To interpret,not just select: Engaging the Chicago School Legacy

Justus Uitermark does the field of Urban Studies a great service in his call for a deeper engagement with the Chicago School of Sociology. Urban scholars, as Andrew Abbott has noted (Abbott, 1999: 23), have often treated the classical Chicago authors not as historical figures but as contemporaries, mining their work for useful concepts while sidestepping their intellectual context and internal tensions. This a-historical approach has value, but it also can produce a simplified narrative of cumulative progress, where predecessors are flattened to make our own contributions seem sharper (Maines et al., 1996). Uitermark's essay is a welcome corrective, and it is in the spirit of his call that I wish to push the conversation further. While he argues for a ‘selective’ reading, I suggest a more ‘interpretative’ one is needed: a mode of engagement that remains open to the difficult, complex, and often contradictory strands of thought found not just across the School, but frequently within the writings of a single author and sometimes even within the same text.

To that end, my response will focus primarily but not exclusively on the work of Robert E. Park. Park represents the ‘hard case’ for this interpretative approach. His work is often characterised by Uitermark as representing a singular ‘ontology.’ If, instead, it reveals deep complexities that reflect fundamental challenges in social science as such, then broader claims about what we must ‘select’ from the school must be reconsidered.

Park was, as Abbott observed, ‘the enigma and talisman of the department's history’ with a ‘a restless and probing mind’ who led an ‘extraordinary’ and complex life. To illustrate that this complexity and restless probing extended to his thought and that Uitermark's characterisations tend to flatten and simplify it, I will explore four interconnected themes: that his concept of human ecology involved far more than biological reductionism; that he prioritised social transformation and learning over innate group qualities; that far from being blind to politics he saw politics as a messy process of social control born from conflict; and that his use of ‘naturalistic’ concepts was a complex engagement with pragmatist evolutionary theory. To do this, I will often complement statements from urban writings with passages from Park and Burgess’ Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Park and Burgess, 1924) (ISS hereafter). It was the Chicago School of Sociology, after all, and their forays into urban studies need to be seen as one key part of their broader sociological project.

First, let us interrogate the claim that Park's theory of ‘human cohabitation’ amounts to an unreflective import from plant ecology. Uitermark argues that this foundation leads to a one-sided focus on ‘primordial traits’ (p. 7), instincts given ‘free reign’ (p. 7), and no appreciation for ‘symbolic struggle’ (p. 19) or the formative role of ‘social environments’ (p. 11). This charge of simple biological reductionism has a long pedigree and is an example of what Maines, Bridger and Ulmer have termed a ‘myth’ (Maines et al., 1996).

A more interpretative reading shows the reductionist interpretation to be untenable. In ISS, Park and Burgess explicitly position plant communities as the lowest form of cohabitation, not even worthy of the name ‘society’ because their relationships are purely ‘external’ (Park and Burgess, 1924: 163). They instead propose the competitive plant model as a useful but limited heuristic for understanding the city's economic aspect, which operates in concert with cultural and political and social processes that predominate in the human world ¹ : ‘Human society, then, unlike animal society is mainly a social heritage, created in and transmitted by communication’ (Park and Burgess, 1924: 161). And in ‘Human Ecology’, Park writes: ‘human ecology … differs … in important respects from plant and animal ecology’ whereby humans have ‘enormously increased … capacity for reacting upon and remaking … his world’ (Park, 1936). Uitermark, however, does not engage with these richer and more complex interpretations of the biotic and the cultural.

The same interpretative lens complicates the assertion that Park saw urban life as a simple loss of ‘social controls’ that unleashed ‘instincts’ (p. 7). In fact, ISS contains an entire chapter on ‘Social Control’, which directs students to consider distinctly human forms of organisation through questions such as, ‘How does social control in human society differ from that in animal society?’, ‘Does control by public opinion exist outside of democracies?’ and ‘What is the relation of news to social control?’ (Park and Burgess, 1924: 863–864). Public opinion is central to his discussion of ‘the sociological process’ in The Crowd and the Public. This focus on the press and public opinion is not merely an abstract sociological concern; it is a centrepiece of the Chicago School's urban research. For example, Park's own contributions to The City analyse the press as a mechanism of control that emerge from the urban predicament itself, precisely because in the social environments of modern dynamic metropolises traditional forms of control have grown less reliable. In ‘The City as a Social Laboratory’, he writes that in the city ‘custom has been superseded by public opinion and positive law … rather than by … instinct or tradition’ (Park, 1929: 4). Park's conception, then, is not one of a hydraulic push and pull between waning social control and biological instinct, but of mutual transformation into new and distinct forms of social control in the modern urban social environment.

A similar complexity is evident in Park's treatment of group identity. Uitermark's essay presents a Park whose sociology sees only pre-existing ‘differences generating conflicts’ (p. 5), rather than one where group and personal identity emerge from social processes. Yet the theme of transformation and process is central to Park's work, captured in his sweeping claim that in the modern city, ‘the individual’ emerges ‘as a unit of thought and action’ and becomes ‘a problem to himself and to society in a way and to an extent that he never was before’ (Park, 1929: 5). In other words, for Park, contra Uitermark, individual and group identity are results, not givens, and modern cities make the question of identity open and challenging in novel ways. Similarly, his famous study of the immigrant as the ‘marginal man’ examines how new identities emerge from the complex dynamics of migration, including through new forms of symbolic representation like the ethnic press. Finally, even the controversial notion of ‘assimilation’ is more complex than it initially appears. Park no doubt sometimes applied it as part of a teleological linear trajectory (Abbott, 1999: 24). ² Yet elsewhere, especially in ISS, he and Burgess present competition, conflict, accommodation and assimilation not as a fixed sequence, but as contingent processes. There, they also frame ‘assimilation’ as a process of ‘interpenetration and fusion’ where contributions from diverse groups can create an entirely novel social formations (Park and Burgess, 1924: 735). These ideas are not easily reconciled, but they demand close engagement across texts to be understood.

It is also difficult to sustain the claim that the early Chicago School was not ‘alive to’ the role of ‘politics and the state’ (p. 14) and that it ‘naturalized’ power relations (p. 19). The sustained discussion of social control in ISS is a clear engagement with power, a text that also explicitly defines ‘the political’ as the process concerned ‘with just those matters in regard to which there is division and difference’ (p. 52). A thinker who asks students to analyse why an early king could only ‘declare what the law was’ rather than create it is clearly not naturalising political authority and its broader power formations but studying their historical and social variations (Park and Burgess, 1924: 864). This critical perspective on power is reinforced by Park's statement that ‘With the exception, perhaps, of Aristotle's politics it was not until the publication of Machiavelli's The Prince that literature affords an example of a man who thought realistically and in the modern manner in the field of politics and social science’ (Park et al., 1972: 90). It is also evident in the historiographical literature on the Chicago School (see especially Dennis Smith's 1988 The Chicago School), which sees it as offering ‘liberal critiques of capitalism’ (Abbott, 1999: 15; Smith, 1988).

Rather than being unaware of power, Park pursued a conception of political economy distinct from the Marxian tradition, one in which public opinion is a central and unpredictable force. While a political leader may attempt social engineering, their actions and policies become fodder for public debate in ways they cannot always anticipate or fully control. As Park puts it:

The political process, as here conceived, may be said to begin at the point where formal programs and planned political action supersedes the evolutionary processes by which, in every stable society, a body of tradition and culture slowly accumulates, under the influence of which succeeding generations of men are gradually disciplined and domesticated. The political process thus defined necessarily interrupts to some extent the customary social order and disturbs some or all of the vested interests. (Park et al., 1972: 96)

This pragmatist view of politics as a complex feedback loop suggests that jettisoning all naturalistic metaphors, as Uitermark proposes, would be a mistake. Pragmatism, a crucial inspiration for Chicago sociology, was itself a concerted effort to develop a naturalistic approach to human behaviour, deeply influenced by Darwinian thought (Joas, 1993). This influence was reciprocal. Darwin himself drew on social thinkers like Adam Smith. This mutual learning continues today, as social scientists adapt evolutionary thinking in sophisticated ways (Blute, 2010) to theorise phenomena like the evolution of urban forms and the spatial distribution of populations (Silver et al., 2022). To abandon this long and fruitful dialogue would be to discard valuable and generative methodological and theoretical tools.

Indeed, Park and his collaborators developed a more sophisticated notion of planning and evolution than Uitermark credits them for. Consider Uitermark's claim that for the Chicago ecologists, ‘social order is the unplanned outgrowth of micro-level interactions’ (p. 19). The Chicago conception is richer and more supple than this. In ‘Community Organization and the Romantic Temper’, Park writes that while a city plan is a ‘product of nature as [much as] design’, that very ‘plan is one factor in communal efficacy’ (Park, 1925: 116). His collaborator Roderick McKenzie clarified this crucial distinction in ‘The Ecological Approach’. He writes that communities are ‘not so much the products of artifact or design’, but adds in a footnote that while ‘the actions of individuals may be designed and controlled, the total effect of individual action is neither designed nor anticipated’ (McKenzie, 1924). This distinction – between planned actions and an unanticipated aggregate result – is central to the Chicago framework. ³

This Chicago School conception of design as a planned input into an unpredictable total process is remarkably consistent with modern efforts to apply Darwinian thought to the social sciences. Specifically, it aligns with the contemporary understanding of ‘randomness’. As Marion Blute explains, in this context, ‘“random”… means “blind” or non-prescient’ (Blute, 2010: 35). The core Darwinian idea does not require an absence of planning, only the entirely reasonable proposition that human actors are unable to fully predict or control the future success of their interventions. Park and Burgess explored this and other wide-ranging ideas from biology in ISS, such as Darwin's theory of emotions. The goal then and now should not be to excise all naturalistic metaphors, but to continue the project of mutual learning and critical engagement between the social and biological sciences.

I have focused on the classical texts of Chicago authors themselves, but pursuing the influence and legacy of the Chicago School would also open important avenues that Uitermark ignores. Perhaps most important would be to pursue a wider view of that legacy. Doing so is one way to add complexity to the claim that the Chicago tradition offers only a one-sided and narrow view that has no purchase elsewhere. Rather than taking this as an abstract question of generalisability, one can study scholars who actually attempted to work with Chicago ideas in different contexts. For example, Park's (informal) student, Fei Xiaotong, is still considered one of the most important founders of Chinese sociology, and the Yenching School incorporated and transformed many Chicago ideas. In this context, the critical reception of Park and the Chicago School more widely takes on a distinct shape. A more internationalist perspective on the actual historical reception of Chicago ideas would certainly add another important (pragmatist, historical and evolutionary) dimension to the conversation regarding their scope. ⁴

My purpose in offering this more complex interpretation of the early Chicago School is not to mount a defence of its authors, Park included. It is to highlight that they were grappling with foundational problems that remain at the heart of the social sciences. How to theorise the relationship between the biological and the cultural; how identities form and transform; how political action fits within broader social processes; how to adapt evolutionary theory to a human context. These are not settled historical debates but live intellectual questions. We can learn from thinkers who wrestled with these questions before us, especially if we read them interpretatively, appreciating their own intellectual struggles of trial and error, assertion and qualification. Uitermark's essay invites us onto this path. My response is an argument to follow it further, to move beyond a selective reading and toward a richer, more challenging interpretation of the enduring problems embodied by ‘The Chicago School’.