ABSTRACT
Delineation of the several contexts to which theory was more or less oriented before World War I provides a fundamental perspective that is indispensable to undertaking the analysis of the theory itself in terms of the scheme. Unlike the later 1920s when theory was construed categorically-conceptually or empirically-inductively, theory in the founding era was regarded predominantly as a formal, deductive, or systematic enterprise. Giddings’s conception of general sociology or sociological theory is perhaps more easily discerned. The manifest differences among these modes of presenting early sociological theory make evident, on the one hand, just how difficult the task of developing a comparative analysis is and, on the other, how useful some generalizing instrument may be. Implicitly or explicitly, the theory of early sociology involves a general division into epistemological-methodological and ontological realms in accordance with the scheme.
