ABSTRACT
In "Sociology Comes of Age" the reader meets Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Charles Darwin, Henry Thomas Buckle, and Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, most of whom are as important to a thorough grounding in social theory as they were then. Ever a dialectician, Bierstedt worked one side of the positivist field, and then the opposite: "the scientific method—whatever various writers may mean by it—does not exhaust the resources of scholarship in sociology. Sociology had changed in the United States between the stricken Thirties and the comfortable Fifties, just as between the volatile Sixties and the rapacious Nineties. The autodidact and housepainter's son, Joseph Dent, substantially enriched British literary culture beginning in 1906 when he launched Everyman's Library. For the theories of social scientists to gain wide acceptance, they must finally reach the columns of popular periodicals and the discussions of Everyman.
