Louis Wirth Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Zane L. Miller

Critical Essay by Zane L. Miller

SOURCE: "Pluralism, Chicago School Style: Louis Wirth, the Ghetto, the City, and 'Integration'," in Journal of Urban History, Vol. 18, No. 3, May, 1992, pp. 251-79.

In the following essay, Miller provides an overview of Wirth's career with special attention to the Chicago School and the influence of Karl Mannheim, and divides Wirth's sociology work into two distinct phases.

Dick Wade, in 1989, reprimanded me for missing a convention session on the theoretical roots of the "new" urban history, then made his case about the roots of the "old" urban history. He located them in sociology, rather than economics or geography, and specifically in the Chicago school sociology of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. He also suggested that it happened accidentally. The new university had lots of money and large aspirations, but even money could not buy a cadre of established stars in established fields from older and more prestigious...
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