ABSTRACT
Sociology in the United States not only touches on a number of independent branches of knowledge such as biology and geography, but it has also entered into a symbiosis with ethnology and social psychology, in whose embraces it is being almost stifled today. The very wide field which American sociology has taken as its own cannot conceal extraordinary narrowness of concept of empiricism. In fact, it extends to spheres which are not always reckoned as properly belonging to it-for example, criminology and social work, sociology of the family; and it discusses numerous individual themes which are usually the subject of specialist study. Robert Morrison Maciver suggests that unhistorical concept of culture adopted by American sociology should be corrected, but he does not get beyond the rather awkward contrast of culture and civilization borrowed from German sociology. Any review of present-day American sociology must necessarily be fragmentary where the institutionalization of sociology in the United States has already reached high level.
