Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/25

 THE VINDICATION OF SOCIOLOGY II

teenth century has been extraordinarily rich. Especially since the middle of the century, there is evident appearance of new ideas, and new points of view which investigation takes as points of departure, and there is increase of the objects of investigation to which research turns its atten- tion. In all this, two facts are decisive, first, the revision to which views of the relations of the individual to the state were subjected, and second, the deeper analysis of the individual himself. This latter led to the result that we learned to understand individual volition and action as product of social conditions; we learned that all the forces which form the life of mankind must be investigated in their influence upon human industry, that this industry is not to be regarded as the outcome of absolute natural necessities alone, but also of casual cultural conditions, that is, of factors historical in origin, and which are morally influenced and directed. Therewith were new tasks imposed upon theory and policy. // was neces- sary to investigate the relationships of industry to other social life-mani- festations, and to understand industry itself as an inseparable member of the one life of society!^ Necessarily involved in all this was enhanced sense of the significance of all the historically evolved institutions and organizations into which individuals are voluntarily or by compulsion articu- lated, the family, the corporations, the parish, the state, etc. This exten- sion of the range of research produced new tendencies and methods in science, and therewith at the same time an antithesis of views about boundaries and purposes, which is nothing else than an expression of the variety of the tasks which economic theory must undertake.

Whether, in view of this fact, one may speak of a unified economic theory, is a question which cannot here be answered. Whatever be the answer, the results of this development must be taken over, and it must be recognized that the merit belongs to the German national economists of having, in all this, begun to investigate industry in all its relationships, and to interpret national industry as a historical social organism, and hence in the flux of social becoming and changing. In this historical life process of popular industry, man appears not merely as the determined but also as a determining factor, which through law and morality takes a hand in the order and progress of historical occurrences. This perception is the root from which the most important and decisive remodellings of our science have grown. It has not abolished the value of that scientific tend- ency which limits itself to investigation of purely economic regularities, but it has brought us into the presence of new tasks. It has led to deeper psychological consideration of the individual and of his motivations ; it has given an impulse to a different conception of the nature of civic society, to a higher valuation of the social organizations of mankind in general; it has brought to pass that, in many ways, economic theory has expanded itself into social science.

' Italics ours.