| By the end of the Second World War, as the discipline of sociology entered the academic mainstream and acquired substantial institutional recognition and support, its leading scholars at Harvard and Columbia--Talcott Parsons, Samuel Stouffer, Robert K. Merton, and Paul Lazarsfeld in particular--began in earnest to assert a professional identity for sociology which likened its maturation to that of the natural sciences. In the politically-charged atmosphere of postwar America, which included sociologists' concerns over McCarthyite and totalitarian threats to free scientific discourse, as well as their growing sense that the inhabitants of a modern mass society could not participate meaningfully in sociological discourse, the scientific aspirations of influential sociologists led them to separate their putatively scientific discourse from the larger, humanistic conversation about society which existed outside the profession. This separation diminished sociologists' capacity for communicating sociological findings to the lay public and led to profound struggles with nonprofessional critics, influential skeptics like Pitirim Sorokin, public-spirited peers like C. Wright Mills and David Riesman, and sociological popularizers like Vance Packard.;The critical period from 1945 to 1962 therefore saw professional sociology close ranks against nonprofessional forms of sociological writing and communicating, which established a foundation of professional insularity that would persist far beyond the first postwar generation of scholars. This study examines these developments through the utilization of sources including annual presidential addresses before the American Sociological Association, programmatic statements in books and articles, scholarly studies in sociology journals and books, and collections of sociologists' personal papers. |
