Florian Znaniecki

Works

• 1918The Polish Peasant in Europe and America

  Five volumes (1918–20, with W. I. Thomas) that use letters and a life history to study the disorganisation and reorganisation of Polish peasant life through emigration.

• 1934The Method of Sociology

  Social facts must be studied with their “humanistic coefficient”, as they appear to those who experience them; proposes analytic induction.

Position

Znaniecki began as a philosopher of values and developed a “culturalism”: the world of culture – values, actions, institutions – cannot be reduced to nature and must be studied as it is given in human experience. For sociology this meant the “humanistic coefficient”: a social fact is what it is for those who take part in it, so the sociologist must reconstruct their meanings. With W. I. Thomas he gave this programme its first large empirical application in “The Polish Peasant”, whose methodological note defined social values and attitudes and made personal documents a source of research. In “The Method of Sociology” (1934) he proposed analytic induction, which generalises from a few thoroughly analysed cases rather than from statistical samples, and in “The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge” (1940) he contributed to the sociology of knowledge; Robert K. Merton discussed the book in a review essay (1941). His work shaped the Chicago School and later symbolic interactionism, and his student Józef Chałasiński continued the collection of memoirs in Poland. Objections came early: Herbert Blumer’s appraisal of “The Polish Peasant” (1939) doubted that the documents actually test the theory, and statistical sociologists argued that analytic induction cannot establish causal laws.

Life & context

Florian Witold Znaniecki was born on 15 January 1882 in Świątniki near Włocławek, then in the Russian part of Poland. He studied philosophy in Geneva, Zurich and Paris and took his doctorate in Kraków in 1910 with a thesis on the problem of values in philosophy. In Warsaw he directed the Society for the Protection of Emigrants, where he met the American sociologist William I. Thomas, who was collecting material on Polish emigration. In 1914 he went to Chicago to work with Thomas; their “The Polish Peasant in Europe and America” appeared in five volumes in 1918–20. In 1920 he returned to Poland as professor of sociology at the new University of Poznań, where he founded the Polish Sociological Institute (1921) and the journal “Przegląd Socjologiczny” (1930). He taught as a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1931–33. When the Second World War broke out in 1939 he was again in the United States and stayed; from 1940 he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana. In 1954 he served as president of the American Sociological Society. He died in Champaign, Illinois, on 23 March 1958.

Further main works

• The Problem of Values in Philosophy (Zagadnienie wartości w filozofii, 1910)
• Cultural Reality (1919)
• Social Actions (1936)
• The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge (1940)