Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/22

 6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

antagonistic would be classed as a survival. The relation between sociology and economics is not competitive, but complementary, and the fact is now taken for granted by scholars in both fields, \\ith exceptions as rare as they are unfortunate. In the end there can be but one political economy, just as there can be but one calculus and chemistry and physiology. Neither can there be at last more than one sociology. Political economy can never maintain a sociology peculiar to itself, nor sociology a peculiar political economy. The economic and the sociological problems are not alternatives, but part and whole. If political economy should become a body of formulas as unalterable as the multiplica- tion table, it would still be, like the multiplication table, an abstraction. If the last word were said about the economies of wealth, it would still be only a single term in the larger problem of sociology, viz. : What is the meaning of the economies of wealth in the total economy of life? Within the past decade this relation has become common knowledge, and has thus dropped out of the list of questions for debate. The men who do not know it have simply not arrived.

Meanwhile the relation between sociology and history has come to be a live issue. Broadly speaking, the historians today seem to be of two types : first, those who treat history as science ; second, those who cultivate it as an art. The latter are merely phenomena to the sociologists, not colaborers. Between the former and the sociologists there are mutual and interdependent interests. Failure to define and adjust these relations is the most obvious reproach upon present social science. The sociologists have no more urgent task than that of closing the gap between themselves and the scientific historians.

By a law of association which need not be justified, we would group among favorable signs even the testimonies which many scholars utter against sociology. There is internal evidence in most of these cases that the objections are based on insufficient knowledge of the sociological argument. Much of the deprecia- tion of sociology, and opposition to it, is in itself conclusive proof that there is need of the precise type of work which the sociol- ogists are trying to do.