What is sociology?

What is sociology? 
Georges Palante "Précis de sociologie" (1901)
A translated article by Bayron Pascal

The term sociology seems too clear to need to be defined. It means etymologically science of society or societies. However, this clarity is only apparent. One can indeed take this term "science of societies" in several different senses. A first sense, the widest of all, consists in the sociology of the whole of the social sciences: Political Economy, politics, ethnology, linguistics, religious sciences, Arts, etc. It is clear that a similar science, lacking a separate object, has no right to exist. Sociology can be understood as the systematization of the particular social sciences, or, if we prefer, the science of the relationships between them. Sociology would be to the various social sciences what is, according to Positivism, philosophy, in relation to the particular sciences it systematizes. It would show the social science relationships between them and fill their gaps. This sense is already more precise than the previous. However it is not yet satisfactory. For we do not sufficiently separate the social phenomena proper from the ethnological, economic, legal, political, etc. phenomena that accompany or engender them. — In addition, the claim to fill the gaps in the political economy, law, morals, etc., would not be more justified, on the part of sociologists, than the claim by some philosophers to fill by more or less contentious assumptions The shortcomings of the physical and natural sciences. Another solution is to assign to sociology the study of social forms, irrespective of their content. "An army, a family, a shareholder society have, regardless of the difference in their origins and purposes, certain common traits, hierarchy, interdependence, differentiation, etc., which can be studied on its own. — The mere fact that Individuals associate themselves produces certain specific effects on them. Whether they are economic phenomena, or legal or moral, they are subject to the action of the social environment [1]. "—" The same author may be said to classify the different species of social backgrounds; It will be noticed that if their properties, like their value, their density, the coalescence of their units vary, the action they exert on individuals is subject to concomitant variations. This will result in a science where observation, classification and explanation are purely sociological. » This conception, supported in Germany by Simmel, and in France by Mr Bouglé, contains a piece of truth. It has the advantage of highlighting the fact that the number, the mass, the population of social groups exert themselves a great influence on the evolution of these groups. However, the following objections may be addressed: 1 ° This sociology stricto sensu, as Mr Bouglé calls it, can only be established concurrently with the various particular studies, the whole of which would comprise the sociology Lato sensu. — the abstract laws governing the modalities of social groups in general cannot be determined until they have studied the groups themselves in detail. 2 ° It is a content which cannot be ignored: it is the psychological content of the groups studied. For it is in ideas, in beliefs, in desires, that all the static or dynamic phenomena that are composed of the life of societies are ultimately translated. The psychological notation remains the one to which all the others are ultimately retaken. To disregard, as Mr Bouglé asks, the "ideas of social units" to focus on the purely formal laws of the groupings, is to give up the merriment of heart what is more real and concrete in social life; It is to let go of the prey for the shadow [2]. In our view, sociology is not something other than social psychology. And we mean by social psychology The science that studies the mentality of units close together by social life. We will have no qualms if we are objected to the fact that this definition brings back to the substance of social psychology and, as a result, sociology itself to individual psychology. In our view, it is up to the latter to always come back. It stays, whether you like it or not, the key that opens all the doors. The social energy par excellence always remains the psyche, not the collective psyche of which Mr. De Roberty speaks [3], but the very short psyche, or individual psyche. It is the latter that can only give meaning to this expression of collective psyche.

Social Psychology will thus have a double purpose:

1 ° to investigate how the insertions of the individual consciences intervene in the formation and in the evolution of the social consciousness (we mean here by social conscience the set of ideas, beliefs and desires that make up the mentality Dominant of a society and which impose a more or less conscious intellectual, emotional and moral conformism on the associated units. The psychology of great men here is of a high interest.

2 ° Look how conversely this, social consciousness acts on individual consciences. What changes or degradation, sometimes depressions, does this social conformation exert on the intelligences and individual characters? What are the psychological effects of solidarity that unites human units, whether this solidarity is professional, economic, religious, moral, etc? — as Mr. Barth rightly notes, "every transformation of society leads to a transformation of the human type and consequential changes in the consciousness of the individuals who make up the society, which in turn reacts on the Society itself [4]. These actions and reactions constitute the object of social psychology.

When Mr. Lester did the psychology of socialism, when Mr. Viale wrote his books on the psychology of crowds and sects, when Mr. Max Nordau studied closely the atmosphere of falsehood whose contemporary society envelops the individual; When Ms. Laura Marholm [5] follows variations in the female mentality based on variations in the social environment; When Schopenhauer analyzes the mentality of "the Lady", and its role in the present society, when Nietzche studies the social consequences of the generalization of the feeling of pity in our European civilisation, or even when it analyses the nature Morality and the social effects of the reversal of the scale of values operated by Christianity, there is no one who can disregard the high sociological interest of similar psychological researches.

In general, social Psychology seeks the relationships of individual consciousness and social consciousness. Sometimes it highlights the points of contact that can meet between these two consciences, sometimes it insists on their contradictions and the ensuing conflicts.

There are profound and delicate analogies between the soul of individuals and that of societies. Such is for example this truth seen by Nietzche that sometimes a violent clash, an energetic rupture with the past is, for both peoples and individuals, a condition of renewal of vitality. "There is, says Nietzche, a degree of insommie, of rumination, of historical meaning, which harms the living being and ultimately destroys it, whether it is a man, a people or a civilization."

Such intuition, borrowed from the most penetrating psychology, makes us grasp the most delicate conditions of the life of societies.

The struggles within individual consciences are often only a reflection of external and social antagonisms. One critic, Mr. Ch. Saroléa [6], makes a very fine distinction between what he calls individual conflicts and social conflicts. It means by social conflicts those which result from antagonism between two classes (for example between the nobility and the roture, between the rich class and the poor Class), on the contrary, it means by individual conflicts the conflicts of the individual with himself Determined by the various social circles to which it may belong and by the contradictory social influences to which it may be subjected. — The parallelism of these antagonisms in the social environment and in the individual consciousness is a subject of study of the most important for the social psychologist.

relationship between the individual mentality and the mentality of the city 

The importance of the relationship between the individual mentality and the mentality of the city or society has been seen for a long time by those who have dealt with social and political problems. — in chapter III of Book III of its policy, Aristotle arises, in quite obscure terms, the question of whether the concept of virtue should be defined in the same way when it comes to the private man and the citizen. Viale is studying a similar problem when it arises whether the fact of making contact, of settling, of agglomerate tends to raise or lower the intellectual and moral level of individuals [7]. [8] Mr. De Roberty also posed the same problem as Viale and gave him a similar solution, but he interpreted it differently.

The points on which there is a conflict between individual consciousness and social conscience are more numerous and more important than those on which there is agreement. We will not develop that point at length at this time. We will confine ourselves to the following remarks: There is often in the ideas, the morals, the beliefs, the institutions of a society given contradictions that leap in the eyes of a observant observer. From the day the consciousness of an individual perceives these contradictions, it cannot help but to be surprised and to ask a question mark on the value of the social mentality ambient. It is these social contradictions which, according to Dr. Nordau, are the cause of the anxiety and discomfort that weigh on contemporary consciences.

Social consciousness often oppresses individual consciences. Individual selfishness is very often the slaves and the dupes of collective selfishness. Nietzche strongly expressed this antinomy: "Most people," he says, "whatever they may think and say about their" selfishness, "do nothing, their lives for their ego, but only for the Phantom of their ego that formed upon them in the brain of their ENT Encourage before communicating with them; — therefore, they all live in a cloud of impersonal opinions, of fortuitous and fictitious assessments, one vis-a-vis the other and so forth of spirit in spirit: singular world of fantasies who knows how to give himself such a reasonable appearance! This mist of opinions and habits grows and lives almost independently of the men it surrounds; It is she who causes the falsity inherent in the general judgments of "man", — all these men unknown to each other believe in this abstract thing called "man", a fiction; And any change attempted on this abstract thing by powerful individualities judgments (such as princes and philosophers) makes an extraordinary and senseless effect on the large number. All this, because each individual does not know how to oppose, in this large number, a true ego, which is his own and which he deepened to the pale universal fiction which he would destroy by that same [9]. "— Schopenhauer had also noted this illusion that so many men place" their happiness and the interest of their whole life in the head of others. "

The task of the social psychologist

What is socially respectable is often worthless in the eyes of the individual reason of the thoughtful man.

There is no need to dwell more on the conflicts between individual consciousness and social conscience. What we have just said is enough to show that there is a whole field open to the social psychologist's investigations. Its main task would be to determine, among these antinomies, which are only provisional and which appear as essential and definitive.

These studies would be objected to being rather literary than scientific. This reproach is not such as to concern us, if we mean that the sociologist must focus on the consideration of the subjective, sentimental or intellectual aspect of social phenomena, by means of a psychological intuition analogous to that which the novelist, the moralist, and the social painter generally use. For there is inevitably a time when, in the complex and delicate field of social things, the scientific spirit, with its rigid compartments — often artificial — must give way to the spirit of finesse. The method of the social psychologist is not "that of the vulgar logic of the school, who puts the truths to the line, each holding the sides of his neighbor, but that of the practical reason, proceeding by broad intuitions that embrace groups and reigns systematic integers; From there could we say, the noble complexity, almost similar to that of nature, which reigns in this spiritual painting [11].

It should be added that, in our opinion, the social psychologist does not prohibit the investigation of contemporary society. According to Nietzche's expression, it is necessary to know to be "a good neighbour of neighboring things" and not to be afraid to watch them closely. Some sociologists defy these investigations into the present society; It is wrong, in our view, because if knowledge of the past is indispensable to that of the present, the latter can also help to interpret the ideas and the manners of the past.

If we extend so long on social psychology, it is that we look at it as the true core of sociology. The proponents of formal sociology make themselves, by force of things, a large part of the psychological deduction [12]; They recognize that it is still a psychological law that is inferred from the sociological laws [13]. The influence of factors such as mass, density, heterogeneity, mobility of the population deserves to be studied. But the necessary complement and the culmination point of this study is social psychology.

Footnotes:

1.    Bouglé, Les Sciences sociales en Allemagne, p. 160 (Paris, F. Alcan).

2.    Bouglé, Les Idées égalitaires, p. 18 (Paris, F. Alcan).

3.    De Roberty, Morale et Psychologie (Reçue philosophique, octobre 1900).

4.    Barth, Die Philosophie des Geschichte als Sociologie, p. 10.

5.    Laura Marholm, Zur Psychologie der Frau. Berlin, 1897.

6.    Ch. Saroléa, Henrik Ibsen et son œuvre, p. 71.

7.    Sighele, Contre le Parlementarisme, 1895.

8.    De Roberty, Morale et Psychologie (Revue philosophique, octobre 1900).

9.    Nietzche, Aurore, § 105.

10.  Nietzche, Aurore, § 105.

11.   Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (édition du Mercure de France, p. 69).

12. Voir sur ce point Lapie, Les Civilisations tunisiennes, p. 283 (Paris, F. Alcan).

13.  Mr. Remy de Gourmont, after analyzing the social effects of the psychological phenomenon of the dissociation of ideas, aptly said: One could try a historical psychology of mankind by looking at the degree of dissociation found in the Following centuries a number of these truths that well-thinking people agree to call primordial. This research should be the very purpose of the story. Since everything in man comes back to intelligence, everything in history must come back to psychology".