Considering the ubiquity and omnipresence of the arts in all known human societies and the varied individual and social functions they seem to serve, it is strange that until relatively recently sociologists, and American ones in particular, have not incorporated them into the center of their intellectual concerns. The reasons for this gap have a great deal to do with the development of sociology in the United States because for various reasons, some circumstantial, others arguably systemic, American sociology came to dominate sociology as a whole for several decades. Examining the scholarly foundations on which sociology came to be modeled reveals how the arts ended up being virtually excluded from its purview. In this chapter I present reasons for this apparent avoidance of the arts, a situation that had come almost to be taken for granted.

Just as an internalist analysis of the arts provides only a limited understanding of the aesthetic realm, analysis of a discipline divorced from its social context is equally flawed because sociologists tend to be drawn to the study of subjects recognized as important by the society and the nation state in which they function. Sociology, no differently from other social sciences, virtually all of which are nineteenth-century constructions, is best considered even today as a discipline and profession in process of formation. Sharing the assessment of many Americans, sociologists judged the arts as being of far less importance than other issues for their professional concerns and consequently allocated them little space in sociology.