SOURCE: A review of Community Life and Social Policy, in American Sociological Review, Vol. 21, No. 6, December, 1956, pp. 788-89.

In the following essay, a review of Community Life and Social Policy, Kolb discusses Wirth's contributions to sociology within the context of a larger tradition.

Somewhere in the recent literature it is written that the day of the system-builder in sociology is over. Yet this is true only in the sense that the builder of the "personal" system is no more. The task of testing, broadening, and deepening the theoretical tradition we have inherited goes on, not in isolation from research but in interactive relationship with it. Those who work at this task are frequently criticized, yet they continue to be the source of major research hypotheses and of modes of comprehending the practical social world about us. So it was and is with Louis Wirth.

Wirth was the inheritor...