ABSTRACT
I first encountered sociology as an undergraduate major in the early 1940’s at the University of Toronto in a Department of Political Economy that included economics, political science, and sociology as subjects in which one could major. My first full-time teaching job was at Princeton in a Department of Economics and Social Institutions. Apart from McGill where Everett Hughes had previously introduced sociology, Canadian universities, including Toronto, the leading one, were at this time rather old-fashioned in their departmental structure and offerings, sociology barely existing as an academic subject let alone a departmentally independent one. The term “political economy” is venerable, actually antedating Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations from which economics as a discipline is conventionally held to derive. In the United States, Princeton was the last major university to introduce any teaching of sociology and did so only after the Second World War. It is no accident that both of these belated institutional practices grouped sociology with economics, the first and most highly developed of the academic social sciences.
