Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/208

 had. however, some critics; one of these, Mihailovsky, a believer in social psychology, wrote vigorous articles on the reciprocal action of the individual and society, on progress and other matters. At the end of the century some Russian admirers of the "economic materialism" of Marx and Engel, partictilarly Beltov, Struve and others, criticised these conceptions, and the psychological theories of Ward, Tarde and other writers which were easily assimilated by the Russian representatives of the "subjective school" and of genetic sociology: these critics ridiculed, just as their authorities did, the failure of most of the previous Russian sociologists to perceive that the "material powers" or methods and corresponding relations of production in material existence "determine social, political and mental evolution in general." This theory contested by the "subjectivists," had some influence on the adherents of genetic sociology: Kovalesky adopted it to some extent, and attempted, for instance, to prove a somewhat closer connection between the family and private property; but nowadays some of the Russian representatives of economic materialism incline to a different conception of social life, being manifestly influenced by the Kantian doctrine of ethics.

Meanwhile a more special statistical treatment of