320 THEORY AND ADMINISTRATION 



the qualifying adjective " political " and to term their science simply 

 " economics." It is still, of course, true that when the economists 

 attempt to make practical applications of the principles which they 

 have deduced, they are concerned with questions of the exercise 

 by the state of this or that function, or the adoption by the law of 

 this or that policy. But this is only the application of principles 

 already determined. So far as economics is considered as a science 

 or a philosophy, it is concerned solely with the discovery of the 

 physical laws that control industry, and the psychic laws that regu- 

 late the conduct of men in their efforts to secure wealth and obtain 

 the greatest amount of benefit from its consumption. 



Political Philosophy and Sociology 



Giving to the term " sociology " its broadest meaning, as the title 

 of the comprehensive science that embraces the study of all social 

 facts, political science is, of course, one of its subdivisions, and its 

 philosophy a branch of social philosophy. If, however, we accept 

 the definition of Giddings, according to which sociology is that 

 science which has to deal with the primary psychological facts and 

 elementary social phenomena which the students of politics and of 

 the other social sciences assume without analysis as the foundations 

 upon which to erect their respective scientific superstructures, 

 sociology, in so far as it deals with political facts, covers much of the 

 ground that the political philosopher has been wont to claim as 

 his own. Speaking especially of political science, Giddings says in 

 his Principles of Sociology: 1 " How is it with the theory of the state? 

 Political science, too, finds its premises in facts of human nature. 

 The active forces of political life, as of economic life, are the desires 

 of men, but they are no longer merely individual desires, and they 

 are no longer desires for satisfactions that must come for the most 

 part in material forces. They are desires massed and generalized; 

 desires felt simultaneously and continuously by thousands, or even 

 millions, of men who are by them simultaneously moved to concrete 

 action. They are desires of what may be called the social 

 mind in distinction from the individual mind, and they are chiefly 

 for such ideal things as national power and renown, or conditions 

 of liberty and peace. Transmuted into will, they become sover- 

 eignty the obedience-compelling power of the state. Political 

 science describes these gigantic forces of the social mind and studies 

 their action; but it concerns itself with their genesis no more than 

 political economy concerns itself with the genesis of individual desires. 

 It simply assumes for every nation a national character, and is content 

 that the political constitution of the state can be scientifically 



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