Louis Wirth

Research

He was a part of Chicago School of Sociology. After completing his PhD at the University of Chicago, he was on the staff at the university. He was appointed at Tulane University over the period 1928–1929, but returned to University of Chicago after that. He became assistant professor at the University of Chicago in 1931, associate professor in 1932 and full professor in 1940.

His interests included city life, minority group behaviour and mass media and he is recognised as one of the leading urban sociologists. Wirth's major contribution to social theory of urban space was a classic essay Urbanism as a Way of Life, published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1938. In this essay Wirth used Weber's notion of the ideal type, seeing the urban and the rural as constituting two distinct types of community at opposite ends of a continuum.

His research was mostly concerned with how Jewish immigrants adjusted to life in urban America, as well as the distinct social processes of city life. Wirth was a supporter of applied sociology, and believed in taking the knowledge offered by his discipline and using it to solve real social problems.

Wirth writes that urbanism is a form of social organization that is harmful to culture, and describes the city as a "Substitution of secondary for primary contacts, the weakening of bonds of kinship, the declining social significance of the family, the disappearance of the neighborhood and the undermining of traditional basis of social solidarity". Wirth was concerned with the effects of the city upon family unity, and he believed urbanization leads to a "low and declining urban reproduction rates ... families are smaller and more frequently without children than in the country". According to Wirth, marriage tends to be postponed, and the proportion of single people is growing, leading to isolation and less interaction.

But Wirth also stressed the positive effects of city life: "The beginning of what is distinctively modern in our civilization is best signalized by the growth of great cities"; "metropolitan civilization is without question the best civilization that human beings have ever devised"; "The city everywhere has been the center of freedom and toleration, the home of progress, of invention, of science, of rationality" or: "the history of civilization can be written in terms of the history of cities".

The social understanding of minority groups that Wirth obtained first-hand as a Jewish immigrant in America, can be applied to understanding the problems of other minority groups in society, such as ethnic minorities, the disabled, homosexuals, women and the elderly, all of whom have also suffered, and/or continue to suffer prejudice, discrimination, and disenfranchisement from the dominant members of a host society. It is in this respect that Wirth's work still rewards detailed study even seventy years after his original investigations.

A good example of Wirth's work, which includes a comprehensive bibliography, is On Cities and Social Life, published in 1964.

Personal life

Soon after arriving in the United States in 1911, Louis met and married Mary Bolton. The couple had two daughters, Elizabeth (Marvick) and Alice (Gray).

He died of a heart attack shortly after giving a lecture at the University of Buffalo in 1952.