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INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION HERBERT BLUMER
The republication of my critique of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America provides an opportunity to comment on several crucial methodological issues which continue to plague sociology and social psychology. My critique, which was published in 1939, was prepared in response to a re quest of the Executive Committee of the Social Science Research Council. That committee had felt that the social sciences could benefit from a searching examination of the methodological character of outstanding pieces of re search in several social sciences. In the case of sociology, the sociologists who were consulted agreed overwhelm ingly that Thomas and Znaniecki's Polish Peasant was by far the most distinguished research study in their field. My critique of this work was regarded as sufficiently impor tant to warrant a conference of eminent scholars to discuss the methodological issues that I had raised. The critique, the conference discussions, and a few separate commen taries are reproduced in the current publication. Before addressing the methodological problems which, as I say, continue to haunt sociology, it is of some interest to reflect on the general way in which The Polish Peasant is viewed today, approximately forty years after my critique and some sixty years after the study. My impression is that sociologists who have come on the scene since World War [v)
II have very little familiarity with the work and would be hard put to identify even a few of the many vital matters that it considered. This absence of even a modicum of firsthand familiarity with the work is all the more surpris ing in view of the exalted position which The Polish Peasant had in American sociology in the period from 1920 to 1940. There is no doubt that in the 1920s and 1930s, The Polish Peasant was viewed extensively in sociological circles at the finest exhibit of advanced sociological research and theoretical analysis. That the work should have moved so drastically and so quickly from this central position of sociological concern poses a most interesting problem for sociologists of knowledge. The shift cannot be attributed, as some might naively assume, to a displacement of a melioristic interest by a scientific interest; The Polish Peas ant was actually a huge scholarly effort to find out what was going on in contemporary human society in place of being a plan for the reform of human society. Nor can the loss of sociological interest in The Polish Peasant be ascribed to a charge that the group life and the group problems with which it was concerned are no longer a part of our contemporary world. Such a charge has no foundation whatsoever, since the work was very clearly focused on the profound changes taking place in modern group life and human experience-the shift from rural, agricultural life to urban, industrial life and the mingling of peoples from diverse cultural backgrounds. Indeed, it should be pointed out that Thomas chose the Polish people for study not because of any special interest in them, but rather as a convenient group for the isolation of the processes of so cial change at work in modern society. Further, it cannot be said with any justification that sociologists of the present generation have lost interest in The Polish Peasant because [vi]
the work does not present an integrated and carefully thought-out body of social theory; to the contrary, The Polish Peasant contains a theoretical scheme of the nature of human group life that is comprehensive, elaborate, log ical, and very clear. Nor, finally, is the loss of sociological interest in The Polish Peasant to be explained by an alleged absence of empirical data that give support and meaning to the extensive social theory presented by the authors. The contrary is, of course, the case; probably no sociologi cal study anywhere