Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/703

 SOCIOLOGICAL STAGE IN SOCIAL SCIENCES 689

theoretical fashions are nearly as capricious, if not quite as obvious, as those in millinery. Nor may we flatter ourselves that we have passed into a period in which fashions in scientific emphasis are set entirely by rational norms. To a certain extent they are of course. The actual scope for the irrational, the un- enlightened, the self-seeking in determining the fashions of em- phasis in the social sciences is still tremendous.

My sixth commonplace is that, of all the things upon which these fortuitous emphases are placed, some must have more value than others for purposes of coherent interpretation. For instance, the attempt, in which so much of our best intellectual ability is now enlisted, to work out a calculus of our present system of economic distribution no doubt has a value. Inasmuch, however, as the proportions in our present distributive system might be disarranged by any one of countless laws which are conceivable, and some of them more or less probable, I submit that it would be somewhat more valuable to find out whether our present dis- tributive system is worth retaining at all. We should say that a mathematical theory of the relative efficiency of pitchers and base-runners would be absurd, because changing a few words in the playing rules might invert the present ratio between pitchers' and base-runners' chances. Is it less absurd to assume that con- trollable conventionality cuts no figure in the larger game? What we really need to know is how artificial the rules actually are, in whose interest the artificiality has been smuggled in, and how the rules might be changed in the interest of a better balance of the human functions.

Or if the suggestion seems too speculative even for illustrative purposes, a real case wHich has fallen under my own observation may serve in its place. During recent years I have been study- ing the development of a peculiar type of political theory in Germany between the Peace of Augsburg and the death of Fred- erick the Great. Now I do not think that this strand of theory is the most important thing in German experience during that period, but I find that a great many less important things have been inflated into an appearance of consequence by the histories of that period, while I look in vain in those same histories for