Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/163

 Rh science of political economy has alone made it possible for us to dream of constructing sociology. As we have seen, sociology is the scientific study of social facts considered in their generality. But who were the first to study social facts scientifically? The economists. In all departments of human activity, practice, that is art of a rudimentary sort, has preceded science. There was cultivation of the soil before there was botany, there was breeding of animals before there was an attempt at zoölogy. But the practical pursuits of agriculture and the breeding of animals led to scientific study of the nature of plants and animals. It has not been different with the social sciences. Practice and a kind of art are in this sphere also very old. In all times there have been diverse views which have presided as a sort of authority over the regulation of labor, or over the levying of customs; precepts of conduct have been furnished to men by laws, by religion, by the morality accepted in their country; there have been general political maxims followed by rulers. All this usually amounts to nothing but a rudimentary praxis; when certain general rules emerge, we may say that an art exists. We cannot say that so far there is science, since what was desired by those who laid down these rules was to produce by the application of them certain social phenomena conformed to their subjective ideas, not a knowledge of social phenomena as they occur spontaneously in the actual environment of the rule-makers.

How then is social science born? If we except Aristotle, whose teaching upon this point cannot be reviewed, and certain moralists like La Bruyère or La Rochefoucauld, who occupied themselves less with formulating doctrines than with observing, we may say that the economists were the first to try, within a particular department of activity, to develop a science of certain social facts. It is in the work of Boisguillebert upon le Detail de France (a most significant title), that we find the original attempt to realize this new idea. To speak generally, the economists in advance of all others realized that by the side of human laws, due to the more or less arbitrary will of an occasional legislator, there exist natural laws, which are not the work of any