Background

Franklin Giddings was born on March 23, 1855, in Sherman, Connecticut, United States. He was the son of Edward Jonathan Giddings, a prominent Congregational minister, and Rebecca Jane Fuller.

Education

Franklin received his early training and education under the strict guidance of his mother and father and was also instructed in surveying and drafting by his grandfather, a prominent citizen of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. After a preparatory course at the High School at Great Barrington, he entered Union College in 1873. He left College in 1875 to take charge of the Academy at Goshen, Connecticut, but continued his studies in private, covering much more ground than was required for graduation. In 1888 he received from Union College the degree of Bachelor of Arts, with reference back to the Class of 1877 in full standing. While at College he took in addition to the required studies a portion of the engineering course.

Career

In 1876 Franklin Henry Giddings entered newspaper life as Associate Editor of the Winsted Herald (Connecticut). In 1878 he was an editorial writer on the Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts, and his work there, coupled with an excess of private study, resulted in a year's enforced rest from active labor, which was spent in studying political economy and law. He resumed newspaper work in 1879 on the Staff of the Berkshire Courier, and remained there for two years, when he became Editor of the New Milford Gazette, Connecticut.

In 1882 Giddings served on the Town School Committee of Great Barrington. In 1884 he returned to Springfield as an editorial writer and literary critic of the Union.

In 1885 he conducted an investigation and reported to the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor on profit-sharing, and in the following year left the Union to become the Editor of Work and Wages at Springfield. During his years of newspaper work his leisure time had been occupied in the study. His first appointment as Instructor came in 1888 when Bryn Mawr College appointed him Lecturer on Political Science. In 1889 he was made Associate, in the following year Associate Professor, and in 1892 Professor. Since 1890 he had also been Lecturer on Sociology in the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia, and in 1894 he left Bryn Mawr on a call from Columbia to its Chair of Sociology. He published between 1885 and 1895 many articles and monographs on economic and sociological theory.

Giddings wrote two of the first textbooks in quantitative sociology: "Inductive Sociology" (1901) and "The Scientific Study of Human Society" (1924). Some of his other writings include "Principles of Sociology" (1896), "Elements of Sociology" (1898), "Democracy and Empire" (1900), and "Readings in Descriptive and Historical Sociology" (1906). In "Studies in the Theory of Human Society" (1922), Giddings asserted that the environment affects the nature of a population and its ability to overcome limitations and create techniques and solutions.

Achievements

• Franklin Henry Giddings is widely known as one of the "four founders" of American Sociology. He built his reputation as a leading quantitative sociologist, behavioralist, and theorist. He was one of the scholars responsible for transforming American sociology from a mere division of philosophy into research science. Giddings's work became the foundation for the neo-positivism defended by subsequent sociologists.
  
  Giddings has been listed as a noteworthy sociologist by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

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  • The Modern Distributive Process. Studies of Competition and its Limits 1888
  • The Theory of Socialization: A Syllabus of Sociological Principles 1894
  • The Principles of Sociology: An Analysis of the Phenomena of Association and of Social Organization 1896
  • The Elements of Sociology a Text-Book for Colleges and Schools 1898
  • Democracy and Empire 1900
  • Inductive Sociology; A Syllabus of Methods, Analyses and Classifications, and Provisionally Formulated Laws 1901
  • Readings in Descriptive and Historical Sociology 1906

Politics

Franklin was a sound-money Democrat in politics. He was a strong supporter of Mr. Cleveland's candidacy during the campaign of 1884, and at the risk of losing position and salary positively refused to write editorials favoring the candidacy of James G. Blaine.

Views

Giddings' basic philosophy was a combination of Comtean positivism and Spencerian evolutionism. He saw social evolution as part of cosmic evolution, as basically an equilibration of energy among individuals and groups that results in differentiation, integration, segregation, and assimilation. He thus viewed every social order as always in a state of moving equilibrium, such equilibrium in power and status being essential for internal justice and order and, on a wider scale, for international peace. He considered sociology both natural science and the basic elemental social science, giving an account of the origin, growth, structure, and activities of human association through the operation of physical, biological, and psychological forces. At times he thought sociology might become a quantitatively exact science.

In his view, "social process," or social life, results from the interaction of "primary causes," the natural resources and accessibility of a given habitat, and the "secondary causes," the human motives arising within society itself. Since all social energy is physical energy transmuted by means of economic activities, the "social composition," or the number, density, and genetic heterogeneity of a given population, is determined by these primary causes. At the same time, harnessing these resources of food and power increases social dynamics and, hence, the processes of differentiation and integration, thus adding complexity to the "social constitution," that is, the functional and purposive groupings, ranging from social clubs to sovereign states. Giddings thus found the task of sociology to be the integration of subjective with objective processes and concepts in terms of mental activity, organic adjustment, natural selection, and conservation of energy.

This basic position is generally sound if rich and accessible natural resources are considered primary only in the sense of being antecedent in time, or as essential, but culturally viewed, static preconditions for the development of a dense population and a highly dynamic social order, or if it is acknowledged that both the manner and extent of their utilization is dependent on the state of cultural advancement. Giddings would probably agree, since he saw all forms of association as "essential phenomena of thought and feeling," so that his analyses of the stages of society's evolution from zoogenic to demotic forms, as well as his analyses of the social constitution and the social mind, were all couched in psychosocial terms.

Membership

Giddings was a member of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, of which he has been Vice-President since 1890, the Authors, Barnard and Century Clubs, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the American Economic Association, of which he was first Vice-President in 1896-1897, and L'Institut International de Sociologie of Paris.

• American Academy of Political and Social Science , United States

• Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia , United States

• 

  American Economic Association , United States

• L'Institut International de Sociologie of Paris , France

Connections

Giddings married Elizabeth Patience Hawes on November 8, 1876, with whom he had three children.

Father:

Edward Jonathan Giddings

Mother:

Rebecca Jane (Fuller) Giddings

Wife:

Elizabeth Patience (Hawes) Giddings

References

• American Masters of Social Science: An Approach to the Study of the Social Sciences Through a Neglected Field of Biography
  1972