Now this account of the concept of _social economics_ is capable of two interpretations. The first is that it is intended to describe a science, which has indeed for its object (as is proper for sciences) _necessary_ connections, in the strict sense of the word. But how establish this _necessity_? How make the concepts suitable to _social economics_? Evidently by allowing ourselves to be guided by a principle, by abstracting a single side from concrete reality; and if it is to be for economics this principle can be none other than the _economic principle_, and social economics will consider only the economic side of a given social life. Profits, rent, interest, labour value, usury, wages, crises, will then appear as economic phenomena necessary under given conditions of the social order, through which the economic principle exerts its influence. The other interpretation is that Stammler's social economics does not indeed accomplish the dissolving work of analysis but considers this or that social life in the concrete. In this case it could do nothing but _describe_ a given society. To _describe_ does not mean to _describe in externals and superficially_; but, more accurately, to free that group of facts from every obscurity, showing what it actually is, and describing it, as far as possible in its naked reality. But this is, in fact, historical knowledge, which may assume varied forms, or rather may define in various ways its own subject. It may study a _society_--in all its aspects during a given period of time, or at a given moment of its existence, or it may even take up one or more aspects of social life and study them as they present themselves in different societies and at different times, and so on. It is history always, even when it avails itself of _comparison_ as an instrument of research. And such a study will not have to make _concepts_, but will take them as it needs them from those sciences, which do, in fact, elaborate concepts. Thus it would have been to great interest to see the working out of this new _social economics_ of Stammler a little more clearly, so that we might determine exactly in which of the aforesaid two classes it ought to be placed. Whether it is merely political economy in the ordinary sense, or whether it is the concrete study of single societies and of groups of them. In the latter case Stammler has added another name or rather two names; _science of the matter of social life_ and _social economics_, to the many phrases by which of late the old _History_ has been disguised (social history, history of civilisation, concrete sociology, comparative sociology, psychology of the populace and of the classes, etc.). And the gain, if we may be allowed to say so, will not be great. _September 1898._ FOOTNOTES: