460 I English for Psychologists and Sociologists

belief was harmful. Even prejudices sometimes performed a useful social role, uniting a group and strengthening its members' sense of safety and reliability. It was specially necessary for the stability of society to maintain those groups and institutions by which the individual was linked with other people and with society as a whole. Urba­nisation, industrialisation, and commerce, which were undermining these traditional foundations of social being, did not lead to a higher form of social organisation but to social and moral disintegration.

Whereas the traditionalists regarded society as an organic whole that had to be understood in order to adapt to it better, the liberals saw in it an «artificial body», a more or less mechanical aggregate of parts that could be altered and improved by people's conscious activity.

Further development of capitalism fostered a polarisa­tion of scholars' class positions. In the theories of the English utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and James Mill (1773-1836), social interest was wholly reduced to the sum total of private interests; «the bourgeoisie is no longer presented as a special class, but as the class whose conditions of existence are those of the whole society». Society, for Bentham, was a body made up of individuals who were regarded as its con­stituent members. While putting forward the principle of achieving the maximum good for the greatest number as a general ethical law, he at the same time considered socially normal and morally acceptable when people strove to achieve their own private interests, even when that did harm to others.

Social thinking did not develop just within the framework of bourgeois ideology. The Utopian socialism of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen was also based on a definite social philosophy on whose banner were the demands of scientific character, sobriety, and positiveness. The works of Saint-Simon (1760-1825) were particularly

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important on that plane. Utopian socialism was incom­patible in principle with scientific investigation.

The real revolution in the science of society, which laid the foundation of scientific sociology, was made by Marx and Engeis. Marx put an end to the view of society being a mechanical aggregation of individuals which allows of all sorts of modification at the will of the authorities and which emerges and changes casually, and was the first to put sociology on a scientific basis by establishing the concept of the economic formation of society as the sum-total of given production relations, by establishing the fact that the development of such formations is a process of natural history.

Marx stressed that people were at once actors and authors of their world-historical drama, and that the structure of society coincided in that sense with the structure of their joint, combined activity.

The understanding of society as a whole, law-governed, innerly connected system entails the principle of objective scientific investigation.

V. Translate the text in writing:

HERBERT SPENCERS SOCIOLOGICAL CONCEPTION