Economy and sociology

Abstract

The article analyses the reciprocal relations between Economics and Sociology. The author begins with Pareto’s position on general Sociology, which entails a fairly strict division between the two fields of scientific enquiry, calling attention to the new points of view that make it advisable to modify this approach. On this connection, the author first emphasises the distinction between that economic life, often held to be the normal ‘material’ of economic science and which is only the expression of bourgeois economic organisation, and the economic life of other organisations based on fundamentally different conditions. Secondly, he notes the survival of these other forms of organisation in bourgeois society - which therefore is considered as an agglomeration of dissimilar elements. The author then makes a comprehensive study of the scanty observations gathered in a field other than that of the bourgeois organisation. In his opinion this material should be elaborated and should find its place in the analytical economic schemata forming part of a discipline called “Integral Economics”. On the other hand, the task of “Economic Sociology” is to point out the regularities of the economic conduct of individuals and of the economic structure of social groups as they occur in real life.