  In “A Program for a Sociological Society” (ca. 1897), an early essay belonging to the same period as “The Study of the Negro Problems” and “The Conservation of Races,” Du Bois places the emergence of the science of sociology in historical perspective. Prior to the industrial revolution, he argues, there was but one science that studied the phenomenon of human action: namely, political economy. Political economy focused on the production, distribution, and exchange of goods under stable social conditions, but gave no attention to the intensification of problems of crime, disease, poverty, prostitution, and ignorance that came with “the new concentration of industrys [sic], crowded into centers of population.” Sociology addresses these problems, demanding a “wider inquiry into the causes and scope of human action.” More generally, “[s]ociology is…the name given to that vast field of inquiry into human action as manifested in modern organized life.”