REVIEWS.
Die soziologische Erkenntnis. Positive Philosophic des sozialen Lebens. Von Gustav Ratzenhofer. Leipzig: F. A. Brock- haus, 1898.'
In a magazine review it is difficult to do justice to a work like Ratzenhofer's. Ratzenhofer resembles that other equally important sociologist of German Austria, Gumplowicz: he is not merely a fully inde- pendent thinker, who understands how to concentrate philosophically and cast into a unified form the most comprehensive physical, psycho- logical, and sociological science ; he is also very peculiar in regard to the systematic formation of his thought, and employs necessarily a terminology at variance with scholastic language. This work, written for professional colleagues, with whom it avoids every explanation, even for the sake of the coherence of its thought, is therefore a very difficult work to arrange in an assenting and dissenting criticism. Instead of such a notice, therefore, we shall best do justice to the work before us by an analysis, with occasional digression for comment. We may preface this analysis by a single general objection. Ratzen- hofer himself maintains that the present work, together with his other, entitled Wesen und Zweck der Politik, which appeared in 1893, form " the doctrinal structure \^Lehrgehdude\ of sociology." They might be the beginning, perhaps, of "a doctrinal structure" or "system." The work is, indeed, a compendium of signal importance and of enduring value, pregnant with thought and suggestive ; it is so systematically put together that every stone is indispensable and none superfluous. But are these two treatises, after all, " the " system or even the "doctrinal structure" of sociology? This the reviewer cannot concede. The book under discussion, Soziologische Erkenntnis, fully deserves its alternative title whereby it claims to be "a positive philoso- phy of the social life." It is undoubtedly the most significant of recent attempts at philosophical concentration of sociological knowl- edge ; it is, further, a vigorous attempt at the dovetailing of a "posi-
■ Translated from Zeitschrift fiir die gesammte Staatswissenschaft, viertes Heft, 1898 (pp. 733 ff.), by Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Ellwood.
528
