Robert Staughton Lynd

Robert Staughton Lynd (September 26, 1892 – November 1, 1970) was an American sociologist, and professor at Columbia University, New York City.

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• I see the tasks of social sciences to discover what kinds of order actually do exist in the whole range of the behavior of human beings; what kind of functional relationships between different parts of culture exist in space and over time, and what functionally more useful kinds of order can be created.
  • R.S. Lynd (1939) Knowledge of what? p.125-6, cited in Karl William Kapp (1976), The nature and significance of institutional economics. in: Kyklos, Vol 29/2, Jan 1976, p.209

• The failure of the social sciences to think through and to integrate their several responsibilities for the common problem of relating the analysis of parts to the analysis of the whole constitutes one of the major lags crippling their utility as human tools of knowledge.
  • R.S. Lynd (1939) Knowledge of what? p.15, cited in Karl William Kapp (1976), The nature and significance of institutional economics. in: Kyklos, Vol 29/2, Jan 1976, p.209