The discipline of sociology was born during a century of rapid social change attributable largely to the Industrial Revolution. Social theorists in nineteenth-century Europe devoted much of their attention to the institutional consequences of the erosion of the old social structure. American sociologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially at the University of Chicago, added an intellectual orientation derived from the political idealism and meliorist pragmatism then fashionable in this country. "Social problems" generally were understood to be conditions that disrupted peaceful social life (e.g., crime) or produced obvious human misery (e.g., poverty) and that could be eliminated or alleviated by means of enlightened social policy and effective social engineering. Nearly all the conditions envisioned as social problems were associated with burgeoning cities and the dispossessed immigrants (foreign and domestic) they attracted. Few scholars doubted that these problems could be objectively...