plans for redistribution of surplus in terms of democracy and justice. Thus social progress is defined as "an accumulation of social surplus together with such equitable distribution of the same as will best further continual accumulation and promote a sufficient degree of harmony to guarantee evolutionary rather than revolutionary change." The formula, progress involves chiefly redistribution, necessitates a comparison of suggested methods, such as positive eugenics; elimination of preventable disease; more equitable distribution of income, leisure and education; functional ownership (not absolute communistic or Marxian equality of wealth or income, but a leaning toward Tawney, Cole, Russell, and Veblen); and co-operative industry. Thus the author's cycle of exposition begins with all the rigors of physical science and ends in utopia. Such a unilateral analysis of social complexity naturally provokes caveats both as to fact and method. The whole discussion of comparative racial or national energies suffers from too many assumptions and non sequiturs. This is inevitable in an attempt to stretch a formula over so large a field. The references, chapter bibliographies, and index are solid and satisfying. But errata in citing authors occur frequently (e.g., pp. 14, 16, 36, 52, 109, 152, 165, and index). CHICAGO ARTHUR J. TODD Vom Wirtschaftsgeist im Orient. By ALFRED RÜHL. Leipzig: Verlag von Quelle & Meyer, 1925. Pp. vii+92. Here is a volume written in the spirit and in the manner of Sombart's studies in the origins of modern capitalism. The contrast between the modern and the medieval mind in respect to trade, which Sombart's investigation emphasized, is no more striking than the contrast in the attitudes of the present-day Orient and the Occident, which is the theme of this fascinating little volume. In some very real sense Rühl's study may be regarded as merely another chapter in the natural history of the capitalistic systems. Although it is the purpose of the author to contrast the Orient and the Occident, his method has been to study a single region. He has sought to describe differences in trade customs which are striking and characteristic but concrete, rather than to formulate broad generalizations based upon a wider survey. He has chosen Algiers for study, partly because the Oriental tradition is still strong, in spite of the influence of France, and partly because the material in regard to the more commonplace aspects of the daily life of the people is abundant. From this material he has succeeded in sketching the outlines of a social order which seems all the more remote from us, perhaps because it is like the one from which we have so recently emerged, but a social order in which we have rather immediate practical interest because it is one with which we are more and more practically concerned. One item of particular interest is the references to the Jew. In Algiers the Jew seems to play precisely the rôle that he played in Europe in the Middle Ages. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO ROBERT E. PARK The Negro from Africa to America. By W. D. WEATHERFORD. Introduction by James H. Dillard. New York: George H. Doran Co., 1924. Pp. 487. $5.00. For a long time there has been a very real demand for a sourcebook on the American Negro. This book by W. D. Weatherford comes as nearly meeting that demand as any book that has yet been published. The Negro from Africa to America is not a critical nor a scholarly work. It is frankly a compilation, but it contains more interesting facts about the Negro, and covers more phases of negro life-and in doing so displays more candor and understanding for all parties concerned, i.e., the black man and the white man, North and South-than any other book on the subject. The black man in America has had a romantic history. There is no such stuff for literature and for poetry in the experience of any people in America as there is in the life, past and present, of the black man. He has been a slave; he is now free, and has the legal status of a citizen. One thing that makes the career interesting is the fact that he is, as Ray Stannard Baker once described him, "the man farthest down," the man most removed from the understanding and sympathy of the larger world in which he lives. This man farthest down is now engaged in a mortal struggle to attain actually, within the American community, the status which he has legally. The thesis of this book is that, with time and patience, this is possible, with the understanding that in their intimate social life the races agree to live apart. This separate racial life already exists. In order to meet the limitations with which he has been surrounded, the Negro has had to create a communal and a racial culture of his own. The Negro race, as Booker Washington used to say, is a nation within a nation. For somewhat different reasons the Jews in this country are in a similar situation. The Jews are seeking to preserve their culture while accommodating themselves in other respects to the conditions of American life. Different as they are in other respects, the Negro and the Jew are alike in this. And this fact is also interesting in this connection because the Jews and the Negroes are the only peoples, of the many peoples in America, who have produced in America a folk, or at least a race, literature. The Jew and the Negro are therefore the two outstanding illustrations of the impending cultural pluralism so interestingly advocated by Horace Kallen. What Mr. Weatherford proposes for the Negro, Mr. Kallen proposes for all the races and language groups in America. He would add to the federation of states the federation of races. The American people have not fairly faced this issue. But the Ku Klux Klan and the Nordic propaganda are unquestionably preparing the way for such a new constellation of the forces in the cultural life of America. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO ROBERT E. PARK Industry and Civilization. By C. DELISLE BURNS. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1925. Pp. 278. $3.50. The purpose and content of Mr. Burns's new book are quite accurately indicated in a sentence from the preface: "This analysis and criticism of the moral standards operative in regard to economic activities is intended to result in increasing a knowledge of moral philosophy, and in correcting some of the traditional moral assumptions of economics." The author's reasoning is developed from the following fundamental assumptions: (1) that the Aristotelian conception of the good life is a sounder ethical principle than the English conception of virtue; (2) that the good life is a matter of self-development, though the principle of service must also be included in formulating moral standards, for reasons which are not made clear; (3) that the human being is not an appetite mainly, but a tendency or a "set" in a certain direction; and (4) that the realization of these tendencies is to be expected both in productive and in consumptive activities, or, in other words, that the distinction commonly made between consumption and production is artificial. There was a marked parallelism between Mr. Burns's handling of certain problems and J. M. Clark's handling of the same topics in his Economics of Overhead Costs, but Professor Clark's handling was much more penetrating and more objective. This book is a contribution to that marginal field which lies on the boundary of economics and ethics. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO FLOYD N. HOUSE Sticks and Stones. By LEWIS MUMFORD. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924. Pp. 247. $2.50. "The characteristic buildings of each period are the memorials to their dearest institutions . . . . for architecture sums up the civilization it enshrines and the mass of our buildings can never be better or worse than the institutions that have shaped them." Thus is Spencer's dictum about human government applied, and that very skilfully, to the housing problem. The real merit of the book lies not in this thesis, which is obvious enough, but in the historical facts which have been put together with a great deal of literary art to illustrate it. For example, the "communism" of New England villages contrasted with the slave basis of southern classical architecture is illuminating. Likewise the mirroring of our imperialistic stirrings and our age of machinery in the civic and commercial buildings of the eighties and nineties and our modern industrial centers. The book abounds in deft touches such as the conclusion that modern skyscraper architecture is "not for men but for angels and aviators." The familiar leitmotifs of machine civilization, the lag between human and physical science, the necessity for regional planning, rational conservation, imitation of city growth through decentralization of industry and its shift through modern motor transportation to small towns and villages, appropriation of unearned increment, garden cities—in short, the developing of ability "to select and control our heritage from the past, to alter our present attitudes and habits, and to project fresh forms into which our energies may be freely poured"-are stressed convincingly and effectively. A well selected though brief bibliography contributes toward making this a book well worth the beautiful type and binding which the publisher has bestowed upon it. CHICAGO ARTHUR J. TODD Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens. Herausgegeben im Auftrage des Forschungsinstituts für Sozialwissenschaften in Köln. Von MAX SCHELER. München und Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1924. Pp. x+450. This book deserves to rank and to function among the principal orientation-monuments for all sociologists. It affords an outlook for the widest survey of the area of the adventure to which sociological pioneering is committed. Since they have dragged out of obscurity the elementary truth that no interpretation of human affairs is complete unless it has completely reckoned with the omnipresent group factor, no stopping-place remains for sociologists until they have followed the group clue throughout all dimensions of human relations. This does not mean that the sociologist, as such, has, or ever will have, a mandate to furnish final interpretations of all aspects of human reality indiscriminately. It does mean that there is use for specializations of sociological technique, in every area of human affairs, by scholars otherwise qualified to investigate within those areas. From the remotest discoverable differentiations in the direction of human life among the biological elements, to the utmost variations of interpsychical influence, in unconscious suggestion as well as in science or art or philosophy or religion, there is work to be done by the investigator with a technique adapted to detection of group phases in the respective manifestations. Not in the sense of the earlier enthusiasts who imagined sociology as a hegemony over all knowledge, but in the line of the new perception that interindividual influences play a part in every variation of the human lot, the field of sociology is the human world. While it is true that sociology must deal with "pauperism, prostitution, and plumbing," it is all the more true that sociology must take part in explaining the highest, widest, and deepest reaches of the human mind. No previous methodological treatise has done as much to impress this fact as the volume before us. The book is what the Germans call a Sammelwerk, or, as we sometimes less accurately say, a symposium. The editor contributes an introduction of 146 pages on "Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge." The remainder of the book is made up as follows: II. FORMAL COGNITIONAL SOCIOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY GENERAL PART: GENERAL FORMS AND LIMITATIONS OF COGNITIVE STRUCTURE 1. Luchtenberg (Privatdozent für Philosophie und Pädagogik an der Universität Köln). Forms in Which Knowledge Is Transmitted. |