Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/222

 20S THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

sors of economics have long since ceased to speak with authority, though perhaps their opinions never enjoyed that respect on the part of the community at large to which their German compeers
 * irc today accustomed.

The so-called historical school of economists, founded almost fifty years ago by the works of Hildebrand, Roscher, and Kines, and which spread from Germany to the other western nations, has left but a feeble impress upon French political economy. Indeed, France seems to have escaped in some strange manner almost all of those new influences of the last half century which elsewhere have molded economic thought. It was not many years ago that Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, the eminent economist of the College de France, published the outlines of a philosophy of law in which he maintained that the laws of the state are of organic growth, the expression of the needs of the people, and consequently that the business of the legislators is really the for- mulation (and not the creation) of laws which already exist in the consciousness of the nation. This entire "discovery " was nothing more or less than the fundamental thesis of the Ger- man " historische Rechtschule " the doctrine so warmly defended in the first half of this century by Lavigny and his partisans.

Of course there are some happy exceptions to the general truths which I have tried to indicate. Such rare men as Paul Canwes, professor of political economy in the Paris Faculty of Law, and Charles Gide, who occupies a chair of economics at the University of Montpellier, have performed work which is marked by a profound appreciation of modern methods as well as a thorough knowledge of what is being done outside of France; but they are yet like "voices in the desert."

So much for the study of the purely economic aspect of social life for political economy in its commonly accepted circumscription. What about the other diverse aspects of human cohabitation, what about the study of sociology in France as compared to Germany ? A close comparison of the opportunities offered obliges one to give to this question an