Under the title of "Socialism of the Chair," studies emerged, which, while attempting also to establish theoretically the po litical conception of the rule of the State, adapted and developed List's idea. It is not enough to say that economic activity of in dividuals is dependent on social phenomena; for is it not true that only by abstraction can we speak of individual economic activity? A more concrete reality is the Volkswirtschaft, the economic ac tivity of society associated not only with economic, but also with ethical and juridical phenomena. This Volkswirtschaft was taken as the immediate object of economic science; it occupied itself essentially with social concerns, and, indirectly only, with indi vidual interests. Here, political economy, though preserving a normative more than speculative character, was at least clearly conceived as a social science with truly social phenomena for its object, of the same nature as other social institutions.
Another phase of progress, akin to the foregoing, was accom plished at the same time. The historical spirit is applicable to all the particular characteristics which distinguish societies and epochs from one another. "National Economy" had therefore to find in history its argument against the universalist theories of the classi cal school. List invokes the historical method ; and Roscher, the founder of the historical school, does not separate the study of economic facts from that of juridical facts in particular, and from social facts in general. Language, religion, art, science, law, the state, and industry--all are viewed as different aspects of one com plete whole, conceived as national life. This school has had a special influence in the development of political economy. With out at any time losing sight of historical research as a means of judging the value of a given political action in given circum stances, it has occupied itself with matters more or less apart from their practical aspect, and has insisted on studying them with a view to their understanding in a detached spirit. It has introduced to some slight extent the comparative method in economic his tory, and, among its most notable exponents, Schmoller clearly formulated the idea that economic laws are inductive. Another Bucher—sketched a classification of economic regimes, thus con structing abstract types to which by their economic organisations all nations, whether present or past, might be assumed to belong. Both, and particularly the latter, were no longer content with studying historic societies. In particular they demanded inf or mation from ethnography as to the economic condition of lower races.
What, however, even more than this reconstruction of law, his tory and economics on a more or less evolutionary basis, consti tutes the main movement towards a system of social sciences, is the appearance of a whole array of new disciplines of an essen tially sociological nature. First, may be mentioned the two allied studies—Anthropology, and the Development of Civilization, which the Germans call Kulturgeschichte ; and amongst the initi ators may be mentioned Klemm in Germany, Pritchard in Eng land, and Broca in France. The founding of prehistoric archaeol ogy, by submitting evidence that the human race in very ancient times had everywhere passed through a state similar to that in which savage or barbarian peoples remain who can actually be observed to-day, went yet further in extending the field of these investigations and fortifying their methods. Not only the unity of human minds, but the relative identity of human evolution, was thus affirmed. The impulse once given, anthropologic discov eries rapidly followed one another, calling attention to remarkable similarities between the most different nations. This it was which the partial encyclopaedias of Schoolcraft and Bancroft revealed, but it was most clearly put in evidence by the great work of Waitz Gerland, in which is found synthesized the anthropological work of a whole epoch.