Albion W. Small

Albion W. Small (born May 11, 1854, Buckfield, Maine, U.S.—died March 24, 1926, Chicago) was a sociologist who won recognition in the United States for sociology as an academic discipline with professional standards. In 1892 he became the first professor of sociology in the United States, at the University of Chicago, where he organized the first U.S. sociology department. In 1895 he founded, and for the rest of his life edited, the American Journal of Sociology, the first U.S. periodical of consequence devoted to the subject.

Through his mother’s family, Small was a distant relative of Abraham Lincoln. He received a theological education in New England, studied in Germany for two years, earned a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1889, and from that year to 1892 served as president of Colby College, Waterville, Maine.

With a Chicago colleague, George E. Vincent, Small wrote what is considered the world’s first sociology textbook, An Introduction to the Study of Society (1894). He called the attention of U.S. scholars to contemporary German-language social theories, particularly those of the Austrian soldier and philosopher Gustav Ratzenhofer, whose ideas strongly influenced Small’s General Sociology (1905).

Small’s own strictly sociological theories and methods soon became obsolete, but he had a more lasting effect on political and economic thought. In political science his conception of the state as a mediator of conflicting group interests was taken up by subsequent writers. The institutional school of economists was influenced by his attack on capitalism, Between Eras from Capitalism to Democracy (1913), for which he drew on the ideas of Karl Marx; Thorstein Veblen, the U.S. economist of dynamics analysis, and Werner Sombart, the German sociological economist.