Growing numbers of social scientists are questioning the products and methodologies of social science because these do not appear to serve as guides to solutions of community problems. The principal cause is fragmentation of disciplines, methodologies, and assumptions of values. What is needed is an integrating principle or reference which will provide a common basis by which apparently conflicting approaches can be evaluated. Presented herein is a topology for such a principle. The topology has two major dimensions, individual needs and community needs, each containing items designed to be specific enough to guide and evaluate testing, but general enough to allow for evolving situations. The axiom on which the topology is based assumes that human societies can only progress if they hold an articulated vision of what they strive to become. Such a vision must be phenomenologically based and must require us to stretch beyond where we are now.
'Eric Fromm, The Sane Socieiy, suggests adaptation to conditions destructive to basic human need (for instance, atomizing of human groups) is bound to lead to insanity-a condition which he suggests we now have. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, also makes the case that many of our systems are used, not because they are functional, but because they are there.