Patrick Geddes and the History of Environmental Sociology in Britain

Abstract

After the appointment of its first full-time professor in L.T. Hobhouse in 1907, British sociology lost an environmental approach that might have substantially altered the shape of the discipline. The environmental approach was that of Patrick Geddes, who made the relationship between people and their environments central for individual and social well-being. In spite of the fact that urban Britain was undergoing environmental crisis due to the negative effects of unrestrained industrialization, a range of other circumstances, personal as well as political and both inside and outside the academy, conspired to coalesce in the more or less deliberate exclusion of Geddes' ideas. The paper suggests that sociologists need to take a radically reflexive approach to the history of their own discipline that recognizes its embeddedness in the wider social world, since both individual and social action, as well as structural forces, may be as influential as quality or coherence in determining the fate of the ideas and theories that they create. In Geddes' case, this leads to a re-examination of both the historical context and the debate surrounding the establishment of sociology at the London School of Economics.