George C. Homans - Biography

Biography

Son of Robert & Abigail (Adams) Homans, he was the great great grandson of John Quincy Adams, the 6th President of the United States, and great great great grandson of John Adams, the 2nd President of the United States. From his autobiography (Homans 1984), it is learned that Homans entered Harvard College in 1928 with an area of concentration in English and American literature. By living in an environment where people are highly conscious of social relations, Homans became interested in sociology. From 1934 to 1939 he was a Junior Fellow of the newly formed Society of Fellows at Harvard, undertaking a variety of studies in various areas, including sociology, psychology and history. An important influence on Homans's perspective was Lawrence Joseph Henderson, a biochemist and sociologist who believed that all sciences should be based on a unified set of theoretical and methodological principles. Homans, with no job and nothing to do, attended Henderson's seminar at Harvard one day and was immediately taken by his lecture. As a result, Homans joined a discussion group at Harvard called the Pareto Circle, which was led by Henderson and inspired by the work of Vilfredo Pareto. Henderson often discussed Vilfredo Pareto in his lectures. Pareto was a sociologist who was concerned with economic distribution. Pareto's theories and Henderson's lectures influenced Homans's first book, co-authored with fellow Circle member Charles P. Curtis, called An Introduction to Pareto. In 1939 he became a Harvard faculty member, a lifelong affiliation in which he taught both sociology and medieval history. This teaching brought him in contact with new works in industrial sociology and was exposed to works of functional anthropologists. He was an instructor of sociology until 1941 when he left to serve the U.S. Navy to support the war. After four years away, he came back to Boston and continued his teaching as an associate professor from 1946 to 1953, and a professor of sociology after 1953. He was then a visiting professor at the University of Manchester in 1953, at Cambridge University from 1955 to 1956, and at the University of Kent in 1967. By virtue of his later theoretical writings (discussed below), he was elected President of the American Sociological Association in 1964. He retired his teaching in 1970.