Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/598

 578 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

one hand, and the separation and dispersion of the agricultural laboring forces, on the other. According to our view, this phenomenon appears even in slave societies for example, in the Grecian and Roman civilizations, as well as in the old southern slave states of the United States.

In the present, as in the past, this situation gives rise to the principal affluent of positive sociology, socialism, whose most illustrious modern precursors are Robert Owen, in England (1771-1858), and Charles Fourier, in France (1772-1837).

This socialism becomes more and more conscious of itself; it proceeds to the criticism of society and constructs plans for new societies, which are now no longer mere Utopias, but which already appeal to the sanction of observation and experiment. Socialism culminates with the school of Proudhon, in France (1809-67), and that of Marx in Germany (1818-83). Begin- ning with these writers, it applies the inductive and historical method to the study of social phenomena. With Cesar de Paepe and Benoit Malon, the too exclusively economic concept of Marx, although retaining its fundamental basis, is transformed into an integral socialism, that is to say, into a complete view of the whole of society considered as a systematic and truly organic arrangement of co-ordinated parts. Further, socialism no longer refuses to accept the positive methods, especially the experimental method ; it proceeds from the particular to the general, from the simple to the complex. For this reason it submits [its ideal structure to the proof of successive experi- ments. Therefore it is ready for amalgamation with positive sociology. The most eminent contemporary sociologists are socialists ; likewise, the socialists are sociologists.

The second current of positive sociology was essentially scientific. Up to the present time, it has been too much neg- lected by historians of social science, but its importance will continue to increase. In the seventeenth century, it was repre- sented by Pascal, Fermat, Leibnitz, Huyghens, the Grand Pen- sionary De Witt, Hudde, Halley ; in the eighteenth century, by the Bernouille brothers, d'Alembert, Euler, Buffon. This scien- tific school began as a true science of the state. At first, it was