Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/686

 SOCIOLOGY AND THE STATE

LESTER F. WARD Brown University

Sociology must be something very bad because it is so much like vice. Most of those who hated it at first sight now embrace it and the rest are either in the enduring or the pitying stage.

As in the case of nearly all other sciences sociology was at first attacked and called a "pseudo-science." The sociologist is perfectly familiar with this, and it has ceased to trouble him. He has been hearing it from Lorenz Stein, Dilthey, Maurice Block, Bernheim, Lehmann, Treitschke, Martini, Van der Rest, and Leslie Stephen. They all say the same things, nothing more and nothing new. Some pains were taken at first to show that there were vast fields which no other science has ever touched or can touch without becoming sociology. But the need of sociol- ogy was so great and so keenly felt that there ceased to be any call to defend it. The people of all countries actually demanded the new science. None of the other sciences held out any hope of furnishing a theoretical and scientific basis for the study of the social problems of the day. Political economy had become a sort of quietism, and bade the people hush and cease to disturb the established order. But the people would not hush, and the unrest grew. Economics then vaulted over to the Austrian theory of value, which is a sociological principle, and then pre- tended that it had always been the "master science." Political science floundered about among a thousand fine-spun and wholly improbable theories of the state. It was both politically and socially hopeless.

When at last a science of both human origins and human wel- fare rose on the horizon it was immediately welcomed as that which had been so long looked for. Launched by Comte and fathered by John Stuart Mill, it moved, though at first slowly.

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