Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/536

 522 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ethic state, with biologic, economic, and civic variations. At the same time, if we see and keep distinctly in mind that each state is all of these at once in some proportion or other, not one of them alone, we shall have adopted a point of view which will insure more certain approach to adequate classification and com- parison of associations than has yet been reached.

In other words, the most promising program in the interest of ultimate classification of societies is the program of assort- ing associations within states in accordance with their structural and functional relations to the whole process maintained by the states. This program may be undertaken in two ways : first, historically and genetically, by analyzing the' least differentiated states and then the more and more differentiated states ; second, contemporaneously, by analyzing the activities maintained by the different associations within a state of the most highly devel- oped group. The results of analysis of this latter sort would then be in a measure available as norms for comparison of less developed processes in earlier states.

The former program is doubtless implicitly in all historical, and particularly in all ethnological, investigation. We need not now inquire why it has been so abortive, from the sociological point of view. Even the sociologists have not invariably seen the advantages of the latter program, and many of them have sooner or later lapsed into impotent imitation of the former. The consequence has been that they have failed to get the proper benefits of either. The most vital tendency in sociology since Comte has appeared in the attempts to analyze mod- ern society functionally. This is the content which gives to Schaeffle's work its permanent value despite the limitation which we have pointed out above (p. 510). Structural and functional analysis of activities within the state, or within society as a whole, is prerequisite to classification of the associations that make up the state or society.

Briefly, this analysis of actual association in modern states was what Schaeffle attempted in his Ban und Leben, 1875. With merely the necessary minimum of attention to the other phases of the situation, he carried through a minute static analysis. He