The institutional origins of American sociology lie in the 1850 founding of a Board of Aliens Commission by the State of Massachusetts, whose charge was 'to superintend the execution of all laws in relation to the introduction of aliens in the Commonwealth.' From the ranks of this organization, the American Social Science Association was founded in 1865. The motto of the association, 'Ne Quid Nimis' (Everything in Moderation), and a representative sample of papers from the association's journal ('Pauperism in New York City'; 'The Emmigration of Colored Citizens from the Southern States'; 'Immigration and Nervous Diseases'; 'Immigration and Crime') suggest its anxiety about immigrants and internal marginals.
American sociology was shaped by specific social and political pressures, as well as by strong international influences. At the point of its emergence it was also substantially supported by Christian reform organizations, as evidenced by the abundance of articles on Christian sociology in the early years of The American Journal of Sociology. The links between sociology and Christianity are consistent with the fact that many of the first American sociologists had close ties to the ministry.
American sociology in this period was often broken down into three interrelated clusters of inquiry: (1) attention to society's static dimensions, which addressed the question of social stability: how does society manage to preserve the status quo? (2) attention to society's evolutionary dimensions, which addressed the question of change: how did society come to be as it is and what might we predict about its future? (3) attention to society's technologic dimen-192- sions, which addressed the question of control: what actions can be taken to improve society and ensure a better future? Running through each of these lines of exploration was the ongoing struggle with the subject of individualism. As Albion Small observed, 'Today's sociology is still struggling with the preposterous initial fact of the individual. He is the only possible social unit, and he is no longer a thinkable possibility. He is the only real presence, and he is never present.' Sociology's emphasis on social determination, its insistence that human consciousness was formed and existed in interaction alone, seemed to undermine an American tradition of individualism. But in fact the task of 'reconstructing individualism' was a continuing preoccupation. Thus, for static analyses the question was: how could individuals be fit into the existing social system? For evolutionary analyses the question was: how do individual differences come about; are they products of inheritance or environment? For technologic analyses the question was: can education and scientific knowledge equip certain individuals with special powers for social betterment? In what follows I will discuss these three clusters of sociological analysis by way of specific American novels. I consider in turn Herman Melville and realism, Henry James and naturalism, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, and experimentalism. This genealogy moves from writers whose major concerns coincided with those of social science, to writers who absorbed social science into their very techniques. The works of Stein and Du Bois, I argue, were overburdened with social scientific methods, which compromised their aesthetic power but made them ideal registers of the ties between sociology and literature in this period.
The overriding concern of Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd, Sailor (written from 1886 to 1891) is social transformation: how to channel the revolutionary energies of the late eighteenth century into the industrial work of the nineteenth century. As a work written in the turbulent closing decades of nineteenth- century America, and set in a climactic moment of revolution and consolidation at the beginning of the 'modern' era, Billy Budd parallels the situation of late nineteenth-century sociology, a discipline that draws upon founding principles framed in the same revolutionary Europe. -193-
Riding the nervous British seas of 1797, haunted by British Jacobinism, Revolutionary France, and mutinies that year at Nore and Spithead, authorities aboard the Bellipotent are consumed with the problem of social order. Like the early European sociologists who were fresh from the experience of social revolt, Captain Vere and his officers fear lower-class uprising. Described as one whose 'settled convictions were as a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds in those days,' Captain Vere knows the reparative powers of a careful and consistent empiricism. The Bellipotent operates through an elaborate network of watching and cataloging: methods of social description and typecasting that keep everyone on board, especially potentially disruptive elements of the sea commonalty, identified and ordered. The power to label and interpret the world around him is critical to Captain Vere's rule.
A key instance of typecasting is the parable of the black sailor at Liverpool that opens the novella. Transformed kaleidoscopically from an ideal to a sacrificial type, the black sailor foreshadows the experiences of Billy Budd. As a handsome cynosure, the black sailor elicits the 'spontaneous homage' of his fellow sailors, a moment of collective tribute that is threatening in its ability to 'arrest' the normal affairs of the Liverpool wharf. In keeping with this threat, another type, which casts the sailor as the sculptured bull of the Assyrian priests, emerges with a kind of grim necessity at the close of the passage. Now an object of sacrifice within an order of nature and ritual, the black sailor is neutralized. This double echo from the past (a mid-eighteenth-century moment that recalls an ancient rite) points to a simpler era when societies cohered by means of a common conscience reinforced by violence. It also registers the traces of primitivism still lurking in modern forms of social control.
Like the black sailor, Billy Budd is marked early on as an outstanding specimen, capable of inspiring his fellow sailors in unpredictable ways. Had Billy not killed Claggart, Captain Vere would have had to find some other reason for his demise. The necessity of his sacrifice, in other words, seems built into the situation from the beginning: a nervous ship in a time of mutiny and revolution, a handsome sailor who inspires collective pride, his execution. Typing Billy as the 'Angel of God' who 'must hang,' Vere transforms Billy into -194- a visual emblem of his power. Billy's execution is a spectacle that confirms Vere's ability to contain collective sentiments.
The link between typecasting and social control brings us to contemporary sociological theories on social types. In Social Control (1901), E. A. Ross argued that a heterogeneous mass society like modern America required deliberate strategies for ensuring social obedience. He advocated the promotion of social models, ideal types, which society 'induces its members to adopt as their guide.' Based on the principle of self- regulation, what Ross called 'bind[ing] from within,' Ross's types left the individual 'with the illusion of selfdirection even at the moment he martyrizes himself for the ideal we have sedulously impressed upon him.' 'The fact of control,' Ross continues, 'is in good sooth, no gospel to be preached abroad. . the wise sociologist. . will not tell the street Arab, or the Elmira inmate how he is managed.' Ross's use of types for the purposes of social control had its analogue in various disciplines of this era. According to philosopher Josiah Royce, the value of an ideal type lay in its ability to instill a feeling of subordination to a unified whole. The loyal individual, he suggested in The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908), embodied the ideal union of individual identity and social commitment. 'You can be loyal,' he wrote, 'only to a tie that binds you and others into some sort of unity. . the cause to which loyalty devotes itself has always this union of the personal and the seemingly superindividual about it.' For the William James of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) as well, the sign of the healthy religious type is his or her 'sense of integration' in a benevolent social whole.
Like these social philosophers, Captain Vere seeks more than Billy's compliance; he needs Billy to believe in his sacrifice, as socially necessary and beneficial. After typing him 'fated boy,' Vere takes various measures (their 'closeted interview,' for example) to ensure that Billy embrace his fate. Billy's declaration at the point of execution, 'God bless Captain Vere,' signals the success of Vere's methods.
Perhaps an even deeper threat to Captain Vere's methods of social control is his master-at-arms, John Claggart. As one who eludes classification, described at one point as an 'uncatalogued creature of the deep,' Claggart seems uniquely resistant to Vere's authority. Yet Claggart is ultimately as tied to Vere's system as Billy through his -195- burning desire to rise in the ship's hierarchy. Both Billy and Claggart represent to authorities like Captain Vere the hope that the dream of vertical mobility, through success in Claggart's case or martyrdom in Billy's, can be counted on to offset lateral threats of collective identification. It is this hope that underlies sociological reconceptions of individuality. In an exemplary formulation, Albion Small moves from the observation that 'individuals are different,' to the claim that 'the associated state [Small's phrase for society] is a process of making them different.' As he explains further in adopting what he calls 'the genetic view,' the social process is 'a progressive production of more and more dissimilar men.' Though he intends another meaning of 'genetic,' Small's use of the term here foregrounds the sense that the modern liberal state has become an active producer of human types. For Small, social processes conspire to produce uniformly related selves, whose functional attributes can be neatly fit into the social system. Unsolicited differences-of race, ethnicity, political or religious belief-that threaten the status quo are subsumed by produced differences that support it. In the creation of type categories that
