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Book No. – 25 (Sociology)
Book Name – Masters of Sociological Thought
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LANGUAGE
William I. Thomas & Florian Znaniecki
Chapter – 14
Table of Contents
THE WORK
- William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki are linked by their common masterpiece, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.
- Their work is intertwined in the history of sociology, and their lives are best approached in terms of their contrapuntal relationships.
- Although they had differing cast of minds and personalities, their shared work defines their scholarly legacy.
- The Polish Peasant will be discussed first, despite both authors having made other noteworthy contributions prior to this joint project.
- The purpose of The Polish Peasant was to provide a documented sociological treatment of Polish countrymen’s life experiences.
- The work focused on their involvement in the major social changes as they moved from the security and rootednessof their native villages to the uprooting wilderness of American urban life.
- The emphasis in the discussion is not on the detailed findings of the work, but on the major theoretical underpinnings that give it significance beyond its stated purpose.
THE POLISH PEASANT—A LANDMARK
- The Polish Peasant is a monumental achievement and the earliest major landmark of American sociological research.
- It is centrally concerned with issues of ethnic identity and ethnic subcultures, which are of renewed significance today, as these issues have resurfaced after Thomas’s and Znaniecki’s time.
- The raw materials of the book are derived from the life-histories of Polish immigrants to Chicago, including personal letters, autobiographies, diaries, and other personal documents.
- These materials are rich in peculiar specificity.
- The aim is not to delve deeply into the documentary evidence, but to explore how the authors captured the peculiarities of their detailed accounts within generalizing abstractions.
- Thomas and Znaniecki rejected the fallacy that science is about the accumulation of facts.
- They argued that “a fact by itself is already an abstraction” and questioned whether we perform this abstraction methodologically or not.
- Their approach involved methodical abstraction to transcend the material, providing a theoretical frame applicable to other materials, even those unrelated to the Polish data in their work.