Having translated into French the ‘Methodological Note’ that introduces The Polish Peasant in Europe and in America by William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, the present authors compare this theoretical statement with that of Émile Durkheim laid out in The Rules of Sociological Method. In both works sociology is considered to be a nomothetic and teleological science. The major difference between the two works lies in the analysis of causality. The sociological method is based on different types of reasoning (inductive/deductive) and different types of data (objective and general in the first case, specific and individual in the second). Their differential definitions of science lead Durkheim, on the one hand, and Thomas and Znaniecki, on the other, in directions, which, up to a point, are mutually exclusive. This being said, there are similarities between the Durkheimian school (which includes Bouglé and Halbwachs) and Florian Znaniecki’s later (1934) work.
The school in Frenchspeaking Africa : an institutional appropriation.
In Africa, the school institution is allogeneous, and as it was not secreted by society, it is not adapted to these countries rythm of growth. It has not the same results as in Occident, but brought forth great and numerous disorders, so that we cannot speak actually of social reproduction by the school.
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