STATIC AND DYNAMIC SOCIOLOGY.
The above title is the subject of an important and timely paper, by Professor Lester F. Ward, in the last number of the Political Science Quarterly.[1] The discussion is not of merely technical or, as it may appear to many, pedantic interest. The lack of uniformity in the use of terms in treatment of societary phenomena is both product and propagator of confused ideas about facts and principles, from the most concrete and simple to the most complex. Agreement upon the questions involved will at once facilitate advance of knowledge about every department and phase of societary conditions. It is especially desirable that teachers of the social sciences should have definite notions of these rudimentary conceptions.
It is not my purpose to review Professor Ward's argument in detail. It deserves to be made the occasion for thorough reconsideration of all the questions which it raises, and for conclusions which will resolve much needless vagueness.[2] As will appear later, it seems to me that Professor Ward has correctly defined the territory of social statics and social dynamics, but I think his criteria of static and dynamic relations are not self-consistent, and furthermore I maintain that he has not indicated the proper method of employing these conceptions.
In general, the distinctions "static" and "dynamic" are logical, methodological and pedagogical. In other words they are primarily and chiefly subjective rather than objective. They are categories imposed upon the object by the mind which attempts
- ↑ Polit. Sci. Quar., Vol. X., No. 2.
- ↑ At another time I shall explain the reference to statical sociology in Small and Vincent's Introduction to the Study of Society. I am not surprised that it is unintelligible, and in a subsequent edition it will be expanded so that the meaning will be evident Professor Ward's other reference to the use of terms in the same volume seems to me hypercritical, as the distinction is not necessarily desirable at the point referred to, although the authors admit the technical justice of the complaint.
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