Sociology — Conclusions
The conclusions of Glenn's Sociology set out as numbered theses, following the order of the tract, with the tract's dated positions marked.
Tract: Sociology · Paul J. Glenn · 1935 · 18 articles in three Books School: Thomist Depends on: Ethics — right, duty, justice, the moral act. Natural Theology — God’s existence and providence, assumed and re-proved in brief. Philosophical Psychology — the soul, intellect, free will, restated here in Book I.
What this tract is for
Not sociology in the modern empirical sense. Glenn’s Sociology is a normative science: it asks how social life ought to be ordered, and derives its principles from the nature of man rather than from survey data. Where Ethics treats the individual moral act, Sociology treats institutions — family, state, Church — and the collective problems of the age.
Its governing claim is that social science without a true account of man is not merely incomplete but methodologically unsound. Book I is therefore an extended re-derivation of God, the soul, free will and grace, on the ground that a sociologist who does not hold these will misread the very facts in front of him.
The architecture
- Book I — Fundamental Principles. God and Christ; then man’s soul, understanding, free will, and grace. Establishes what a human being is, since everything after depends on it.
- Book II — The Structure of Society. The social element (the origin of man, the person, rights and duties); the social unit (the family); the social groups (state and Church).
- Book III — The Problems of Society. The same three levels revisited as concrete difficulties: problems of the family, of the community, of the nations — each split into moral and economic.
Books II and III are deliberately parallel: II gives the institution as it ought to be, III the institution as it is failing. And Book I is not preamble — Glenn returns to it constantly as the standard against which failures in III are measured.
Book I — Fundamental Principles
1. Sociology presupposes theism. God exists, and the world including man belongs to Him by absolute right of ownership. Glenn’s argument for putting this first: if the justice of that primal claim goes unrecognised, the sociologist has no way of knowing what justice for man is, and works guided only by sentiment, prejudice, or unthinking allegiance to some set of arbitrary rules. → B1 C1 A1 — God
2. God acts on the world as creation, preservation, and government or providence. → B1 C1 A1
3. Christ is true God as well as true man, proved from His claim, His personal character, His works, His prophecies, and His Resurrection. → B1 C1 A2 — Christ
4. Christ redeemed mankind and founded a Church to carry the fruits of the Redemption to all men of all ages. All are obliged to find that Church and become worthy members of it; Glenn identifies it as the Roman Catholic Church alone. (Note the register: this is a philosophy manual that argues from revelation at this point, and says so.) → B1 C1 A2
5. The human soul exists and is the single principle of man’s threefold life — vegetal, sentient, rational. A man has only one soul, though it is multiple in its functions. → B1 C2 A1 — The Existence and Nature of Man’s Soul
6. Body and soul are united substantially, not accidentally, and the soul is demonstrably spiritual and immortal. → B1 C2 A1
7. Man possesses understanding and free will, and free will cannot be rationally denied — established by concrete example as well as abstract reasoning. → B1 C2 A2 — Human Understanding and Free-Will
8. Duty follows upon freedom. The fundamental human duties are to practise the true religion and to live virtuously. → B1 C2 A2
9. Sociology that discounts free will is unscientific. Many modern sociologists, field workers especially, treat their “cases” impersonally, attributing character wholly to heredity and environment. Consequently they make no appeal to free will and open no avenues for its readier functioning in the remedies they propose. Glenn’s charge is not that this is immoral but that it is demonstrably unscientific — it omits a real causal factor. This is the tract’s characteristic move, and it recurs in every Book: metaphysics deployed as a critique of method in social science. → B1 C2 A2
10. Divine grace — sanctifying (habitual) and actual — is a real factor in human lives which the sociologist cannot omit and still have his doctrines square with fact. → B1 C2 A3 — Divine Grace in Human Lives
Book II — The Structure of Society
The social element
11. Evolutionism or Transformism is a hypothesis, not a scientific fact, and as touching man Glenn holds it demonstrably false. ⚠ Dated — see below. → B2 C1 A1 — The Origin of Man
12. Even if evolution were established for lower life-forms, it would not touch the question of human origin nor enter into any explanation of the nature of a man. Glenn presses this as the more important point: the evolutionary assumption cannot explain first origins at all, and importing it into sociology renders that sociology “inept, sterile, and scientistic.” → B2 C1 A1
13. The true origin of man is ultimately God’s creation of the first parents; proximately the human reproductive process together with the immediate divine creation of each individual soul. The pre-existence of human souls is untenable. → B2 C1 A1
14. A person is an individual substance of a rational nature. Substantial personality invests every human being with a worth not to be calculated or expressed in cold terms of speech. → B2 C1 A2 — The Character of the Human Person
15. The dignity of the person is the root-principle of sociology. Glenn’s own section heading, and the single load-bearing thesis of the tract — every conclusion in Books II and III is referred back to it. → B2 C1 A2
16. Rights and duties are grounded in the natural law, with right, duty, justice, charity and equity defined and distinguished at the outset. The natural duty of worshipping God in the true religion is treated first, before any social right. → B2 C1 A3 — Fundamental Human Rights and Duties
17. Four fundamental rights are established in order: life and bodily integrity (self-murder is evil, and certain measures recommended by modern sociologists violate this right); liberty, with its proper field and its modern violations; labour; and property, as the normal requirement for fulfilling the duties of life and labour. → B2 C1 A3
The social unit — the family
18. The family is anterior to every other social group, vested with rights and duties no State can limit or take away. → B2 C2 A1 — The Origin and Nature of the Family
19. The family’s origin is not evolutionary but the institution of monogamous marriage, which came into the world with the creation of the first man and wife. → B2 C2 A1
20. Marriage is both a natural and a divine institution — the normal earthly destiny of most human beings, yet not compulsory on all; those who choose may lead a life of single continence. → B2 C2 A1
21. Marriage has two essential attributes, unity and indissolubility, and divorce is anti-social — as are the evils that lead to and favour it. → B2 C2 A1
22. Marriage is an enduring contract, not a matter of sentiment or passing attraction, calling for perfect fidelity on the part of both spouses. → B2 C2 A1
23. Sterilisation, contraception, and segregation of the sexes are essentially evil as tending to forbid the family. (Glenn’s terms are “sterilisation, prevention, segregation.”) → B2 C2 A1
24. The family in the normal home is the best social school and the model economic society. For ideal functioning it should have several children and a due balance of sons and daughters. → B2 C2 A2 — Social Functions of the Family
25. Parents hold the primary right in education, and the family is the bridge between the person and the wider communities of civil and religious life. → B2 C2 A2
26. Women in industry and business is fundamentally anti-social, and the feminist theory of “equality of the sexes” is fallacious — all human beings being equal in dignity and value, but the sexes complementary rather than identical, with distinct and distinctive requirements. ⚠ Strongly dated — see below. → B2 C2 A2
The social groups — state and Church
27. The State is a natural society, perfect in its own sphere, whose members are first families and only secondarily individual persons. That ordering is deliberate and does real work: it is what grounds the family’s immunity from state absorption in Th. 18. → B2 C3 A1 — The State
28. The State originates in man’s natural and normal needs, not in any primeval social contract. → B2 C3 A1
29. Rational nature does not dictate the form of government. Men may be ruled by an absolute monarch, a senate, an elected leader, a president, or another manager or ruler; forms are determined by differing circumstances. What nature requires is that there be some workable form. Glenn takes no position on the best regime, which is worth noting given how often manuals of this period are assumed to. → B2 C3 A1
30. State authority is limited, and its functions are both negative (protection) and positive (promotion of the well-being of its members). → B2 C3 A1
31. The Church is a perfect society whose first function is the spiritual care of men, and she requires a measure of earthly independence and temporal sovereignty to discharge her duties unhampered. → B2 C3 A2 — The Church
32. The Church has a true place in the earthly affairs of society, because the direction of temporalities among men is inevitably bound up with issues that are spiritual and eternal. → B2 C3 A2
Book III — The Problems of Society
33. The family’s problem of stability — its causes, and its one adequate means of solution. → B3 C1 A1 — Moral Problems of the Family
34. The problem of property: there is an urgent social need for permanently established, privately owned homesteads. → B3 C1 A1
35. The problem of labour and unemployment, with the causes of depressions and their only available cure. → B3 C1 A1
36. A living, marrying, family wage is owed — a wage sufficient to maintain a man and his family in decency and frugal comfort. The forces working against it are partly industrial and social, partly personal to those managing the family budget. Glenn’s three remedies: the practice of religion, the establishment of just associations, and warranted intervention by the civil power. → B3 C1 A2 — Economic Problems of the Family
37. On crime and delinquency: every activity studied or promoted concerns human beings, not impersonal “cases.” Human beings have free will, full human dignity, and are responsive to noble motives and to divine grace. The social scientist who loses sight of this in the maze of scientific apparatus will either fail of permanently successful work or do positive harm to society. (Th. 9 applied.) → B3 C2 A1 — Moral Problems of the Community
38. Social dependency — the care, maintenance and relief owed to the poor, to paupers, and to orphans. → B3 C2 A1
39. On racial problems: mankind is one true society descended from a common stock, and no member is naturally of greater value than any other. Talk of superior and inferior races is inane; Glenn names and dismisses the Nordic theory directly. Inequalities of ability, talent, opportunity and possession are real; inequality of human dignity is not — there is no greater and lesser in the measurement of human souls.
Applied to America: Glenn states plainly that the Negro is treated unfairly and definitely suffers wrong. He was brought to the country against his will, kept in servitude, denied opportunities of education, and is now confined to the poorer parts of towns, denied recreational facilities furnished for whites, excluded from proportionate participation in community affairs, and made to feel a social inferior. Glenn names segregation as a humiliation, lists it among the wrongs rather than the remedies, and classes the whole question as a moral problem for that reason. ⚠ Period idiom — see below. → B3 C2 A1
40. Taxation is a natural requirement for the maintenance of government and imposes a personal obligation on the citizen. The problem is not whether to tax but the difficulty of establishing a perfectly just and fair system of levies. → B3 C2 A2 — Economic Problems of the Community
41. A balanced population requires a proportionate rural population — requisite for family life, for wider ownership of land, for decent self-employment, and for a self-supporting nation. → B3 C2 A2
42. Nationalism must be distinguished from patriotism, and treaties and covenants bind in conscience. → B3 C3 A1 — Moral Problems of the Nations
43. Wars are mostly unjustified, nearly always inept methods of achieving justice among nations, and wars beget other wars. Nearly every war ends in a merely temporary settlement; the treaty of peace almost always imposes harsh and humiliating requirements on the conquered, and so becomes an effective instrument in preparing the next war. Few wars are really finished. Glenn’s verdict on the record of war as a means to justice is the single word Failure. → B3 C3 A2 — Economic Problems of the Nations
44. The Malthusian doctrine of population and food supply is wholly fallacious, and the danger the world faces is under-population, not over-population. ⚠ Dated — see below. → B3 C3 A2
Dated positions
This tract has almost no intra-scholastic disputes — unlike Theodicy or Criteriology, Glenn is not arguing against Molina or Mercier here. What it has instead is a set of positions resting on the science, economics and social assumptions of 1935. They are stated as conclusions, so a reader needs to know which ones later ceased to be held.
| Thesis | Glenn’s position | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Evolution (Th. 11) | A hypothesis, not a fact; “demonstrably false” as touching man | Pius XII’s Humani Generis (1950) later treated the evolution of the human body as a legitimately open question for Catholics, requiring only the immediate creation of each soul — which Glenn also holds (Th. 13). His theological conclusion survives; his scientific verdict does not. |
| Women in industry (Th. 26) | Fundamentally anti-social; “equality of the sexes” fallacious | Not a position of the Church as such then or now, and not repeated in later Catholic social teaching. Glenn’s underlying distinction — equal dignity, complementary rather than identical roles — is separable from the conclusion he draws about employment. |
| Malthus (Th. 44) | Wholly fallacious; the danger is under-population | The demographic argument has been contested in both directions since; Glenn’s confidence reflects the interwar birth-rate decline, not a settled result. |
| Racial problems (Th. 39) | Racial hierarchy false; the Negro suffers real wrong; segregation a humiliation | The conclusion is unusually forthright for a 1935 American manual and needs no qualification. The vocabulary is of its period, and any quotation on the site will read as such. |
A note on this section: it has no counterpart in the Metaphysics, Natural Theology or Epistemology sheets, because those tracts don’t need one. I’ve added it here because several of Glenn’s conclusions are empirical rather than metaphysical, and a page that lists them flat, without dates, would be presenting 1935 social science as current. Cut it if you’d rather the sheets stay purely expository — but if it goes, Th. 11, 26 and 44 need some other marking.
Key terms
— perfect society · one possessing within itself all means necessary to its end (state and Church each are, in their own order)
— natural society · one arising from human nature, not convention
— social contract · the rejected theory of the state’s origin
— family wage · a wage sufficient to keep a man and his family in decency and frugal comfort
— transformism · evolution by transformation of species
— sanctifying / actual grace · habitual elevation of the soul / transient divine help
— justice, charity, equity · the three measures of social obligation, distinguished in B2 C1 A3
Reading it properly
The tract is best read out of order. B2 C1 A2 (“The Root-principle of Sociology”) is where Glenn states what he is actually doing, and it makes sense of Book I’s long detour through God, the soul and grace. Then B1 C2 A2 for the argument that a determinist social science is unscientific on its own terms — the most interesting thing in the tract, and the one whose force does not depend on any of the dated material above.
Book III is the weakest part and the most time-bound; read it as a period document rather than as a set of standing conclusions.