ABSTRACT
T hese Papers formed a symposium held in September, 1941, in connection with the celebration at the University of Chicago of the fiftieth anniversary of the University. This symposium had a double origin. Representatives of the Division of the Social Sciences planned a program of papers having to do with some of the more comprehensive and underlying aspects of society. The program was to emphasize three borderland fields of recent research interest—borderland from the point of view of the student of human society. In the first place there was the disposition in recent years for students of primitive society on the one hand and of modern society on the other to study their subjects in common terms: the significant event here was the rapprochement of anthropology and sociology. In the second place recent investigations of the social behavior of monkeys and apes had made a fresh contribution to the understanding of the origins of human society. In the third place the rapidly developing work of students of mammalian and bird societies had aroused the interests of sociologists and anthropologists. So the social scientists arranged for papers to be read respectively by an animal ecologist, a student of the social behavior of monkeys and apes, an anthropologist, and a sociologist known for his understanding of modern urban society. The essential idea was to present human society as an example within a class, societies, and to have a look at some of the resemblances and differences among examples of the class.
