THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 221
To make the illustration more specific, suppose our atten- tion is given to the French Revolution. Thousands of writers have described facts and essayed interpretations of the Revolu- tion, without having approached the sociological conception of the meaning of the period. Expressed in the rough, study of the French Revolution, under guidance of the sociological cate- gories, would proceed somewhat after this fashion :
First : All the activities of the French during the period accomplished some portion of the process of realizing the essen- tial human interests. What was that portion of the process in its large outlines ? The question sends us forth to get a bird's- eye view of the Revolution from some altitude which will reveal the great lines of movement usually obscured by the picturesque details which first attract attention. Let us suppose that we make out the following as the general process : The French, from lowest to highest, had become conscious of wants which the traditional social system arbitrarily repressed. The Revolu- tion is a spontaneous, spasmodic effort of the French to release themselves from those inherited restrictions, and to achieve a social situation in which the wants of which they are now con- scious will be free to find satisfaction.
Second : What, then, were the actual wants which impelled different portions of the French people ? In brief, the peasantry wanted to eat the bread which their toil produced, instead of giving the most of it to the landlords who did not toil ; the wage-earners in the towns wanted work enough and pay enough to improve their condition, and they saw no way to get either without abolishing the privileges of the rich. The third estate, according to Sieyes's famous dictum, had been nothing in the state, and wanted to become something ; the thinkers were enamored of new notions of individual rights, and were roman- tically eager to change the situation so that those rights might be realized ; on the other hand, the privileged classes, the eco- nomic, the political, and the ecclesiastical aristocrats, wanted to preserve their privileges. They wanted to defeat the pur- poses of their fellow-citizens. They wanted to perpetuate a situation in which the wants antagonistic with their own would continue to be defeated.
