Sociology

We may indicate this factor in the evolu tion as follows: Judged by subsequent events, and expressed in the most summary form, po litical economy became a forerunner of sociol ogy because, however defined and however conducted, political economy devoted itself more and more effectively to critical analysis of that portion of social phenomena which seemed to the economists to fall within their appropriate field of view. Regardless of the question which had to be reconsidered over and over again, as to the validity of their ideas bout their special field, and regardless too of the specific facts which they collected, and of the peculiar doctrines which the various theo rists derived from the facts, by the very refine ments of analysis through which they attempted to get at all the meanings of their phenomena the economists set a pace, and furnished sug gestions for imitation, which could not have remained without influence upon other men who were interested in other species of group phenomena. Simply because the type of human group which forms "the market," whether in the most generalized or in the most localized sense, is only one of myriads of types of human groupings, it was only a question of time when there would be imitators of the economists who would devise ways of applying equally search ing analysis to many types of human activities not primarily and immediately, at all events not exclusively and finally activities of the market. This then is the main aspect in which the evolution of economic thinking since 1800 concerns sociology. In a word, it seems to have been necessary that a type of thinkers should have been developed who had become keen for analysis of the operations of the mar ket; and as we shall observe in the next para graph, another type keen for analysis of men's actions under the political and legal aspects, before a type of scholars could develop with ability to perceive that men are not fully ana lyzed when they have been thought of only under the economic, the political and the legal aspects. In fact, the sociologists were recruited very generally from either the historical, the economic or the political faculties. Our main thesis at this particular stage of the exposition is that the economists prepared the way for the sociologists, and partly assured their coming, by working out an apparatus for objective ex hibit of economic processes as they really are. In so far as the sociologists derived immedi ately from the economists, it was by cherishing the spirit of group-analysis, and by turning this animus to application upon other than eco nomic groups.

Even before the middle of the 18th century, there were among the cameralists writers who seem to have been almost within sight of the beginnings of sociology in the present sense. Examples are Gerhard, 1713, and Zincke, 1742. (Consult Small, The Cameralists,) pp. 175 and 249). The most effective prospecting for a future sociology however was done in Ger many, at about the middle of the 19th century, by a series of political scientists. These men seem to have had very little to do with one another, and we do not know whether they were actuated by impulses received from a common source. Several of them, at all events, hit upon a similar if not an identical problem, and it was in substance the same problem with which the men in Germany, Eng land and the United States who called them selves sociologists began their work 20 or more years later. Von Mehl, one of the most notable of these pre-sociologists, reviews the movement and furnishes a bibliography of it as it had developed up to 1855. (tGeschichte und Literatur der Staatswissenchaf ten,' Vol. 1, pp. 69-110). Von Mohl is himself typical of this movement at its best, and we may use him as the most available index of its character. The very title of his first chapter affects an American sociologist as a generation ahead of its time. It reads: °The Sciences of the State and the Sciences of Society" (°Die Staats wissenschaften und die Gesellschaftswissen schaf ten"). The contents of the chapter con firm the impression of modernness. It turns out that the author was in the bonds of that mystical conception of the state from which the Germans are not yet delivered, and he placed in antithesis with the state an equally mystical concept ((society"; yet his challenge to analyze the concepts °state" and °society" might very well be celebrated as one of the beginnings of sociology. He proceeds after this fashion: "Only recently have we come to the clear con ception that the community life of men is by no means exhausted by life in the state, but that between the sphere of the individual per sonality and of the organized unity of popular life there is a collection of intermediate life phenomena which also have community objects as their purpose, which do not have their origin from the state or through it, although they are in existence in it, and that these are of the highest significance for weal and woe. These

two areas of thoughts and theories, which for more than two thousand years have seemed to be similar, or at most have been regarded as part and whole, have at length proved them selves to be essentially different, and must also be treated separately, so that in the future they will exist side by side, as distinguished but coequal divisions of human knowledge. . . . The science of society must now be founded and developed. In particular its limits with respect to the science of the state must be de termined. This . . . not merely for soci ety, but almost as much also for the state and the theory of the state. . . . Of independ ent works about society there is not a word in the older schools of philosophic writing down to the time of Kant. In this entire literature there is not a single work which has attempted to grasp in their essential nature the life cir cles outside of the purpose and organism of the state, and to think of them as a whole." Thereupon von Mohl names numerous books and monographs which began to appear after 1797 in Germany, and beginning with Montes quieu in France, which betrayed a certain dis appointing appearance of having seen the need of a °science of society" in distinction from a science of the state. After noticing the type of writers on society whom he calls "essentially not social philosophers but social partisans" (Saint-Simon, Fourier, Robert Owen), and after referring to numerous political theorists who had been approaching the real problem as he saw it, of whom the most notable was Ahrens (). Treitschke discusses particularly the proposals of Ahrens and von Mohl. He asks whether it is really necessary, as such men contend, either completely to reconstruct political sci ence or to create a new doctrine that shall totally displace it. He reaches his reply by in specting in turn the groups which von Mohl had used as illustrations, and as to each of them he reaches virtually the opposite conclu sion to that of von Mohl, viz., Treatment of this group belongs in political science, and can be adequately provided by political science. With the exception, however, of tribal and ethnic groups, certain economic strata ("Nahr Wehr-und-Lehr Stand"), the educated and the uneducated, religious communities, "voluntary associations of all sorts," and the family, the groups which he considers are so obviously political that with reference to them the con clusion is not surprising. It was easy to show that each of the groups not primarily political has numerous and vital relations to the state. Nor was it difficult to make it appear to friends of an established cult who did not want a rival, that a rival would be superfluous. It was plausible that all the relations of these groups to the state could be treated best by the estab lished "science of the state" and that facts about these groups which did not interest "the science of the state" were not worth scientific notice. There is a tone of assurance, therefore, in Treitschke's manner throughout the mono graph which indicates his belief that he was forever laying the bogy of a "science of society." In fact, however, in order to reach his negative conclusion he had advertised the existence of groups which he named and others which he did not name. He had featured facts about these groups which could not he exhausted by political theory. We cannot prove that Treitschke's influence actually stimulated any one to follow up the study of human groups. It is certain that he did not prevent such study, and he unconsciously contributed to demonstra tion that it was needed.