THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIOLOGY 



advocate the communal ownership of the means of production. 

 Class-domination is meaningless in the absence of property, through 

 which alone hereditary classes can be perpetuated. Then secondly, 

 his treatment of utility, though it involves scrupulous classification, 

 is yet somewhat naive. The distinction is made between the utility of 

 a collectivity (people, nation, state) and utility for a collectivity. 

 Consider the population of a country. There will be a certain optimum 

 population. But optimum for what.'^ A great increase of population 

 will increase the "utilit\^" of the country by leading to increased 

 military and political power. For this the optimum would be high. 

 A lesser increase in population, however, might lead to a maximum 

 distribution of individual goods (utility for the country). Hence this 

 optimum would be much lower. But is this more than a rather 

 pedantic way of saying that an imperialistic foreign policy demands a 

 large internal population as potential cannon-fodder } This we knew 

 before. Everyone has noted the double activity of Mussolini and 

 Hitler in discouraging birth-control and demanding territorial ex- 

 pansion at one and the same time. 



The upshot of the matter is that although the biological, and even 

 the physico-chemical, approach to sociology has a certain part to 

 play, any attempt to construct a sociology on their foundations alone 

 is bound to lead to failure. Pareto was not the first to have recourse 

 to the analogies of physico-chemical equilibria; Bogdanov and others 

 in Russia had taken that line at the beginning of the century, and it 

 is interesting that they were severely criticised by Lenin.^ 



The Contribution of Psychology. 



So far this review has mainly been concerned with the contribution 

 of Genetics to a human biology. But there are reasons for thinking 

 that Psychology, Physiology and Biochemistry have equally great 

 contributions to make. It seems that sociologists have hitherto some- 

 what underrated the possible value of a psychological approach, 

 repelled perhaps by the exaggerations of some of the lesser followers 

 of the psycho-analytic schools. Nevertheless, I am convinced that on 

 most of the fundamental problems, the psycho-analysts are correct 

 in their attitude. The psychologists of the future ought to be able to 

 provide us with a theory of child upbringing which would abolish, 

 by a kind of preventive medicine, the warped and unhealthy mental 

 states which to-day so often threaten the otherwise good relationships 



^ In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Works, Vol. II, p. 379. 



171 



