The Rise of Sociology. Paths of Institutionalization in Germany and the United States around 1900

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German scholarship represented a model that deeply inspired sociologists across the United States. It is therefore surprising that the institutionalization of sociology within American universities took place much earlier and faster than in their German counterparts. This raises the question as to how these different pathways towards formal academic establishment of the discipline might be explained. A comparative analysis suggests the answer lies in the diverging conceptions of what constituted “sociology” at the time, set against the background of tensions between abstract social theory and policy-relevant empirical research in the context of social reform.