control that which is to be ; the first speaks in the indicative mood, the second in the imperative.
If I have believed it necessary to insist upon this distinction between art and science, it is because the distinction once made wonderfully simplifies the task which I have undertaken. Economic science, according to this distinction, is the study of the facts pertaining to the production, the circulation, the distribution and the consumption of wealth, and also of the laws which emerge from these facts. Economic art, on the other hand, is a body of precepts relating to a possible better form of organizing these different phenomena. Political economy reaches its completion only in combination of these two orders of research.[1]
Sociology, on the other hand, understood not in the popular sense but in the acceptation fixed by the usage of its most eminent exponents, does not present this duality. Sociology is a science only, the general science of societies. It does not wish to be an art, since researches of the scientific order are enough to occupy the sociologists; and practical applications, to be fruitful, must be reserved until later. It is true that, even thus limited, the field open to the sociologist's efforts remains immense.
That which the sociologist has to study is not merely, as in the case of the economist, the facts and the laws pertaining to wealth; it is the totality of societary phenomena. The sociologist must pass in review all societies and all the classes of facts
- ↑ The economists often take the words "science" and "art " in a different sense. They mean by "economic science" at the same time: (1) the study of real economic phenomena (which is the sense in which we should use the term); (2) the determination of the economic ideal (which constitutes what we call economic art). They call "economic art" the accommodation of this ideal to times and circumstances (which is in our view simply the affair of practical economy). They say that all this is merely a question of words. Doubtless, but the words are important. It seems to us entirely incorrect to confound under one title (that of "economic science") two things as different as the study of real facts and the search for the ideal. For even when it is thought that the ideal is to let things follow their natural course, there is still a radical difference between the speculative interest which attaches itself to the real and the practical interest which seeks for the better.
