THE SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY: A REPLY ^
PROFESSOR CHARLES A. ELLWOOD University of Missouri
Nothing more truly amazing has appeared of late in the name of science than the article by Professor Henry Jones Ford on "The Pretensions of Sociology" in your issue of April 29. When a whole class of scientific men, some of whom are as careful in- vestigators and thinkers as American scholarship has produced, are attacked indiscriminately, they certainly have a right to demand that prejudice shall not be their judge.
In the first place, Mr. Ford does not distinguish between soci- ology and sociologists; nor does he distinguish these latter from social radicals and revolutionaries. All the plausibility of his argument is due to this confusion of the science and its votaries, together with the fact that he selects Spencer and Ward as typical sociologists, although their systems of sociological thought were formulated over a quarter of a century ago. There is scarcely one in the whole list of "established sciences" which has not in some stage of its development been exploited by quacks and visionaries. This is notably true of political science or philosophy, which pro- duced a whole crop of dangerous radicals from Hobbes to Rous- seau. At the present time, there is scarcely a mental healer in the United States who does not appeal to the science of psychology as the foundation of his art. Yet who would judge the science of psychology by such quacks?
As a matter of fact, very few sociologists of reputed standing endorse the revolutionary ideas which he credits all with possess- ing. Free love, trial marriage, divorce by mutual consent, the con- tract theory of society, and other anarchistic ideas, so far from being endorsed by a majority of sociologists, have, perhaps, been more powerfully combated by them than by any other class of scientific men. A few socialists and revolutionaries have put for- ward these ideas in the name of sociolc^, but not sociologists in the sense of scientific students of society. I challenge Professor
^ Republished from The Nation by permission of author and editor.
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