The Science of Society: Sociology at McGill University, 1918-1939

The study of how an academic institution shaped the character of a discipline. During the interwar years, McGill University established the first Department of Sociology in Canada, and the department's first academics were graduates of the University of Chicago. Though initially nurtured by the same utilitarian trends which shaped McGill's character, the university's sociology department's focus during the 1930s on unemployment in Montreal resulted in administration's fear that the discipline was turning McGill into the centre of socialist propaganda. In the late 1930s, when the university's Board of Governors decided to take action against political radicalism within the school, the sociology department became a major target. The result was constraints upon what professors could research and write.

PhD dissertation

University of Toronto

Toronto, ON

1985

485p.

en