Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/832

 8l6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ologv in the first and sixth, I would have been glad to institute a thorough comparison of sociology with economics, from which to many it seems so difficult to separate it. My failure to do this was not at all due to any such difficulty in my own mind, but wholly to the fact that before a comparison could be prop- erly made it was absolutely necessary that the principles to be set forth in later papers, and especially in the eighth and elev- enth of this series, as well as in the present one, be first laid down as the basis of any real distinction. We are now fully prepared to consider this question, but the limits of space will necessarily render its treatment brief. It is therefore best to come directly to the point.

The fundamental distinction between sociology and eco- nomics is based on the difference in their respective beneficiaries. Both have utility 1 for their end, but the recipients of the utility that sociology aims to confer belong to a different class from those of the utility which economics aims to confer. Broadly stated economics may be said to benefit the producer while soci- ology benefits the consumer. But the term producer must here be taken in its widest and really proper sense of anyone who by any form of labor adds anything to the value, i. e., to the utility, of a product. The term consumer, on the contrary, must be taken in the narrower sense of the enjoyer of a product irrespective of whether he is also a producer or not. It will add to the clear- ness of the distinction, and will at the same time be approxi- mately correct, if we identify the producing class with the business world in general, or the industrial world as a whole, and the consuming class with the public in general or society as a whole. The latter class of course includes the former, but, dis- regarding parasites, the former includes all of the latter except the helpless, whether from age, disease, or physical and mental defectiveness. It is not the relative size or quality of these two classes that constitutes the distinction in question, but the direction given to the utility by economics and sociology respectively. In short, economics, as so many economists have

1 As defined in the fifth paper, this JOURNAL, Vol. I, p. 627.