Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Joint Review of Izoulet and Joyau (1899)

Schwiedland’s joint review presents two inaugural lectures by philosophy professors: Jean Izoulet’s Les quatre problèmes sociaux, delivered at the Collège de France, and E. Joyau’s Les principes des sciences sociales, delivered at Clermont. Its two successive accounts connect the transformation of social authority with the moral conditions of reform. Schwiedland chiefly reports the lecturers’ arguments; their shared emphasis is that changing institutions requires reciprocal obligations and changes in conduct.

Izoulet divides society into religious, political, economic, and domestic spheres. Relations between creature and deity, people and government, poor and rich, and woman and man have all changed since the preceding century. Democratic demands, workers’ claims, and women’s heightened expectations make legal adjustment unavoidable. Economic dependence is especially resistant to purely contractual solutions:

Bleiben die zufällig Angestellten doch auf die Dauer Mitbürger der Unternehmer!

English translation: Those who happen to be employed do, after all, remain in the long run fellow citizens of the entrepreneurs!

Dismissal does not dissolve the civic bond between employer and worker. Izoulet’s argument thus places economic relations within an enduring social responsibility. Yet he rejects the radical expectation that inherited relationships will change completely: institutions retain an indestructible core even as the growing self-respect of subordinate groups shifts rights in their favor. The decisive change is toward reciprocity:

Das Verhältnis zwischen dem Herrschenden und dem Beherrschenden werde sich zweifellos zweiseitig gestalten.

English translation: The relation between the ruling party and the ruled will doubtless come to take a two-sided form.

The point is not simply to reverse authority but to make rights and duties mutually binding. Izoulet traces the disruption of the old equilibrium across all four spheres to Rousseau. Love, money, law, and faith have been unsettled without a new balance adequate to moral feeling having emerged. His diagnosis therefore combines recognition of necessary reform with anxiety about its unfinished foundations.

Joyau’s lecture moves from these substantive social problems to the methods and purposes of social inquiry. He distinguishes description and classification, historical explanation of change, and practical consideration of what ought to exist. This third standpoint makes judgments of good and evil, justice and injustice integral to the social sciences: they are moral sciences because people recognize an obligation to alleviate suffering and advance the good.

Historical misery does not, for Joyau, disprove the possibility of progress. Earlier submission often reflected hopes deferred to the afterlife, while rebellion met violent suppression. Improvement remains possible, but freedom and reason operate within the enduring effects of education, previous actions, and dependence on others. Social solidarity therefore both obliges individuals and limits abrupt reconstruction.

Deshalb komme es vor allem auf innere Reformen der Menschen an: pour vivre libres, il leur faut les mœurs d'hommes libres.

English translation: What matters above all, therefore, is an inner reform of human beings: in order to live free, they must have the manners and morals of free men.

This conclusion locates lasting reform in habits adequate to freedom, rather than in institutional change alone. Joyau’s appeal to the full realization of liberty, equality, and fraternity closes the review. Read together, the lectures illuminate a late-nineteenth-century conception of social reform in which expanding rights, reciprocal duties, and moral self-transformation are inseparable.