ABSTRACT
The social significance of ignorance and ignoring may have important latent functions which are as revealing of the social structure as positive knowledge. The bibliographical accounts of the section on "Economic Sociology" was the responsibility of Bourgin, Simiand, and a new addition to the team, M. Halbwachs. In political outlook, Emil Durkheim and Max Weber were also remarkably close. Both had a sympathetic understanding of the working class and its spokesmen, both felt that socialism sought too facile a solution to the complexity of the modern social order. Durkheim and Weber saw eye-to-eye in rejecting biological and racial explanations of social behavior when this was still in vogue in the wake of Social Darwinism. Durkheim was a confirmed republican throughout his life and Weber gravitated to this position in later life from an earlier support of the monarchy, but neither was dogmatically and blindly the follower of a political creed.
