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The History of
Sociology in Britain
New Research and Revaluation
Edited by Plamena Panayotova
 The History of Sociology in Britain
“This book explains that sociology is at its best when it is conducting rigorous
empirical enquiry. There is a strong British tradition of empirical sociology that
has often been obscured by fashions for theory. Much of that tradition lies in work
for public agencies concerned with social improvement. That socially reforming
tradition is given its due place in this important contribution to our understand-
ing of how academic enquiry can help societies understand themselves.”
—Lindsay Paterson, Professor of Education Policy, University of Edinburgh, UK

“This book represents an important contribution to understanding the history

of sociology in Britain. But more than that, the essays in this book also chronicle
the development of social thought, social research and social science education
in Britain over more than 200 years. The book also addresses the controversial
question of who and what is remembered and prompts us to consider why some
social thinkers may be forgotten over time.”
—Louise Ryan, Professorial Research Fellow, University of Sheffield, UK
 Plamena Panayotova
Editor

The History of
Sociology in Britain
New Research and Revaluation
Editor
Plamena Panayotova
Sociology Department
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-19928-9    ISBN 978-3-030-19929-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19929-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland
AG 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans-
mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Preface

The essays in this volume are a selection of those presented at the

Conference on the History of Sociology in Britain held at the University of
Edinburgh on 16th–17th April 2018. This conference, the first devoted
solely to the history of British sociology, brought together a distinguished
group of historically minded sociologists and historians of social science.
In 1980, the British Sociological Association annual conference had
dedicated part of its deliberations to a discussion of several aspects of the
development of sociology in Britain between 1950–1980 (cf. Abrams
et al. 1981). The 2018 Edinburgh conference provided a valuable oppor-
tunity not only to update and build upon the 1980 discussions but to go
beyond them in scope and ambition. The Edinburgh conference covered
a much broader sweep of history and historical themes, going as far back
as the Scottish Enlightenment right up to the present day. Unlike the
1980 historical discussions, which were included in the BSA annual con-
ference as a way of commemorating the upcoming 30th anniversary of
the Association, the 2018 conference was held purely for the sake of
exchanging knowledge and ideas; bringing together a small band of devo-
tees, all of whom were concerned about the lack of opportunities to share
knowledge face-to-face about the history of British sociology and all of
whom were keen to promote the idea of history as a vital tool in under-
standing the distinct character of sociology in this country. The confer-
ence also set a precedent in bringing together representative figures from
v
vi Preface

two distinct groups of British sociologists, which, historically, have existed

separately but parallel to one another: ‘quantitative sociologists’ who have
long persisted as a minority in British sociology and so-called ‘main-
stream’ or primarily non-quantitatively oriented sociologists who have
tended to make up the majority. More recently, a number of initiatives
have been introduced to encourage the development of quantitative
research and teaching in British sociology. The success of these initiatives
has been limited and dialogue between quantitative and qualitative soci-
ologists has remained difficult. This conference was a rare opportunity for
these two groups to start a dialogue about the troubled experience British
sociology has had, stretching deep into the past, with the teaching of
quantitative methods and their application in sociological research.
Interest in the history of sociology in Britain has never been totally
absent among sociologists; however, to this day, study of the history of
sociology has remained ‘a speciality’ carried out by sociologists whose
expertise lies in other fields of sociological enquiry; or by historians. A
great deal remains to be done to stimulate a deeper curiosity and concern
within the wider sociological community about sociology’s past; and it is
hoped that this conference was a small but advancing step towards this
goal. This conference may have been the first in many respects but, hope-
fully, it won’t be the last. One of the major aims of the present book is to
promote its legacy by spreading word of the benefit of its results, of its
overall message and of its long-term goals and, thereby, act as an inspira-
tion and a catalyst to others.

Edinburgh, UK Plamena Panayotova

7 November 2018
 Acknowledgements

The publication of this book would not have been possible without the
unwavering support I have received in the past nine years from my col-
leagues at The University of Edinburgh. I wish, firstly, to thank my doc-
toral supervisor, colleague and friend, John MacInnes—learning from
him has been an invaluable and enjoyable experience that I will always
treasure. Donald MacKenzie, Lindsay Paterson, Vernon Gayle and Steve
Kemp have all stimulated my interest in the history of sociology and sta-
tistics and have helped me in building the foundations of my scholarship.
This book came out of a conference on the history of British sociology
which I organised and which was held on 16th and 17th April 2018 at
the Sociology Department in The University of Edinburgh. The idea for
this conference first emerged during a supervision meeting with John
MacInnes and, later on, took shape over dinner with John
H. Goldthorpe—I thank both of them for encouraging me to pursue and
realise it. Due credit must also go to Jonathan Hearn, Head of Sociology,
who supported my idea from beginning to end; to the Graduate School
at the School of Social and Political Science and Edinburgh Q-step for
their approval and contribution to the funding of the event. Thank you
to Lizzie Robertson, the Sociology secretary, who spent many hours sort-
ing out some of the organisational details; and to my colleague Christine
Hübner who volunteered to help me on the days of the conference. Last
but not least, I’m grateful to all scholars who attended the event and
vii
viii Acknowledgements

c­ ontributed to the diverse and lively debates; and, of course, to all pre-
senters and participants in the discussion panels: Frank Bechhofer, Martin
Bulmer, Lawrence Goldman, John H. Goldthorpe, Christopher
T. Husbands, Kenneth Macdonald, John MacInnes, Donald MacKenzie,
Peter Mandler, Colin Mills, Geoff Payne, Jennifer Platt, Chris Renwick,
Baudry Rocquin, Marius Strubenhoff and Stephen Turner.
Sadly, one of the participants, Frank Bechhofer, passed away just
recently. He died in December 2018. He was one of the founding mem-
bers of the Edinburgh sociology department and a fine scholar who gave
me much support when I was working on my doctorate and preparing
for the conference. I dedicate this volume to his memory.
This is my first time working on a book. I feel extremely fortunate I
haven’t written it alone. Working with the contributors to this volume
has been extremely rewarding and has taught me things that cannot be
found in books. I couldn’t have asked for a more positive experience at
this early stage in my career. Thank you to all of you—I feel humbled and
privileged to have had the opportunity to earn your trust, work closely
with you and receive your support in making both the conference and the
book happen.
I’m extremely grateful to my good friend, Ron Wilson, who for years
has been teaching me the crafts of learning and writing and has helped
me in the preparation of chapters one and eleven. To my family and my
partner Ivan—thank you for shining a bright light above my shoulders
while I was busy working on this book.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Plamena Panayotova

Part I Disputed Origins   35

2 Did British Sociology Begin with the Scottish

Enlightenment? 37
Kenneth Macdonald

3 Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Social Science in

Nineteenth-­Century Britain 71
Lawrence Goldman

Part II Neglected Legacies 101

4 Making Sense of Christopher Dawson103

Garrett Potts and Stephen Turner

ix
x Contents

5 Richard Titmuss, Eugenics, and Social Science in Mid-­

twentieth-­Century Britain137
Chris Renwick

6 Social Status, Social Position and Social Class in Post-War

British Society161
Colin Mills

7 ‘Poor Cousins’: The Lost History of Sociology in the

Polytechnics191
Geoff Payne

8 Anglo-America: The Case of Edward Shils, Sociologist,

1910–1995221
Martin Bulmer

Part III Teaching Sociology 247

9 No Longer Oblivion: Sociology Courses Before the ‘First’

Sociology Course249
Christopher T. Husbands

10 The Rise of the Social Sciences in British Education,

1960–2016281
Peter Mandler

11 The Teaching of Research Methods in British Sociology in

the Twentieth Century301
Plamena Panayotova
 Contents xi

Part IV Historical Peculiarities 337

12 Sociology and Statistics in Britain: The Strange History of

Social Mobility Research and Its Latter-Day
Consequences339
John H. Goldthorpe

13 What Kind of ‘Ology’? Two Cultures and the Success of

British Sociology389
John MacInnes

Index415
 List of Contributors

Martin Bulmer Department of Sociology, University of Surrey,

Guildford, UK
[email protected]

Lawrence Goldman St. Peter’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford,

UK
[email protected]

John H. Goldthorpe Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford,

UK
[email protected]

Christopher T. Husbands London School of Economics and Political

Science, London, UK
[email protected]

Kenneth Macdonald Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford,

UK
[email protected]

John MacInnes University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

[email protected]
xiii
xiv List of Contributors

Peter Mandler Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge,

Cambridge, UK
[email protected]

Colin Mills Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

[email protected]

Plamena Panayotova The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

[email protected]

Geoff Payne Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

[email protected]

Garrett Potts University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

[email protected]

Chris Renwick University of York, York, UK

[email protected]

Stephen Turner University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

[email protected]
 List of Figures

Fig. 6.1 Correspondence Analysis bi-plot for extended GSS

­occupational groups 165
Fig. 10.1 Number of A-levels awarded in sociology and psychology
(in thousands), 1972–2016 286
Fig. 10.2 Number of first degrees awarded in psychology, sociology and
anthropology, 1966–2016 287
Fig. 10.3 Proportion of psychology, sociology and history degrees
awarded as percentage of all first degrees, 1967–2016 288
Fig. 10.4 Gender balance in degrees awarded in psychology and
­sociology, 1966–1979 289
Fig. 10.5 Proportion of sociology and psychology A-levels awarded as
percentage of all A-levels, 1972–2016 295
Fig. 12.1 Galton’s view of British social structure 343
Fig. 12.2 Contingency between occupations of fathers and sons 347

xv
 List of Tables

Table 6.1 Six occupational coding schemes 163

Table 7.1 ‘How many sociologists did it take to teach a degree in
sociology in 1966?’ 208
Table 9.1 Identified courses involving ‘sociology’ given in the UK,
1888–1904251
Table 11.1 Sociology courses at the LSE by type and period 304

xvii
 1
Introduction
Plamena Panayotova

The history of British sociology has always been a footnote to sociological

research and literature; a footnote written and read by a tiny minority of
historically minded sociologists. Only occasionally, most often to cele-
brate the anniversary of an institution or commemorate a renowned indi-
vidual, does it attract a wider audience. Courses on the history of sociology
in Britain, or in other countries, do not exist; while historical compo-
nents of introductory sociological courses are usually limited to a brief
discussion of the intellectual heritage of nineteenth-century bearded
scholars such as Karl Marx, Max Weber or Emile Durkheim. A rounded
history of sociology in Britain has rarely, if ever, been attempted: ‘This
still awaits its historian’, Martin Bulmer (1985b: 3) wrote in 1985 and his
words still have a familiar ring today. The most cited work on the history
of British sociology remains Philip Abrams’ essay on The Origins of British
Sociology: 1834–1914 published fifty years ago and a work which is lim-
ited not only in scope but which is also suspect in its historical judgment.
Yes, there is still much to be learnt from an old piece of history writing; but

P. Panayotova (*)
The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2019 1

P. Panayotova (ed.), The History of Sociology in Britain,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19929-6_1
2 P. Panayotova

even if it does not contain any inaccurate information which has been
superseded by new research, with the passage of time all historical work
itself becomes an historical artefact, a topic of history. All history writing,
to a varying degree, reflects the concerns of the time in which it was writ-
ten; Abrams’ essay is no exception. And while many sociologists in Britain
are aware of Abrams’ essay, they are unaware of the much more special-
ised literature on the subject, conducted mostly in history departments,
which would help them to put the history of sociology into its proper
perspective (see below). It’s hard to escape the feeling that the history of
sociology in Britain still awaits recognition as a valuable tool in sociologi-
cal teaching and research. But most importantly of all, the history of
sociology in Britain still awaits its audience. What is needed is not just
continuous updating of history writing but more appreciation of the
value and power of historical understanding. And this understanding
begins with an understanding of the reasons why sociologists’ general
neglect of the history of their subject really matters.1
To begin with, we need to understand, and history can help us in this
respect, that the neglect of historical enquiry and the lack of up-to-date
historical scholarship are not by any means a new problem, either for
sociology, or for social science more generally. ‘The great paradox of our
age’, Ernest Gellner wrote thirty years ago, ‘is that although it is undergo-
ing social and intellectual change of totally unprecedented speed and
depth, its thought has become, in the main, unhistorical or anti-­historical’
(Gellner 1988: 12). Gellner was specifically referring here to philosophers
and social scientists and their widespread neglect of the importance of
employing an historical perspective in any type of analysis, be it philo-
sophical or sociological; this despite the rise of history as an academic
subject in the nineteenth century and its growing sophistication in the
twentieth century. A specialist historian in the social sciences would be
aware of the existence of a number of specialist essays on the history of
sociology (Sprott 1957; Madge 1957; Little 1963; Halliday 1968; Banks
et al. 1980; Soffer 1982; Albrow 1989; Kumar 2001) and longer mono-
graphs (Kent 1981; Evans 1986; Halsey 2004; Savage 2010) but as far as
the wider sociological community is concerned these remain items on a
curiosity shelf which would be examined only in rare circumstances.
 1 Introduction 3

The absence of any historical perspective is not at all new in sociol-

ogy—this is evident from the lack of engagement with the history of
sociology in some of British sociology’s core institutions. For example, a
recent examination of the archives in Keele of the first sociological institu-
tion in Britain, the Sociological Society, shows very little reference to the
work of the social scientific institutions that preceded it, despite the
important role they played in fostering social scientific research in Britain
during the nineteenth century. The Social Science Association (SSA)
(1857–1886) receives two passing comments in the private documents of
the Sociological Society’s organiser, Victor Branford (Branford 1903;
Sociological Society [Victor Branford] 1903); aside from this, the Society,
as an institution, made no acknowledgement of, and paid no tribute to,
the SSA, neither to criticise nor praise its contributions. The Sociological
Society also made no effort to engage seriously with the work of another
important predecessor, the Statistical Society of London (now Royal
Statistical Society (RSS)) which was established in 1834. The links
between the two societies were weak to non-existent right from the
start—two people, Edward Brabrook and Sir John Macdonald were
engaged in leading positions in both Societies in the early 1900s but there
is no evidence that either Brabrook, or Macdonald, or anyone else made
any significant efforts to strengthen the connections between the
Statistical and the Sociological Societies (for more details, see Panayotova
2018). It could, of course, be argued that the Sociological Society was
reluctant to engage with the historical legacy and contributions of the
SSA and the RSS due to its different focus and distinct understanding of
sociology. However, the Sociological Society had no institutional links
even with the only nineteenth-century institutions which shared its basic
understanding of sociology—the London Positivist Society, established
in 1867, and the closely related English Positivist Committee (like them,
the Sociological Society embraced Auguste Comte’s view of sociology).
And if the attitude of the Sociological Society towards the history of
social science in Britain seems like an example of a remote past, too
remote to remember, then we find parallels, a very similar attitude, in the
British Sociological Association when it was first established in 1951. The
BSA did not acknowledge the contribution or historical role of either the
4 P. Panayotova

Sociological Society or the Institute of Sociology2 (cf. Carr-Saunders

et al. 1951; Banks 1967; Platt 2003).
These examples of a failure to acknowledge their heritage are brought
up not to pass judgment on either the Sociological Society or the BSA;
nor to argue that the members of the Sociological Society were unaware
of the existence of the nineteenth-century institutions; but simply to
emphasise that this in itself is a characteristic of British sociology that
deserves attention and that has the potential to tell us something funda-
mental about British sociology—why it is that the development of sociol-
ogy in Britain created conditions not only for intellectual but also for
institutional divides? Ultimately, an historical perspective on the problem
of historical neglect in sociology saves us from wrongfully assuming that
we are facing a new problem.
An important part of historical understanding is the ability to distin-
guish old problems from new; enabling us to tell the difference between
the beginning of a new trend from a simple shift in an old one. This
brings us to another reason why neglect of the history of sociology in
Britain matters: knowledge of history is necessary to avoid simply repeat-
ing or arguing all over again what has already been said or argued. One
aspect of sociology has suffered acutely in this respect, and with
consequences.
The first official government report on the state of the teaching of
social sciences in Britain was published in 1946, summarising the results
of an investigation conducted by Lord Clapham and his advisers. Since
then, numerous reports of similar nature have been published, with nota-
ble examples including Pearson (1947), Heyworth (1965), Rosenbaum
(1971), ESRC (1987), Review Committee on Sociology (1989),
MacInnes (2010), British Academy (2012). Despite differences in ratio-
nale, focus, scope and data all of these reports are remarkably similar in
one respect: they all repeat, using more or less the same vocabulary, the
argument that British social science, and especially sociology, do not uti-
lise the potential of quantitative methods in teaching and research; some-
thing, which the reports argue is desirable and, if not improved, could
damage the future of the subject. The legacy of these reports, at least with
regard to the relationship between sociology and statistics, is precisely in
these repetitions, as they indicate the existence of a consistent trend in
 1 Introduction 5

British sociology characterised by an inability to resolve the complex

issues involved in the development of quantitative research and training
within academic sociology. Their remarkable repetitiveness is also an
important indication that the direction of their recommendations was
consistently at odds with what social scientists, notably sociologists,
thought or wanted for themselves and their subject. But with regard to
what this example tells about the dangers of the neglect of history, the
recommendations, focusing solely on the present and simply repeating
the failed proposals of the past rather than addressing the real causes of
repeated failure, actually resulted in allowing a problem to continue.
History can teach us how to build on and improve older strategies
for action.
The value and power of historical knowledge is not limited to revealing
that things and arguments supposedly new and exciting are often little
more than failed repetitions of the past that has been ignored or forgot-
ten. Neglect of the historical record can lead to distorted perspectives that
affect present-day thinking in ways that are detrimental to good scholar-
ship. For instance, even to this day it is commonly believed that the early
post-war period in British sociology was dominated by ‘positivist’ research
and teaching. The veracity of such beliefs, however, was questioned early
on, the best-known example being Jennifer Platt’s 1981 article The Social
Construction of ‘positivism’ and its Significance in British Sociology,
1950–1980. Platt’s analysis of the types of sociological research published
in the three leading sociological journals in the early post-war period in
Britain shows that ‘the existence of a clearly defined positivist style is
highly questionable’ (Platt 1981: 76). By the time Platt was writing, how-
ever, the ‘positivism’ disputes had led to a widespread belief that some, if
not all, quantitative methods are inherently ‘positivist’ and, therefore,
somehow ‘anti-sociological’ or ‘a-sociological’. This was despite the fact
that the term ‘positivism’ was extremely ambiguous and unclear; that
there were no self-proclaimed ‘positivist’ sociologists; and that accusa-
tions aimed at quantitative sociologists were made without reference to
empirical and concrete examples from research and teaching (for more
details, see Panayotova 2018). Platt’s investigation was not totally suc-
cessful in convincing the sociological community that early post-war
sociology in Britain had not been ‘positivist’; similarly, Marsh’s 1980s
6 P. Panayotova

defences of the survey method against many unsubstantiated attacks on

behalf of the ‘anti-positivists’ was unsuccessful in eradicating the belief
that surveys are inherently ‘positivist’ (Marsh 1979, 1980, 1982). This
does not mean that historical analysis is useless; without Platt and Marsh’s
interventions, the positivist conception would have gone largely unchal-
lenged. However, only continual observation of historical trends and close
examination of the historical development of movements, ideas, and
institutions can prevent the perpetuation of myths and ungrounded
beliefs. Neglect of the historical perspective can harm a discipline by
allowing it to thrive on the basis of convenient but opinionated and
unsupported claims.
Neglect of historical perspective also matters because without it we are
blind to the different options and alternate paths that existed for sociol-
ogy in the past but which, for a variety of reasons, were not taken. If we
fail to take account of alternative courses of development this can, and
often does, lead to assumptions, albeit implicit, that the development of
sociology in one direction or another was inevitable. Closer inspection of
crucial instances in sociology’s development in Britain shows clearly how
mistaken such views often are.
A recent history by Chris Renwick of the events that took place in the
Sociological Society, for instance, examines the various possibilities that
existed within this institution to influence the course of the development
of sociology in a direction more closely associated with the study of biol-
ogy (Renwick 2012). And a study which I completed recently (Panayotova
2018) examines an alternative possibility with regard to the relationship
between sociology and statistics in Britain: given that the social science
that developed in Britain during the nineteenth century was both empiri-
cal and statistical, and that the major advances in statistics were made
here in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, it can legitimately be
questioned why, when first established, British sociology was established
as an a-statistical subject and remained such consistently throughout the
twentieth century. This and Renwick’s studies are valuable in the sense
that they allow us to ‘see how the same cards, so to speak, could have been
dealt out differently’ (Gellner 1988: 15) and, thereby, understand more
fully the choices that sociology made in the past and how the specific deci-
sions taken with regard to these choices determined its future. Probing
 1 Introduction 7

past evidence, therefore, helps us not only to locate and understand where
we are now but also to trace the path and identify the various crossroads
that took us here; such knowledge can provide us with a comprehensive
map, opening our eyes to the fullness of the landscape and the roads that
cut through it and, in the future, hopefully, at the very least, saving us
from blindly following what we may otherwise have mistakenly taken for
the one, the only, right path ahead.
Having a proper historical perspective also enables us to identify things
that have remained in the collective memory of sociologists in a static
way; the understanding of which has not been modified with the passage
of time. A good example of this came out of the recent Edinburgh confer-
ence. One of the sessions at the conference was devoted to the 50th anni-
versary of the publication of the first study to come out of the research on
The Affluent Worker. Three members from the original Affluent Worker
team were present—John H. Goldthorpe, Frank Bechhofer and Jennifer
Platt.3 The methodological strengths of The Affluent Worker project such
as, for example, its effective combination of theory and methodology and
its well-planned research design, were pointed out. But a much bigger
part of the discussion was devoted to the issue of whether The Affluent
Worker should continue to be hailed as one of the milestone achieve-
ments of twentieth-century British sociology. It was argued that all
knowledge, but social scientific knowledge especially, gradually becomes
out-dated. Social scientific knowledge tends to become out-dated more
quickly, as it is necessarily rooted in particular social settings and reflects
distinct social concerns that characterise a particular period. The Affluent
Worker study is no exception—although it is important to consider it as
an historical achievement it would be inappropriate to use it on its own
as a representative example of what sociology is, or should be, nowadays.
Remembering The Affluent Worker could be useful to sociologists nowa-
days in their teaching and in their research but only if it is accompanied
by the necessary historical understanding of the conditions that prevailed
within sociology as a subject and in society more generally at the time it
originated. It is the historical meaning of The Affluent Worker, and, for
that matter, of any other piece of research from the recent past, that now-
adays really matters more than its research findings. And it is only by
employing an historical perspective that we can even begin thinking
8 P. Panayotova

about the importance not only of remembering our predecessors’ work

but also paying more careful attention to the way we remember and the
reasons for remembering some things, but not others.
Sociologists who have written about the history of sociology often jus-
tify their work by arguing that their rationale is to recover something that
has been lost from memory with the passing of time. A series of articles
published in The Sociological Review in 2007 devoted to some of the
members of the Sociological Society, for instance, aimed to ‘recognise
anew the importance of these forbears’ (Savage 2007: 429); reclaim the
importance of the social theory of [Patrick] Geddes (cf. Studholme 2007)
and retrieve [Victor] Branford from obscurity, praising him for ‘envision-
ing’ a ‘theoretically and empirically grounded sociology’ (Scott 2007:
479). Another recent publication used a similar argument, namely, ‘to
recover [these] lost histories’ and ‘to offer multiple histories’ (Holmwood
and Scott 2014: 2). This may be a legitimate strategy but it should also be
made clear that the recovery of something ‘lost’; a modification of current
understanding; a revision of the past are by default the aims of every study
of a historical nature. Emphasis on recovery (and re-discovery) and revi-
sion contributes little to the strength of the arguments in favour of the
necessity for an historical perspective in sociology, which rest on this
basis. It is much more persuasive, and difficult, to argue why recovery,
rediscovery and revision are at all necessary at a particular point in time
and to justify this not only on the basis of contemporary concerns but
also historically. This is something that not all authors using ‘recovery’
and ‘revision’ as justification seem to have taken into account but which
this book acknowledges clearly. History is valuable and important not so
much because it recovers and revises; the value of a history of sociology
comes from the fact that when done well, it helps us identify trends and
get a clearer view on the intellectual, institutional problems that have been
driving the development of the subject in the last two centuries. Adding
to the list of histories through revision and rediscovery is simply not
enough; ‘new’ histories should aim to identify ‘new’ problems.
Neglect of the historical perspective has not only been multifaceted,
but also systematic. However, the fact that we observe a systematic neglect
of the historical perspective in sociological research and teaching in many
different aspects does not imply that this is universal and that there
 1 Introduction 9

haven’t been in sociology’s history sociologists who have made efforts to

address it. In fact, there are several volumes with collected essays on the
history of sociology, some of which have gone far in redressing the situa-
tion outlined above. The volumes Practice and Progress: British Sociology
1950–1980 (1981) edited by Philip Abrams and colleagues and Essays on
the History of British Sociological Research (1985a) edited by Martin
Bulmer were published within a few years of one another in the early
1980s. This period is, historically, important for British sociology for at
least two reasons: by that time, British sociology had already been through
a phase of rapid-rate development that had transformed inter-war British
sociology, which had been unpopular and academically weak, into one of
the most fashionable and academically thriving subjects. But by the early
1980s, this phase was over and British sociology was facing increasing
criticism from government, funding bodies and the media and was
becoming less popular with students: in the words of two contemporary
commentators ‘sociology raised student expectations in the early 1960s
beyond those it either could or should try to meet’; by the early 80s, it ran
the risk of becoming ‘imprisoned in its sudden popularity’ (Westergaard
and Pahl 1989: 379).
Quite naturally, the experience that academic sociology had gathered
in the previous decades and the hostile social, political and academic cli-
mate of the early 1980s provoked an interest among sociologists about
the development and status of their subject, and created an urge for a
better understanding of who sociologists are, how they contribute to aca-
demia and society and how best to cope with contemporary challenges.
What better way to act upon such interest, than to look back and exam-
ine sociology through an historical perspective? The two volumes of col-
lected essays published in the early 1980s attempted to do exactly this.
The editors of Practice and Progress, for instance, argued that with this
volume they were attempting ‘an evaluation of British sociology during
the period 1950–80’ and an examination of ‘problems of methodology
and the creation of sociological knowledge’ and of two developments
which had ‘exerted a considerable influence on the direction and interests
of British sociology, namely, Marxism and feminism’ (Abrams et al. 1981:
6, 8). Bulmer’s (1985a) volume was more specific in its aim—it dealt with the
problem of the existing divide between the tradition of social empirical
10 P. Panayotova

enquiry that originated in Britain in the nineteenth century and contin-

ued to exist throughout the twentieth century in social science depart-
ments, academic institutes and government agencies; and the academic
subject of sociology which, overall, remained non-empirically oriented:
‘It is hardly an exaggeration to say that almost all of the empirical social
research undertaken in Britain between the wars went untouched by
what then passed for academic sociology […] it is surely remarkable that
for forty years the standard bearers of the discipline in Britain were
devoted to the primacy of armchair reflection’ (Bulmer 1985b: 4–5).
Both volumes therefore probed the contemporary state of sociology,
sometimes even with the risk of revealing inconvenient truths, in order to
deal with the problems sociology had been, and was still, facing.
Another volume of collected essays on topics related to the history of
British sociology appeared more recently under the editorship of
Holmwood and Scott (2014). The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in
Britain lacks the problem-oriented rationale of the previous two volumes;
instead, a brief introductory note suggests that the volume aims to recover
‘lost histories’ and put an ‘emphasis on multiple histories’ (Holmwood
and Scott 2014: 2). These are, of course, legitimate aims. It could be the
case that the emphasis on recovering lost knowledge, instead of attempt-
ing to resolve any problematic issues, is itself a reflection on the current
academic status of sociology and the self-perception of mainstream soci-
ologists, since, it may be argued, compared to the 1980s when the previ-
ous two volumes appeared, British sociology in the 2000s enjoys again
popularity and public support. But there is room for improvement: vol-
umes, like Holmwood and Scott’s that contain essays on the history of
various sociological fields (‘multiple histories’) and that organise histori-
cal knowledge in terms of topics (rather than historical problems), make
a valuable contribution; and if the essays in them appear disconnected,
this on its own is a valuable indication of disconnectedness in the history
of British sociology itself. But volumes like Holmwood and Scott’s are
also less effective in conveying the message about the usefulness of an
historical perspective. It is problem-oriented historical volumes that are
most effective in raising awareness of ‘the bigger picture’ and improving
sociologists’ historical literacy—that is, the ability to use an historical per-
spective in one’s own work, regardless of the topic. What defines better
 1 Introduction 11

than anything else a subject like sociology is the way it researches and
teaches its object of study and the problems it encounters in the process;
and not what it studies or teaches. An historically literate sociologist is
therefore not somebody who knows about the historical development of
every field of sociological enquiry; but rather somebody who understands
the problems sociology has faced in the past and the role they play in
influencing its present and future development.
It is the primary aim of the present volume to help sociologists in this
country overcome their neglect of history and to contribute, albeit a lit-
tle, to the improvement of historical literacy among British sociologists
about some of the most fundamental and consequential problems that
their subject had to face throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries. This book aims to achieve this by bringing together historical per-
spectives on sociological research and teaching; on the divide between
empirical social enquiry and academic sociology and on the divide
between ‘the quantitative minority’ and ‘the qualitatively and non-­
empirically oriented majority’ that work in British academic sociology
today. This book thereby contributes to existing historical knowledge but
also challenges it; it helps sociologists remember, but it helps them to
remember by equipping them with the tools that allow them to under-
stand contexts, trends and problematic developments and use that under-
standing in their own work.

Disputed Origins
The book is divided into four sections and each section focuses on a par-
ticular intellectual or institutional problem that is essential for the under-
standing of the history of sociology in Britain. The first section examines
the problem of the disputed origins of British sociology. Writing about
origins has been a contested issue among historians ever since the emi-
nent Herbert Butterfield argued in The Whig Interpretation of History
(1965 [1931]) that history ‘is not the study of origins; rather it is the
analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our pres-
ent’; and that it is a defining characteristic of Whig historians to ‘imagine’
that they have discovered in the past a ‘root’ or an ‘anticipation’ of the
12 P. Panayotova

present (Butterfield 1965 [1931]: 47). However, Butterfield’s exclusion

of the study of origins from proper, non-Whig history is based on just
one of the meanings that a study of origins might have. When the study
of origins is understood as a study of the driving force and used as an
ultimate explanation of the phenomenon under investigation, then, yes,
it is highly likely that an historical account on such a basis would use
present-day understanding to judge, and thereby distort the past. And in
this sense, the study of origins can be as dangerous as Butterfield argues.
But a study of origins can also mean a study of beginnings, which would
involve an examination of the context in which ideas, movements, and
indeed whole subjects like sociology, first originated. A study of origins
can help historians use the benefit of hindsight not to distort the past by
turning the present into ‘an absolute’ and the past into ‘merely relative’
(Butterfield 1965 [1931]: 16); but to discover where the study of ‘the
mediations by which the past was turned into our present’ can with rea-
sonable accuracy be said to have begun and to explain the reasons for this—
and this is precisely why the study of origins, when done properly, matters.
The study of the origins of British sociology has tempted a few schol-
ars, most notably, Philip Abrams, whose 1968 essay The Origins of British
Sociology was quoted at the beginning of this introduction. In many
respects, Abrams’ study fails to avoid the risks, identified by Butterfield,
which are involved in writing about historical origins. Abrams’ account
uses, albeit implicitly, a 1960s understanding of sociology as primarily a
theoretical subject in his evaluation of the influence that nineteenth-­
century social science, as represented in the work of the SSA and the RSS,
had on British sociology: because these institutions did not emphasise
theoretical social science, they were ‘frustrating’ and harmful to the devel-
opment of sociology; it was because of social reformism and the statistical
movement that British sociology failed to emerge in the nineteenth cen-
tury. It is the rhetoric, the line and logic of Abrams’ argument, more than
any of the details of his argument, that are flawed and misleading—by
condemning early social science in Britain for the absence of ‘a sociology’
of a particular kind that was seen as desirable in the 1960s, we learn little,
not only about how nineteenth-century British social science originated,
but also about the mediations, to use Butterfield’s term, that brought
about twentieth-century British sociology.
 1 Introduction 13

In this respect, Lawrence Goldman’s paper in this volume, Victorians

and Numbers: Statistics and Social Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain,
represents a valuable revision. Drawing on many years’ experience of the
study of the history of nineteenth-century social science (Goldman 1983,
1987, 2002) and on extensive archival research, Goldman’s paper focuses
on the peculiar development of the British statistical movement in the
nineteenth century, providing one possible explanation of why it was
more likely that when British sociology was established at the beginning
of the twentieth century it developed into a non-statistical subject. In this
way, Goldman’s paper locates more clearly the problems that British
social science faced in the beginning and how these problems affected the
mediations, in the period 1830s–1900s, by which British social science’s
past was turned into British sociology’s present.
Preceding nineteenth-century ideas about social science, there is
another set of ideas that came to the fore with social reformism and social
statistics, that have also been considered by some scholars as marking the
beginnings of ‘sociology’. These ideas underpinned the Scottish
Enlightenment movement and are contained in the work of scholars such
as Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, John Millar, Adam
Smith, Dugald Stewart and others. A number of essays, including Alan
Swingewood’s Origins of Sociology: The Case of the Scottish Enlightenment
(1970); Lisa Hill’s Anticipations of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century
Social Thought in the Work of Adam Ferguson (1996); and more recently
John Brewer’s The Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Social Thought,
c.1725–1915 (2014) attempt to trace the origins of British sociology to
the Scottish Enlightenment. While these essays all argue that, in one way
or another, the work of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers anticipated
modern sociology, Kenneth Macdonald’s chapter Did British Sociology
Begin with the Scottish Enlightenment? challenges this view by arguing that
the presence of some sociological insights in the work of Smith, Ferguson
and others does not justify the claim that ‘sociology’ began with their
work. Unlike previous scholarship on the topic, which focuses more on
the analogies between the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers
and later British sociology, Macdonald emphasises that what also needs
to be taken into account are the differences between the ways the Scottish
14 P. Panayotova

Enlightenment thinkers did their ‘social science’ and the ways systematic
sociological research is done today.
The study of origins is inevitably a contested field; and, the fact that
definitions of sociology are themselves controversial, makes the prospects
of agreement between scholars even more difficult. Goldman’s and
Macdonald’s contributions, it is hoped, will provide clearer directions on
taking the right approach to such questions and provide valuable insights
into devising more reliable criteria for reaching any kind of conclusions.

Neglected Legacies
The question of what gets remembered in history and for what reasons is
a prime historical issue. Given British sociology’s comprehensive neglect
of its history, the present volume makes a special contribution in redress-
ing this issue by revaluing the role, influence and legacy of prominent
figures and institutions.
The chapter by Garrett Potts and Stephen Turner Making Sense of
Christopher Dawson highlights the case of the scholar Christopher
Dawson, who is well-remembered as a historian but has been almost
completely lost to British sociology despite his affiliations with sociologi-
cal institutions in early twentieth century Britain like the Sociological
Society and its later offshoots and with The Sociological Review, as well as
his general endorsement of sociological ideas, popular at the time.
Dawson’s case is a clear example of how a renowned contemporary can
turn into a forgotten shadow of the past, and Potts and Turner’s explica-
tion of how this came about suggest that this was not inevitable. Not
everything that has been remembered is necessarily remembered for good
reason and, as Potts and Turner’s essay shows clearly, not all that has been
forgotten is necessarily forgotten for a good enough reason.
Revaluation of how we remember the history of sociology is high-
lighted by rather extreme cases, such as the case of Christopher Dawson,
but it is not limited to such cases. Another figure who was also active in
social science before the Second World War but is primarily remembered
for his work on social administration and the welfare state after the War,
is Richard Titmuss.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
I plunge once more into the symphony of search. We must move (it
is the fate of imperfection: that we must seem to move): our hope is
to move in unison with all the other parts of God. For the harmonious
sum of movements is immobile—is Truth’s still image. Work that
seeks not respite, that seeks knowledge, is indeed holy: for it binds
pitiful man into this symphony.
I think of the design on a man’s palm. Is the design of the stars a
similar chart recording the destiny of man’s brain? Of course, there is
rapport here—but of what nature? Man’s destiny, the graph of
molecule, cell, electron in man’s brain, and the congeried stars—are
they related as will, voice, phonographic record (where then is the
Will?), or as simultaneous projections of some body that includes us
all? This search is my work. I feel with exquisite anguish how the
heavens will help me. The vulgar idea of the phonographic record is
unreal. The stamp of voice and the record in the wax are not cause
and effect: or rather, cause and effect are but relative revelations to
our minds of two facts as simultaneous and organic as the two faces
of a coin. Even so the correspondence between braincell and star is
organic, integral and formal. Braincell and star are related like the
chemic stresses of a body. But our point of reference is the mind,
and the mind still thinks alas! in scaffold terms of space, of cause
and effect, of time. Hence, the sideral design appears beyond us,
and appears always changing. Our limitation paints the human
drama. Two infants dropped from one womb meet star-wordings
abysmally separate. All—from the plane of the womb to the farthest
sideral sweep—has changed to human consciousness and will, in
the instant between the births. The brains of the infants are two: the
foci of their minds make of the stars two sentences—and of their
lives two solitudes forever....
I stand before these clumsy artefacts of the child-seers ... the
astrologers ... and behold the stuff of a great thought! Am I not
young, exhilarant, equipped? There is the event, threefold expressed
for our three-dimensioned mind: the stars speak the event, human
life enacts it, histology and biologic chemistry release it. What a
Rosetta Stone for the unsealing, not of the written word of dead
Egyptians, but of the living word of God! Thought and its chemic
symbols in brain and body, act in human history and its wording in
the sideral cosmos—they are my materials, and they are docile in
my hand! I shall create an Axiom in the science of man: his
conscious part in God....

But this is not for to-night. The black type of my book is gray. Other
signs fill my room.... Mildred and love, fear and hate and horror. Why
not read them, since they are clamorous near? Are they perhaps as
true as the stars? What is their symbol yonder?
Molecules of brain, and flaming suns aflicker like ghosts through
emptiness. Are they will-o’-the-wisps misleading me from emptiness
which is perhaps the truth?
I am unhappy. My life which I have given to proud search, it seems
to-night that I have cast it away on nothing. Emptiness fills my room.
Between and beyond the stars, is there not Emptiness? I have not
Mildred. Shall I win her? What else is there to win?
Cosmos is a black cavern zero-cold, and the star-worlds flashing
their feeble fires are lost. If they and we embody God, is God not
also lost? Infinite cold, infinite blind blackness: vagrant mites spitting
their star fire into tiny corners. How do I know these flame-specks
are my fate? Why not the vaster spaces in between? the spaces
empty, the spaces zero-cold? Perhaps the fate of Philip is a sun,
burnt out. And my own, the black void that will never burn.... I lay
aside my book. Its arrogant hopes seem childish. Are no men born to
utter upon earth the Black that gapes between the closest stars?
Yet why think so? That Black is an illusion. Space does not exist:
emptiness is but your ignorance. The void between and beyond the
stars is the void within your fragmentary knowledge. And through this
fact, the void cannot concern you, since only knowledge longs and
only knowledge hurts. But were it even so, why fear the void? What
is there to fear in emptiness? Fear is not emptiness. Your fear denies
your fear.
—O my beloved: this grandiose lack is only lack of you!
How came I to love you? When my young mind moved toward the
mysteries of flesh, it was not your flesh made the search sweet.
When my young spirit went upon its journey, knowing there was no
end, it was not your spirit made the journey sweet. You have come
late upon me: yet all my seeking is dead without you, and all my
seeking has come full upon you! When I first saw you, my thought
was not to kiss your mouth, but to achieve a knowledge and a power,
like your own beauty’s wisdom beyond words. What mystery is this?
—And what mystery is my despair to-night? Am I not close to
Mildred? Could not a fool see in her luminous candor the dawn of
love? There was a danger, and that danger is dead! While it lived....
I pace my room: back and forth from the recessed windows to the
wall where stands a little table with a vase holding a white lily. And I
try to think.
—You must see. You must understand.
Yes, yes. I have gone too far to fall back easefully on ignorance.
—You must probe. You must understand.
Yes, yes. I look at my books.
—Not that.
I think of Mildred.
—Not Mildred....
I stand still: a shudder swarms my skin, draws my throat taut, uprises
in my hair....

... the white room larded with books: the face noble and reticent, and
the swift births of amaze, of pity, of horror ... indecorous death. Pale
hands fluttering up like rebellious dreams—and fallen.
My own hands bar my eyes.... How do I know this is not morbid
nonsense?
—What then is sense?
I am not so used to murder that this news, passionately close to my
love’s life, should not move me.
—I do not blame you, that you are moved.
“What can I do?”
I speak these words aloud, and the despair that dwells in them takes
shape. Shape of an impulsion. I know already what I am going to do.
But I contrive even now to laugh at myself.
—Fine man of science, driven by despair. Illogical, driven man!
I take off my clothes, and though the night is warm, I shiver in my
bed.

f
I AM asleep and dawn is all about me: dawn within me: I am up from
bed and I am putting on my clothes. My face in the mirror wakes me.
I am half dressed already, and my mind says: “You must not forget to
shave.” I see my face. The mirror is by the window, it stands on a
highboy in my bedroom. Dawn is a mingling of stirs: whistle of boat
in the river fog, rattle of wagon in the gray cool mists turning and
twisting, footbeat solitary on the damp hard pavement—this is dawn
coming by the window into my room, to my face. I look at my face,
and then my face awakes me.
I put a fresh blade in my razor and shave swiftly. I take off the
underwear of yesterday that my hands, while I slept, put on: I bathe
cold: I dress fast.
The street is not different from the dawn that drenched my room.
Stone is solitary, damp: houses are stifled by the night that they hold,
that is passing. I buy a Times and a World at the corner stand where
the dark hunched man with thick glasses and a bristling beard gazes
at me with exaggerated eyes. I do not look at the paper, waiting for
the car. As I sit in the car, I read quietly what I expected to find. Here
is the substance:
It is a simple case. Mr. LaMotte’s serving man, Frank
Nelson, is implicated and is already in the Tombs. His
master gave him the evening off, and clearly the crime
could not have been committed without knowledge of this
and of the fact that Mr. LaMotte was alone. At about 8.30,
a man came to the apartments where Mr. LaMotte has his
chambers and told the colored doorboy, Elijah Case, that
he had an important note to be delivered in person. Elijah
phoned up and Mr. LaMotte responded. Elijah carried the
man to the third floor, pointed out the door, heard the
messenger knock, saw him enter ... and went down. Little
time passed before the elevator signal rang again. Elijah
went up, opened the elevator door and the messenger
stepped in.... Elijah recalls him clearly. “How do you
happen to be so certain?” the police asked him. “I dunno.
But I is.” He says the man was dressed entirely in black,
and that his head was white. “Do you mean white like a
white man?” “Nossah ... I means white lak ... lak chalk.”
“Even his hair?” “I don’ remember no hair. A white head.
Da’s all.” “Even his eyes?” Elijah shuddered. “Yessah. Dey
was white, too.”... The police infer that the colored boy,
who is simple-minded and imaginative, made up his
monster after he had learned the event. In any case, Elijah
went back to his little hall office: and shortly after a call
came in, by phone, for Mr. LaMotte. No: Mr. LaMotte had
no private phone. Instructions were, not to say in any
instance whether Mr. LaMotte was at home, to get the
name and announce it first. It was Mrs. LaMotte, the
deceased’s mother. She often called, and although
frequently Mr. LaMotte would tell the boy: “Say I am not at
home” ... that doubtless was why he used the house
phone ... never in the three years Elijah had worked at the
apartment had Mr. LaMotte failed to answer his signal,
 and never had he refused to speak to his mother. Elijah
phoned up, now, and received no answer. This satisfied
the mother who rang off. But it began to trouble Elijah. Mr.
LaMotte never walked down, and also he never left
without giving word to the boy. During all that time, Elijah
had not been required to leave his little office in full view of
the hall. Finally, Elijah was scared. He phoned again. No
answer. He went up, and rang, and pounded on the door.
He went down into the Square and found an officer. They
broke open the door, for the pass-key was with the janitor
who was away.... The murdered man was lying on his
back in the library, with a wound in his heart. There was
little blood, no weapon, no sign of a struggle. But the
weapon must have been a long and slender knife aimed
with rare accuracy. Nothing seemed to be missing. The
small safe in a recess of a bookcase was shut, no
fingerprints were found. If the object was theft, the
valuable stolen is unknown and hence its loss is still a
mystery. Or else the thief was frightened off ... that
happens. A simple case, which leaves the police in
confidence of a quick solution....
I noted the address and left my papers on the foul straw seat of the
car. A man with a skull-like head, skin yellow and tough and eyes
that bulged with a lost tenderness, reached out for them. Leaving, I
was aware of the two mournful rows of humans facing each other
like lugubrious birds on swinging perches.... I found the number and
flashed my police card at a brown boy who took me up: the wonder
in his eyes was mingled with proprietory pride at his connection with
a headline murder. At the door stood a policeman. I heard myself
say, coolly:
“I am Doctor Mark of the Institute.” I did not show my card.
He understood nothing, and was impressed by me. I was beginning
to be impressed by myself.
Alone in the hall, I hesitated.—I need still not go in. Someone was in
the room, and he would come, and I could talk with him explaining
my personal interest in a friend. Why not go in? What was I doing
here? I had come like an automaton sprung by the despair of the
distant night. Moving, I lost my agony. Even this single stationary
moment in the hall brought to my nerves a starting pain as if to stand
still were some unnatural act forced by my will on my body.—Let me
go on. The door opened, and a blunt big man scrutinized me with the
vacuous stare that doubtless he took for subtlety. I watched myself
dispose:
“I am Doctor Mark of the Institute.” I showed him my card, “... and a
friend: a family friend.” I did not hesitate. I wore a light top coat, and I
took it off.
The man softened and nodded.
“I am Lieutenant Gavegan.” We shook hands. “He’s in there, sir.” He
pointed with his thumb in a miracle of reticent grace. There was a
pause in which my will must have spoken. For he said, as if in
answer:
“I suppose I can leave you alone in there, sir, a few moments. Don’t
touch nothing.”
I saw the image of a cigar in his flat mind as he moved toward his
friend, the officer at the entrance. I shut the door behind me.

g
I KNEW this room. The regimented books marched high toward the
high ceiling: the subtle notes upon the shelves of color and of plastic
twisted like flageolets in a bright cadenza down against the stout
march of the books. The square room veered roundly, the ceiling
vaulted: all was a concave shut and yet wide about this man who lay
upon the floor.
I knew the room, and I was not amazed. Casual thoughts....—
Mildred was here: you are the woman for whom men kill, a white-
faced man killing with shiny boots ... went through my mind as I
leaned down: I was unamazed and cool, lifting the sheet that lay
upon the body.
The face did not stop me. I opened the white shirt with its solid
bubbles of blood, and my sure hands went to the wound. The blade
had been struck from a point higher than the breast, so that its angle
from above was acute. It had passed through the pectoralis major
and minor muscles, through the fourth intercostal space, and into the
right auricle of the heart. The ascending portion of the aorta had
been severed. Death was immediate and clean. No surgeon with a
body prostrate under his hand could have cut better. This body now
was prostrate before me. Swiftly, my eyes measured it: it was six
feet, possibly six feet two.... I folded back the shirt, and now, as if I
had been satisfied, I looked at the face of Philip LaMotte.
I studied the face which, not twelve hours since, had come to me in
the apocalyptic street. A white pallor overlaid the rich dark
pigmentation. The beard stubble had grown: it emphasized the
accurate delicacy of the chin and the tender strength of the lips. The
nose arched high. The brow was serenely broad: the black curled
hair, like a filet, came low and round. The shut eyes made the vision
startling: a Saint of the Chartres Porche.
I saw myself crouched over this slain saint whom death had sculpted
into marble. My mind remarked with an aloof surprise, how little my
observations and my will at work surprised me. Was I discovering,
indeed? or was I appraising? Was I probing a crime that for good
cause haunted me, or was I reviewing ... reviewing——?
I was on my knees crouched over the body of Philip LaMotte. I heard
the door. I looked up at the figure of Detective Gavegan. With careful
grace, I arose.
“Does the boy Case have a good memory of the man’s size, who
brought the message?”
“He says: about medium size.”
“How tall is Case?”
“You saw him. He’s a short darkey.”
“If the man’d been Mr. LaMotte’s size, Case would have known it?”
“Six foot, one and a half? Well, I guess.” Gavegan flattened his eyes
once more upon me in a simagre of study.
“I know what you’re thinkin’,” he snickered. “They all likes to play
detective. How could so short a man have finished him so fine? Size
ain’t strength, Doctor Mark: no more than a big man need lack for
wits.” Gavegan’s huge form swelled.
I watched him. The hopelessness of making him respond to my
discoveries, still so dark to myself, fought against a pleasant call in
me that it would be wrong to hide anything from the law.
“Has that message ... has any letter been found?”
He shook his head wisely. “No: nor there won’t be. The final
examination is this morning. That’s why the body ain’t yet been
removed. But there won’t be. That letter was mere pretext.”
“This looks a simple case to you?”
“Plain motive. Theft. How do you know what Mr. LaMotte was
carryin’ in his pocket just last night? The butler knew. Mebbe a jewel
for a girl. Or a bundle of securities. Surely a wad of bills, and he
preparin’ for a journey.”
“Oh, he was preparing for a journey?”
Gavegan gave me a gentle look of pity.
“Come over here,” he beckoned with his head. On a small teak-wood
desk between the windows, lay a diary pad bound in black levant. It
was open to this day. There was one note, scrawled small in pencil:
“Gr Ct M 10.30”
I fingered the pad. There were almost no other entries.
“What do you think that means?”
Gavegan loomed. “Grand Central Station. Train at 10.30. And
meetin’ there with ... M.”
“Plausible,” I said, and was unsure if I agreed or if I mocked. “I
suppose you know already who is ‘M’?”
He eyed me with omniscience. “That we don’t give out, sir. Even to a
distinguished friend.”
“But the wound, Gavegan! Have you looked at the wound?”
He was stupid. I prepared to tell my thoughts. Was it because or
despite that he was too stupid to receive them?
“The wound might puzzle you, I think, if you had studied more
anatomy. The man who dealt it did so from above, for it struck the
right auricle of the heart at an angle of less than forty-five degrees!
How could a short man do that to a man six feet one and a half? And
how could any man murder LaMotte like that, if LaMotte were not
literally baring his breast: parting his arms, even raising his arms (the
muscle wound shows that, besides) in order to receive the blow?”
The image of a victim coöperating with his slayer was too much for
the law. The discomfort of my analysis struck Mr. Gavegan as an
impertinent invasion. He barred it with laughter. I could see his
thought in his mouth and his eye.
“—These scientist cranks.”
I went on: not knowing, again, if my motive was to convince or was
bravado in the certainty that my man was beneath convincing.
“Gavegan, have you ever noted the subtle stigmata of the hypnotic
trauma?”
Gavegan grumbled.
“I’m afraid, sir, I’ll be havin’ to let you go. The Coroner’s cormin’
again. We always likes to be hospitable to the big doctors at the
Institutions, whenever we can help ’em in their studies.” He pulled a
huge silver timepiece from his vest, and went to the window, and
looked out.
I was immersed so fully, that even now my action did not make my
mind break in amaze from the rhythm of events. The big man was at
the window looking out: for he believed he had heard the Coroner’s
car, and doubtless this meant that his night’s work was over and he
could go to his wife. I moved unhesitant to an open door that led into
a little passage. A strip of blue carpet covered the floor. And naked-
clear there lay on it a white envelope which I picked up and put into
my pocket.
I thanked Gavegan: gave him two cigars, and left.

h
WHEN I reached my rooms, Mrs. Mahon was there with my
breakfast tray, and wondering what could have taken me out so
early. Mrs. Mahon was the Italian widow of an Irish policeman. I sat
down to my fruit, and her ample and unsubtle beauty was pleasant to
my mood, so that I held her with words. Mrs. Mahon loved to talk
with me: but in her sense of my state she was shrewd, and she had
never intruded her wide hard rondures and the brash clarities of her
mind upon my silence. She stood over me now, with her bare arms
crowding her bosom, and told me of the latest misdeeds of her lover.
Mrs. Mahon was beautiful, and to me entirely without charms. Her
head was small, the black hair massed low on the blandness of the
forehead, and her nose was Roman. Her eyes bore out my fancy of
the moment, that she was not flesh; for in their heavy facets was no
expression. The mouth was long and quiet. Its sensuality seemed a
deliberate trait, somehow not born of her own flesh but of the will of
the artist who had made her. Finally, her body as I could sense it
under the loose white fabric of her gown, was an arrangement of
obvious feminine forms: high breasts, stomach and hips subdued:
and yet to me devoid of the mystery of her sex. She was the body
unlit, goodly and functioning: the sacrament of flesh without the
spirit. So this day it was cool nourishment to look at Mrs. Mahon, to
drink in her clarities, to convince myself that she was not sculpture,
quite the opposite: real.
The tang of the grapefruit, the earthy pungence of the not too fresh
eggs, the bite of the coffee, merged with Mrs. Mahon: and I was
happy in a deep forgetfulness. I was sleepy. The thought came:—
You have had a bad dream. Your visit to the body may be real: but
you can wipe it out like a dream. It need have no consequence in the
real world. And that is the trait of the dream, is it not? the one trait
that shuts dream out from other planes of life? And I chatted with
Mrs. Mahon, and gave her advice.
“His misdeeds,” I said, “save you from ever being bored by him. You
should be thankful.”
She smiled: “Oh, I guess he’s a man: and I guess I’m a woman. I
suppose I get him sore, too, sometimes, just because my ways are
them of a woman. And yet, if I wasn’t a woman, and if he wasn’t a
man——”
“Precisely, Mrs. Mahon. What you’ve just said is philosophical and
deep.”
She shook her head at my solemn words which, I judged, tickled her
as the prickings of a poignard might titillate an elephant. She went
out with my tray, and the thought “Rome” came to me as I watched
her perfect carriage: the low spacing of her feet, the swing of her
hips, the breadth of her back, and the little head so rightfully
proportioned, like a rudder steering the life that dwelt within her body.
—Rome. How far I am from Rome. How sweet Rome would be, with
its sure shallow strength.
I lit a pipe. Melancholy and the hint of an old anguish wiped out Mrs.
Mahon.—This anguish is what moves me, moves me toward what
seems the cause of the anguish. A paradox that is a common law.
Look at love: how pain of unfulfillment moves us upon the loved one,
and as we come ever closer, ever deeper and more absolute grows
the pain of unfulfillment. If I could analyze what this is that has taken
me: if I could only know where it began.... But I know that it must first
fill out its life ere my mind measure it. What did my poor analysis
avail me? How wisely I announced: “Your anguish moves you toward
the source of your anguish. You cannot stay still because you must
fulfill your own beginning.” And how blindly I moved!
I reached into my pocket and took out the envelope that I had not yet
examined, and that Mrs. Mahon had helped me to forget. It was
addressed
 Philip LaMotte, Esquire
By Bearer
and it was in the straight high script of Mildred Fayn!
It was empty.
I tapped it against my open palm and wondered why I felt that it had
any bearing on the case. There was no proof that this was the
alleged letter of the fatal messenger. On the contrary, how could I
entertain a thought that would implicate Mildred in this horrible affair?
What was I trying to find, or to think? I was abhorrent to myself.
Doubtless, Mildred had written more than once to a man so close.
My reason flayed my miserable thoughts: but did not break them: did
not avail against their issuance in deed.
I telephoned to Mildred.
“Yes?” she answered and her frail voice bloomed out of the wire,
drenching my sense in a languor of desired peace.
“Mildred,” I said, “doubtless these days you would prefer not to see
me.” She did not answer this. “But something possibly important has
come up: I feel that I should speak to you.”
She hesitated.
“Meet me at lunch, at Sherry’s ... at one-thirty.”

i
MY work took me. I worked well. Doctor Isaac Stein’s warm voice
startled me at my shoulder.
“You have a fine power of concentration, Doctor Mark. I’ve been here
five minutes watching your immobile absorption.”
I turned and met the gray eyes of the great bio-chemist: of the man
whom of all Americans I admired most.
“It is the contrary of concentration. My brain is split in two. And the
one part does not trouble the other.”
He nodded and frowned.
“It’s the part of your brain which dwells so voluptuously with those
ganglions, that interests me.”
“I stand rebuked, sir.”
“You’ll learn that the other part which you think now so worthily
engaged in speculation and in rhapsody, is merely the part not yet in
solution—not at the point yet of true condensation. When you’re
wholly crystallized, Mark, then you’ll be whole.”
“You disapprove of me, Doctor Stein?”
He laughed. “You should know better than that.”
“You have the passion for unity of your race, sir.” I laughed back.
“This faith in unity which your science posits is itself the creation of a
wild mystic rhapsody.”
“It is the premise of every human thought, of every human act.”
“—That has survived, since it fitted into the unitary scheme. But is
there not something arbitrary about that, Professor Stein? Two
intense single-minded peoples, the Greeks and the Hebrews, set up
a scale of consciousness based on the Unit, and narrow down the
multiverse to that. Everything that men did or thought must fit that
scale of One, be translated into it: everything that failed was
rejected, was unrecorded, hence intellectually was nonexistent. To-
day, after three thousand years of this sort of selection, we have
quite an array of theory, data, thought, all in the key of One: we have
a whole civilization based on One, a whole set of religions tuned in
One, to which our senses as well as our minds submit and finally
conform. What does that prove beyond the thoroughness of the
Greeks and Hebrews? of their initial will to throw out all contrary
evidence, to deny all dimensions beyond it?”
“Could this premise of the Unity have builded up so wholly the
structure of science, æsthetic, logic ... the structure of human action,
were it but an arbitrary premise that might be replaced by others at
least as valid?”
“The strength of the limited, Doctor Stein: the protection of
exclusion.”
Doctor Stein’s eyes sharpened.
“Very well. Then, does not the success of this premise, which you
call limiting and protective, prove that it expresses perfectly the
human essence? The fact that by means of the premise of unity man
is beginning to master life, does that not prove, besides, that man’s
essence and the essence of being are common terms, permitting a
contact after all between the subjective and objective, between the
phenomenal and the absolute?”
“You are assuming the success, Doctor Stein! And you are assuming
that this thing which man is ‘mastering’ is life: is something more
than the creation of the subjective will which started with the Unit that
it finds everywhere and thereby ‘masters’ ... finding and mastering
only and always itself. You are assuming that every day is not
compounded of events which transcend the powers of unitary logic
and unitary experience even to conceive them. How do we get out of
the difficulty? From these parabola shapes that are the events,
perhaps, of every day, our minds snatch down the fragmentary
intersections that touch the terms of our minds. The rest is ignored.
Your ‘success’ of biology, mathematics, chemistry, physics,
æsthetics, mechanics, is simply your own dream, complacently
rounded by your unitary will. Unchallenged, for the most part, for the
simple reason that long ago man’s mind has lopped off whatever
might have challenged.”
“Well, then, even you will admit that the human will is unitary.”
“And what does the will cover? how successful, how potent is the
human will? If it were not deeply at variance with Life, would our will
make mostly for anguish and for failure? Would it not be a bit more
competent than it is? Would history, social and personal, not be a
happier story?”
Professor Stein’s eyes were hot.
“Come up some evening, Mark: any evening when I’m in town: we’ll
go into this.”
He left me.

j
CLASPING Mildred’s hand in the pied lobby, I touched a warm,
proud sorrow. She was changed ... deepened rather. In her great
eyes, a new limpidity: and more than ever the counterpoint of her
bright hard body and of her spirit, dark and profoundly still, gave to
her a beauty almost beyond my bearing.
I gripped myself. I silenced my clamoring question: “Mildred, Mildred,
did you love him, then?” We sat, touching our food, saying no word,
until I had mastered myself.
When I was able to speak:
“I went to his place this morning, and they let me in.”
Her eyes rose to mine and dwelt there quietly.
“I saw his face, dead. Even in death it was noble. He must have
been a great man, Mildred.”
Her eyes assented, serenely.
I made my eyes see only the loveliness of this girl: but perhaps my
mouth trembled with a jealous pain.
“John,” she answered both my eyes and my mouth, “you are
suffering too. You are afraid Philip’s death has given him an
advantage over you—a sort of perfection easier to love than your
own struggling life. That’s not true, John. Would I lunch with you in
this gay place to-day, not twenty-four hours after his death, if I
responded in such a foolish way to life? You are very dear to me,
John: I know that also.”
I could not speak. So I took from my pocket the envelope and gave it
her, in silence.
She examined it, turning it about. Her eyes met mine fully:
“How amazing! How amazing!” she whispered. “Where does this
come from?”
“I found it on the floor not far from where he lay. It might have been
nearer, or have blown from its place on the desk. For the windows
were open. Why is it amazing?”
“Why? Because it is my hand. And because I did not write it.”
“Mildred, for the sake of our reason, be sure of what you say. You
must have written more than once to Philip.”
She paused: her teeth bit hard in her lower lip, a tremor of resolve
pushed up to her sharp shoulders. Then, in a quiet containment, she
answered me.
“I make no mistake, John. I did write, infrequently, to Philip. I never
sent him a note by messenger. If I needed to communicate with him
quickly, I telephoned, or I wired.”
In her pause, the gilt bustle of the room where we were lunching, the
room itself, became a shallow and unreal line upon some darkling
density about us. Mildred went on:
“This is a fine version of my hand. But it is not my hand. And there is
more superficial evidence than my conviction, that it is not mine. Did
you notice the envelope, John?”
Her hand on the table with its débris of crystal and porcelain and
silver was steady: mine, taking the paper, trembled.
I looked, and my soul blanched: my hands seemed to crumple and
collapse about the flimsy paper. I fumbled at the flap. There was the
same lining of green tissue, and the name embossed in tiny letters ...
Tissonier ... the Paris stationer from whom I had bought my stock!
How could I have failed to notice this before? this fine baronial
envelope and the tinted tissue lining which I liked because it gave to
the sheer white linen an undertone of privacy symbolic of what an
envelope should carry.
“It’s my envelope! It’s one of my envelopes!”
I faced Mildred’s eyes: and I was whole again, for in her own there
was no withdrawal, no banal suspicion marring their bestowal. She
spoke, and lightly:
“Could there be some simple explanation?”
“There must be.”
She smiled: for she knew that my response proved I had understood
the caress of her own thoughts. Oh, Mildred, how I loved you at that
moment, how unbelievably pure stood your spirit in my mind, and
how I quailed to think that these mists of blindness and blood should
mar your dwelling in my life and the sweet entrance of my life in
yours.
“Let me see,” she was saying while I longed for peace ... peace with
my love: “Let’s put our heads together.... It is my writing, forged. It is
your envelope, stolen. We can dismiss the possibility of someone
else just within our circle having my hand, and having gone to just
that papeterie in Paris for his correspondence paper. I suppose your
stationery is accessible enough?”
“It stands in an open pigeonhole in the base of my table.”
“John, do you know anyone who knows both me and Philip ... some
possible person?”
I had to be equal to her coolness: this was the very wine of my love
that she was perpetually in her moods and acts inspiring me to a
new height of conduct.
“I can think of no one. Of course, that remark is worthless: there
might be such a person without my knowing it. But where would the
motive be in stealing my envelope and forging your script upon it?
The whole complex act strikes me as stupid: a gratuitous elaboration
in no way fitting the simplicity of the murder. Just look, Mildred. A
man announces, when he knows Mr. LaMotte to be alone, that he is
the bearer of a message. He does not say, from whom. He would not
be expected to say: for if the message is confidential, the name of
the sender will not be transmitted over the telephone. What comes
next? He is in the presence of his victim; if he has a letter at all, its
purpose is already fulfilled in the act of handing it over. At that
moment must come the blow. I can see a reason in his having forged
your hand. Mr. LaMotte’s interest would be greater, opening the note.
In his engrossment, the assassin would have an easier field for his
work.”
“More than engrossment. Amazement. Philip finds in the envelope
no note at all. He finds a word from me in such strange hands ... and
no note.”
“That is true. It would be enough to bewilder: to stun. That is
important. But why my envelope?”
“Well, it is your envelope?” she smiled again.
“I feel certain of it.”
“There must be a reason. Possibly to attach suspicion to yourself?”
“A clumsy way, Mildred. A clumsy thing to do since I never met the
man. Besides, the envelope lies on the floor of a passage where the
police failed even to find it. The murderer would not have bungled
there after his perfect blow. The envelope would have been in the
victim’s hand if it was to serve as a false clew.”
“You are assuming perfection in the murderer, John. That does not
strike me as correct. If he’d been perfect he’d have left no clew at all
... and he was seen, seen clearly. Therefore, he is not perfect.
Therefore, illogic might enter in: even contradiction—even absurd
elaboration.”
“Yes.” I was thinking of my talk with Doctor Stein. Where had my
sudden words sprung from?—Perfection ... illogic ... contradiction:
Mildred went on:
“You can’t assume that this act is a perfect single whole, with no
excrescence, no alien details.”
I marveled at her.
“A man so perfect as to murder perfectly would not murder at all.”
“Go on.”
“Not murder Philip LaMotte.”
“Go on.”
“The fact that he needed to destroy a person so noble, so great,
proves his own imperfection: proves that there was a flaw in him; a
flaw of bad thinking, a flaw of impure action. By that flaw you will find
him.”
“Mildred, you mean that it is precisely in some act of his which we
who are not murderers would reason could not have been
committed, that we will find him?”
“That you will find him, John.”
“I?”
“I think you will look for him, John.”
“Not we?”
“I cannot look for him, John. But I feel that you will look for him ...
and you are going to find him.”
So quietly she spoke: almost so pleasantly: again I knew how in her
perfection there could be room not alone for no fear, even for no
emphasis. She had the ruthlessness of purity. And I was caught in it:
held now forever in the white fierce light of her exaction. Would I
burn in it? or grow luminous? Would I grow luminous first, and burn
at last?
So quietly she spoke: “I feel that you will find him.”
And I was quiet, too. I had resolved to tell my whole experience: in
the street at the hour of Philip LaMotte’s death, in his room this
morning where his wound had told so mysterious a tale. Her way
silenced me. She did not want to enter, in her own person, this dark
threshold. Was she commanding me to proceed for her, or was she
expressing her impersonal knowledge of what I was going to do? It
mattered little. I knew the event chained me. I knew that she knew
what I was going to do. Perhaps when I saw light I might know also
why.
But she was sitting near, and this was real. In her face lay a warm
flush: the glamor of her mouth and of her skin and hair was
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