Albion W. Small

Christianity and Industry

Even with my limited abilities it would not be hard to be more interesting on this subject than I shall allow myself to be. Only a small fraction of the witty and plausible things have been said about the problem that will be said before November. Something more than smart sayings will be necessary, however, before we shall have got very far toward resolving the situation. Christianizing any part of life always has been an irksome task, and it is not likely to be less so in the future. It is almost as hard to state the task in proportioned and balanced terms as it is to contribute toward its performance. Christians are due for much hard thinking before they are qualified to plan intelligently for the Christianizing of industry. My aim now is to locate some of the more important points of departure for surveying the central moral question of our time. I must try to be judicial, although I know that to succeed I must be tedious. But this is not the worst. In nine-tenths of what I am about to say I may seem to have ignored the subject entirely, and to have

The Scope of Sociology. VI. Some Incidents of Association

IN the five foregoing papers we have indicated some of the large ideas, both of fact and of method, which sociologists are learning to take for granted as necessary preliminaries to their special work. We come then to the threshold of sociology itself. Within the horizon which we have outlined we encounter the reality of human associations, in countless numbers and in bewildering orders, all making up the comprehensive fact of association in general. Our task as sociologists is to analyze, classify, and interpret these different phases of association in their relations to each other and in their bearings upon the interests of living men. When we reach the stage of maturity at which we recognize the need of the sociological order of generalization, we are already in possession of facts in great abundance about human associations. This material may be chiefly the spoil of accidental observation, or it may have been inherited from the less general social sciences. From the sociological standpoint, it is unassorted and uncriticised. We assume that the analyses of the more special social sciences may be made tributary to sociological synthesis, but we must mark out a procedure of our own before this aid can be used to full advantage. The point of departure which we propose for sociology is the viewpoint from which all known human associations present certain characteristics in common. Whether we have in view the conjugal association of one man with one woman in the family, the casual association of buyer and seller in the market, the intermittent association of priest and layman in the religious assembly, or the permanent association of citizens in the nation, certain relationships are universal among the persons associated. The intensity of these relationships varies indefinitely. They are often discernible only as tendencies. They might not be suspected if other experience did not point to them. Many of them

Some Contributions to The History of Sociology. Section I. Introduction

Knowledge of work already done is a necessary preliminary to scientific procedure. Through misfortune rather than fault the early American sociologists were able to satisfy this condition only in a meager degree. Consciousness of the lack of social science in general is a late achievement. Sociological consciousness is a specialized phase of the more general apprehension. The outline, to which the first section is an introduction, sketches certain methological developments, in the older divisions of social science, which proved to be antecedents of sociology. In brief, attempts to interpret human experience have advanced from mysticism to criticism, and to differentiated and specialized criticism. The exhibit which is to follow indicates certain gradations in this progress which emerged in sociology. Waymarks of the evolution of sociology are selected chiefly from German methodologists, because their influence upon the generation of American scholars who won academic recognition for the subject is more evident and cumulative than other sequences.

A Vision of Social Efficiency

The less numerous of the two prominent British schools of sociology cherishes the proposition that the business of sociology is to construct social ideals. There is no evidence to show whether or not that view would be adopted by the American Sociological Society. I should certainly not accept it as a definition of the functions of Sociology. On the other hand, I have scant respect for any sociological technique which does not at last contribute to credible forecasts of better things in the future, and thus at least indirectly to foreshadowings of improved society in general, along with partial revelations of ways and means of achieving those improvements.

The Sociological Stage in the Evolution of the Social Sciences

For more years than we like to acknowledge, some of us have been saying that sociology is the fundamental human science. Others of us have preferred to say that sociology is the inclusive human science. Outside the ranks of sociologists there has been little evidence either of understanding these formulas or of will to understand them. Probably we have not always accurately interpreted one anothers versions of these propositions, and possibly if we could begin over again from our present point of view we might find ways of expressing what we were groping after in an idiom that would grate less harshly on the ears of the unconvinced. At all events I do not intend to unlimber those instruments of a warfare which now seems almost as ancient as it was honorable. I shall begin with the irenic assertion that whatever else may have been true or false about sociology, it was inevitable. Many acorns must feed swine and many more must rot on the ground, but those that strike root and survive are bound to become oaks. So thinking about human affairs has had to share the lot of all things mundane by yielding its wasteful toll of abortions and futilities. Given anywhere however the conditions for persistence, given freedom to evolve what is involved, given time to survey its previous course and to prospect the unexplored regions within its horizon, and thinking about human experience is as certain, in the fulness of time, to acquire the reach of so,ciology as the child to attain the stature of a man. Whether or not we believe human reason capable o,f penetrating the subor the super-finite, all liberated minds are agreed that there is no, stopping-place for our intelligence until we have applied our understanding with all its resources to everything that falls within the sweep of our conscious experience. Higher

Some Contributions to the History of Sociology. Section XV. The Restoration of Ethics in Economic Theory. The Professorial Socialists. The Verein Fur Socialpolitik.

The initiative of Knies, mentioned in Section XIII, passed in transformation of German economic theory into the movement of which Wagner and Schmoller may be taken as representatives. The address in which the former made his most dramatic confession of the new faith is epitomized. An account of the formation of the Verein fur Socialpolitik, with digest of its creed, follows. An outline of Schmollers version of the doctrine presents the situation against which the obstructionary type of social theory made its culminating attack.

Americans and the World-Crisis

NOTE.-The following pages contain the substance of a Commencement address delivered at Colby College, Sunday evening, June I7, I9I7. The address was not written and was not intended for print. If it were to be transposed into the style presumed to be suitable for a journal of this type, accuracy and fulness of statement, with citations of evidence, would be necessary to an extent impossible in the circumstances under which the copy has been prepared. A summer cottage at one of the most isolated spots on Cape Cod does not supply means of academic precision. The further fact that such pertinence as the address may have belongs to it less as an impersonal argument than as a reflex of intimate experience, decided in favor of reproducing it as nearly as possible in the form in which it was spoken.

Ratzenhofer's Sociology

The untimely death of Gustav Ratzenhofer has had the effect of giving his name a certain precedence among the sociologists to which it would not have been entitled by the date of his writings. There was also a distinct note of independence, a courage of unpopular convictions, a willingness to accept the role of a voice crying in the wilderness, in Ratzenhofers personality, which is gradually winning him a hearing. This Journal will presently publish a review of Ratzenhofers posthumous work. Meanwhile some of the most striking traits of this important sociologist, both as a man and as a contributor to our science, are in and between the lines of the introduction to the book, so that a translation of it will certainly be welcomed by our readers. It is in full as follows:

The Scope of Sociology. VIII. The Primary Concepts of Sociology

I. The physical and spiritual environment.On the physical side we have said all that is needed for the purposes of this survey in the fourth paper of this series.2 In a word, sociology is not a physical science, but at every step the sociologist must be prepared to ask the question: To what extent are the activities of men that we are considering influenced by that natural environment which the physical sciences interpret ? Sociology is science rather than philosophy-using both terms in an old sense which we shall explain away presently-for this reason: We are not trying to construct a speculative, conceptual abstraction, in order to make that the subject of our inquiry. We are not dealing with a subject that exists in a vacuum, or in the clouds, or merely within the realm of thought-phenomena. We are aware that an earthquake, or a thunderstorm, and an outburst of human passion or a play of human sentiment, occur in the same world, and have to be accounted for, in the case of the second order of facts, by reference in part to the same laws which operate in the case of the first order of facts. Why are crimes against property more frequent in winter than in summer, and why are the same classes of crime more ingenious in the temperate than in the torrid zone ? For one reason, among others; that in the former cases the struggle with nature for the means of subsistence is much more difficult. The conditions of life are more relentless. It costs more effort to live at all. The criminal impulse is more sharply stimulated under the pressure of the more acute necessity. This perception that men are dependent upon physical nature is so obvious that it has often been impossible to break away from the force of its implications sufficiently to see that any

Sanity in Social Agitation

NEVER was the air so full as now of social agitations. On the whole, this is a healthy sign. I sympathize with the mighty social movement of which these agitations are incidents. I cannot sympathize with the methods which some of the most conscientious and high-minded agitators adopt. I am aware that my relation to the different parties concerned with these social questions is very much like that of the Girondists at the beginning of the French Revolution. They deplored the selfishness and obstructiveness of the privileged classes on the one hand, but they equally disapproved the extravagant theories of the popular leaders on the other hand. They were consequently despised by the court party on the one side, and by the revolutionists on the other. They were presently ground between the upper and nether millstone of this double hate. Modern business is a sensitive plant. Some of the men who have the heaviest responsibilities for its cultivation would suppress every implication that there is anything to improve in business practices. They would have all criticisms of present social order sternly ignored, except within the inner councils of the managing few. On the other hand there is persistent popular clamor for wholesale and radical reform in the present ways of doing business. Between these two extremes it is not a pleasant nor a popular role to search for the golden mean. Nevertheless, the scholars ambition is to find and tell the truth, not merely to repeat the things that people want to hear. I have in mind the sort of agitation which holds before our imagination the prospect of accomplishing some wide-reaching changes in the worlds ways of doing things, in the hope of