Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/313

 REVIEWS 299

mean either of two things. First, that political economy proceeded without facts. This is the sense which Giddings frequently seems to connect with the terms "abstract" and "abstraction." 1 Or, it may mean, second, that the term "inventory" is intended to damn some use of facts by sociologists whom Giddings accuses of putting an inven- tory to a use different from that employed by other positive sciences.

As to the second of these alternatives I merely remark that there may be other sociologists besides Professor Giddings who do not understand the scientific use of an inventory. If so they deserve censure or pity for every mismanagement of their material. As to the former alternative I am obliged to declare it a distortion of history to claim that political economy since Adam Smith has ever sanctioned such a use of a " princi- ple" as Giddings makes of the "consciousness of kind." Half-taught economists have perverted logic in this way, but they must be held indi- vidually responsible, just as Giddings, not sociology, must be charged with the attempt to foist these speculative survivals upon social science. The right-thinking economists had no difficulty in discovering credi- ble evidence of " economic self-interest " in man's actions. Their " abstraction " was the disentangling of this one motive and the actions determined by it from all others, not denial of the existence of others ; not necessarily the relative valuation of this and other motives; but the tracing of the operation of this one motive so far as its influence could be detected. In order to do this political economy has over and over again arranged economic activities in " inventories," and it has been obliged to do so in order to be sure that no classes of cases had been overlooked in observing the effects of self-interest. The sociologists whom Giddings had in mind are likewise using inventories strictly in accordance with the rules of observational and experimental science.

Giddings is entirely wrong again in his interpretation of the logical significance of the Austrian school.* He would make it appear that the Austrian economists are exploiting one of his pre-Platonic meta- physical fabrications. They are doing nothing of the sort. Giddings speaks of " abstract analysis " as though it were an analysis of some- thing that has an existence apart from facts, and independent of them. The process which the Austrian school are trying to perform is that of

1 E .g. t p. 47. That is, he confound* abstraction with formal reasoning, with which it may or may not he identical. This is another antinomy in his thinking almost as vital as the others.

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