Early American Sociology and the Polish Peasant

The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20), by W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, is something of a forgotten classic in sociology. The book has been kept alive in recent decades primarily by social historians (Handlin, 1951; Cravens, 1978; Persons, 1958; Zaretsky, 1984; Elder, 1981) American sociologists did not fully appreciate its theoretical importance when it appeared nor have they since.' The main importance of the book was in founding the discipline of sociology, in the epistemological sense of clarifying the unique intellectual space into which this discipline alone could see and explore (Foucault, 1973: 344-348; Husserl, 1970a). The Polish Peasant did not achieve this feat singlehandedly, for American sociology had been attempting to legitimize itself, theoretically, or rather meta-theoretically, for several decades. But the Polish Peasant was the