ABSTRACT
Few terms are more commonplace in descriptions of sociology's past than those of “founders” or “founding fathers.” That sociology has founders is a disciplinary platitude, evidence of a metaphor that has died “off into literalness,” and become one of those “skeletons which remain after the capacity to arouse the senses...has been rubbed off by familiarity and long usage” (Rorty 1989:16, 152). Yet that description is only partly accurate: the “founder” idea is also the source of various bones of contention. What, then, makes a person a “founder,” and in what, more generally, might the “act” of founding be said to consist?
