Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/741

 THE PRESENT STATUS OF SOCIOLOGY IN GERMANY 725

industry into world industry. According to him the develop- ment of industry runs the course from the home via the city to the state. Here, so far as we can see, it halts. In the first stadium blood relationship forms the basis ; in the second, neigh- borhood ; in the third, nationality. "The path which humanity has passed over is from community to society (Gemeinscltaft zur GesellscJiaft] and so far as we can see it ends with constantly closer socialization" (p. 77).

This is the undertone of the book socialization is constantly becoming closer. At the highest grade of culture which the development of humanity has thus far reached social bonds are not loosened, but on the contrary they are drawn closer. And again, it is a sort of blood relationship which serves as basis and as impelling force for this socialization. We shall further see that another thinker, who first put this terminology "com- munity" and "society" to the special uses just noticed, reached conclusions of quite dissimilar sort, something indeed like pes- simism. At all events Ferdinand Tonnies pays too little, and perhaps no respect to " the mighty consolidating force of the principle of nationality."

III.

While it is true of every science that the search after and the leaning toward analogies has resulted in little good, in sociology they have even for who knows how long barred the way to normal and regular development. With all due rec- ognition and admiration for the monumental works of Herbert Spencer, he must yet be charged with obstructing the develop- ment of sociology by his insistence upon the analogy between society and an organism. In his own mind this analogy may have had merely the force of a means of interpretation, which served him, according to a perfectly valid methodology, as a leading string to guide from member to member until all could be comprehended as existing together in a comprehensive phe- nomenon, "society;" others, however, have been unable to observe proper bounds, and on the basis of analogies which they