THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

achieve something large and socially valuable, his fascination
by sociology, he was led to conceptualise his aim in life as
that of creating «practical theories*, of becoming absorbed in
some task oi «applied sociology*. The reduction of political
economy to formulas seems only partly appropriate to such
an aim, and the venture seems gradually to have lapsed ai
his interests became channelled in another direction.
THE OFFICE OF SOCIOLOGICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Towards the end of 1891 a Societe des Etudes Sociales
et Politiques was formed in Brussels by a number of prominent
Belgian scholars. Otlet observed its emergence with considerable
interest, and at the end of the year he confessed to
having two particularly serious subjects on his mind. The first
was the familiar but.haunting «ambition not for myself but for
a great new continuing work», the second, the former apparently
given some focus by the recent foundation of the Societe
des Etudes, was «a sort of institute for the synthesis of
sociology and psychology*.
Henri La Fontaine directed a section for bibliography
within the Societe des Etudes. There appears to be no account
of the beginning of Otlet's collaboration with La Fontaine but
social and professional acquaintance must have soon quickened
and deepened with the discovery of strong mutual interests.
The two men belonged to similar learned and other societies;
they were both lawyers, though La Fontaine was fifteen
years older than Otlet and had gained some eminence as
a jurist in the area of international arbitration. Like Otlet, La
Fontaine had been a stagiaire of Picard's and had worked on
Picard's monumental compilation of Belgian jurisprudence,
the Pandectes beiges. It was clear that the strengthening
during 1892 and 1893 of his friendship with La Fontaine was
of the utmost importance for Otlet, for it was to provide him
throughout most of his life with that close intellectual companionship
the absence of which he had so often lamented in his
diary. 12
All of Picard's clerks presumably did their stint of work
on the Pandectes beiges which grew steadily in size throughout
the last part of the century and on into the twentieth. By
1920, indeed, it consisted of over 100 weighty volumes. 13 Some
knowledge of the underlying philosophy of this work is useful
in understanding the foundation in 1893 by Otlet and La Fontaine,
on the basis provided by the Bibliographical Section of
the Societe des Etudes Sociales et Politiques, of an Institut
International de Bibliographie Sociologique. In this philosophy
•one may locate the source of the narrowing of Otlet's attention
from sociology and psychology, from the universalist
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