The Chicago Schools of Sociology and Economics

The Chicago school of sociology refers to a group of academics at the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century who focused heavily on qualitative methodologies, data analysis, and leveraging the city itself as a social laboratory. Two of its most important members were Albion Small (the founder of the department) and Robert Park. Another school of thought at the University of Chicago, the Chicago school of economics, grew in popularity in the middle of the twentieth century and extolled the virtues of a laissez-faire free market economic system. This school was founded by Frank Knight and popularized by Milton Friedman. Given the overlap between the Chicago schools of sociology and economics in time and place, there were undoubtedly influences and interplays between the two schools.

In a 2013 book review for Cities, cultural policy and governance, Chris Bailey wrote that both schools were influenced heavily by a sense of place (Bailey, 2013). “Both, in one sense, stem from one world city, and from one university, Chicago,” he wrote. “They shared a common assumption that the city is a kind of laboratory, where experimentation, and not just observation, should happen.” Friedman himself once commented on the two schools sharing a philosophical underpinning. In remarks to a University of Chicago board of trustees faculty dinner in 1974, he said, “Morris Janowitz describes the central thrust of the Chicago school of sociology as consisting of emphasis ‘on empirical data and the need for integrating data into what they believed to be an appropriate theoretical framework’ — a description that applies equally to one aspect of the Chicago school of economics” (Milton).

Part of the reason for this shared framework stemmed from the fact that the two departments were housed under one roof. Small, frustrated by the siloed nature of the various social science departments, wanted to increase interdisciplinary collaboration and to avoid the departments becoming “pretty nearly water-tight compartments … where each subgroup practiced its own critical technique from its particularistic viewpoint, with precautions against contagion from groups occupying a different ground” (Mullen, 1985). The impact of this collaboration under one roof was revolutionary. Friedman said, “Chicago pioneered in the social sciences and fostered active cooperation among them— most concretely by constructing a single social science building to house them all, so it is perhaps not surprising that ‘schools’ should have flourished in the social sciences and should have had much in common.”

One direct way that the various social science departments fostered cooperation was with the founding of the University of Chicago Social Science Research Committee, which “was to study questions of poverty, race, employment, voting patterns, housing and family life” in Chicago in a multidisciplinary way (Mullen, 1985). Scholars whose work was supported by this committee included sociologists Park and Louis Wirth, as well as economist Knight (who later taught Friedman) (University of Chicago Library, 2006). This intersection of economics and urban life later led Friedman to remark, “The fundamental difference between Chicago at that time and let’s say Harvard, was that at Chicago economics was a serious subject to be used in discussing real problems, and you could get some knowledge and some answers from it. For Harvard, economics was an intellectual discipline on a par with mathematics, which was fascinating to explore, but you mustn’t draw any conclusions from it” (Galbács, 2020, p. 93).

Chicago school sociologists also had some proto-free market views that foreshadowed the later work of Friedman and other Chicago school economists. Park’s ideas on urban ecology, along with those of fellow sociologist Ernest Burgess, were a social application of Darwinian evolutionary processes, in which cities were dominated by the forces of competition for urban resources like land and work. “People not only compete against each other on an individual basis for work and better jobs, but the groups to which they belong also compete against each other on a collective bases,” criminologist Lonnie Athens wrote in 2013. “According to Park and Burgess, this competition among human beings and groups for work and ever better jobs sets the basic terms and conditions for their existence on earth” (Athens, 2013). Park, similar to free-market theorists who came after him, may even have believed that not only does this competition simply exist naturally but “that contemporary forms of competition are instrumental for societal progress” (Faught, 1986). Wirth, too, looked to Darwin to explain urban phenomena, writing in his 1938 “Urbanism as a Way of Life”: “As Darwin pointed out for flora and fauna and as Durkheim noted in the case of human societies, an increase in numbers when area is held constant (i.e., an increase in density) tends to produce differentiation and specialization, since only in this way can the area support increased numbers.”

Although competition is a central pillar of Friedman’s free market philosophy, the Chicago school of economics was rarely as explicitly Darwinian as the Chicago school of sociology. “While Darwinist theories of human ecology remained strong and explicit through the 1960s in the Chicago School of sociology, they were buried in the obscure methodological machinery of the Chicago School of economics,” Elvin Wyly and others wrote in 2018. “With the exception of Milton Friedman’s brief mention of Darwinian natural selection among competing firms struggling to maximize returns, American neoclassical economics carefully avoided evolutionary discourse” (Wyly et al., 2018).

The University of Chicago was able to develop two widely influential schools of thought at around the same time, with the school of sociology having a major impact on the school of economics that followed. How was Chicago able to develop these impactful schools? “Not isolation and uniformity, but tolerance for diversity,” Friedman said. “These are the sources of the Chicago proclivity to generate ‘schools.’” These are also the sources, Chicago sociologists would say, of the power of the city.

References

Athens, L. (2013). Park’s Theory of Conflict and His Fall From Grace in Sociology. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(2), 75–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708612471315

Bailey, C. (2013). Cities, cultural policy and governance. Cultural Trends, 22(2), 133–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2013.783180

Faught, J. (1986). The Concept of Competition in Robert Park’s Sociology. The Sociological Quarterly, 27(3), 359–371. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1986.tb00266.x

Galbács Péter. (2020). The Friedman-Lucas transition in macroeconomics: a structuralist approach. Academic Press.

Milton, F. (2016). Remarks at the 54th annual Board of Trustees dinner for faculty, University of Chicago, 9 January 1974. Hoover Institution. https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/1974janchicagoThe54thAnnual.pdf.

Mullen, W. (1985, September 29). A Meeting Of Minds. Chicago Tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1985-09-29-8503070686-story.html.

University of Chicago Library. (2006). Guide to the University of Chicago Social Science Research Committee Records 1923-1964. The University of Chicago Library. https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.SSRC.

Wyly, E., Daniels, J., Dhanani, T., & Yeung, C. (2018). Hayek in the cloud. City, 22(5-6), 820–842. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2018.1549863