Inama-Sternegg’s text is a single-author critical review essay, first published in the Neue Freie Presse in 1907 and expanded in 1908. It reviews A. E. F. Schäffle’s posthumous Abriss der Soziologie (1906), but its scope is larger: it reassesses Schäffle’s whole sociological project and, through it, the still-unsettled claim of sociology to be a unified science. Its thesis is admiring but severe: Schäffle’s ambition to classify the forms, functions, and development of social life was intellectually grand, yet his system failed because it moved too quickly from suggestive synthesis to scientific universality.
The essay first reconstructs the fate of Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers. Inama-Sternegg grants its extraordinary range, but argues that Schäffle’s biological and psychological analogies burdened the work from the start. Schäffle was therefore received alongside Lilienfeld and Spencer as a naturalistic sociologist, even where his actual social observations deserved better.
Das Buch wurde abgelehnt, nicht wegen seiner soziologischen Ergebnisse, sondern gerade wegen der angewandten Darstellungsmethode.
English translation: The book was rejected not on account of its sociological results, but precisely because of the method of presentation employed.
The later stripping away of those analogies did not save the system. For Inama-Sternegg, it exposed the unfinished character of the sociology itself: the organic imagery had been misleading, but it had also given the earlier work imaginative force. The tragic irony is that Schäffle, trying to answer his critics, removed the very vitality that had made the work compelling. The case thus becomes exemplary rather than merely personal.
Das ist das Schicksal der Soziologie Schaffles; aber nicht nur Schaffles, sondern der Soziologie überhaupt, soweit sie es bisher gebracht hat.
English translation: Such is the fate of Schäffle's sociology; but not only of Schäffle's—rather of sociology in general, so far as it has hitherto progressed.
The essay’s central conceptual move is to separate a fruitful social point of view from the premature construction of sociology as a master science. Inama-Sternegg does not deny collective realities; indeed, his strongest positive claim is that modern disciplines have been transformed by learning to see human life socially rather than as a mere sum of individuals.
Auf allen Wissensgebieten vom menschlichen Leben hat sich der Gedanke als fruchtbar erwiesen, daß dieses Leben ein gesellschaftliches ist, daß seine Phänomene Kollektivtatsachen, Kollektivzustände und Vorgänge von eigenem auch begrifflichen Lebensinhalte sind, nicht nur Summen oder Aggregate von Zuständen und Vorgängen individuellen Lebens.
English translation: In all fields of knowledge concerning human life, the idea has proved fruitful that this life is a social one—that its phenomena are collective facts, collective states, and processes possessing their own life-content, even conceptually, and are not merely sums or aggregates of the states and processes of individual life.
What he rejects is the leap from this insight to an all-embracing system. Anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, law, political science, economics, statistics, geography, psychology, and cultural history all bear on society; no single thinker can master them all. Hence his deliberately sharp word for much unified sociology: not because it asks the wrong questions, but because it generalizes before the necessary scholarly labor has been done.
Man verzeihe das harte Wort, aber die bisherige Entwicklung der „Soziologie“ als einheitlicher Wissenschaft berechtigt einigermaßen dazu.
English translation: May the harsh word be forgiven, but the development of “sociology” as a unified science up to now to some extent justifies it.
Against such haste, Inama-Sternegg defines science as the patient absorption and testing of ideas within specialized bodies of knowledge. His defense of specialization is not narrow guild spirit—he acknowledges Comte, Spencer, Quetelet, Bastian, and Schäffle within their proper strengths—but a methodological demand.
Solche Geistesarbeit aber bedarf des Fachwissens, in unserer Zeit reichster Spezialisierung mehr als je.
English translation: Such intellectual work, however, requires specialist knowledge—more than ever in our age of the richest specialization.
This standard explains his final verdict on Schäffle. The two tasks Schäffle assigns sociology—a theory of social development and a unified survey of persons, actions, communities, traffic, civil organizations, and cultural formations—remain unsolved because Schäffle was chiefly a systematizer, not sufficiently historian or politician. His lasting merit lies above all in national economy, where his synthetic power had firmer disciplinary ground.
The conclusion is cautious, not dismissive. Sociology may yet become scientific, but only through the convergence of specialized research and repeatedly observed regularities, not through premature universal schemes.
Und damit, — nur damit — nähert sich die Sozialwissenschaft, wie jede Wissenschaft, der Erkenntnis von Gesetzen, welche die Welt der menschlichen Gemeinschaft regieren, die sie aber vorderhand nur ahnen, dann vermuten kann und erst in wiederholt beobachteten Regelmäßigkeiten ihrer Wirksamkeit zu erkennen gelernt hat.
English translation: And thereby—only thereby—does social science, like any science, approach knowledge of the laws that govern the world of human community: laws which for the time being it can only sense, then surmise, and has only learned to recognize in the repeatedly observed regularities of their operation.
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