“In 1900, Alessandro Grappali wrote: ‘It has been more than fifty years since Auguste Comte gave birth to his young discipline [social physics]: the baptism of life by clearly defining the methods, but the task and the fuel, have not been able to change the state of crisis that inevitably beset any discipline in its infancy.’ These lines could also be written now. Probably Durkheim with his Rules of Sociological Method said the way, the only real way of scientific sociology. But the inevitable mistakes that Groppali reported, have not disappeared, especially as Durkheim has left for the moment no one after him to continue his work. Mr. combat Bouglé Professor those mistakes which even their authors return. Witness Mr. René Worms whose Sociology, reduced to fair value the organicist theories. But there is a more ‘pure’ design, more ‘scientific’, so-called sociology, which has long been adeptness, which gave her the safest works between 1896 and 1914. It is more false and more dangerous; we want to talk about the mechanistic conception of social science. Comte especially Quetelet and Spencer also have their responsibility for this design. These are especially Mr. Haret, Lester Ward, Winiarski, and A.-P. Barcelo, who developed the mechanistic conception.”

“We have no illusions, we know that our detailed study will simply highlight more strongly the conclusion that the social mechanism is a utopia, a metaphysics, and we need more than ever think about the strong words of Durkheim, ‘what our rule claim is that the sociologist in entering the social world is aware that it enters the unknown: he must feel in the presence of facts which the laws are also unexpected that could be those of the life, when biology was not made’.”