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this question can perhaps be resolved in the negative (I do not in the least affirm that such is the case)
without our having to deduce that social science is impossible. It could as well be said that astronomy
and mechanics would no longer be possible because it had been shown that La Place’s theory of
nebulas is not generalizable and that the formations of stars observed in different parts of the sky
appear to be thrown into divergent paths which cannot be reduced to a single formula. I admit that the
spectacle of the starry sky would in no way be spoiled for me by the belief that the firmament is not
an immense display of despairing monotony. For the same reason I should not be displeased, in
reading history, to see in it the unexpected perpetually springing forth from the complication of
regular causalities, liberty born from order, fantasy from rhythm, embroidery from the canvas.
It was therefore an error to think that in order to establish the new science it was necessary to trace
all human histories to their point of departure, not omitting a single phase, and that if a single link on
this chain were skipped, everything would be lost. From this idea came the exaggerated importance
sometimes accorded the stories of travelers or the excavations of archaeologists, which do merit the
sociologist’s attention but never to the point of letting him think the future of the science depends on
their results. Without agreeing with John Stuart Mill that, as a precondition for becoming a
sociologist, it suffices to be a psychologist and a logician, we may say that the first thing to
accomplish is a very careful analysis of one’s own particular social state in order to discover
hypotheses which, later verified or rectified by sufficiently extensive comparisons with foreign
societies, will finally appear as the elementary principles of sociology.
Only the economists, I repeat, were aware of this methodical necessity. Their great merit has been
to seek laws of causation applicable to their area—the law of least effort, for example, of supply and
demand, or the theory of rent—and through them to create an abstract political economy, superior and
necessarily anterior to concrete political economies. Auguste Comte was correct in noting that in
every order of things there exist two types of science, one abstract and the other concrete—as for
example an abstract astronomy which governs all possible stars and a concrete astronomy which
applies the abstract laws to real stars. He added that the same distinction is applicable to sociology,
but in this all he did was generalize what the economists had already put into practice in their own
area. Their example was followed in varying degrees, and the religious, linguistic, juridical aspects
of society, its moral, political, and aesthetic aspects, were studied in turn according to the
comparative method by scholars who, from their multiple comparisons, succeeded in extracting many
comments of very general importance, some of which certainly merit the title of laws. It is the
condensation, the reciprocal interpenetration of all these partial sciences that we may call abstract
sociology. It would have been for Comte to lay its foundations, but belying his remark that abstract
science is anterior to its corresponding concrete science, his own works, so teeming with penetrating
insights, sketch out a concrete sociology. Now, what would be the theory about the moon or Mars if
Newton’s law of attraction were still unknown? And how can there be a theory of Roman history or
Arabian civilization without a key of universal sociological explanation? Montesquieu wrote a
masterpiece of sociological anticipation in his Grandeur et décadence des Romains, but to tell the
truth it is a barrage of penetrating insights without connection, a brilliant and multicolored barrage
that he threw into the eyes of the spellbound reader.
It is necessary, therefore, to condense and synthesize the partial enlightenment derived from
comparative grammar, comparative mythology, political economy, and the other social sciences; for
each on its own set forth or stuttered out some laws, which, it must be admitted, were usually
imperfect and must all be recast by the very reason of this synthesis. But the first condition of a good
synthesis is a good analysis. Analyzing these laws, we shall see first of all and without difficulty that