociology in particular, research is all too often associated with the transmogrification of knowledge into numbers and the reification of the latter into the simulacra of theory. Park's career as an academician was confounded by this disciplinary hubris. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as sociology emerged from its immersion in German romantic philosophy, its academicians still clung to its baptism in American Protestant thought, seeking to infuse the latter with the trappings of positive science. In any event, a transvalued and secularizing sociology would have to come to terms with the existence of evil in the world.