heless, it is necessary that we speak further of this
doctrine, in order to explain better and more in detail for what
reasons two of the so-called factors, the state and the law, have been
and are still considered as the principal and exclusive subject of
history.

Historians have indeed for centuries placed in these forms of social
life the essence of development. Moreover, they have perceived this
development only in the modification of these forms. History has for
centuries been treated as a discipline relative to the
juridico-political movement and even to the political movement
principally. The substitution of society for politics is a recent thing,
and much more recent still is the reduction of society to the elements
of historical materialism. In other words, sociology is of quite recent
invention, and the reader, I hope, will have understood for himself that
I employ this term for the sake of brevity, to indicate in a general
manner the science of social functions and variations, and that I do not
hold to the specific sense given it by the Positivists.

It is more satisfactory to say that, up to the beginning of this
century, the data bearing upon usages, customs, beliefs, etc., or even
upon the _natural conditions_, which serve as the foundation and
connection for social forms, were not mentioned in political histories
unless as objects of simple curiosity, or as accessories and complements
of the narration.

All this cannot be a simple accident, and indeed is not. There is, then,
a double interest in taking account of the tardy appearance of social
history, both because our doctrine justifies yet again by this means
its reason for existence, and because we thus eliminate, in a definite
manner, the so-called factors.

If we make an exception of certain critical moments in which social
classes, by an extreme incapacity for adapting themselves to a condition
of relative equilibrium, enter into a crisis of more or less prolonged
anarchy, and if we make an exception of those catastrophes in which an
entire world disappears, as at the fall of the Roman Empire of the West,
or at the dissolution of the Califate, then it may be said that, ever
since there has been a written history, the state appears not only as
the creation of society but also as its support. The first step that
child-like thought had made in this order of considerations is in this
statement: That which governs is also that which creates.

If