ABSTRACT
Social science has so far presented people with at least two new and highly problematical creatures whom people are unlikely ever to encounter in our everyday experience. In general, economists and psychologists have not been prepared to face the contradiction between their artificial human being and the real one; their critics have usually belonged only marginally to the profession. Noble and impressive though the definition of sociology as the “science of man” may be, such vague phrases tell people little about the specific subject matter of the discipline. The problems of sociology all refer people to one fact that is as accessible to our experience as the natural facts of our environment. The attempt to reduce man to homo sociologicus for the sake of solving certain problems is neither as arbitrary nor as recent as one might think.
