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Conference Panel: The Intellectual Legacy of the Johns Hopkins Seminary of History and Politics: Reconsidering the Genealogy of the Social Sciences*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Philip Ethington  and
Eileen McDonagh
Philip Ethington
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
Eileen McDonagh
Affiliation:
Northeastern University and Radcliffe College
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Conference Panel: The Intellectual Legacy of the Johns Hopkins Seminary of History and Politics: Reconsidering the Genealogy of the Social Sciences
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Studies in American Political Development , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Fall 1994 , pp. 375 - 408
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1. See, for example, the essays in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press).

2. Not all of the innovation was at Johns Hopkins, of course. Henry Adams had introduced the seminar method at Harvard as had Charles K. Adams at the University of Michigan. Yale offered a Ph.D. as early as 1861 and had reorganized for graduate study by 1870. Yet it was JHU that implemented the most systematic restructuring of higher education, becoming, as Curti, Merle put it some time ago, “the first truly graduate school in American society.” The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper and Bros., 1951), 514Google Scholar.

3. The term “seminary” is the literal translation of “seminarium,” the term used for such teaching formats in the German universities at the time.

4. An excellent overview of the seminary and its participants is Gettleman's Introduction in Gettleman, Marvin E., ed., The Johns Hopkins University Seminary of History and Politics: The Records of an American Institution, 1877–1912, 5 vols. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987)Google Scholar.

5. There are many studies of the “Chicago School.” See Bulmer, Martin, The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

6. See, for example, Bernstein, Richard J., The New Constellation: The Ethical/Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Toulmin, Stephen, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Benhabib, Seyla, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar. The entire project of Jürgen Habermas since about 1970 can be characterized as seeking to repair social science with a moral philosophy he calls “universal pragmatics.” This project is most thoroughly worked out in his Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., tr. McCarthy, Thomas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981–1987).Google ScholarDiscussions of Habermas's project are too numerous to list here, but see Berstein, , New Constellation and White, Stephen K., The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, Justice and Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

7. Two of the panelists have written at length about these issues. See Higham, John, “The Matrix of Specialization,” in Oleson, Aledanda and Voss, John, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in America, 1860–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Ross, Dorothy, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

8. Curti, Growth of American Thought, 514.

9. This and the following paragraphs draw on Ross, The Origins of American Social Science. See also earlier studies, such as Fine, Sidney, Laissez-Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865–1901 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956)Google Scholar; and Hofstadter, Richard, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)Google Scholar. A fine recent study linking intellectual development more generally (including philosophy) with political development is Kloppenberg, James T., Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

10. Ross, Origins of American Social Science, 105.

11. These developments are covered in Furner, Mary O., Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975)Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, Academic Freedom in the Age of the College (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964)Google Scholar. The Stanford story, and that of the collection of thinkers at Lincoln, Nebraska, is pieced together from a variety of sources, but see especially Ross, E.A., Seventy Years of It: An Autobiography of Edward Alsworth Ross (London: D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc., 1936)Google Scholar.

12. On professionalism, in addition to Ross and Furner, see Haskell, Thomas L., The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

13. “A Sociological View of Sovereignty,” American Journal of Sociology 5 (July 1899–May 1900): 1–6. Commons briefly entertained an identity as a sociologist while teaching at Syracuse University during 1885–1899. On Howard's intellectual odyssey, see the discussion below.

14. The question of male feminism and antifeminism among the early social scientists is most explicitly treated in Deegan, Mary Jo, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918 (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1988)Google Scholar.

15. The relationship between Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman and the Stanford intellectuals is treated in Ethington, Philip J., The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chap. 8Google Scholar; the political and intellectual implications of these connections are further explored in idem., “Hypotheses from Habermas: Notes on Reconstructing American Political and Social History, 1890–1920,” Intellectual History Newsletter 14 (1992): 21–40.

16. This is not at all to say that women social scientists did not make a major contribution to social science theory and methods. The “social survey,” in particular, was a form of research largely developed by women working outside of universities in the mainly womenrun social settlements. See Sklar, Kathryn Kish, “Hull-House Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women's Work in the 1890s,” in Bulmer, Martin, Bales, Kevin, and Sklar, Kathryn Kish, eds., The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 111–47Google Scholar. See also Fitzpatrick, Ellen, Endless Fitzpatrick Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Morgan, J. Graham, “Women in American Sociology in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Sociology 2:2 (Spring 1980): 1–34Google Scholar.

17. A definitive critique of the “end of feminism” theory is Cott, Nancy F., The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

18. Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Muncy, Robyn, Creatinga Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University, 1991)Google Scholar; Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar.

19. Freedman, Estelle B., “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,” Feminist Studies 5:3 (Fall 1979): 512–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Kerber, Linda, “The Paradox of Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts, 1805,” American Historical Review 97:2 (04 1992): 349–78Google Scholar; McDonagh, Eileen, “Gender Politics and Political Change,” in Dodd, Lawrence C. and Jillson, Calvin, eds., New Perspectives on American Politics (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1994), 58–73Google Scholar; Okin, Susan Moller, Justice, Gender and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989)Google Scholar; Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

1. A photograph of the table in its original site, with Adams at the head, is in Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York, 1973), no. 7, following p. 339Google Scholar. On a significant parallel and contrast between the early Hopkins seminar and present-day historiographical interests see Higham, John, “Herbert Baxter Adams and the Study of Local History,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 1225–39Google Scholar. The records of the early seminar are conveniently accessible in Gettleman, ed., The Johns Hopkins University.

2. Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity’ Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, England, 1988), 87–88Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968), 38–40, 65–67Google Scholar.

3. Hugh Hawkins provides a precise, reliable, and judicious narrative of Adams's, activities in Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1889 (Ithaca, 1960)Google Scholar. The best account of Adams's intellectual formation is in Raymond J. Cunningham, “Mark, VolksstatU, and Weltstaat: The Historical Organicism of Herbert Baxter Adams,” unpublished essay. See also Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 1st ser. (1882–83).

4. Holt, W. Stull, ed., Historical Scholarship in the United States, 1876–1901: As Revealed in the Correspondence of Herbert B. Adams (Baltimore, 1938), 55Google Scholar.

5. Wilson to Axson, Ellen Louise, October 16, 1883, in Link, Arthur S., ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 2 (Princeton, 1967), 479–80Google Scholar. See alsoBragdon, Henry W., Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 57–64, 75–80, 95–113Google Scholar.

6. Johns Hopkins Studies, 1st ser. (1883) 14; Donnan, Elizabeth and Stock, Leo F., eds., An Historian's World: Selections from the Correspondence of John Franklin Jameson. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society 42 (1956): 21, 25Google Scholar.

7. Gettleman, , The Johns Hopkins Seminary 1 (05 8, 1884), 97Google Scholar.

8. Jameson, , “An Introduction to the Study of the Constitutional and Political History of the States,” The Johns Hopkins Studies, 4th ser., no. 5 (1886): 5–29Google Scholar. On why this project attracted Jameson see the editorial note in Rothberg, Morey and Goggin, Jacqueline, eds., John Franklin Jameson and the Development of Humanistic Scholarship in America, 1 (1993): 13–14Google Scholar.

9. Gettleman, , The Johns Hopkins Seminary 1 (01 23, 1885): 139Google Scholar. Enough students did follow Jameson's, lead so that he was able, several years later, to edit Essays in the Constitutional History of the United States in the Formative Period, 1775–1789, by Graduates and Former Members of the Johns Hopkins University (Boston, 1889)Google Scholar.

10. Billington, Turner, 46–79. No contemporary evidence supports Billington's belief that Turner “had to conform to the institutional interpretations so favored at Hopkins” (p. 73). Adams's organicist approach to history was entirely congenial to the early Turner. Ibid., 83.

11. Andrews, , “The River Towns of Connecticut: A Study of Wethersfield, Hartford, and Windsor,” The Johns Hopkins Studies, 7th ser., nos. 7–9 (1889): 8–9Google Scholar; Gettleman, , The Johns Hopkins Seminary 3 (12 5, 1890): 741Google Scholar; Andrews, , “The Theory of the Village Community,” Papers of the American Historical Association 5 (1891): 47–60Google Scholar.

12. C.M. Andrews to H.B. Adams, October 23, 1891, May 19, 1892, Herbert Baxter Adams Papers, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, box 33.

13. Andrews to Adams, October 11, 1891, October 23, 1891.

14. Vincent, John Martin, “Herbert B. Adams,” in Odum, Howard W., ed., American Masters of Social Science (New York, 1927), 123Google Scholar.

15. Gettleman, , The Johns Hopkins Seminary 1 (05 16, 1884): 100Google Scholar.

16. Eisenstadt, A.S., Charles McLean Andrews: A Study in American Historical Writing (New York, 1956), 9Google Scholar; Jameson, J.F., “The American Historical Association, 1884–1909,” American Historical Review 15 (10, 1909): 5Google Scholar.

1. The bulk of this paper is based on three previous publications: Ross, Dorothy, “On the Misunderstanding of Ranke and the Origins of the Historical Profession in America,” in Iggers, George G. and Powell, James M., eds., Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; idem., Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); idem., “An Historian's View of American Social Science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (April 1993): 99–112.

1. Gilman, Daniel Coit, The Benefits Which Society Derives from Universities (Baltimore, 1885), 15–16Google Scholar, quoted in Rudolph, Frederick, The American College and University: A History (New York: Vintage, 1965), 272–73Google Scholar.

2. See the preface to the conference proceedings in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, Macksey, Richard and Donato, Eugenio, eds., 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), xv–xixGoogle Scholar. Donnay's remark is taken from p. 38.

3. Vidal, Gore ed., Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 13–21Google Scholar. The passages cited below are from pp. 14, 19, and 21.