Thomas, William Isaac

William Isaac Thomas (1863–1947), American sociologist and social psychologist, directed the field of sociology away from the abstractions of an earlier generation of “system builders” to concrete studies of group life and social behavior. Thomas was widely regarded as one of the University of Chicago's most productive and original scholars, first as a graduate student (1893–1896) and then as one of the sociology faculty (1896–1918). His greatest, most lasting influence was as a framer of sociological concepts and methodologies, establishing the life history (a self-reported narration of life) and the personal document (letters, diaries, archival records) as basic sources for social research. Thomas proposed that social problems required an understanding of both “social organization” and the subjective (experiential) aspects of social reality and a commitment to sociology and social psychology, respectively. He was also an early champion of comparative methods in social science, pioneering comparative studies in culture and personality. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), written with Florian Znaniecki, has been regarded as one of the most important works in American social science and was the subject of several scholarly reappraisals in the years after its publication, the first by Herbert Blumer in 1939. The influence of Thomas on U.S. sociology was also felt through his close friendship and association with Robert E. Park. They met at the 1910 International Conference on the Negro held at the Tuskegee Institute, a meeting that eventually led to Park's appointment at Chicago and their lifelong collaboration.

Thomas was born in rural Virginia and entered the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, graduating in 1884, where he remained as a teacher of Greek and modern languages while undertaking graduate studies in English literature and modern languages, receiving a doctorate in 1886. By his own account, he was moved to pursue learning through the examples of two teachers—a professor of Greek language and culture and a natural scientist who taught him evolutionary science, fields of study that remained part of his distinct interdisciplinary focus throughout his life. In his “Life History,” Thomas described his youthful “conversion” to the intellectual and scientific life and his plans to travel to Germany to pursue that life through the study of modern and ancient languages. While on a leave from Tennessee from 1888 to 1889, he studied at Göttingen and Berlin, working in languages and in the new fields of ethnology and the folk psychology of Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal.

On his return to America in 1889, he accepted his first full-time academic post at Oberlin College as a teacher of English and comparative literature. These early years of reading, learning, and teaching he described as “the most satisfactory of my life.” At Oberlin, his interest in social [Page 835]science was further stimulated by his reading of Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology from which he took his evolutionary and anthropological view of human development. In 1893, Thomas went to the newly established University of Chicago to pursue a second doctorate in sociology, working under the direction of Albion W. Small and Charles R. Henderson. Thomas's second doctoral dissertation, “On a Difference of the Metabolism of the Sexes,” was later developed and published as Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex (1907) and is numbered among the early sociological studies of the social aspects of sexual behavior and relations. It is also an example of Thomas's interest in the social problems of his day that evoked intense moral discussion, such as prostitution and sexual behavior, issues he addressed as problems of “human behavior,” using research methods from anthropology, clinical case studies, and fieldwork.

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