Political Science

Abstract

THIS book is a series of more or less authoritative essays on the several branches of social science and exhibits wide variation in merit, ranging from vague meandering through wordy labyrinths leading nowhere, up to real sublimity and noonday clearness of thought. A sample of the labyrinthic uncertainty meets us at the very outset in the first essay, wherein Teggart is said to have stated the difference between history and the other sciences in one “fine phrase”. He said: “Science deals with objects, entities, things, and their relations; history concerns itself with events”. One could, of course, debate until doomsday on such a theorem, either for or against, without tolerable approach to a satisfactory, definite, and agreed solution. No very clear light is thrown on the matter by the further cryptic utterance: “Events happen; things do not”. Hence we may conclude that science deals with things that do not happen! All this may be fine phraseology, but does not appear very helpful to the hopeful student struggling to make his way over the wide and troubled seas of sociology. Moreover, the above quotation from Teggart is supposed to note the difference between history and the “other sciences”, and this would seem to imply that history itself is a science. Whence it follows that one particular science, history, deals with events that happen, whilst the other sciences treat of things that do not happen! Let us find what solace we can in this methodological labyrinth.

Research in the Social Sciences: its Fundamental Methods and Objectives.

By Robert Ezra Park Allyn Abbott Young Clark Wissler Robert Emmet Chaddock Robert Sessions Woodworth Roscoe Pound Arthur Meier Schlesinger John Dewey Charles Austin Beard. Edited, with an Introduction, by Wilson Gee. Pp. xi + 305. (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1929.) Ss. 6d. net.