Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/715

 REVIEWS 699

classes to begin the study of economics with this book as an outline. Under competent instruction it would be a syllabus that would set as high a standard for attainment as the strongest students would be able to satisfy. The method deserves wide use.

A. W. S.

Chicago Conference on Trusts. Speeches, Debates, Resolutions, List of the Delegates, Committees, etc. Held September 13-16, 1899. Chicago : The Civic Federation of Chicago, 1900. These 626 pages contain very few facts, and fewer arguments, that were not previously familiar to everyone who had followed either academic or popular discussions of capitalistic tendencies. While the book cannot therefore be said to have added to known facts about trusts, it certainly does constitute a very valuable exhibit of the ways in which different types of our people are today thinking about them. While the more recent " Anti-Trust Conference " in Chicago simply served to give certain partial views a chance to advertise themselves, this book is a better index than could be found elsewhere within brief compass of the currents of thought in the United States upon nearly all phases of the subject. For this reason the book will soon be ancient history, but at the present moment it is well worth the atten- tion of all who are concerned with our social and political problems.

A. W. S.

Les transformations du pouvoir. Par G. Tarde. Paris ; Felix Alcan, 1899. Pp. X + 266.

The substance of two courses of lectures read by the author in 1896 and 1898 in the Ecole libre des Sciences Politiques and in the College libre des Sciences Sociales is presented in this book to a wider public. The author tells us that the argument is an application of his previously published sociological ideas to political interpretation. He recognizes that there is a physical side to the phenomena of the transformation of social power, but he wisely leaves this group of factors to sciences com- petent to deal with them, and confines himself to the psychical phases of the problem.

The idea which the book develops is that there is demand for a science of political power to be placed by the side of economic sci- ence (1). Compared with economic, scientific, aesthetic, or religious