Inter-War Sociology and History: Shared Assumptions of Modernization Theory

During the inter-war period, a pronounced sociological antipathy toward history seemed most evident within the Chicago School, where Robert Park pioneered modern fieldwork. Park directly emulated European anthropologists like Bronisław Malinowski, who had championed participant observation during the Great War. However, closer analysis demonstrates that historians and social scientists of this era largely operated under two related sets of foundational assumptions. Even the French Annales School, an exception in its advocacy for social history, was not entirely free from these prevailing ideas.

The first core supposition was a belief in a world-historical shift from a traditional, hierarchical, and religious society toward a modern, egalitarian, and rational order. Elites were seen as the primary drivers of this process, whereas the masses—particularly women and so-called ‘inferior races’—were thought to modernize far more slowly, if at all. This framework cast the elite in the role of history’s ‘midwife,’ with those who understood this dynamic celebrated as ‘national heroes’ or ‘far-sighted modernizers.’ Secondly, these theories of progress owed a significant debt to Gustave Le Bon’s concepts of collective psychology, which reinforced the dichotomy between a rational, active elite and a passive-yet-volatile mass.

According to this psychological model, the implicitly feminized and racialized mass could not control its irrational drives without elite guidance. However, it could ‘internalize’ simplified ideas through repetition and imitation. While the masses were credited with an innate good sense that might occasionally inspire the elite, left alone, the crowd was perceived as prone to extremes and vulnerable to exploitation by malevolent counter-elites. Thirdly, both history and social science assumed that progress unfolded within discrete nations, each possessing a unique ‘character.’ Patriotism was viewed as the essential social cement required for functional societal cohesion.

A fourth shared assumption was that rapid social change inevitably fractured traditional bonds, causing widespread disorientation—termed ‘anomie’ by social scientists—within the mass. This state of normlessness was believed to increase the population’s susceptibility to demagogues and peddlers of utopian ideologies. On the surface, academic history appeared distinct from social science due to its ostensibly non-theoretical and predominantly political focus. Nonetheless, historians largely concentrated on narrating the nation’s struggle to achieve self-consciousness, homogeneity, and independence against internal and external enemies, a process that prominently featured ‘great men.’

Within these narratives, the historian’s own nation was portrayed variably as a civilizational exemplar, an unfulfilled essence, or a historical victim. Some national historical traditions drew more explicitly on social scientific frameworks. The Nazis’ Volksgeschichte, for instance, utilized anthropology to search for the distant ethnic origins of the German nation. Conversely, the liberal historian Eckart Kehr, in his work Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik (1931), agreed with Max Weber that Germany’s aberrant democratic development was explained by the anachronistic political strength of its aristocracy. While critical of nationalism, Kehr did not abandon the national framework of analysis.

Marc Bloch, a founder of the Annales School, offered a more critical perspective on nationalism and explicitly engaged with Émile Durkheim’s sociological anthropology. His seminal work, Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931), grappled with the idea of a distinct French pattern of historical development in terms still compatible with broader narratives of progress. Ultimately, both historians and sociologists unwittingly shared versions of grand theory, wherein change was an external ‘force’ driven by the functional needs of a social system.

In this paradigm, meaning was derived from measurement against abstract theory rather than from the authentic actions and beliefs of historical protagonists. Because historians’ debt to such grand theory remained unacknowledged, it proved resistant to critique. The apparent obviousness of progress as a concept further facilitated the deep entrenchment of these sociological theories within Western historiography during the 1950s. Modernization narratives have proven difficult to displace, not least because they persist within sociology itself, as evidenced by some contemporary introductory texts.

While alternative strands existed within both social theory and historical writing, they too often struggled to completely cast off modernization assumptions. Perhaps unfortunately, the most insightful critiques came to fruition just as post-structuralism diverted scholarly attention to other matters. Ironically, the subsequent cultural turn sometimes inadvertently endorsed the very tenets of the functionalist social science it sought to challenge, demonstrating the enduring legacy of these inter-war paradigms.