challenges the validity of analogy as a method capable of giving accurate results, his views in this respect conflicting with those of Spencer and certain Russian sociologists, above all with those of Stronin.
Mihailovskii contests Spencer's opinion that society is an organism, rejecting at the same time false conceptions of a collective consciousness. For Mihailovskii, society is an organisation of individuals of like kind and of equal value. In his explanation of historical and social facts, the sociologist ought not to set out from the whole, but from the consciousness of the individual. The nature of the individual, says Mihailovskii, is most conspicuously shown in work; for men, for the human individual, work is what motion is for matter. (It must be observed that Mihailovskii is here drawing an analogy!) Work is the chief attribute of individuality, the chief characteristic of individuality as such. Talent, birth, wealth, beauty—these are non-essentials, to a greater or less extent they are chance qualities; talent comes by favour of fortune; a man's wealth is not won solely by himself; and so on. But work is the deliberate use of energy, the expenditure of energy to attain a goal, and work is therefore the manifestation of man's true essence, the manifestation of individuality.
It follows that the essence of sociality is to be found in the collaboration or cooperation of individuals, and that the nature of the cooperation determines the character of successive epochs.
For this reason, because cooperation socialises men, Mihailovskii is just as little inclined as Comte and other sociologists to admit the validity of economic materialism. Cooperation is not merely economic in nature, but comprises all social work, including intellectual work. In the last resort culture subserves the purposes of work, and therefore culture cannot be utilised as an explanation of social and historical processes. Of course the cooperation of human beings is explicable by motives and reasons, and is referable above all to inborn egoism and altruism. Here Mihailovskii follows Adam Smith, for to natural and inborn egoism he counterposes the no less inborn and natural altruism; he appeals to Comte's "altruism," to Feuerbach's "tuism," and to Dühring's "sympathetic natural impulses."
Mihailovskii was not slow to study Marx. Immediately
