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In addition to its being a contribution to sociological theory, Maurice Stein's The Eclipse of Community is also an interpretation of a special and quite popular aspect of sociology, studies of American communities. No one who has read, for example, the Lynds’ classic Middletown has to be told that it is an exceedingly difficult book. Its vast and bewildering subject creates numerous interpretive problems for the reader, not the least of which has come to be distinguishing its value as history from its value as sociology. In The Eclipse of Community, Maurice Stein has produced a primer on how to read a community study. He supplies a theory of American community development, cites the major sociological tradition of community studies, sets limits on the scope of such studies, and suggests how the community sociologist may avail himself of the methods of other social-science disciplines, notably anthropology and psychoanalytic psychology.
It is Stein's view that observations of American communities, whether they be of small towns, large cities, evolving suburbs, produce data that can be employed to describe three basic sociological processes: Urbanization, Industrialization, Bureaucratization. Though these processes do not function entirely exclusive of one another, there are phases of community development when one or another achieves prominence, and a community study at a particular phase can illuminate the prominent process.
Part I of this three part book interprets this view through the work of several eminent community sociologists. Urbanization, the process motivated by the influx of a large, heterogenous population into a relatively small, circumscribed geographical area, was the principal process illuminated