SOCIOLOGY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY.[1]
In order to compare two sciences, to distinguish their relations, it is necessary in the beginning to give each of them a precise definition. As to political economy we may accept the current definition: political economy is the science of wealth—the science of the processes of production, circulation, distribution and consumption of material objects useful to human life. We remark immediately, however, that in this definition we consider political economy as a science only, not as an art. This discrimination of economic science from economic art is familiar. Science is the study of facts as they are. Art is an effort to organize things as we wish them to be. Art and science to be sure both speak of laws, but with this difference. For science, laws are, according to the formula of Montesquieu, "necessary relations which spring from the nature of things." They are formulas, derived by induction, which sum up the relations of coexistence and of succession found to be constant in the facts studied. For art, on the contrary, laws are a priori precepts, which claim domination over all application and all practice. Hence laws are for science the goal, for art the point of departure.
- ↑ The author of this paper appends the following note: "The present essay is an outcome of a discussion upon the relations of sociology and political economy, which took place at the session of the Paris Society of Political Economy, June 5, 1894. Part was taken in the discussion by MM. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Emile Levasseur, Frederic Passy and others. In what I said I was tempted to repeat certain ideas which I had already expressed in the Revue de Sociologie (1893, Nos. 1 and 5). Those who have done me the honor to read those articles will easily perceive that even upon these points I have introduced certain new considerations."
The paper appeared in the Revue Internationale de Sociologie, vol. ii. No. 6. We translate it not because we agree with its restriction of the scope of sociology on the constructive side, but because it represents the thought of an important group of scholars in France upon a subject which must be debated for some time yet before permanent agreement is reached. The author, whom we are glad to introduce to our readers, is an official of the French bureau of commerce and industry, general secretary of the Institute Internationale de Sociologie, and the director of the Revue Internationale de Sociologie.
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