ABSTRACT
The birth of sociology in the United States of the 1920s owes its origin to the complexity of the new metropolitan situation and more in general to the processes of industrialization, which were rapidly changing the traditional urban scenario and its relative social structure. The explicit or implicit effects that industrialization, urbanization, and emigration had on the social reality, and in particular on individuals, produced the scope within which nascent American sociology put its theoretical and methodological approach to the test. The city therefore became a veritable social laboratory and Chicago, in particular, the emblematic, ideal, and typical model, where the double animus of the modern metropolis expressed itself most strongly. The city of Chicago and, in general, all modern cities appear as an environment where subjectivity is exalted most and also as a reality where new forms of segregation and social exclusion (Rauty 1999, xxiv–xxv) emerge alongside forms of isolation and a decline in traditional social and community networks, as well as a simultaneous spread of phenomena of psychic and social hardship. It is within this milieu that the first department of sociology was founded (1892), directed by Small and which, from the very onset, stood out both for the particular attention it paid to the study of personal behavior within the urban context and for the impact it had on the evolution of sociology in America (Young and England 1995, 92–96).
