The Introduction to the Science of Sociology at one hundred and the genesis of Chicago School of Sociology

International Conference, University of Salerno, 4-5 October 2021

In June of 1921 The University of Chicago Press published a text by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology,the first handbook on a discipline whose role was to discover, through the emerging science, ”the organization of knowledge pertaining to the relations of men in society”. The text represented the beginning of a very close and effectual work by two authors who expressed, in different ways, the long theoretical and administrative government of the Sociology Department.
For more than twenty years, the text, “the green bible” – a name which described the color of the cover and the ‘sacredness’ of the volume – was the leading textbook on the discipline, read by generations of students. The book sold more than thirty thousand copies in those years, and it represented, as Robert Faris remembered, “a standardization” of sociological subject matter, and a major contribution to the research impetus that followed its publication: the proposal of a “unified theory for social research”, a really new and ‘proper territory’.
Park and Burgess developed the volume around a series of sociological categories, from a wide range of sources, and represented “the observation and reflection of men who have seen life from very different points of view”. About one thousand four hundred authors were cited within the book, across the 1000 pages and 14 chapters. Every chapter has an introduction, materials, methods and problems, a bibliography about the growing field of American Sociology, enriched by the contribution of other social sciences, and above all, particularly sociological analysis of Georg Simmel. The text represented a theoretical eruption in a time of social closures, offering an incomparable instrument to address Chicago’s cultural dominion inside American universities.
Our aim is to celebrate that volume, 100 years after its publication, while debating various roots connected to its genesis and realization, its organization and contents, in an open discussion connecting varied sociological categories with modernization and globalization, but mainly reviving the same old questions about “the place of sociology among the sciences and in particular its relation to other social sciences” as well as in regard of the contemporary emergence of a publicsociology.

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