Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen · 1911
Schullern’s short review presents Maunier’s book as an effort to coordinate economics and sociology under conditions of increasing specialization. Its foundation is the social character of economic phenomena:
Der hierfür grundlegende Gedanke ist der, daß die wirtschaftlichen soziale Tatsachen sind, ein Umstand, der ausführlich nachgewiesen wird.
English translation: The thought fundamental to this is that economic facts are social facts, a circumstance which is demonstrated in detail.
Schullern praises the careful classification of economic facts and traces its conceptual consequence: legal phenomena exemplify social phenomena because their traditional and coercive characteristics are most fully developed there. The first book reconstructs the historical alternation between combining and separating economics and sociology; the reviewer commends Maunier’s wide reading. Underlying this history is a claim about the unity of the object studied:
Für ihn ist die soziale Wirklichkeit eine innerlich gleichartige und ungeteilte, deren Betrachtung nicht etwa wegen ihres Wesens, sondern nur aus Gründen der Bequemlichkeit zerlegt werden darf, aber nicht muß.
English translation: For him social reality is an inwardly homogeneous and undivided one, the consideration of which may be divided up, not on account of its essence, but only for reasons of convenience — though it need not be.
Disciplinary divisions thus serve convenience rather than reflect divisions inherent in social reality. Yet, as Schullern reports, affirming the need for an economic sociology has not sufficed to create one. The second book develops this problem through economics’ relations with social morphology, law and morality, linguistics, aesthetics, religion, and technology. Schullern singles out the discussion of law and morality as especially instructive. His favorable assessment rests on the book’s conceptual organization, historical learning, and illumination of disciplinary connections; the review’s central concern is how specialization can coexist with an integrated understanding of social life.
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