The Anthem Companion to Robert Park

Description

‘The Anthem Companion to Robert Park’ encourages readers to consider the virtue of rethinking—and rereading—this major figure in American sociology.

The collection attempts to come to term with Robert Park’s legacy. As will become evident, the focus is largely though not entirely on the work rather than the man. Mary Jo Deegan makes use of aspects of Park’s biography to illustrate what she sees as his disavowal of developing sociology as a moral science in the interest of objectivity. The article by Martin Bulmer addresses how Park came to understand what it meant to “do sociology” and Raymond Lee sees Park’s inquisitiveness as the guiding thread linking his journalism and sociology. Lee contends that in terms of sociological research, inquisitiveness was channeled by a theoretical orientation that was open to mixed methods research.

Lonnie Athens and Donald Reitzes address theoretical concerns, particularly as they pertain to Park’s place in relation to the pragmatist tradition, the work of George Herbert Mead and the emergence of symbolic interactionism. Athens offers a systematic comparison of Mead and Park on social action, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of both positions. Reitzes contends that Park’s contribution to social psychology has heretofore been underappreciated, and sets out to rectify that relative neglect. Peter Kivisto, Chad Alan Goldberg and Vince Marotta address aspects of Park’s contribution to race and ethnic relations, reflecting the centrality of this theme to his body of work taken as a whole. Kivisto explores Park’s understanding of assimilation, which has come to be known as the “canonical theory of assimilation.” Goldberg’s chapter engages in a parallel undertaking by exploring Park’s concept of the marginal man and the subsequent career of this concept. Marotta begins by noting that Park’s links to journalism and his focus on empirical investigation led many subsequent commentators to overlook the theoretical sophistication of his work. In his contribution, Marotta compares Park to contemporary critical race theorists. Coline Ruwet analyzes the shifts in his thinking about the city over the course of a quarter century. Specifically, she identifies three stages in the evolution of Park’s thinking. Anthony Blasi rounds out the collection, addressing a topic usually not associated with Park: religion.

Taken as a whole, it will be evident that these articles embrace no singular response to Park, but rather a broad range of responses, generally appreciative but also critical. The goal of this book is not to make a case for or against Park, but rather to encourage readers to consider the virtue of rethinking—and rereading—this major figure in American sociology. If one is left with a sense that we actually still do not know enough about Park the person and Park the sociologist, but that getting to know him on both fronts is important, then this companion will have served its purpose. 

Introduction. The Legacy of Robert Ezra Park, Peter Kivisto; Chapter 1. A Twisted Path: Park, Gender and Praxis, Mary Jo Deegan; Chapter 2. Robert Park’s Journey into Sociology, Martin Bulmer; Chapter 3. Beyond “Get the Seat of Your Pants Dirty in Real Research”: Park on Methods, Raymond M. Lee; Chapter 4. The Basic Components of Social Action: Mead versus Park, Lonnie Athens; Chapter 5. Robert E. Park: Neglected Social Psychologist, Donald C. Reitzes; Chapter 6. Robert E. Park’s Theory of Assimilation and Beyond, Peter Kivisto; Chapter 7. Robert Park’s Marginal Man: The Career of a Concept in American Sociology, Chad Alan Goldberg; Chapter 8. Marginality, Racial Politics and the Sociology of Knowledge: Robert Park and Critical Race Theory, Vince Marotta; Chapter 9. The Cities of Robert Ezra Park: Toward a Periodization of His Conception of the Metropolis (1915– 39), Coline Ruwet; Chapter 10. The Impact of Robert E. Park on American Sociology of Religion, Anthony J. Blasi; Chronology; Contributors; Index.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783086566
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Anthem Companion to Robert Park
ANTHEM COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY
Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the past two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor
Bryan S. Turner – City University of New York, USA; Australian Catholic University, Australia; and University of Potsdam, Germany

Forthcoming titles
The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim
The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde
The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff
The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch
The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen
The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte
The Anthem Companion to Robert Park
Edited by Peter Kivisto
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

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© 2017 Peter Kivisto editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

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ISBN-13: 978-0-85728-184-5 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 0-85728-184-4 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS Introduction. The Legacy of Robert Ezra Park Peter Kivisto Chapter 1. A Twisted Path: Park, Gender and Praxis Mary Jo Deegan Chapter 2. Robert Park’s Journey into Sociology Martin Bulmer Chapter 3. Beyond “Get the Seat of Your Pants Dirty in Real Research”: Park on Methods Raymond M. Lee Chapter 4. The Basic Components of Social Action: Mead versus Park Lonnie Athens Chapter 5. Robert E. Park: Neglected Social Psychologist Donald C. Reitzes Chapter 6. Robert E. Park’s Theory of Assimilation and Beyond Peter Kivisto Chapter 7. Robert Park’s Marginal Man: The Career of a Concept in American Sociology Chad Alan Goldberg Chapter 8. Marginality, Racial Politics and the Sociology of Knowledge: Robert Park and Critical Race Theory Vince Marotta Chapter 9. The Cities of Robert Ezra Park: Toward a Periodization of His Conception of the Metropolis (1915–39) Coline Ruwet Chapter 10. The Impact of Robert E. Park on American Sociology of Religion Anthony J. Blasi
Chronology
Contributors
Index
Introduction
THE LEGACY OF ROBERT EZRA PARK
Peter Kivisto
Edward Shils was uniquely positioned to assess the importance of Robert Ezra Park during the maturation period of American sociology insofar as he was both a student of Park and, less than two decades later, a collaborator with Talcott Parsons in producing Toward a General Theory of Action ( 1951 ). Thus, he had an insider’s familiarity with both the Chicago school of sociology in its heyday and with Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations during the era that it achieved hegemonic status in American sociology. His decision to enroll as a graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago was predicated on what he had come to know about Park’s writings, though he had never taken a sociology course before arriving at the Midway. And, as it turned out, he managed to take only one course from Park, it being the last course he would ever teach at Chicago before retiring (Shils 1991 : 121).
During the 1990s, Shils would write not one, but two appreciative remembrances of Park. Summing up his understanding of Park’s significance in the latter of these two works, he wrote, “I would insist that he was one of the great sociologists who, like Weber and Durkheim and Tönnies, still has an important place among those great sociologists of the past. With Durkheim, Park was the only sociologist who understood something about the nature of collective self-consciousness” (Shils 1996 : 104).
In making these comparisons, Shils reminds us that Park was a contemporary of these scholars. Indeed, Park and Weber were born in the same year, 1864, the youngest of this group (Simmel, who Shils curiously does not mention, was born in 1858, the same year as Durkheim). This is worth observing because in some way Park seems to be closer to the present than his European counterparts. In part this can be explained by the fact that Durkheim, Simmel and Weber were all dead by 1920 and Tönnies was an emeritus professor by 1921, increasingly located on the margins of German university life as a consequence of his anti-fascist views. Meanwhile, Park lived until 1944, nearly to the end of World War II.
But I think there is another reason as well. If we treat the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Eric Hobsbawm suggested we ought to, we see the former as a “long” century (1789 to 1914 – extending from the French Revolution to the beginning of World War I) and the latter as a short one (from 1914 to 1991 – from World War I to the collapse of the Soviet Union). From this perspective, Durkheim, Simmel, Tönnies and Weber were to large extent nineteenth-century intellectuals, having produced most (though not all) of their major works before 1914. In contrast, Park’s sociological career began with his move to Chicago from Tuskegee in 1913 and thus coincided with the very beginning of the short twentieth century. His major sociological works did not begin to appear until two articles were published in 1913, and thus the body of sociological work for which he is known is very much located in the short twentieth century (which is not true of his journalistic writings, including his muckraking articles on the atrocities committed by the colonial functionaries of King Leopold in the Belgian Congo, or of his ghost writing for Booker T. Washington ).
Who Was Robert E. Park?
Born on February 14, 1864, in Harveyville, Pennsylvania, near the end of the American Civil War, Park spent his formative years in Red Wing, Minnesota. He recounted to his biographer and former assistant, Winifred Raushenbush ( 1979 : 6), an encounter with Jesse James when he was about 12 years old, when he provided the bandit with directions to the local blacksmith’s shop. Park left Minnesota to pursue his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, where he took courses from the philosopher John Dewey . After graduation, he worked as a journalist for a number of metropolitan newspapers in Chicago, Denver, Detroit and Minneapolis. During this time, he married Clara Cahill and in 1897 entered Harvard, continuing his studies in philosophy with William James, George Santayana and Josiah Royce.
Park’s first encounter with sociology occurred in 1899 at the University of Berlin when he attended Georg Simmel ’s lectures. These lectures would comprise the sum total of Park’s formal instruction in sociology. Simmel’s influence was profound. Park came to share his conviction that modernity would express itself most tangibly in the city. Apropos of this, Park ( 1950 : 167) once contended that the world could “be divided between two classes: those who reached the city and those who have not yet arrived.” Park’s sociology of modernity would focus on the extraordinarily heterogeneous subgroups of urban dwellers. What set Park apart from his mentor was his keen interest in the racial and ethnic groups that were migrating to cities. This was a reflection of his American roots because the significance of these differences was far more pronounced in American cities than in those in Simmel’s Germany.
Before embarking on developing his own sociological enterprise, however, Park made another extended departure from academe. After returning from Europe to Harvard, he completed his dissertation, which was translated seven decades later from German to English as The Crowd and the Public ( 1972 ). With a freshly minted PhD in hand, one might have expected Park to seek academic employment. Instead, he returned to his former profession as a journalist, this time as a freelance writer concerned with social reform. He became involved in the activities of the Congo Reform Association, an organization committed to educating the public about the cruel colonialist exploitation of the inhabitants of the Congo by Belgium, then under the leadership of King Leopold. Park served as secretary of the organization and penned a series of muckraking journalistic exposés with provocative titles, such as “Blood-Money of the Congo” and “The Terrible Story of the Congo” (see Lyman 1992 for a republication of these and related works, along with an in-depth analysis of them).
Through his involvement in the association, Park met Booker T. Washington , who invited Park to work for him as a press agent at Tusk