Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    logical point of view, whereas the engineer’s point of view is 'Scrap your exceptions. . . To a biologist the social problem is not 'How can we get these men and women to fit into society’ but 'How can we make a society into which these men and women will fit’.” 1 It should be needless to say that what Professor Haldane so well expresses as the biological stand¬ point is even more decidedly that of the sociologist, whose very subject-matter is human society as it exists in all its infinite diversity, and who, in his studies, literally revels in this diversity. We make no exaggerated claims for sociology at its present stage. Human society, in this year of grace, 1932, is admittedly in a sorry state. Nations calling themselves civilised seem unable to avoid the periodical self-destruction of war. In the midst of plenty, millions of men, women, and children, in America as well as in Europe and Asia, perish un¬ timely through chronic insufficiency of food. Mass unemployment in all industrialised communities ac¬ companies the heaping up of colossal individual fortunes that make political equality a sham. But we can register, nevertheless, some social progress. The twentieth century is not, in any civilised country, as was the eighteenth; and no small part of the change is due directly to improvements in social institutions, which have been, in fact, though often unconsciously so, the outcome of the study of society. When we reflect how little had been 1 Professor J, B, S, Haldane, in The Listener, 10th February 1932.
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