The Scope of Social Technology

UNDERSTANDING of the present and direction of the future depend upon knowledge of the past.History treats the phenomena of human life in their process of unfolding.Thus there is a history of the concrete, individual facts of political life; of educational ideals, methods, and systems; of military organization and conflicts; of industry and commerce; of art and religion.Even the history of philosophy, and of economic and political theory, may be named as distinct from the systematic presentation of philosophy, economics, or politics.'Wundt has treated the province of psychology, individual and folk-psychology, philology, history, ethnology, the doctrine of population, politics, economics, jurisprudence, philosophy, and shown their relations to each other.2Economics3 deals with the phenomena of wealth-that is, of material, transferable, and limited means of satisfying human desires.Grand divisions of economics are theoretical economics and practical economics.Theoretical economics includes statics and dynamics.Practical economics includes economic politics and finance.Already we have treatises on agrarian politics, politics of commerce, manufactures, transportation, the economics of the "labor question," of ecclesiastical institutions, and of educational systems.It is sometimes claimed that there is a particular practical economic science wherever the problem is relatively wide in scope and connected with a natural group of phenomena.The tendency to mark off specialized "sciences" is seen in biology as well as in economics, and there would be more justification for this in sociology because of the greater complexity of the phenomena.