Louis Wirth

Louis Wirth

Louis Wirth
(August 28, 1897 – May 3, 1952)
Born (1897-08-28)August 28, 1897
Gemünden, Rhine Province, Prussia
Died May 3, 1952(1952-05-03) (aged 54)
Nationality American
Fields Sociology
Alma mater University of Chicago
Academic advisors Robert E. Park
Ernest Burgess
W. I. Thomas
Albion W. Small

Louis Wirth (August 28, 1897 – May 3, 1952) was an American sociologist and member of the Chicago school of sociology.

Life

Louis Wirth was born in the small village of Gemünden in the Hunsrück, Germany. He was one of seven children born to Rosalie Lorig (1868-1948, from Butzweiler/Eifel) and Joseph Wirth. Gemünden was a pastoral community, and Joseph Wirth earned a living as a cattle dealer. The family was Jewish and both of his parents were religiously active. Louis left Gemünden to live with his older sister at his uncle's home in Omaha, Nebraska in 1911. Soon after arriving in the United States, Louis met and married Mary Bolton.[1] The couple had two daughters, Elizabeth (Marvick) and Alice (Gray).

Research

Wirth studied in the United States and became a leading figure in Chicago School Sociology. His interests included city life, minority group behaviour and mass media and he is recognised as one of the leading urban sociologists. Wirth's major contribution to social theory of urban space was a classic essay Urbanism as a Way of Life, published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1938.

His research was mostly concerned with how Jewish immigrants adjusted to life in urban America, as well as the distinct social processes of city life. Wirth was a supporter of applied sociology, and believed in taking the knowledge offered by his discipline and using it to solve real social problems.

Wirth writes that urbanism is a form of social organisation that is harmful to culture, and describes the city as a “Substitution of secondary for primary contacts, the weakening of bonds of kinship, the declining social significance of the family, the disappearance of neighbourhood and the undermining of traditional basis of social solidarity”.[2] Wirth was concerned with the effects of the city upon family unity, and he believed urbanization leads to a ‘low and declining urban reproduction rates … families are smaller and more frequently without children than in the country’. According to Wirth, marriage tends to be postponed, and the proportion of single people is growing, leading to isolation and less interaction.

But Wirth also stressed the positive effects of city life: "the beginning of what is distinctively modern in our civilization is best signalized by the growth of great cities“;[3] "metropolitan civilization is without question the best civilization that human beings have ever devised“;[4] "the city everywhere has been the center of freedom and toleration, the home of progress, of invention, of science, of rationality“[5] or: "the history of civilization can be written in terms of the history of cities“.[6]

The profound social understanding of minority groups that Wirth obtained first-hand as a Jewish immigrant in America, can equally be applied to understanding the problems of other minority groups in society, such as ethnic minorities, the disabled, homosexuals, women and the elderly, all of whom have also suffered, and/or continue to suffer prejudice, discrimination and disenfranchisement from the more numerically dominant members of a host society. It is in this respect that Wirth's path-breaking and insightful work still amply rewards detailed study even today, some seventy years after his original investigations.[7]

A good example of Wirth's work, which includes a comprehensive bibliography, is On Cities and Social Life, published in 1964.

Bibliography

See also

References

  1. ↑ Biographical note in the Guide to the Mary Bolton Wirth Papers, University of Chicago
  2. ↑ Wirth, Louis (1938) Urbanism as a way of life
  3. ↑ Wirth, Louis (1938) Urbanism as a way of life
  4. ↑ The City. (The City as a Symbol of Civilization.); The Papers of Louis Wirth, The Joseph Regenstein Library, Special Collections/University of Chicago, Box: 39, Folder: 6
  5. ↑ Life in the City. In: Wirth 1956: p. 206-217
  6. ↑ Wirth, Louis (1940): The Urban Society and Civilization. In: Wirth, Louis (ed.), Eleven Twenty Six
  7. ↑ Wirth, L: "The Problem of Minority Groups.", page 347 in Ralph Linton (ed.), The Science of Man in the World Crisis, New York: Columbia University Press, 1945.

Further reading

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