ABSTRACT
The development is, paradoxically, identifiable only retrospectively after the ascendance of social action itself. It involves the discovery that early American sociological theory anticipated the action orientation. Critical theory is insistent on freedom or emancipation and on moral or practical reason but it also demands a distinctive aloofness from the present social order. The developments of the 1920s brought a peculiar hiatus between the epistemological-methodological division of theory and the social ontological realm so that theory without any qualifying designation tends to mean substantive theory. The frequent publications on the state or condition of the social sciences or merely on sociology itself did articulate both the controversies and the possible foundations for their resolution. Like the predecessors of the founding era, Park espoused a general sociological theory which was predicated on both social epistemological-methodological and social ontological premises.
