Excerpt from Economic Foundations of Society

Modern sociologists are still groping about for a point of departure from which to explain the complex of social phenomena. It was easier for the philosophers of the last century, for all were then agreed that Society was to be "rightly constituted by victorious Analysis." But Philosophism has had its day, and Positivism now reigns in the domain of social science. We no longer hope to reconstitute society upon a fabulous state of nature, we are seeking now to discover the natural laws of social evolution.

On the one side there are the biological sociologists who would determine the principles of the new science by analogies drawn from the animal world. But it is not enough merely to substitute super-organic for organic evolution, and proceed at once to confer biological definitions upon sociological facts. True, the terminology of the science is thereby enriched and its methods somewhat improved, but the principles peculiar to social growth still remain to be discovered. There is also a group of psychological sociologists who seek the motives of collective life in the individual instincts of the man. But personal proclivities are so largely the result of historical inheritance and the social environment, that there is constant danger in pursuing this method of confusing cause with consequence, and thus becoming involved in a vicious circle. It is difficult, besides, without some guiding principle, to hit upon instincts that are especially characteristic of the human species, and at the same time sufficiently original and universal to apply to all social phenomena.

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