ABSTRACT
The sociology of the Founding Fathers was explicitly and irrepressibly theoretical. They directly referred to ‘theory,’ social theory,’ sociological theory,’ theoretical sociology,’ or ‘general sociology.’ Broadly speaking, early theorists adhered to a prevailingly dualistic social ontology, with the majority ascribing a somewhat greater significance to idealistic as opposed to materialistic components of social reality. Continued social existence is accompanied by and characterized by antagonistic cooperation. The basic nominalism lying behind the conception of the emergence of a social or public will is evident in numerous attestations of early American sociologists. Characterization of early social ontological theory is a complex undertaking. It is based on evolutionary naturalism which links the prevailing ideas of the social to other domains of nature and to the dominant problematics of the era and still incorporates the basic ontological distinctions between ontological materialism and idealism.
