ABSTRACT
On an occasion when we come together at Harvard to honor publication by Transaction of Behavioral Theory in Sociology: Essays in Honor of George Caspar Homans, the author thinks it fair to say that the work of Robert Hamblin and John H. Kunkel are also paying respects to probably the single-most decisive force in the creation of social psychology. Homans aroused great feelings of collegial animus precisely because of this emphasis on the person as something that extended beyond the corpus of scientific study, into the study of social action. There can be little doubt that his emphasis on the will, on the moral code, on the capacity for the act, for Homans defined the special people of this world. Indeed, as we know from an autobiographical work in progress, Homans took the place of the powerful or influential individual to be an obligation, or a series of obligations, to one's fellow humans, and not a divine right.
