Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/642

 626 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

life-current. Sociology was welcomed as the science of such com- plex unitary entities. Thus the history of sociology has been influenced by the fact that the idea of such a new science has taken shape during a period when thought about social facts has been intensely politico-nationalistic. Nationalism was winning, or had newly won, its triumphs, and it was assumed, almost as a matter of course, that social topics would be contemplated from a politico- nationalistic point of view. The idea that any social science is politico-national science had the field, and governed thought, as the idea that anything to travel in was a stage-coach once had the field, and governed the form of early railroad cars, and even yet appears in the compartments of European cars, and some- times in moldings upon their exteriors that outline the form of a series of coach bodies.

Although it has been common to admit that the word " soci- ety" is also a name for other forms of human relationship, including the fortuitous concourse in a hotel lobby, or a culture group like Christendom, Jewry, or the Hellenes; and it even has been added that all humanity, save isolated groups that live in ignorance of the existence of any other portions of the race, constitutes a single society; yet these admissions have been little more than lip-service. These forms of society have been recog- nized with a nod and passed by, while the only society really accepted as fit to be the object of study for the sociologist has been the nation-state.

This view has not only occupied the popular mind. The sci- entists also clearly show that they feel the association in a railway coach or a hotel lobby to be far too temporary and trivial, and that of " humanity " too tremendous or too vague or too remote from interest to be the object of their study. Even a culture unit like Christendom is not the kind of a society that extensively engages their attention. A city comes nearer to being the real and inter- esting thing, inasmuch as it is more like a nation-state, being a political body, definitely limited and having a complex and inclu- sive common life. The conception of a society that enlisted them in the study of sociology, that dominates their thought and dis- cussions, the society that they wish to study and aim to explain,