Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/583

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REVIEWS
563

carding the old labels "egotism" and "altruism" there seems danger of missing certain vivid realities of "my-feeling" as pretty definitely set over against the thought of other people. The reaction is thoroughgoing and at times plays havoc with traditional ways of thought and speech, which the conservative will for a long time regard as corresponding to certain realities.

In spite of such incredulity, this sort of analysis will bring the student to close quarters with actual social facts. Dr. Cooley has made an important contribution in both matter and form to the growth of social theory. But even more valuable is his practical application of this theory to the problems of personal development, of self-realization through living a common life with and for one's fellows.

George E. Vincent

The University of Chicago



Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties. By M. Ostrogorski. Translated from the French by Frederick Clarke, M.A., with a preface by the Right Hon. James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth. 2 vols. New York: The Macmillan Co. Pp. Iviii + 627 and xliii + 793.

This work will occupy a place like that of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America or Bryce's American Commonwealth. It must not only be consulted by all students of the actual workings of democratic political machinery, but it will have to be used as their point of departure by all serious students of the subject.

The subject-matter is not the constitutional history or the legal structure of democratic peoples, but the form, spirit, and workings of political parties, the "government outside the government." As Mr. Bryce observes (Preface, p. xxxix):

No one has, so far as I know, produced any treatise containing a systematic examination and description of the structure of parties or organizations governed by settled rules and working by established methods. Even in the United States, where party organization early attained a completeness and effective power unapproached in any other country, I could not find, when in 1883 I began to study, and was seeking to portray, the institutions of that country, any account of the very remarkable and well-compacted scheme of organization which had been at work there for forty or fifty years; and noted that among even the best-educated men there were few that had