Publisher's Synopsis
In approaching the definition of the social phenomenon, what above all strikes the eyes of the observer is the general faculty of such a phenomenon to lend itself to a double method: scientific and creative. Social life presents matter par excellence, which submits itself as much to scientific observation as to teleological action, and constitutes the object of studies, as well as of politics. In appearance, this bifaciality could seem contradictory, and its two exclusive faces one of the other. For science must have to do with a matter accessible to our experience, with the phenomena of life, with facts, which universally and without exception are subject to the inflexible law of causality, and from then on, every vital fact individual as well as social, the birth of a new historical current as well as the release of heat, must be considered as a necessary and inevitable result of certain pre-existing facts, of certain given conditions, the result towards which all "must-be" and conscious effort of the human will is just as superfluous and devoid of any meaning, as it is to any natural processes.
