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EMPIRICAL BASES OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY *1
1883
Thanks to the archaeologists we learn where and when a new discovery first appeared, how far and
how long it has spread, and by what roads it has travelled from the place of its origin to its adopted
country. Although they may not take us back to the first furnace which turned out bronze or iron, they
do take us back to the first country and century in which the pointed arch, printing, and oil-painting,
and, still much more anciently, the orders of Greek architecture, the Phoenician alphabet, etc.,
displayed themselves to a justly marvelling world. They devote all their curiosity 1 and activity to
following up a given invention through its manifold disguises and modifications, to recognising the
atrium in the cloister, the praetorium of the Roman magistrate in the Roman church, the Etruscan bench
in the curule-chair, or to tracing out the boundaries of the region to which an invention has spread
through gradual self-propagation and beyond which, for yet to be discovered reasons (in my opinion
they are always the competition of rival inventions), it has been unable to pass, or to studying the
results of the intersection of different inventions which have spread so widely that they have finally
come together in one imaginative brain.
In short, these scholars are forced, perhaps unconsciously, into surveying the social life of the past
from a point of view which is continually approximating that which I claim should be adopted
knowingly and willingly by the sociologist. I refer here to the pure sociologist, who, through a
necessary although artificial abstraction, is distinguished from the naturalist. In distinction to
historians who see nothing else in history than the conflicts and competitions of individuals, that is, of
the arms and legs as well as of the minds of individuals, and who, in regard to the latter, do not
differentiate between ideas and desires of the most diverse origins, confusing those few that are new
and personal with a mass of those that are merely copies; in distinction to those poor carvers-up of
reality who have been unable to perceive the true dividing line between vital and social facts, the
point where they separate without tearing, archaeologists stand out as makers of pure sociology,
because, as the personality of those they unearth is impenetrable, and only the work of the dead, the
vestiges of their archaic wants and ideas, are open to their scrutiny, they hear, in a certain way, like
the Wagnerian ideal, the music without seeing the orchestra of the past. In their own eyes, I know, this
is a cruel deprivation; but time, in destroying the corpses and blotting out the memories of the painters
and writers and modellers whose inscriptions and palimpsests they decipher and whose frescoes and
torsos and potsherds they so laboriously interpret, has, nevertheless, rendered them the service of
setting free everything that is properly social in human events by eliminating everything that is vital *2
and by casting aside as an impurity the carnal and fragile contents of the glorious form which is truly
worthy of resurrection.
To archaeologists, then, history becomes both simplified and transfigured. In their eyes it consists
merely of the advent and development, of the competitions and conflicts, of original wants and ideas,
or, to use a single term, of inventions. Inventions thus become great historic figures and the real agents
of human progress. The proof that this idealistic point of view is the just one lies in its fruitfulness.
Through its [fortunate], although, I repeat, involuntary, adoption, do not philologist and mythologist,
the modern archaeologist, under different names, cut all the Gordian knots and shed light upon all the
obscurities of history and, without taking away any of its grace and picturesqueness, bestow upon it