Wilbert E. Moore

Wilbert E. Moore was elected by his peers to serve as the 56th President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, “The Utility of Utopias,” was delivered at the organization’s annual meeting in Miami Beach, Florida on August 31, 1966, and was later published in the American Sociological Review (ASR Vol 31., No 6., pages 765-772). Upon his death, an obituary was published in the April 1988 issue of Footnotes (p. 13). 
 

Obituary 

Written by Robin M. Williams, Jr., Cornell University, published in Footnotes, April 1988

On December 29, 1987, American sociology lost one of its most eminent and beloved contributors through the death of Wilbert Ellis Moore. Born in Elma, Washington on October 26, 1914, he received his BA degree from Linfield College in 1935 and the MA from the University of Oregon two years later. Then, striking out for the East, he conquered Harvard University, winning the AM (1939) and the PhD in 1940. 
From graduate studies Wilbert went on to begin his teaching career at Pennsylvania State University in 1940. From 1943 to 1964 he was at Princeton University, first at the Office of Population Research and then in the Department of Sociology. In 1964 he became a staff sociologist with the Russell Sage Foundation, where he remained until 1970. He then began a new career at the University of Denver, serving as Professor of Sociology and Law until late in 1987.

Meanwhile Wilbert had energetically pursued a long, productive and distinguished career of professional service to social science. Among many other activities, he served a term as a director of the Social Science Research Council, was president of the Eastern Sociological Society, and was a responsible and wise participant in many committees of the American Sociological Association. He was president of the ASA in 1966.
His honors included election to the American Philosophical Society, Sigma Xi, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Culminating the recognition of his achievements was his receipt in 1987 of the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the ASA (Footnotes, October 1987).

He was a creative research sociologist, whose original and careful scholarship spanned a wide range of centrally important concerns. From his graduate student days forward, he maintained a strong interest in the comparative sociology of social change, exemplified in major works on industrialization and socioeconomic development as well as in a series of penetrating essays on basic theories of social change.

Among the best known of the some dozen major books he authored were Industrial Relations and the Social Order (1946), Industrialization and Labor (1951), Economy and Society (1955), The Conduct of the Corporation (1962), that gem of concise exposition, Social Change (1963), Order and Change (1967), The Professions (1976), and World Modernization (1979). Along the way he found time, somehow, to edit or co-edit five other works, including the landmark volume (with Eleanor B. Sheldon), Indicators of Social Change (1969). It can be fairly said that his early works decisively shaped the founding and development of the then emerging field of industrial sociology. He was a pioneer in analyzing industrialization and other pervasive aspects of social change in world perspective. For a full generation, his works have stimulated and guided the development of comparative sociology, not only in North and Latin America but in many other countries.

During the 1980s, Wilbert Moore was venturing in new directions in his research on sociology of law. In collaboration with Joyce Sterling he already had reported a reinterpretation of Max Weber’s conceptions of rationalization of law (in Sociological Fornm, Winter 1987), and he had planned a rich agenda of work on law in relation to social structure and social change.

He was a master of concise exposition, in which highly complex concepts and theories were unfolded in a lean prose style that reflected the organized precision of his probing and skeptical thinking.
Wil was a superb raconteur. His keen sense of the general absurdity of things produced a low-keyed humor that permeated his irresistible tales of persons and events.

Wilbert’s gentle humor expressed his sensitive and empathic character. At the same time, he had his share of impatience with pretentiousness and obscurantism-often targets of a spontaneous and mercilessly accurate wit that delighted sociological audiences for four decades. Generous to a fault, he was always ready to accept error as part of the human condition, but he did not spare the laser in his critical responses to excessive claims or inadequate scholarship.

Wilbert and I were born in the same year, in the same month; he often rejected my claims to special respect because I was two weeks his senior. We were at Harvard together as graduate students in the dramatic days preceding World War II. We overlapped for a year at the Russell Sage Foundation. When I gave my presidential address to the ASA in 1958, he introduced me. When he gave his presidential address to the ASA in 1966, I introduced him. Reflecting upon these histories, Wilbert once suggested that we should coauthor a joint autobiography. We never did quite get around to it.

Wilbert Moore represents a model of sociological inquiry at its best. He had an enduring vision of the integrative intellectual tasks of the field, high respect for evidence and rigorous thought, an enormous capacity for sustained effort, a creative imagination, and a deep sense of the importance of dose acquaintance with the complexity of historical processes. His influence has been and is far reaching. We are all in his debt and we shall miss him as a great sociologist and a great human being.