ABSTRACT
Although it is well known that George C. Homans spent his entire academic career at Harvard University, the nature of his rise from an undergraduate majoring in English to a tenured professor of sociology is not widely understood. Homans’s reputation as a sociological theorist rests largely on two works that articulate his social behaviorism or exchange theory, The Human Group (1950), which he described as “by far the most popular of my books” (1968: 4), and Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (1961). These mature works, however, were written after he had received a permanent appointment at Harvard. His earliest sociological publication, An Introduction to Pareto: His Sociology (1934), coauthored with Charles P. Curtis, was, as we shall see, significant but not decisive in establishing his permanency at Harvard. The crucial factor was his relatively unknown monograph, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (1941), which he affectionately characterized as “my favorite among my books” (1968: 2). In this original historical study, Homans applied selected ideas of Pareto in an attempt to explain certain medieval institutions, especially the English field systems of land holding. Although Homans later moved away from Pareto and became quite critical of his conceptual scheme, it appears that his early involvement with Pareto and the locally influential “Pareto Circle”—along with his own talent and hard work—were the keys to his successful rise at Harvard. 1
