Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/419

 NOTE ON WARD'S "PURE SOCIOLOGY" 405

Ward has confused socialization and sociology. Socialization is both conscious and unconscious, but sociology is thought about socialization, and is necessarily conscious if we may except such cases of absent-mindedness as Ward must be accused of in this instance. Nobody understands this distinction better than he, and his colleagues must be forgiven for regarding it as a good joke that he could permit himself to trip on such an obvious snag. Sociology is just as pure when it is explaining the connection between conscious social actions as when it is doing the same work upon the unconscious. If we were to take Ward at his word, none of Tarde's books would be pure sociology, none of Giddings's, nor Ross's Social Control, nor even this, his own volume, Pure Sociology. Each of these books treats both of unconscious and of conscious socialization. To know "the phe- nomena and laws of society as it is," and to reach explanations of the processes by which social phenomena take place (p. 4), it is not less necessary to study the phenomena of the most con- scious societies of today than to sift ethnological evidence about primitive peoples. It is just as pure sociology to get at the explanation of a panic in Wall street, or a change of the diplo- matic situation in Europe, or a shifting of the political attitude of American trade-unions, or a variation in popular religious ideas in the United States, or the attempts to develop a science of sociology, in distinction from attempts to reform society, as it is to interpret the actions of savages who never had a thought of their own. It seems to me that Ward's treatment, in spite of his definition, recognizes this principle, and I find no way to reconcile the scope of his treatment with his definition of pure sociology. If he held, rigidly, to his definition, he would leave out the vast mass of conscious social actions the best part of "achievement" as he defines it in chap, iii, which certainly requires explanation no less than the unconscious. As he claims that sociology falls into the two parts, pure and applied, the latter of which is telic rather than explicative, explanation of conscious social actions would in that case be left in a limbo which sociology does not penetrate.

It is no answer to cite the notorious fact that most social