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By sociology Pareto means a synthesis of all the particular researches and disciplines dealing with human society—law, economics, political history, the history of religion, and so on—in a search for the relationships between social facts (1, 2). Sociology is to provide a framework into which will fit the results of these specialized studies; it is to be a comprehensive study which aims at discovering the principles underlying the form and changes of society in general.Such is Pareto's own formulation. It is apparent that he believes both that there are general principles underlying the form and changes of society, and that these can be discovered by a new discipline, sociology, working on the results of the specialized studies. The primary concern of the new discipline must therefore be methodology, and Pareto devotes much more attention to the problem of method in the social sciences than he does to the construction of his own theory of society. His justification for this is his belief that the methods of all previous sociologists have been basically faulty and can lead only to invalid conclusions. In this paper it is proposed to follow Pareto's emphasis, and to deal with his analysis of social facts and his general theory of society primarily with a view to bringing out those aspects which raise the problem of method in the social sciences.

Comte, writing a century ago, claimed that in human affairs we were just entering the scientific stage. Already the physical sciences had made an auspicious beginning. They have made spectacular advances since Comte's pronouncement. Nevertheless, extensive areas in the physical sciences remain to be explored. Still wider areas in the domain of the social sciences await systematic investigation and precise analysis. The need for scientific advances as a means of meeting recurring crises in human affairs seems more necessary than in the days of Comte. It is quite evident today that we have greater sophistication, more extensive questioning, and a more marked social self-consciousness. The word scientific, widely and loosely used, seems to symbolize the temper of our age.