Chicago School

An ambitious, comprehensive theory of social and spatial evolution that achieved hegemony—and then notoriety—in sociology, geography, urban studies, and other social sciences in the twentieth century, the University of Chicago was established in 1890. The Department of Sociology, founded two years later, was the first large and lasting institutional center of the new discipline in the United States and, indeed, the world. In sociology, the Chicago School became most closely associated with an approach known as symbolic interactionism, which focuses on micro-level processes of social interaction and the ways individuals and groups construct distinct, contextual meanings from events and behavior. Geography and urban studies were more deeply influenced by a series of spatial metaphors developed by Chicago sociologists as well as by a theory of “human ecology” emphasizing the interdependencies among people and the fast-changing environments produced by industrialization and urbanization. Generations of undergraduate and graduate students used the city of Chicago as a living laboratory for field research, building a methodological and empirical infrastructure that was widely admired, emulated, and eventually challenged. Reputation, perception, and myth associated with the Chicago School became so dominant that as early as the late 1950s, one prominent sociologist referred to the tradition as “Urbanism, Incorporated”—a nod to press portrayals of Prohibition-era organized crime as “Murder, Incorporated.” Ever since the 1960s, successive generations have used “Chicago School” as a floating signifier, either as nostalgia for a legendary lost tradition to be restored or as an epithet for obsolete, conservative modes of research that legitimate status quo inequalities of urban society. Both admiration and attack, however, are based on selective interpretations of a body of work that was simultaneously vast, intergenerationally dynamic, and marginalized within the wider hierarchical structures of academic knowledge production and policy influence. Far more powerful than sociology or geography, for example, has been a separate Chicago School of neoclassical and neoliberal economic theory and political economy. Latter-day critiques, therefore, are more relevant to the philosophical antecedents of the Chicago School that are being revived today in distinct, interdisciplinary currents of social physics, sociobiology, cybernetics, information theory, and performative computational cultures of media and representation.