Maurice Halbwachs: Chicago as Experiment and Experience (Fall, 1930)

When teaching at the University of Chicago in the Fall of 1930, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs discovered both an archetypal American metropolis and a group of sociologists who were studying it. Back in France, he published “Chicago, expérience ethnique”, as an article in Febvre and Bloch’s Annales. Archives of this scholarly study of Chicago include the letters the sociologist wrote to his family, and a travelogue he anonymously published in a daily newspaper. These exceptionally rich documents allow us to follow the visitor while he observed the city, read studies of it and conversed with local scholars. How was Durkheim’s disciple able to make his “experiment” of an urban population divided along ethnic lines fit with his previously formalised social morphology of an urban organism? The inquiry which is here presented discusses both what a scholar is able to see when he travels in a foreign country, and how the common forms through which he experiments the social world intermingle with the analytical schemes of a scientist.