American sociology is associated with quantification, as well as an alternative tradition of qualitative research. The development and relations of these traditions were always accompanied with issues over objectivity, the role of subjectivity, causality, statistical methods, and the relation between the aspiration of sociologists to be scientific and their relation to the reform movements that provided many of their topics. These basic issues were already established in the precursor to academic sociology, the surveys and statistics of the labor statistics movement, which was a collection of state and federal research bureaus. This research went beyond labor questions to deal with many social problems. The “scientific” aspirations of sociology were already present in the writings of these researchers but were transformed by Franklin Giddings into a science based on the philosophy of Mach and Pearson, and on a new model for measuring social facts. This was contested by critics who preferred an organic view of social causality and a higher idea of objectivity. The issues were focused in the thirties and forties by the rise of attitude surveys, which led to the postwar synthesis of Columbia sociology, which sought scientific status for casual claims through generalizability. This project was influential but ultimately disappointing, and was replaced in the sixties by causal modelling, which provided its own model of causality. This, together with an acceptance of the inevitability of irreducible perspectives, largely ended the aspiration to “science” in the theoretical sense.