Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/38



T may or it may not be accidental that the interest in social science has lately received a mighty impetus. Books and articles on social and political theory, on democracy, the individual and the group, the state, the crowd, come from the press in well-nigh endless succession. The time indeed seems eminently ripe to reconsider our ideas of society and their application to life, for history has run amuck, and unless man interferes before it is too late, we may yet have to face the task of rebuilding the whole of civilization from the bottom up. As it always happens in cases like this, the more practical and immediate demands of the hour reëcho in the more remote realms of scientific thought and speculation. Thus the relations of history and ethnology to other sciences, such as psychology and sociology, have recently been reconsidered by Lowie, Hocart, Wissler, and Rivers. Kroeber has turned his attention to the theoretical relation of the historic to the biological sciences. Going still further, the same writer published a somewhat cryptic, but none the less interesting, catechism of historic theory and methodology, which elicited a spirited reply from Haeberlin. Again, the danger of over-emphasizing the purely conventional barrier between the different social sciences was pointed out by the present writer, and this was made the point of