Bolender.com

An admiring student, Kimball Young, said in his obituary of W. I. Thomas that he "never regarded himself essentially as a theorist." This was probably so, but he surely was a theorist despite himself. What is more, he attempted throughout his life to gain greater intellectual clarity and analytical depth, rather than pursuing a fixed initial line of thought. To follow him on his intellectual voyage is a moving experience.

Thomas's early writings--for example, his Sex and Society published in 1907--still show heavy traces of the biologistic biases of the times, even though they also indicate the author's efforts to free himself from these influences. Only those devoid of a sense of historical context will bridle today at such pronouncements as, "Morphologically the development of man is more accentuated than that of woman. Anthropologists . . . regard women as intermediate between the child and the man." Statements such as these, moreover, ought to be read in conjunction with Thomas's fervent pleas in this work for an end to the subjection of women. At this stage in his thinking he may still have been partly in the throes of sexist reasoning, but he could also write in the same book, ". . . When we taken into consideration the superior cunning as well as the superior endurance of women, we may even raise the question whether their capacity for intellectual work is not under equal conditions greater than in man." The book ends with a magnificent sentence which should help wash away many of Thomas's early sins: "Certain it is that no civilization can remain the highest if another civilization adds to the intelligence of its men the intelligence of its women." What applies to his treatment of women also applies, grosso modo, to his writings on race relations and American Blacks.

Just as the biologistic bias in Thomas's early writings cannot be ignored, neither can his psychologistic bias. It would be a mistake, however, not to recognize that he overcame that bias in his later work. Still, it is surely a bit unsettling to learn from the early Thomas that the rules of exogamy "doubtless originate in the restlessness of the male" and his tendency "to seek more unfamiliar women." Many other such naive psychologistic interpretations of institutional arrangements can be found in this book. But such gaucheries stand side by side with little gems of sociological reasoning, such as: "The degree to which abstraction is employed in the activities of a group depends on the complexity of the activities and on the complexity of consciousness in the group."

During the first stages of his career Thomas slowly developed from a traditional ethnographer, reared in the German tradition of Voelkerpsychologie, to a sophisticated social psychologist with a sociologist bent, as evidenced by The Polish Peasant and the works immediately following. His early works must be read as stepping stones on the way. Only a year after the publication of Sex and Society, Thomas's Source Book for Social Origins appeared. A careful reader could already perceive that the author, while providing a wealth of ethnological data as source materials and still operating with such psychological notions as "attention," "habit," and the like, was on his way to developing sociological interpretations that owed relatively little to the biologistic and evolutionary propensities of most of his contemporaries.

Thomas's genius came to full flowering in The Polish Peasant, a book free from biologistic and psychologizing biases, as well as the occasional racist overtones of his early works. In his later works Thomas continued to develop theoretical leads to social psychology first adumbrated in The Polish Peasant. It would seem that by some subconscious division of labor, Znaniecki in his later writings elaborated the notion of social values, which he called "cultural reality," while Thomas's concerns were in the main directed to the social psychological approach characterized by the notion of attitudes.
 

From Coser, 1977:519-520.