Ellwood’s Europe Turner, Stephen. 2010. Ellwood's Europe. The definitive version of this was published in Transatlantic Voyages and Sociology: The Migration and Development of Ideas, edited by Cherry Shrecker. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 163-176, all rights reserved. Stephen P. Turner University of South Florida Charles Ellwood is usually described as a junior member of the founding generation of American Sociology. Ellwood fulfils many of the standard stereotypes of the American sociology student of the era. He was born on a farm and, after winning a state scholarship, went to Cornell, as he himself noted, ‘because it was virtually the state university of New York’1. He then went directly on to the University of Chicago, where he was converted only partially from his concerns with social problems to a theorist. He was one of the first Ph.D.’s in sociology from the University, and the first Chicago Sociology Ph.D. to hold a position in Sociology at a major university other than Chicago itself: a large land grant university in the Midwest, Missouri. He stayed there for most of his career until leaving for Duke, an institution with a strongly religious orientation that prized him for his religious writings.2 Ellwood wrote no great books, nor did he coin any basic concepts, with the possible exception of the use of ‘inter’ terms to describe the social process. He was the author of several successful textbooks, including one which invented the field of social problems, largely an American phenomenon, as a part of sociology (Sociology and Modern Social Problems 1910a). He was rumoured to have a million copies in print, most of which were of the various editions of this book. One suspects that this is an overestimate, though it was widely believed by his peers 1 ‘Sociological Life History of Charles Ellwood’, Luther L. Bernard Papers, The University of Chicago Library Special Collections. 2 For a summary of Ellwood’s American career, see Turner (2007). (Odum 1951), but it is still likely that he was the most widely circulated sociologist of his time, other than Herbert Spencer. Despite this ‘American’ profile, Ellwood was among the most European of American-born sociologists. He made four major trips to Europe, each of which was consequential. His first was as a student in Berlin, where he encountered Georg Simmel, which stimulated the development of his own approach to sociology; to England in 1914, which turned his interest to anthropology and set him on path to writing as a ‘public sociologist’, and in 1927, when he came upon Italian fascism and returned to warn Americans of its dangers. His final trip was as President of the Institut International de Sociologie (IIS), where he struggled to create an international federation of national sociological societies, and to resist the fascist takeover of the organization. This apparently quintessential ‘American’ provincial was also the most translated American sociologist before 1945, with books in French, German, and Dutch, as well as Japanese and Chinese. The translated books included one of his books on Social Problems and also included his theoretical and social psychological works. All this occurred despite the fact that he had no significant academic power, and no connections with Rockefeller money, unlike his contemporaries at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Columbia. Something else makes him historically interesting. Ellwood’s connections in Europe, and especially his warm relations with small-country sociologists, such as those of the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia, point to a world of interwar sociology that has little connection with the world that emerged after World War II, and has rarely been studied as a part of the history of international sociology. They also point to a powerful division in sociology, but also a mysterious and complex one, concerning not Europe against or in contrast to American sociology but internationally, involving conflicts with Europeans and Americans in alliances against other groupings of Europeans and Americans. This material undermines some traditional images of the relation between European and American sociology. If one were to believe the famous thesis of Friedrich Tenbruck, according to which there was a categorical distinction between European and American approaches to sociology, with American sociology marked by its moralism and European sociology by its rejection of moralism (1988), one would be puzzled by the fact that Ellwood had warm relations with many European scholars. In the 1930s he was President of the IIS (L'Institut International de Sociologie), the third American to hold that office, after Lester Ward and Franklin H. Giddings, and presided over the Congress of the International Institute of Sociology, then the major international gathering of sociologists. Ellwood’s successes and failures in Europe also suggest some possible interpretations of the divisions between European and American sociology, and to some extent undermine Tenbruck’s argument,3 by pointing to some different and more powerfully divisive issues between two different tribes of sociology. Student Days Ellwood was given a strong dose of German philosophy at Cornell University, where, from 1892 to 1896, he was an undergraduate. Ellwood’s Bachelor’s thesis (1896) was on the relationship between sociology and ethics, a topic that continued to interest him throughout his career. His thesis exemplifies Ellwood’s lucid and economical style, as well as his omnivorous intellectual appetite. The discussion included representatives of both contemporary French political theory, in the form of Paul Janet’s lectures, and recent German commentary on Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. The conclusion of the thesis also explains Ellwood’s choice to go to Chicago: Albion Small, the head of its 3 This is not to say that there is nothing to Tenbruck’s argument, and Ellwood’s relationships provide some evidence in support of it. Ellwood wrote a polemical article in 1933 against what he called ‘Emasculated Sociologies’, which he sent to Leopold von Weise. Von Weise’s pained response was that he had hoped that his own sociology, which he thought of as being pure rather than ethical or political, would find a home in the United States, because, as he presciently saw, German sociology had become political in a way that excluded it. There is a similar response by a Czech sociologist, Emmanuel Chalupný, with whom Ellwood was especially close (Emanuel Chalupný to Charles Ellwood [March 17, 1940] Charles A. Ellwood Papers. Duke University Archives). But there is also evidence that European audiences responded to the idea that sociology ought to say something about the questions of the day. Sociology department, was part of what Ellwood referred to as ‘the Germanizing School’ of social and political thinkers who believed, as Small is quoted by Ellwood, that ‘knowledge of reality passes directly and naturally into conceptions of contained possibility’, meaning conceptions of the ideal forms of social institutions (1896, 58). When he arrived at Chicago, he pursued these interests, which were of course shared with John Dewey, whom he took two courses with at Chicago. This set him on the path toward a social process-oriented interactionist social psychology. But his interest in European thought continued, especially under the influence of Small. Small had him translate an essay on method by Frédéric Le Play for the American Journal of Sociology (1897), and Small encouraged him to go to Germany to study with Simmel, whom Ellwood later recalled as a special friend of Small, and to acquaint himself directly with the German scholars he had been studying. He spent time in 1897 and 1898 in Germany. The date is important here. Simmel was himself at an early stage of his career, and there was no ‘sociology’ as an academic subject, merely a philosophy seminar, which Ellwood attended. At the time, Simmel’s books included On Social Differentiation (1890), an Introduction to the Science of Ethics (1892-93), and The Problems of the Philosophy of History ([1892]1977). Only the first had any claim to be sociology, and it was evolutionist in the same manner as much of the literature of the time, and also, as Max Weber later pointed out, evaluative in his use of the notion of progress (1949, 17). Ellwood disagreed with Simmel about the relation of ethics to sociology, which was the theme of the seminar paper he wrote for Simmel (1898, cited in Jensen 1946-47, 342). But unlike Weber, Ellwood retained the idea that evolutionary processes, both social and biological, had ethical implications, and that sociology had a special role in relation to ethics because of this. This was an idea that was basic to the community that made up the international sociology of the time, the IIS, which was especially concerned with the puzzle of whether socialism could be made consistent with Darwinism. Ellwood, as we will see, was soon to be taken up by this community as one of their own. Ellwood’s dissertation, on social psychology, was published as soon as it was written as a series of four articles in Small’s American Journal of Sociology in 1899. It discussed such American figures as Mark Baldwin and Simon Patten, as well as Gabriel Tarde on imitation, and was, with Tarde (cf. Kalampalikis, Delouvée, and Pétard 2006, 28), among the first to use the term ‘social psychology’. The dissertation contrasted ‘mental phenomena dependent on a community of individuals’ to the ‘action and reaction of individuals in a group on one another’ (1899a, 656), and argued that the latter was fundamental. This phrasing marked what was the crucial distinction between interactionism and Durkheimian collective psychology, though Durkheim is not mentioned. Its argument was nevertheless immediately attended to both by the rapidly developing body of anti-Durkheimian opinion, and by the Durkheimians themselves.