SOURCE: "Introduction: Sociology as a Discipline," in On Cities and Social Life, by Louis Wirth, The University of Chicago Press, 1964, pp. ix-xxx.

In the following essay, an editor's introduction to Wirth's selected papers, Reiss provides an overview of Wirth's sociological ideas, and discusses these within the framework of the discipline as a whole.

Sociology, for Louis Wirth, is a more or less organized body of knowledge about human behavior—"What is true of human behavior by virtue of the fact that always and everywhere men live a group existence?" Like others from the "Chicago school" of sociology, he held that the discipline of sociology consists of three divisions, loosely defined: demography, ecology, and technology; social organization; and social psychology.

The field of demography, ecology, and technology is concerned with the physical, biological, and situational base of human living, and the techniques and tools that man evolved which affect...