Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

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the former Stanford University professor and prominent Progressive Party intellectual who had advocated an instrumental role for social science in the control and progress of society. 27 Ross and many of his contemporaries pioneered a vision of social science which shared a tenet with the missions of the Protestant ministers--social reform planned and implemented by highly educated elites. 28 Indeed, many of the early 27 Ross, who had written Social Control (New York: Macmillan, 1901), extolled the power of social science in the aid of planned social reform. He was also one of the sociologists with the most hierarchical conceptions of race. For the rise of sociology as a discipline, see Mary Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975); and Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). In a rather complicated book, one of the myriad things Ross does is to place the rise of social science in the United States within the context of a language of ‘American exceptionalism,’ the end achievement being the transformation by Park’s Chicago school of the idea of America as a ‘melting pot’ into the ‘objective,’ ‘natural process’ of the ‘assimilation cycle.’ 28 The ‘enlightenment project’ of American social reformers at the turn of the century owed much to the European Enlightenment which spawned the notion of social science, but its alliance with organized religion differed markedly from the ‘enlightenment’ of Voltaire and Denis Diderot. The American social scientists scoured the European traditions for antecedents to their fledgling social science, and found the most conducive ‘father figures’ in the Scottish Enlightenment (Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson), who were much less anti-clerical than the French philosophes. For a canonical discussion of the rise of the ‘science of human society,’ see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Volume II: The Science of Freedom (New York: Vintage, 1969). It is interesting to contrast Gay’s reading of the European Enlightenment with 20
sociologists had been ministers or missionaries themselves before converting to social science. The ties of social science and social work inspired by the ‘social gospel’ remained strong. 29 Enlightenment was a means to a better world, and the pursuit of knowledge about race relations on the West Coast was an end in itself. This goal reflected a belief in the value of learning, as well as a reflection of the deep faith which both Protestant Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosphers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932) which in comparison is a revealing reflection of the importance which ‘progressive’ American thinkers placed upon religion and faith in both their own ‘enlightenment’ and in their view of the the 18th-century version. 29 Chicago sociologist Ellsworth Faris was a former missionary and remained an ordained minister, and both Ernest Burgess and W.I. Thomas were the sons of ministers. Robert Park was a member of the church of Edward Scribner Ames, a pragmatist philosopher at the University of Chicago and a prominent minister of the ‘social gospel.’ Both Albion Small and Charles Henderson, early members of the Chicago department, saw sociology as a science in service of social problems, and the Department of Sociology was an important ally of the School of Social Work and Administration which was housed across the Midway from sociology’s Harper Hall. During the twentieth-century, Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth both had close connections to the social workers at the school founded by Edith Abbot and Sophonisbia Breckenridge, a reflection of their deep interest in immigrant adjustments. Perhaps the most famous ‘social work’ institution which social scientists at Chicago became associated with was Jane Addams’ Hull House Settlement. See Robert E. L. Faris, Chicago Sociology, 1920-1932 (San Francisco: Chandler, 1967) for a description of the missionary background of Chicago sociology. Robert Faris was the son of Ellsworth Faris, and a sociology student at Chicago during those years. 21
Page 1 and 2: Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: The
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Page 39 and 40: the ‘Oriental’ was nonetheless
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Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

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