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Lester F. Ward: A Life's Journey. Gale Largey. 108 minutes. 2005. http://www.galelargey.com. Available through the American Sociological Association Bookstore. $25.95 members; $39.95 non-members.
When I worked on my master's degree at Virginia Tech during 1989 and 1990, I was exposed to the writings of a number of early American sociologists, since my thesis advisor, Ellsworth Fuhrman, had published a book in 1980 that examined the thought of Lester Ward, Franklin Giddings, Albion Small, William Graham Sumner, Edward Ross, and Charles Cooley. Cooley's name is still familiar to sociologists because of concepts he developed, such as the "looking glass self" and "primary groups," which are still in vogue today. Likewise, Sumner is still recognized, albeit not on the same level as Cooley, for his concepts of "folkways" and "ethnocentrism. " However, Ward, Giddings, Small, and even Ross have almost completely fallen off the sociological map.
After I left Virginia Tech to work on my Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania I forgot my brief flirtation with Ward et al., largely because in theory courses, both classical and contemporary, no one-and I mean no one-ever mentioned Ward or Giddings. The only early American sociologist who was getting any play at all was W.E.B. Du Bois, a somewhat ironic turn of events considering that during his time Ward and Giddings were much better known than Du Bois. In contemporary sociology we now have a situation in which Lester F. Ward is almost a complete unknown, although for many years the field of intellectual history-and specifically the subfield of American intellectual history-has studied Ward's place in the development of early American sociology.
For a number of reasons, however, sociologists have of late started paying more attention to Ward. Some of this has to do with the feminist project of rescuing forgotten and suppressed voices from the past-particularly those of women and persons of color-who were overlooked during their time because of racism and sexism. What these researchers are starting to discover is that Ward was one of the first social scientists to develop a systematic theory of...