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Subject Area: Political Theory

Chicago Social Science & Quantification - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, Spring 1982, vol. 5, No. 1 [1982]

Edition used:

Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.

Part of: Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, 20 vols. 19781-982

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Chicago Social Science & Quantification

Martin Bulmer

  • London School of Economics and Political Science

“Quantification and Chicago Social Science in the 1920s: A Neglected Tradition.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 17 (July 1981): 287–297.

When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory”—Lord Kelvin. A visitor to the University of Chicago may find this inscription carved below the bay window of the school's Social Science Research Building, which was erected in 1929. The words emphasize most concretely the centrality of quantitative methods in Chicago social science during the 1920s and early 1930s. Yet the psychology, sociology, and political science departments at Chicago during that period have long been identified with the “soft” case-study approach to research, which deemphasized quantification in favor of collecting personal documents and life histories.

Prof. Bulmer sets about rectifying this misapprehension. His article chronicles the important developments in quantitative methods which occurred in Chicago's social science departments during the twenties. In his account, he gives special emphasis to the contributions of Ernest Burgess, William F. Ogburn, L.L. Thurstone, and Samuel Stouffer. He also examines the contribution made by the institutionalization of social research in the Local Community Research Committee. Significant developments in the use of census tract data, attitude measurement, and partial correlation analysis are treated as well.

After detailing the extensive Chicago tradition of statistically oriented research, Bulmer asks how it is possible that the tradition has been relatively ignored in histories of the social sciences. He believes that several reasons may explain this neglect. First of all, statistical developments occurred in several departments at the same time—sociology, political science, psychology, and economics. With its crisscross evolution, progress in statistically oriented research poses real problems to the historian who wishes to describe its course over the years.

Secondly, as Robert Alun Jones and Sidney Kronus have demonstrated, interest in quantitative methods and interest in the history of sociology seem to be negatively correlated. They argue that the more committed a social scientist is to the “scientism” of his discipline, the more likely he is to adopt an ahistorical approach to the subject.

Furthermore, the traditions of quantitative research tend to regard progress as more cumulative, more “scientific,” than in the case of qualititative research or theory. There is less desire to examine the roots of the quantitative tradition and much less preoccupation in teaching statistical research with material that covers the origin of particular approaches and the history of particular techniques. Historical developments in quantitative research have thus tended to be forgotten.

A more insidious tendency is what Bulmer calls the Inverse Whig interpretation, which sees sharp discontinuity and error between the distant past and the more enlightened (and emancipated) present. With such a point of view, it proves difficult to acquire the perspective needed to see that continuities are considerably greater than oversimplified contrasts between “Chicago” and “Columbia” schools would suggest.