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

1

1 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.