ABSTRACT
The social sciences have a particular mission in the furtherance of the cause of the United Nations. Not only can they join with the other sciences and arts in the cooperative enterprise of strengthening the bases of mutual understanding but they are specially qualified to explore the conditions of understanding, to discover the obstacles to it, and to suggest ways in which these can be overcome. For sociologists have been pre-eminently concerned with social relations as such. Their studies have not been directed, for the most part, to the particular sociologies of nations in the sense in which historians have written the histories of particular nations. The Social and Economic Council and other organs of the United Nations might find it advantageous to formulate projects for unesco that could be made the themes, after due preparation, of such conferences.
