Like a good sociologist, Simmel argued that money is neither the root of all evil nor
the means to our emancipation: It’s both.American Sociological Thinkers
Three American sociologists from the first decades of the twentieth century took the
pivotal ideas of European sociology and translated them into a more American ver-
sion. They have each, since, joined the classical canonor officially recognized set of
foundational sociologists.Thorstein Veblen.Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) is best known for his bitingly satirical
work,The Theory of the Leisure Class(1899). Here, he argued that America was split
in two, between the “productive”—those who work—and the “pecuniary”—those
who have the money. That is, he divided Americans into workers and owners,
respectively. The wealthy, he argued, weren’t productive; they lived off the labor of
others, like parasites. They spent their time engaged in competitive displays of wealth
and prestige, which he called “conspicuous consumption”—consumption that is done
because it is visible and because it invites a certain social evaluation of “worth.” One
comes to advertise wealth through wasteful consumption.
He also saw a tension between the benevolent forces of technology and the profit
system that distorts them. He contrasted the rationality of work, of the machine
process and its personnel, to the irrational caprices of speculators, financiers, and the
wealthy who squander valuable goods so as to win prestige. Modern society was nei-
ther a simple Marxian class struggle between the malevolent wealthy owners and their
naïve and innocent workers, nor was technology inevitably leading to either social
uplift or social decay. It was not a matter of the technology but of its ownership and
control and the uses to which it was put.Lester Ward.Lester Ward (1841–1913) was one of the founders of American
sociology and the first to free it from the biological fetters of the Darwinian model of
social change. Ward rebelled against social Darwinism,which saw each succeeding
society as improving on the one before it. Instead, Ward stressed the need for social
planning and reform, for a “sociocratic” society that later generations were to call
a welfare state. His greatest theoretical achievement, called the theory of “social
telesis,” was to refute social Darwinism, which held that those who ruled deserved to
do so because they had “adapted” best to social conditions (Ward, [1883] 1969).
Ward argued that, unlike Darwinist predictions, natural evolution proceeded in an
aimless manner, based on adaptive reactions to accidents of nature. In nature, evolu-
tion was more random, chaotic, and haphazard than social Darwinists imagined. But
in society, evolution was informed by purposeful action, which he called “social telesis.”
Ward welcomed the many popular reform movements because he saw enlight-
ened government as the key to social evolution. Education would enable the com-
mon man and woman to participate as democratic citizens. The bottom layers of
society, the proletariat, women, even the underclass of the slums, are by nature the
equals of the “aristocracy of brains,” he wrote. They lack only proper instruction.George Herbert Mead. George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) studied the development
of individual identity through social processes. He argued that what gave us our
identity was the product of our interactions with ourselves and with others, which
is based on the distinctly human capacity for self-reflection. He distinguished
between the “I,” the part of us that is inherent and biological, from the “me,” the
part of us that is self-conscious and created by observing ourselves in interaction.20 CHAPTER 1WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?