DeGreef's theory has suffered from being studied in vacuo. Really it is its author's reforming interests that explain its peculiarities. DeGreef's early ideal for his country (nineteenth-century Belgium) was that it should witness a rapid growth of self-sufficient syndicats, at once trades unions and producers' associations after the manner of Proudhon, to be bound together by a Proudhonian system of free credit. To this DeGreef and his friends added a project of occupational representation, beginning with collective bargaining for each industry and locality and culminating in occupational representation in Parliament. DeGreef's plan antedates the French Syndicalists by a generation and the Guild Socialists by two. Failing to win the Belgian labor movement to his views, DeGreef proceeded to evolve a formal system of sociology that should give those views scientific validity. His hierarchy of the seven social factors is calculated to prove the dependence of all the higher forms of civilized association, more particularly the political, upon the economic, and his theory of frontiers to prove that the path of progress must be in the direction of organic growth of a free type of economic organization across all artificial group boundaries. In building up his system, DeGreef makes elaborate use of Comte's and Spencer's formulas, but to no fruitful purpose. This is as far as most critics have gone. Within this framework, however, DeGreef's observations of the process of group pressure and accommodation, summarized under his concepts of "contract" and, more specifically, débat, have permanent vitality.

By his fellow-sociologists DeGreef has commonly been regarded as a closet philosopher. He is supposed to have spun out his famous classification of social categories without regard to the practical interests of life. This is a misapprehension. DeGreef did

write many books on abstract social theory, but his interest in social reform came first in point of time and remained fundamentally dominant throughout his life. Roused to indignation by the misery of the Belgian working classes and influenced by the teachings of the eminent political proscripts who thronged the Brussels of his student days, DeGreef early threw himself into the radical youth movement of the eighteen sixties. With his classmate Hector Denis and others he edited various radical journals, most notably the arch-Proudhonian organ, la Liberté. Proudhon at this time had won to himself the ablest of the young students of the Belgian capital with his teachings of economic and political "mutualism" or voluntary association.1 In the Liberté DeGreef and Denis urged the Proudhonian principle of self-governing associations of producers joined together in a network of free credit associations. To this they added a theory of occupational representation which they had derived indirectly, in the course of their University studies, from Ahrens of Göttingen.

DeGreef, indeed, appears to have drawn up the Proudhonian program for which the Belgian delegates to the conventions of the First International contested. These ideas were not only defeated in the International by Marx, with his doctrine of state socialism resulting from the class struggle, but they gradually lost ground even in Belgium. As Marxism increased in power, DeGreef found it more and more impossible to serve effectively in the labor movement, although for a number of years he was one of the lawyers who defended working-class interests most whole-heartedly.

He turned then to more academic writing and published his first work in theoretical sociology, the Introduction, in 1886-89. This was so well received that DeGreef was appointed to the first

'Proudhon's basic economic doctrine was the belief that all human labor is materially of equal worth and would remain so but for exploitation, and that the way to restore it is to set up independent producers' associations with free credit. His basic political doctrine was at first pure anarchism, but later became what he called "federalism" or "mutualism" or "contractualism," by which he meant a system of decentralized, delegated government, wherein the citizen in every sphere of activity always reserves to himself more power than he cedes, explicitly contracting with other citizens or groups or the government itself for the carrying out of their mutual obligations.

chair in sociology at the University of Brussels. When the eminent geographer and philosophical anarchist, Réclus, was dismissed from the University because of popular agitation, DeGreef and Denis in indignation led an exodus from the University. They founded a new institution, L'Université Nouvelle, which was especially devoted to the social sciences and which was committed both to complete freedom of thought and the closest possible co-operation with the workers' educational movement. There DeGreef taught quietly until his death in 1924.1a

Yet, underneath this apparent academic calm, the deeper currents of DeGreef's interests were still in the direction of practical social reform. He not only published books on his free credit, and guild-socialistic theories, but he also publicly argued, both before and after the war, for his system of occupational representation.

The question then remains, Are any traces of this reforming bent to be found in the "system" of DeGreef's sociology itself? In the present writer's opinion they furnish the only rational key to the whole.

Easily the most important of DeGreef's works, after the Introduction—indeed, far ahead of it for freshness of content-is the three-volume Structure générale des sociétés, published in 1908. His many other theoretical writings contain practically nothing foreign to these two, and none adequately summarizes the Structure, although some of the briefer ones, notably the little Lois sociologiques, are more convenient to the general reader."

In order to gain a fair perspective of DeGreef's theory, however, it is necessary to see it against the background of some of his applied works. The Ouvrière dentellière, the Rachat des charbonnages, and the recently republished Régime représentatif give a vivid picture of the Proudhonian syndicalist state toward which he

1a For a fuller treatment of DeGreef's life and works, see the writer's Guillaume DeGreef. The Social Theory of an Early Syndicalist, “Columbia University Studies," 1925.

It is unfortunate for DeGreef's reputation that the Introduction, which is particularly full of classification, should have come first. It is the Structure générale which contains his interesting theory of frontiers. But even this is burdened by a dull and nearly empty introductory volume-beyond which few American readers have penetrated.

is determined all the institutions of society shall head. It is his belief that his own "system" scientifically proves the validity of that hope.

Indeed, it is interesting to note that near the end of his life we find DeGreef remarking in his autobiography (as yet unpublished): "These two little brochures (the Rachat and the Ouvrière) have given me a satisfaction as great as-in fact greater than -the most substantial of my theoretical works.”

DeGreef builds his system upon the framework of Comte's classification of the sciences. It will be recalled that Comte had ranged all human knowledge in its abstract aspect on an ascending scale of complexity, with mathematics at the foot and "sociology," or general social theory, at the head. Comte's thesis was that the successive sciences along his scale had developed serially in point of time, a given advance in the lower being the necessary condition for a parallel advance in the next higher up, and so on; his criterion of advance throughout the series being progression through three stages of thought: from the theological through the metaphysical up to the positive."

DeGreef will have nothing to do with all the last part of Comte's theory, his "law of the three stages," and his basic thesis of the leading rôle of ideas in history. Proudhon and the whole socialist school have made him impatient of such "ideology." But he does take over bodily his belief in a necessary and irreversible serial development of the sciences. The point at which DeGreef claims originality for his scheme is in his projection of the Comtean series into and over the social field itself. The activities of human life are themselves reducible to classes of greater and less complexity, with the more complex always dependent upon the less for impulsions to advance. Here, DeGreef urges, is the key to progress.

Comte believed, of course, that the present age was ripe for the final stage of positivism for the last sciences, the biological and social. When once the study of society itself had become truly scientific, the present disorganization of human life would cease: for "ideas rule the world or throw it into chaos." The last great revolutionary or "critical" age, marked by the breakdown of all the old shibboleths and controls, would give way before a new and final "organic" age wherein all would proceed according to reason and love.

The series as constituted by DeGreef runs: (1) economic phenomena, (2) genetic, (3) aesthetic, (4) psycho-collective, (5) moral, (6) juridical, (7) political. A given improvement in, let us say, political machinery, will be ineffectual unless it is backed up by a sufficient development of the "lower centers of co-ordination," more particularly the lowest of all, the economic. And so on.

Why DeGreef should have chosen this particular seven and no other for his series has long been a puzzle to his critics, but the question is really of no importance, the whole construction is so patently artificial. The significant thing is the way he uses his series when once it is set up. Although nominally social influences are supposed to travel from one link to another along the entire chain of the hierarchy, actually it is in practically every case the effect of the economic activities upon every other group that DeGreef describes and illustrates. Whatever point he begins with, he always ends there; and the effects he cites are almost always described in terms of "good" or "bad," of heading toward or away from his syndicalistic world-state.

Next to economic activities, it is the activities at the other end of the scale, political activities, that receive the most attention from DeGreef-again quite natural if we accept the syndicalistic hypothesis. They would necessarily be put last in the series, since DeGreef considers government a very superficial sphere of activity and one to be minimized as rapidly as possible as society advances. His system really revolves upon the axis of the interrelationship of these two. The intervening classes, as we have said, receive relatively little attention, and are usually introduced in only a passive rôle to show the effect upon them of economic changes. Such as they are, however, they serve to give substance to his construction.*

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Their order appears natural enough. "Genetic phenomena," the population problem socially considered, would necessarily be included somewhere and would necessarily come low down on the scale, near economic phenomena; while custom and law form a natural series with government. (To a lawyer it would be natural to divide the two.) That he should give a separate place to beliefs, and under this category lump together religion and scientific speculation, is perhaps inevitable to a one-time Comtean, and a man, moreover, who feared a dangerous sectarian schism in Belgian life; but it will be noted that the "beliefs" category is put well down on