SOURCE: An introduction to Robert E. Park: The Crowd and The Public and Other Essays, edited by Henry Eisner, Jr., The University of Chicago Press, 1972, pp. viixxv.

In the following essay, Eisner discusses Park's contribution to sociological theory.

Robert E. Park's doctoral dissertation, Masse und Publikum (The Crowd and the Public), was published in 1904. A perfect copy, recently encountered in a large university library, was yellowed and brittle but apparently undisturbed by any reader for sixty-five years. This may be symbolic of the attention paid, explicitly at least, by American sociology to the earliest work of one of its most influential pioneers. Seldom cited, the dissertation is sometimes even omitted from Park bibliographies. But as Everett C. Hughes has remarked, "The results of Park's work in those four years of study in Germany are diffused throughout American and even world sociology, even unto today." To read The Crowd...