ABSTRACT
Harriet Martineau was not only one of the earliest and most significant founders of the discipline of sociology, but she remains today a potent source for a much-needed conceptual and professional re-founding of the discipline. Bibliographically speaking, there is little need to repeat the introductory details of Martineau’s remarkable life and accomplishments as relevant outlines of Martineau’s biography are now easily available to sociologists and other social scientists. 1 Further, Martineau’s life has been (and continues to be) usefully explored, often in considerable depth, by our colleagues in the humanities. 2 Suffice to say that well before the appearance of university textbooks, college courses on sociology, and the formation of professional sociological organizations, Harriet Martineau gave ‘sociology’ widespread currency in English-speaking households through her ground-breaking translation in 1853 of Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive. Beyond this, she also produced a superb and still highly relevant systematic treatise, How to Observe Morals and Manners, the first of its kind, detailing the procedural and theoretical intricacies of sociological observation and data collection. She conducted model sociological field studies in the United States, the Middle East, Ireland, and England. In all, Martineau was a remarkable interdisciplinarian who tackled – with integrity, perspicacity, and aplomb – an astonishing range of sociological subject matter from the micro to the macro, from the details of farming and domestic work, prisons, illness, abolition, education, and the status of women, to manufacturing, international politics, and war. An immediate appreciation of the exceptionally wide reach of Martineau’s theoretical, methodological, and empirical grasp is provided by the several compilations of her representative shorter writings. 3
