VIII. The Primary Concepts of Sociology.1
Sep., 1902 entry in the serialized work
"The Scope of Sociology"
American Journal of Sociology 8(2):197-250.
I. The physical and spiritual environment.
On the physical side we have said all that is needed for the purposes of this survey in the fourth paper of this series2 In a word, sociology is not a physical science, but at every step the sociologist must be prepared to ask the question: To what extent are the activities of men that we are considering influenced by that natural environment which the physical sciences interpret? Sociology is science rather than philosophy-using both terms in an old sense which we shall explain away presently–for this reason: We are not trying to construct a speculative, conceptual abstraction, in order to make that the subject of our inquiry. We are not dealing with a subject that exists in a vacuum, or in the clouds, or merely within the realm of thought-phenomena. We are aware that an earthquake, or a thunderstorm, and an outburst of human passion or a play of human sentiment, occur in the same world, and have to be accounted for, in the case of the second order of facts, by reference in part to the same laws which operate in the case of the first order of facts. Why are crimes against property more frequent in winter than in summer, and why are the same classes of crime more ingenious in the temperate than in the torrid zone? For one reason, among others; that in the former cases the struggle with nature for the means of subsistence is much more difficult. The conditions of life are more relentless. It costs more effort to live at all. The criminal impulse is more sharply stimulated under the pressure of the more acute necessity.
This perception that men are dependent upon physical nature is so obvious that it has often been impossible to break away from the force of its implications sufficiently to see that any other factor is concerned in human life. We have had materialistic interpretations of life galore, from some of the pre-Platonists to living writers. The fact which all these philosophies have overworked is that every external act, and every subjective emotion which occurs in the case of any person, has the whole mass of physical surroundings and antecedents as its conditions. One does not utter a sentiment, or compose a song, or offer a prayer, or feel a transcendental emotion, without being, in some degree or sort, moved to the same by the soil and climate and technical processes and institutional arrangements which constitute the vehicle of one’s life. But the fact that the same farm produces Websters whom the world has already forgotten and the Webster whom the world will never forget, proves that the materialistic interpretation of life is a snap-judgment. The physical environment is always present, but it is not all that is present. In considering any social problem we must always ask: How much does the physical environment have to do with the case? The answer will in some instances be a negligible quantity. In others it will furnish the only clue to the situation, as distinguished from similar situations that turn out differently under other physical conditions.
For instance, the chief reason why Germany cherishes a colonial policy today, and why the United States merely tolerates a provisional colonial policy, is the physical difference between German over-population and American under-population. On the other hand, the reason why Germany clings to the union of church and state, while America abhors it, is so very remotely connected with physical conditions that it would be a strain upon language and ideas to give the physical factor in the case any weight at all. Whether we are dealing with percentages of individual cases of given types in a population, or with types of purely social organization on a large scale, the sociological program must always be to give the physical factor precisely the value which it has-no more, no less, neither minimized nor exaggerated by any a priori, speculative assumptions.
Parallel with the physical environment we must prepare to give proportionate value to the second condition mentioned in the title of this section, viz., the spiritual environment. As Professor Thomas has said in his paper on “The Gaming Instinct”:3
Psychologically the individual is inseparable from his surroundings, and his attitude toward the world is determined by the nature of suggestions from the outside. The general culture and social position of his parents, the ideals of the social set in which he moves, the schools he attends, the literature he sees, the girl he wants to marry,are among the factors which determine the life-directions of the youth. From the complex of suggestions coming to him in the social relations into which he is born or thrown, he selects and follows those recurring persistently, emanating from attractive personalities, or arising in critical circumstances.
Professor Ross has used the term ”social ascendency” for the whole sum of facts in a society by which tradition and derived standards impose themselves upon the individual. This social ascendency is partly by means of social machinery, like the industrial and the governmental systems. It is partly by means of ideas, customs, standards of taste, form, morals, which most of the persons affected by them do not express in words. They are an invisible presence, but they often dictate the course of social events as absolutely as a physical cause procures its effect. Perhaps the best illustration for Americans is the race-sentiment in the South, as contrasted with the promiscuity of sentiment on the same subject in the North. A visitor from the North goes to a southern state, and before he has been there an hour, if he mingles with the people, he detects a something in the social tone which he has read about, but never before directly experienced. He finds himself among some of the most genial, warm-hearted, high-minded people he has ever seen, but he finds them governed by a code of sentiments toward the colored man which seem to him unintelligible and inconsistent. The northern man does not know how to draw the distinctions in his conduct toward the black man which the southern man draws instinctively, and on the other hand the northern man will draw lines at points where the southern man does not feel the need of them. Here are two different spiritual environments. The southern man lives in an environment of race-distinctions. The northern man lives in an environment of merely personal distinctions. To the northern man personal likes and dislikes, social inclusion or exclusion, will depend on the individual. His being a negro makes no more difference than his being a Spaniard or Italian or Russian or Englishman. To the southern man the idea of a socially acceptable negro is a contradiction in terms.
No argument on the merits of the case is implied in the illustration. The point is that these familiar mental attitudes are convenient evidences of the universal reality, viz., a spiritual tone, atmosphere, perspective, standard, which sets the limits of action for individuals in the community.4
It is necessary to emphasize the fact of the spiritual environment, partly because we have that familiarity with it which breeds contempt. It is so commonplace that we think it may be ignored. It is necessary, also, because in other cases the fact is like the pressure of the atmosphere. Each of us is affected by it most intimately, but few of us have discovered it. Just as every portion of space has its physical atmosphere, so every portion of society has its thought-atmosphere. This mental envelope largely explains habit and custom, impulse and endeavor, power and limitation within the society. To know the act, the person, the episode, the social situation, the social problem, the social movement in any single case, we must know the thought-environment or the spiritual environment in which it occurs. This is a requirement that is universal and without exceptions.5
II. The personal units
Nothing more clearly signalizes the difference between present sociology and the older philosophies of history than the matter-of-fact analysis which we now make of the persons who compose society. We do not deal with the metaphysical conception of a fictitious individual, on the one hand, nor are we, on the other hand, any longer speculating about “society” as though it were an affair independent of persons, and leading a singular and superior order of life apart from persons. We see that human society in all times and places is the combined activities of persons who react upon each other in countless ways. It becomes a first consideration, then, to derive a thoroughly objective, positive, literal conception of these personal units, always producing social situations and social reactions.
Social philosophy, as just now hinted, has always vibrated between theories of individuals, regarded as independent, self-sufficient existences, and theories of society, regarded as an entity which has its existence either altogether independent of individuals or at least by and through the merging and the submerging of individuals. Accordingly the question has been debated from time immemorial: “Does society exist for the individual or the individual for society?” or, more specifically, ” Does the state exist for the individual or the individual for the state?” In contrast with all the forms of philosophy which propose problems of this sort, it is a primary proposition of sociology that the issue raised by these inquiries is essentially artificial and fictitious, because the dilemma presented is created only by a begging of the real question. It is assumed that there is a disjunctive, alternative, exclusive relation between individuals and societies. At best the one is assumed to be merely a means to the other, in such a sense that the means ceases to be of account when it has done what it can toward the end. It is impossible to criticise in full this way of looking at things, without using concepts which need previous explanation – concepts which we shall reach presently. It is also impossible to say whether the psychologists or the sociologists have had most to do with discovering this fallacy. However this may be, the formulation of life in terms of activity has brought psychologists and sociologists to the point of view that individuals and societies are not means to each other, but phases of each other. A society is a combining of the activities of persons. A person is a center of conscious impulses which realize themselves in full only in realizing a society.
Quite recently there has been revived discussion of Aristotle’s dictum, “man is a social animal.” It has been asserted and denied that Aristotle was right. Whether Aristotle meant to express what we now see to be the truth or not may be left to those who care for such trifles. That there is a sense, and an important one, in which man is a social animal is a primary sociological datum. Man cannot be man without acting and reacting with man. The presence of others is necessary in order that I may be myself. The self that is in me cannot become aware of itself, and display itself, except by means of contacts with other people. Just as the mind needs the body in order to be a force in the world; just as the hand needs the eye, and both need the nerves, and all need the heart, in order that either may be its peculiar self by doing a peculiar work in partnership with other organs; so a person is not a person without the reaction and the reinforcement which partnerships with other persons permit. It may be that men begin to occupy their place, a little above the anthropoid ape and a little lower than the angels, by perpetually fghting with each other. Whether this is the case or not, we know that the fighting which men have done with each other has been among the means of developing the individual and the social type. Using the term “social,” not as an expression of moral quality, but as an index of reactions between conscious beings, it is as literally true, and first of all in the same sense true, that man is a social animal, as that the eagle is a bird of flight. The latter proposition does not mean that the eagle is born flying. It simply means that the eagle does not get to be an eagle except through learning to fly, and in the practice of flying. So men are social animals in the sense that they do not get to be men except through learning and practicing the arts of contact with other men.
All this is so simple, to be sure, that it might well go without saying, if different kinds of philosophy had not made the seemingly obvious fact a matter of doubt, dispute, and confusion. The sociologist needs to make the fact clear to himself at the outset of his attempts to understand society. The personal units that are the integers in all social combinations are not of themselves, apart from such combinations, integers at all. A brick is as much a brick when it is dropped and forgotten on the way from the kiln to the building as the other bricks that are set in the wall. It is not a part of a structure, but it has all its individual characteristics independent of other bricks. A brick, qua brick, is not a social phenomenon. A person, on the contrary, cannot come into physical existence except through the co-operation of parent persons; he cannot become a self-sustaining animal unless protected for several years by other persons; and he cannot find out and exercise his capabilities unless stimulated to countless forms of action by contact with other persons. The personal units in society, then, are units that in countless ways depend upon each other for possession of their own personality. They find themselves in each other. They continually seek each other. They perpetually realize themselves by means of each other.
We might go on to show that mere consciousness itself is, to a considerable degree, an affair not of an assumed individual, existing like a brick, unrelated to other bricks, and not dependent upon other bricks for its characteristics. Consciousness in itself, or at least self-consciousness, is not an individual but a social phenomenon. We do not arrive at self-consciousness except by coming into circuit with other persons, with whom we achieve awareness of ourselves.6 For sociological purposes this degree of refinement is unnecessary. We need to know simply that persons do not enlarge and equip and enrich and exercise their personality except by maintaining relations with other persons. Even Robinson Crusoe kept up a one-sided connection with society. If, when he walked out of the surf to the shore, he had left behind him the mental habits, the language, the ideas which he had amassed in contact with other persons, not enough available means of correlating his actions would have remained to provide him with his first meal.
It must be observed, further, that these considerations are not mere pedantic generalities. Some of the most intensely practical public questions of the present and the immediate future go back to premises involved in the foregoing. Some of the sharpest conflicts of opinion and practice in politics and business will have to be fought out on lines drawn from the base just indicated. For instance, old-fashioned Jeffersonian democracy was a political philosophy which assumed precisely the individualism rejected above as an optical illusion. All the modern variations of Jeffersonian democracy, in spite of their stalwart and salutary traits, are weak from the implications of this impossible individual, and they are foreordained failures in just the proportion in which they ignore the composite, dependent, social character of the individual. On the other hand, all the socialisms, from the mildest to the most radical, imply the opposite misconception, viz., that society is the only real existence, and that the personal units have no separate and distinct claims or character sufficient to modify theories devoted solely to the perfection of social organization. All socialisms tend to gravitate toward programs which magnify social machinery, and minimize the importance of the personal units. All such questions as that of municipal control of public utilities; the relation of the state to education, morals, the dependent classes, religion; the relation of the public to corporations and combinations, to artificial encouragement of industries by tariffs, patents, treaties, and other devices; with the thousand and one variations of the problems continually confronting every modern community; imply and involve assumptions about the relation of society as a whole to the personal units. Of course, very few persons will bring these fundamental considerations, in their naked academic form, into the arena of practical politics or business; but every person who influences politics or business will, consciously or unconsciously, throw into the scale the weight of his prejudice about this matter of the personal unit us. the social whole. The sort of work that the sociologist has to do is needed as a means of reducing the weight of both kinds of prejudice, and of substituting for each a just conception of the intrinsic relation between the personal units and the social whole.
Accordingly, while we must emphasize this, so to speak, diffused social personality of the apparently individual units, and while the fact that each person realizes himself very largely at a distance from himself in the activities of other persons—-while this fact becomes a very significant factor in the most practical calculations of politics and business, the present tendencies in social theory and practice so strongly favor this side of the facts that emphasis of the personal side, the individual aspect, of the situation is imperative.
As a mere latest and highest order of the animal kingdom, the human race is simply a mass of matter formed by the operation of physical forces, and distributed through space by the operation of other physical forces. So far, the human race is one aggregate, as truly as the land and the water of the earth’s surface, or the atmosphere that surrounds the earth, or the system of the starry host that fills the heavens. As a conscious company, however, the human race is not one aggregate, but a whole composed of as many distinct and self-impelled units as there are persons in the human family. We have taken due account of the fact that society is always and inevitably conditioned by its character as a portion of flotsam and jetsam within a physical environment, and furthermore as a portion of that environment. But society, in that portion of its character which sociology has especially to consider, is not matter, but persons. These persons have such fundamental likenesses that certain general propositions are true of them all, and we both may and must think of them as one and inseparable. They have such decisive differences that we have to count with them as though they were radically and finally separate.
To express the facts in an illustration, society is not a machine, a locomotive, for instance. Society has no single motor contrivance which furnishes power to all other parts of the machine. Society has no fire-box and boiler which send steam into the cylinders, and society does not transfer force from certain active parts to certain inert parts, so that the latter have power of motion. The trucks of the locomotive could not move of themselves. The driving-wheels could not move of themselves. The connecting-rod could not move of itself. The piston could not move of itself. The water could not boil of itself. Society, on the contrary, is a whole made up of parts each of which can and does move of itself, and indeed the only way to get these personal units to move as persons is to call upon the motor machinery which is located in each person. When the engineer wants the locomotive to do its work, he does not appeal to trucks and driving-wheels and connecting-rods and boiler-pipes, etc., to exert motor energy of their own. He supplies an external energy. When society acts, it has no source of energy outside of the consciousness of the personal units who compose it. Thoughts and feelings in these units must set the units in motion. Thoughts and feelings in one unit must correspond with thoughts and feelings in many others in order that there may be positive social action. If the thoughts and feelings in the units fail to co-operate, there is simply negative or destructive reaction between them.
A profounder psychological analysis of the individual than is necessary for our purpose is both possible and necessary before we reach ultimate theorems of conscious action. We may content ourselves, however, for sociological purposes, with going simply thus far, viz.: persons are centers of likes and dislikes, of sympathies and antipathies, of wants and aversions, of demands and of rejections, of desires and of disgusts. All action that goes on in society is the movement and counter-movement of persons impelled by the particular assortment of these feelings which is located in each. Society is what it is at any time as the resultant of all the efforts of all the personal units to reach each its own peculiar sort of satisfaction.
We have found it most convenient to group the wants which all men feel under six heads. Every desire which men betray may be analyzed down to elements which fall into these groups, viz.: (a) health, (b) wealth, (c) sociability, (d) knowledge, (e) beauty, (f) rightness.7 Our main proposition with reference to this analysis of the personal units is this: In order to have an adequate analysis of any social situation, past or present, it is necessary to have an account of the precise content and proportions of these several wants, both in typical persons of the society and in the group as a whole; i. e., what proportion do the physical desires, for example, bear to all the desires, and in what form are physical satisfactions sought? So of each of the other desires.
No better brief illustration is at hand than one furnished by Professor Dewey in the paper mentioned above.8 His thesis is that occupations determine the fundamental modes of human activity, and that the occupation, presupposing different immediate and remote objects of desire, and requiring variations in fundamental modes of activity, produces variations of mental type, including variations of desires. For instance, the hunting life differs in turn from the agricultural, the pastoral, the military, the trading, the manually productive, and intellectual, etc. Each of these different kinds of life presents distinct classes of problems. Each stimulates its peculiar classes of desire. Each promotes the formation of peculiar habits, in adapting effort to satisfaction of the desires. Each of these types of habit formed by an earlier and necessary stage in conquering the conditions of life tends to persist, and it reappears as a modifier of the impulses and habits that survive and are more appropriate in a later stage.
Whether the illustration goes as far as necessary or not, we have sufficiently emphasized the main contention: All social problems are problems of the relations of personal units that have in themselves distinct initiative and choice and force. This personal equation must be assigned its real value, in order to reach true formula of the social reaction.
III. Interests.
No single term is of more constant use in recent sociology than this term interests. We must use it in the plural partly for the sake of distinguishing it from the same term in the sense which has become so familiar in modern pedagogy. The two uses of the term are closely related, but they are not precisely identical. The pedagogical emphasis is rather on the voluntary attitude toward a possible object of attention. The sociological emphasis is on attributes of persons which may be compared to the chemical affinities of different elements.9
To distinguish the pedagogical from the sociological use of the term “interest,” we may say pedagogically of a supposed case: “The boy has no interest in physical culture, or in shop-work, or in companionship with other boys, or in learning, or in art, or in morality.” That is, attention and choice are essential elements of interest in the pedagogical sense. On the other hand, we may say of the same boy, in the sociological sense: ” He has not discovered his health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness interests.” We thus imply that interests, in the sociological sense, are not necessarily matters of attention and choice. They are rather affinities, latent in persons, pressing for satisfaction, whether the persons are conscious of it or not; they are indicated spheres of activity which persons enter into and occupy in the course of realizing their personality.
Accordingly we have implied, and to some extent expressed, all that is involved in the fact of interests, in what was said in the previous section about the personal units. Interests are merely specifications in the make-up of the personal units. We have several times named the most general classes of interests which we find serviceable in sociology, viz.: health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness. These have been sufficiently commented on in the passage already cited.10 In that passage these interests were treated as elements of personality.11
We need to emphasize, in addition, several considerations about these interests which are the motors of all individual and social action: First, there is a subjective and an objective aspect of them all. It would be easy to use terms of these interests in speculative arguments in such a way as to shift the sense fallaciously from the one aspect to the other; e.g., moral conduct, as an actual adjustment of the person in question with other persons, is that person’s “interest, in the objective sense. On the other hand, we are obliged to think of something in the person himself impelling him, however unconsciously, toward that moral conduct, i. e., interest as”unsatisfied capacity,” in the subjective sense. So with each of the other interests. The tact that these two senses of the term are always concerned must never be ignored; but, until we reach refinements of analysis which demand use for these discriminations, they may be left out of sight. Second, human interests pass more and more from the latent, subjective, unconscious state to the active, objective, conscious form. That is, before the baby is self-conscious the baby’s essential interest in bodily well-being is operating in performance of the organic functions. A little later the baby is old enough to understand that certain regulation of his diet, certain kinds of work or play, will help to make and keep him well and strong. Henceforth there is in him a co-operation of interest in the fundamental sense, and interest in the derived, secondary sense, involving attention and choice. If we could agree upon the use of terms, we might employ the word “desire” for this development of interest; i. e., physiological performance of function is, strictly speaking, the health interest; the desires which men actually pursue within the realm of bodily function may be normal, or perverted, in an infinite scale of variety. So with each of the other interests. Third, with these qualifications provided for, resolution of human activities into pursuit of differentiated interests becomes the frst clue to the combination that unlocks the mysteries of society. We need not trouble ourselves very much in general about nice metaphysical distinctions between the aspects of interest, because we bave mainly to do with interests in the same sense in which the man of affairs uses the term. The practical politician looks over the lobby at Washington, and he classifies the elements that compose it. He says, ” Here is the railroad interest, the sugar interest, the labor interest, the army interest, the canal interest, the Cuban interest, etc.” He uses the term “interest” essentially in the sociological sense, but in a relatively concrete form, and he has in mind little more than variations of the wealth interest. He would explain the legislation of a given session as the final balance between these conflicting pecuniary interests. He is right, in the main; and every social action is, in the same way, an accommodation of the various interests which are represented in the society concerned.
It ought to be plain, then, that our analysis of society, first into personal units and then into the operative interests within the units, is not the construction of an esoteric mystery, to be the special preserve of sociology. It is a frank, literal, matter-of-fact expression of the reality which society presents for our inspection; and it is the most direct step toward insight into the realities of society. Social problems are entanglements of persons with persons, and each of these persons is a combination of interests developed in certain unique proportions and directions. All study of social situations must consequently be primarily a qualitative and quantitative analysis of actually observed mixtures of interests. Whether it is a problem of getting the pupils in a school to do good work, or of making the religious force in a church effective, or of defending a town against illegal liquor traffic, or of organizing laborers for proper competition with employers, or of securing an enlightened national policy toward foreign peoples-whether the particular social situation or problem which we have in hand fills out the four walls of our house or reaches to the ends of the earth, in every case the primary terms of the problem are the particular interests of the particular persons who compose that particular situation.
The phrase “properties of numbers’ survives in many minds from their earliest encounters with arithmetic. Whether or not it was good pedagogy to use the phrase we will not inquire, but the idea and the program behind the phrase may furnish an analogy for our present use. The boy who simply makes change for the papers he sells on the street corner has this at least in common with Newton and Laplace, and the bookkeepers, and the actuaries, and the engineers, who carry on the most complicated mathematical calculations, viz., they are concerned with the”properties of numbers.” So far as the problems of each go, they must learn, somehow or other, to know the properties of numbers under all circumstances where they occur. In like manner, people who seek social intelligence, whether they are street gamins hustling for a living with help from nobody, or social philosophers attempting to report the past and to foretell the future of the human family, all are dealing with the properties of persons. Just as the chemist must very early get familiar with certain primary facts about his “elements,” their specific gravity, their atomicity, their relation to oxygen, etc., etc.; so the sociologist, whether amateur or professional, must early get a working knowledge of the essential peculiarities of persons. Sociology accordingly amounts to a technique for detecting, classifying, criticising, measuring, and correlating human interests, first with reference to their past and present manifestations, and second with reference to their indications for the future. The sociological study that is provided for in university courses is not like the instruction in law, which is calculated to make men the most effective practitioners under the code that now exists. All our programs of sociological study are more like the courses in pure and applied mathematics which a West Point student is obliged to take. They are not expected to give him specific knowledge of the situations which he may encounter in a campaign. They are supposed to make him familiar with the elements out of which all possible military situations are composed, with the means of calculating all possible relationships that can occur between these elements, and with the necessary processes of controlling theoretical and practical dealings with these elements under any circumstances whatsoever.
Every real social problem throws upon the sociologist who undertakes to deal with it the task of calculating a unique equation of interests. General sociology is a preparation for judging a concrete combination of interests very much as general training in physiology and pathology and clinical practice prepares the physician for diagnosis of the new cases which will occur in his practice. He may never meet precisely the same combinations of conditions and symptoms which he has considered in the course of his preparatory training, but he is supposed to have become familiar at least with all the general types of conditions and symptoms which can occur, and to have acquired ability to form reliable judgments on the specific nature of any new combinations of them which he may encounter.
Suppose, for instance, we are dealing with the practical problems of law-enforcement in a particular town in a state which has a prohibition law. There are certain very familiar types of persons who persist in treating the situation as though it were an affair of two and only two simple factors, viz., the law on the one side, and its violation on the other. The fact is that both the law and the violation are expressions of highly complex mixtures of interests, and neither the law nor the violation precisely represents the actual balance of interests in the community. On the one hand, the law was derived from a co-operation of at least these six factors, viz.: first, a high, pure, moral interest that was uppermost in certain people; second, an interest in good social repute, spurred by a state of conscience that condemns the liquor traffic, but without enough moral sympathy with the condemnation to act accordingly unless lashed to action by the zeal of the first interest; third, a political interest, in making capital out of a policy which would win certain voters; fourth, a business interest, in getting the trade of certain people by opposing a traffic that they oppose, or in creating difficulties for a traffic which is indirectly a competitor; fifth, a personal or family interest, in preventing or punishing a traffic which has inflicted or threatens to infict injury upon self or relatives; sixth, an interest in the liquor traffic itself, which calculates that opposition can be fought more adroitly when it is in the shape of positive law, than when it is vague and general. In every particular case these six sorts of interest that create the law will be subdivided according to circumstances, and the relative influence of each will vary indefinitely. We no sooner realize these facts than we are aware that in its substance, its force, its spirit, the law is not the absolute, categorical, unequivocal factor that it is in its form. While it has no uncertain sound as a statutory mandate, expressed in impersonal words, it has a most decidedly quavering quality when traced back to the human wills whose choices give it all its power.
On the other hand, if we analyze the violations of the law, we find that it arises, first, from thoroughly immoral interests— greed of gain, contempt for social rights, willingness to profit by the physical and moral ruin of others. Second, the interest in satisfying the drink appetite. This ranges from the strong and constant demand of the habitual or besotted drunkard to the weak and intermittent demand of the man who uses liquor somewhat as he uses olives or citron or malted milk. Third, the interest in personal freedom. There are always people in considerable numbers who want to do whatever others presume to say they ought not to do. This faction includes elements from hopeless moral perversity to highly developed moral refinement. Fourth, business interests not directly connected with the liquor traffic: belief that trade follows the bartender; desire to keep solid with the interests directly dependent upon the liquor traffic; competition with other towns that are said to draw away trade by favoring liquor sellers, etc. Fifth, political interests, desire to use the liquor interest for personal or party ends. Sixth, social interests. Friends are directly or indirectly interested in the liquor traffic, and influence must go in their favor, from the negative kind that allows hands to be tied and mouths closed, to the positive kind that manipulates influence of every sort to obstruct the operation of the law. Seventh, legitimate business interests.
This rough analysis of the situation shows that, instead of two simple factors, viz., law and the violation, we are really dealing with a strangely assorted collection of interests, awkwardly struggling to express themselves in theory and in practice. We are not arguing the question how to deal with the liquor traffic, and we are not implying an opinion one way or the other about prohibitory laws. We are simply showing that, whether we are dealing with one kind of a law or another, we may be very uncritical about the ultimate factors involved. The two facts in question, viz., the law and the violation, prove to be in reality the selfsame persons expressing different elements of their own interests. The father of the prohibitory policy has been known to plead with a judge not to pass sentence on a liquor seller in accordance with his own law. The same persons who sustain the law also violate the law in some of the different degrees of violating and sustaining referred to above. The law on the one hand, and the violation on the other, are nothing but shadows, or apparitions, or accidents, except as they reflect the actual balance of interests present in the members of the community. The real problems involved are, first, to discover whether the law or the violation most nearly corresponds with the actual desires lodged in the persons; and, second, to devise ways and means of changing the balance of desires in the persons, in case immorality proves to be the community choice.
It is both a social and a sociological blunder to proceed as though the law were something precise, invariable, and absolute. The law is an approximate verbal expression of social choices which are mixed, variable, and accommodating in a very high degree. The law has no existence, as a real power, outside of the continued choices of the community that gives it effect. In a very real and literal sense it is necessary to get the algebraic sum both of the law-abiding and of the law-violating interests, in order to know just what the psychological choice of the community, as distinguished from the formal law, really is.
This illustration has been carried out at such length because it is a kind of problem with which all of us are more or less in contact, and our ways of dealing with it so frequently show practical disregard of the elementary significance of the operative interests concerned. The main point is that for theoretical or practical dealing with concrete social problems we need to be expert in detecting and in measuring the precise species of interests that combine to form the situation. To carry the illustration a little farther, most of the states in the American union agree to prohibit both intemperance and ignorance. In general, all of us, both communities and individuals, condemn both vices. We put our condemnation in the shape of laws regulating the liquor traffic, on the one hand, and laws establishing free and perhaps compulsory education, on the other hand. When we attempt to define intemperance and ignorance, however, we find that we have infinitely varied points of view, and that our desires are correspondingly varied. We consequently lend very different elements of meaning and force to the formal laws. Some of us think that intemperance begins only when a man gets physically violent, or fails to pay for the liquor he consumes; and that ignorance means inability to read and write. Others of us think that intemperance exists whenever fermented or alcoholic liquors are swallowed in any form or quantity, and that ignorance is lack of a college education. Accordingly the phenomena of the continued consumption of liquors, in spite of laws against intemperance, and of persistent non-consumption of school privileges, in spite of laws against ignorance, are equally and alike inevitable manifestations of the actual assortment of desires out of which the community life is composed. We repeat, then: the problem of changing the facts is the problem of transforming the interests (desires) that make the facts. Social efficiency, on the part of persons zealous to alter the facts, involves skill in discovering the actual character of the desires present, knowledge of the psychology of desires, and tact in the social pedagogy and politics and diplomacy which convert less into more social desires.
These statements imply all the reasons for the study of fundamental sociology. From first to last our life is a web woven by our interests. Sociology may be said to be the science of human interests and their workings under all conditions, just as chemistry is sometimes defined as “the science of atoms and their behavior under all conditions.” Man at his least is merely a grubbing and mating animal. He has developed no interests beyond those of grubbing and mating, or those tributary to grubbing and mating. Every civilization in the world today carries along a certain percentage of survivals of this order of interests, and societies still exist wholly on the level of these interests. On the other hand, some men develop such attenuated spiritual interests that they pay only perfunctory and grudging tribute to the body at all, and live in an atmosphere of unworldly contemplation. Between these extremes are the activities of infinitely composite society, moved by infinite diversities of interests. These interests, however, as we have seen, are variations and permutations of a few rudimentary interests. Our knowledge of sociology, i. e., our systematized knowledge of human society, will be measured by the extent of our ability to interpret all human society in terms of its effective interests.
IV. Association.
Some of the terms in our schedule may be classed as highly conceptual. They may be criticised as theoretical and even fanciful. Of course, we would not admit the claim, but there would be plausible pretexts for urging it. The present term, however, is only in the slightest degree open to that impeachment. It calls attention to one of the constant and universal facts of the human situation. It puts that fact in the form of a generalized expression. It thereby registers a fundamental condition of every human problem. This condition cannot be eliminated or ignored without reading the situation itself out of existence. In a word, the term means that whatever has to do with human society thereby has to do with men associating or in association. Society and association connote and presuppose and imply and involve each other. As terms they are correlates, as facts they are essentially identical.
But it is objected, on the other hand: “This goes without saying. It should be taken for granted. We cannot talk about society without assuming it. To say that society is association, or that all men live in association, is a commonplace and a platitude. It is not science, but only a parody and a burlesque of science.” The answer is that the fallacy of all fallacies is the turning of the real into the unreal by neglecting the obvious. This concept “association” thrusts itself upon every man in his senses, but the history of philosophy down to the present moment is strewn thick with proof that men can be preternaturally skillful in avoiding it. Rousseau would have been a man without an occupation if he and his dupes had accepted association as a literal, universal fact. The theory of the “social contract” would have perished still-born, if this commonplace of association had been brought to bear upon it. The whole individualistic philosophy, in all its shades and qualities, from Cain to Nietzsche, would have been estopped if men had given due heed to this fact of association. The world would have been spared most of the theological controversies of the Christian centuries, and we should not have wandered until now in the labyrinth of ethical theories that apply only to a world which never was, if this commonplace of universal association had been allowed its natural and necessary value. All that we are, all that we think, all that we do, is a function of our fellow-beings before and beside and beyond ourselves.
We are not professing that the term association reveals anything new except in the sense that every generalization of familiar things is a revelation. Every man who had ever seen apples on a tree knew that, if the stem broke, the apples would fall to the ground, but it took Newton to express that fact in a form that took in all the like facts in the world. When Newton made his generalization of the law of gravitation, it did not tell any new facts, but it enabled people for the first time to see a like element in a multitude of old facts which had not seemed to have any common element of likeness before. So our present term does not purport to increase the sum of knowledge. It merely arranges knowledge so that it can be put to more intelligent use.
Of course, there is no magical value in a word. This term “association” explains nothing, although the moment we get the perception that every individual or social situation is a fraction and an episode of an association we have a pointer toward explanations. The term, like all those which this paper emphasizes, merely affixes a name to a constant phase of human facts. It thereby signalizes the reality of that phase of things. It records the importance of the reality, and it invites attention to the reality. In thus proposing a technical term for one of the universal conditions of human life, we remove one of the excuses for false, distorted, fictitious versions of the facts of life. Like each of the terms in our schedule, our present term, ” association, proves to be a mute cross-examiner of all evidence and theory about social facts; e.g. , we have a concrete problem, say a juvenile delinquent, a widespread practice of tax-dodging in a city, an astounding indifference of the Christian nations of Europe toward Turkish misrule. There is not only a possible but a very familiar way of treating situations of which these are types, as though the fact of association did not exist. To be sure, it cannot be utterly excluded from anyone’s attention, but it is made an entirely negligible quantity. If the total-depravity theory of the individual is used as the explanation, if the action of a community or a nation is accounted for solely by hypotheses of qualities within its members, the fact and the force of association are virtually ignored. With this concept in mind, on the other hand, we are bound to ask: What have the associates of the boy or the men or the nations to do with their acts? The result is that we find a ground for familiar proverbial wisdom of all times and peoples; e.g. , “Evil communications corrupt good manners;” “A man is known by the company he keeps;” “Cherchez la femme,” etc.; i. e., whatever our philosophy, we have always in practice looked for some part of the reasons for people’s acting in other people. The boy in the slums may give no more real evidence of depravity than the boy on the boulevards, but the difference of his associates, young and old, turns the scale. The men who dodge taxes in New York or Chicago may be in themselves no worse than other men, but they may have a belief that other men turn the public revenues to private benefit, and that still other men in other parts of the state escape burdens that are loaded on the cities. Their tax-dodging may be no more praiseworthy; but, instead of being an act of unmitigated meanness and unsociability, we find it has an element at least of self-defense and quite natural if not justifiable retaliation. So England’s inertness in the face of Turkish atrocities proves to be less from English indifference than from Russia’s watchfulness of opportunity, and vice versa. In a word, all human facts, from those most narrowly individual to those which concern the whole living population of the world, are to be understood fairly and fully only as phases of the larger ranges of facts with which they are associated.
V. The Social.
With this term we denote a concept which is less directly available outside of technical sociology than those which have gone before, and most of those which will follow. For the professional sociologist, however, it is a matter of cardinal necessity to find for this concept a distinct and clear content. If he is confused or vague at this point, his whole sociology will be a blur in consequence. The concept has been discussed incidentally, however, in earlier papers of this series, and reference to those passages is sufficient for our present purposes.12
To illustrate the bearing of the abstract propositions just cited, reference may be made to an argument from the present viewpoint against Professor Giddings. It is contained in a review of Inductive Sociology published in Science, May 2, 19o2. The claim urged is that, if the technical sociologist lacks a distinct perception of what the social involves, particularly a clear appreciation of the contrast between the individual and the social phases of human conditions, it is possible for his analysis virtually to ignore the associational factor altogether, and to degenerate into futile speculation about an arbitrarily abstracted individual. Our thinking will be realistic only in proportion as we discriminate between the individual elements in social problems, on the one hand, and the social elements, on the other.
VI. The Social Process.13
Again we have to deal with a concept which the psychologists have been elaborating simultaneously with the sociologists. It is impossible to distribute credit for work at this point. It is sufficient to acknowledge that the sociologists have doubtless been assisted by the psychologists, more than they are aware, in expressing the social reality in this aspect.
In this case, too, we are dealing with a concept which is among the most necessary of the sociological categories for organizing all orders of social knowledge, from the most concrete to the most generalized. That is, we have not arrived at the stage of sophistication peculiar to our epoch, unless we have learned to think of that part of human experience to which we give attention as a term or terms in a process. The use of the word is immaterial. The possession of the idea, the perception of the relation between portions of experience, is essential. We do not represent human experience to ourselves as it is, unless we think every portion of it as a factor in a process composed of all human experiences.
In the absence of any generally accepted psychological formula of the concept “process” the following is proposed: A process is a collection of occurrences, each of which has a meaning for every other, the whole of which constitutes some sort of becoming.
The thesis corresponding with the title of this section is: Every portion of human experience has relations which require application of this concept “process.” Human association, or society, is a process. Every act of every man has a meaning for every act of every other man. The act of Columbus in discovering America is going on in the act of reflecting on this proposition, and our reflection upon this proposition has a bearing upon every act of every man now living or hereafter to live in America. All the acts together which make up the experiences of man in connection with America constitute the becoming of a social whole, and an organizing and operation of that whole beyond limits which we can imagine.
Our present thesis anticipates nothing with reference to the nature of the social process, or its mechanism, or its results. We are concerned at the start merely with the empty, formal conception that human experience, whether taken in its minutest fragments or in the largest reaches which we can contemplate, is, so far as it goes, a congeries of occurrences which have their meaning by reference to each other. The task of getting for this concept, “the social process,” vividness, impressiveness, and content, is one of the rudiments of both social and sociological pedagogy. That is, if we are trying to get the kind of knowledge about society which the sociologist claims to be all that is worth getting, because it is all that is complete in itself, all that goes beyond partialness and narrowness and shallowness, we must learn to analyze that portion of experience which we are studying, in terms of the process which it is performing. For instance, suppose we are studying history. Our attention will be given either to more or less detached series of events, or we must ask, ” Just what phase of the social process is going forward in this period?” A conception of the general meaning of the period as a whole gives us clues to the proportions and other relations between the particular events. It gives us pointers about the classes of occurrences best worth watching in the period. It enables us to determine in some measure whether we have actually become acquainted with the period, or have merely amused ourselves with a few curious details which had a certain fractional value within the period.
To make the illustration more specific, suppose our attention is given to the French Revolution. Thousands of writers have described facts and essayed interpretations of the Revolution, without having approached the sociological conception of the meaning of the period. Expressed in the rough, study of the French Revolution, under guidance of the sociological categories, would proceed somewhat after this fashion:
First: All the activities of the French during the period accomplished some portion of the process of realizing the essential human interests. What was that portion of the process in its large outlines? The question sends us forth to get a bird’seye view of the Revolution from some altitude which will reveal the great lines of movement usually obscured by the picturesque details which first attract attention. Let us suppose that we make out the following as the general process: The French, from lowest to highest, had become conscious of wants which the traditional social system arbitrarily repressed. The Revolution is a spontaneous, spasmodic effort of the French to release themselves from those inherited restrictions, and to achieve a social situation in which the wants of which they are now conscious will be free to find satisfaction.
Second: What, then, were the actual wants which impelled different portions of the French people? In brief, the peasantry wanted to eat the bread which their toil produced, instead of giving the most of it to the landlords who did not toil; the wage-earners in the towns wanted work enough and pay enough to improve their condition, and they saw no way to get either without abolishing the privileges of the rich. The third estate, according to Sieyes’s famous dictum, had been nothing in the state, and wanted to become something; the thinkers were enamored of new notions of individual rights, and were romantically eager to change the situation so that those rights might be realized; on the other hand, the privileged classes, the economic, the political, and the ecclesiastical aristocrats, wanted to preserve their privileges. They wanted to defeat the purposes of their fellow-citizens. They wanted to perpetuate a situation in which the wants antagonistic with their own would continue to be defeated.
Third: To understand the Revolution as a section of the social process we have to follow out the details of analyzing these several classes of wants down to the concrete demands which each interest urged, and of tracing the relations of each occurrence worth noticing during the whole episode to the whole complicated interplay of these desires throughout the whole complex movement.
Fourth: To complete our insight we have to reach at last a new expression of the new situation in France, at a selected period after the crisis. We have to discover the form and the manner and the degree in which these wants that expressed themselves in the upheaval realize themselves in the situation that remained after the upheaval. We thereby have a measure of the absolute motion accomplished by the French as a result of the relative motion between the units during the period. That is, we have followed the process from something to something else through intermediate correlations of actions.
Of course, everyone who has written history or read it has had some more or less vague instinct of the program just indicated. It would be hard to find a recent writer of history who might not maintain a plausible argument that his plan of work implied all, and more than all, just specified. Whether a given writer or reader gives due place to the process-category is a question of fact, to be decided on the merits of each case. Our present business is to bring the necessity of the concept into clear view. If it should prove that everybody in practice uses the concept already, our contention that it is necessary will surely not be weakened. If it should prove that the concept is not as distinctly before our minds in studying history as the contents of experience require, our contention will in the end not be in vain.
Recurring to our proposition above, that we must employ the concept social process, whether we are getting intelligence about society by studying strictly past events or present problems, we may put the case again in more concrete form by applying the argument to the present ” labor problem” in the United States.
To some people the case of the coal operators and the workmen in Pennsyivania is merely a fight between two parties tor their rights under the law. Without implying an opinion about the merits of any specific case, we may assert that no one has a proper point of view from which to form an opinion until he can present the situation to himself in more adequate terms. The fact is that the production and distribution of wealth occur now under conditions that have been changing very rapidly, not only since the so-called “industrial revolution’ of nearly a century ago, but particularly during the last twenty-five years. In the course of this changing a parallel mental process has been going on; our concepts of social rights have undergone decided modifications. A hundred years ago American men had to deal only with other men like themselves. Today the distinctive factors in the situation are, first, that racial intermixture has radically changed the character of the population, and, second, that a host of artificial men are actors on the scene, and they are relatively as much superior to real men as the mythological gods were in turning the tide of battle now one way and now another before the gates of Troy. Corporations, i. e., legal persons, giants more mighty in the economic field than ancient chieftains were in the field of war, have transformed the situation in the working world. Our social process in the last century has been the play of five chief factors: first, the composition of the population; second, the development of a technique of production; third, the development of a governmental system; fourth, the development of general social or moral ideas; fifth, the development of a system of distributing the output of our productive technique. Today we are confronted by the fact that our system of production has developed along one line of least resistance, viz., that discovered in the economics of the productive process, while our system of distribution has developed very largely along other lines of least resistance, viz., in accordance with the relative power in competition of men, on the one hand more and on the other hand less, able to get artificial helps in the struggle for distribution. One consequence is that the results do not conform strictly to the ratio of contributions to production. Meanwhile our politics and our social philosophy have developed in a sort of alternating current between these main factors of the process. Consequently, the inevitable problem immediately upon us is that of reconsidering and readjusting our whole scheme of distribution with its underlying concepts of justice.
This being the case, every strike, or other interruption of the process, becomes an implicit challenge to the thinkers to find out what meaning the interruption has with reference to the healthiness or unhealthiness of the process itself. The immediate question is: Has either party failed to meet the requirements of public law and of private contracts ? This immediate question, however, is relatively trivial. The more important question is: Do the law and the social situation make it morally certain that one party can and will take an unjust advantage of the other part in deciding how the burdens and the products of industry shall be divided? Especially, has the legal creation of artificial persons so changed the balance of power between men that those who are simply left to their individual resources as natural persons are in an unjust degree at the mercy of those who are clothed with the power of artificial persons?
These questions open the whole problem of the actual process which is going forward in our own day. They require such knowledge of the demographic, economic, legal, and moral factors of our present activities that we can form the same kind of a judgment about a given labor difficulty which a trainman forms about a cracked wheel or a hot bearing.
The most characteristic feature in our American social process today is the instinctive effort of all to defend themselves against the superior power which some have gained by combination, and then to find a way of getting for themselves the advantages of combination. The most important discovery which the nineteenth century made was the secret of multiplying individual power, and of intrenching individual security by combination of interests. The present stage of the social process is a typical reaction against a monopoly of that discovery by the few, and a typical effort to get the benefits of the discovery for the many.
As has been urged above, an adequate conception of human association as a process involves something in addition to analysis of what has actually taken place, or what is occurring. It extends to perception of what is coming to be in course of this occurring. Here we must leave the solid ground of certainty and venture into the dangerous region of inference. Yet no knowledge is worth having unless it is convertible into forecast of the future. What we want to know of the social process first of all is whether it is likely to continue beyond us. Are there indications of what the process will amount to if it does so continue? Do we get any light from the process, so far as it has gone, about the elements in the process which are best worth promoting ? Does the process reveal anything about the means available to direct and develop the process? In other words, do we discover in human attainments and achievements details and tendencies which impress us as good and desirable in themselves? Do we conclude that the future human process must be a tragedy of sequestrating those goods to the uses of a few, or that it will be a widening epic of the advance of the many toward the same attainments and achievements and enjoyments? At this point is the critical position in our whole attitude toward the social process. Is it to us a process of the advance of all men toward all the goods that seem good for any men, or is it a perpetual process of the preferment of some at the cost of others? Do the good things that men discover, and think, and perform, belong forever to select men, or are they merely samples of the things which the continuance of the social process will procure for the general typical man ?
It is not essential to an exposition of the concept “social process” that this question should be answered here, but so much must be compressed into this outline that a theorem of which no demonstration can be presented may be ventured gratuitously, viz.: If we are justified in drawing any general conclusions whatever from human experience thus far, it is safe to say that the social process tends to put an increasing proportion of individuals in possession of all the goods which have been discovered by the experience of humanity as a whole, and that all social programs should be thought out with a view to promotion of this tendency.
In other words, the social process, as we find it among men thus far, bears testimony that the inclusive aim which men should set up for themselves ought to be the perfecting of social co-operation, to the end that the lot of every person in the world may be to share, in a progressively widening proportion, in all the developing content of the most abundant life. The social process is not to be forever a consumption of men for the production of things. It must become more and more a consumption of things for the production of men. This human product must be perfected in all the qualities and dimensions of life. More and better life by more and better people, beyond any limit of time or quality that our minds can set, is the indicated content of the social process.
VII. Social structure14
The concepts dealt with thus far in this paper have come into conscious use in sociology rather late. They have been forced upon our attention as analysis and interpretations have become more exact. They are rudimentary and necessary, from the logical point of view, but it took the sociologists a long time to see the need of such concepts.
Under the present title, on the other hand, we encounter a concept which has had much more than its due share of influence upon sociology since Comte, and it would be easy to show that it has implicitly played an important role, though most of the time it was unexpressed in direct terms, throughout the whole range of thinking about human actions. The notion of social structure has certainly dominated all the social sciences during the past fifty years. So far as we can see, it is a concept which we must always use. It seems probable, on the other hand, that we shall reduce the ratio of its prominence below that which it has enjoyed during the formative period of sociology.
Every activity implies a formation of elements by means of which the activity takes place. In general this means a structure of parts concerned in the activity.15
It is not intended that the term “social structure,” as here used, shall cover any questions that are in dispute about the sense in which the concept is applicable to society. The notion has been overworked, abused, distorted, misrepresented, and misunderstood. Many sociologists have accordingly felt obliged to protest against the notion altogether; or, at least, they have so strongly objected to certain versions of the notion that they have virtually argued against the validity of the fundamental category itself. At the same time, everyone who has attempted to interpret men’s activities has been obliged to use the concept in some generic form. The essential fact is that, when men act together, whether in pairs or in multitudes, there is always an adjustment of some sort between them. Thus in a matriarchal family the woman has a certain conceded prestige and influence, with reference to which the man and the children are subordinate. In the patriarchal family there is similar subordination, but the man is the center of power. In every group of boys or girls at play, the arrangement of leaders and led is sure to develop in some degree or other, sooner or later. In a gang of men at work, there will always be a gravitation toward definite arrangement of leaders and led, or boss and bossed. So in every larger and more developed human activity. The adaptations of the individuals to each other may be entirely fluid and flexible and transitory, as in a crowd accidentally assembled by curiosity; or they may become definite, rigid, and relatively permanent, as in the legal institutions of civilized society. Wherever social activities occur, however, this manner of adjustment between the actors, this structure of the parts, is just as real as the existence of the parts themselves. This structure into which persons arrange themselves whenever they act together is both effect and cause of their actions. The activities cannot be fully or truly known, therefore, without knowledge of the social structure within which and by means of which they take place. It has come about, accordingly, that many sociologists have virtually made the treatment of social structures the whole of sociology. They have, moreover, interpreted social structure in such a dogmatic way that progress of social knowledge has been retarded by reaction against their methods. In refusing to accept unfortunate versions of social structure many people have placed themselves in an attitude of antagonism to the whole conception of social structure. This is an impossible war between words and realities. The latter must prevail. Men act in and through correlations with each other. This is the essential fact which the concept “social structure” recognizes. We are inevitably forced to find out at last what manner of social structure is concerned in any given portion of human experience which attracts our attention. This is as true of a district school, or of a country town, or of a local church, as it is of China or the “concert of the powers.” “What are the customary, understood, accepted, and expected modes in which the individuals concerned get along with each other?” This is one of the first questions to which we must find an answer, if we are attempting to understand any portion of society.
For many reasons the most available help in reaching a working familiarity with the concept “social structure,” as it is now held by all sociologists, is Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, Part II, “The Inductions of Sociology.” Spencer’s account of social structure must be taken with many grains of salt. In the first place, whether Spencer himself was perfectly clear in his own mind about the matter or not, the biological analogies which he uses so liberally are to be taken as purely illustrative, good so far as they go, but not to be confounded with the literal relationships between persons which they are employed to symbolize. People who use biological figures most liberally in expressing social relations are most emphatic today in asserting that they use those forms of expression merely as the most convenient rhetorical device for making social relationships vivid. Society is not a big animal. There is no social stomach or brain or heart or eye or spinal cord. The digestive process for society is performed by the digestive organs of the individuals who compose society. The thinking of society is done in the minds of the individual members of society, and so on. Yet all the individuals in a society are, as we have seen, in association. The feeding and thinking and other primarily individual activities which they perform all have a positive or negative effect on the maintenance and activities of the association. It comes about, therefore, that we are practically justified in speaking as though society itself had these parts or organs which are literally located in individuals only. This will be more evident if we combine with further discussion of the present subject the closely related subject of the next section.
VIII. Social Functions16
Men in association have common work to do. Because they have this common work to do they associate, and because they associate they find more occasions for common work. Everybody has to eat, but, after people have associated a little while, they find that some of their number are not producing food. They are doing other things, like singing patriotic songs, or decorating weapons, or performing religious rites. Their activities would not feed them if the association did not exist. In fact, however, the interests of the members of the association have become so specialized that there is a demand for these activities which are only indirectly connected with the food-producing activities. We may express this fact in terms of social function in this way: some persons become set apart in the course of the social process for the social function of supplying food; other persons are gradually permitted or required by the interests of all to perform other functions less essential to the sustaining of life than the function of food-getting. Each of these kinds of work involves some detail of social structure, and, on the other hand, all social structures are assortments of persons incidental to the supply of incessant general wants, i. e., the performance of social functions.
There is nothing mystical or arbitrary about these two concepts, social structure and social function, as they are held by all sociologists. They are merely the most convenient symbols that we can adopt for literal facts in society. On the one hand, human life is a vast complex of work interchanged between all and each. In brief, men in association carry on a system of functions for each and all. To do this the associates arrange themselves in certain more or less permanent adjustments to each other. This is the fact indicated by the term “social structure.” Wherever there is society there is social function and social structure. The closer we get to the real facts of society, the more specifically must we be able to answer the questions: Precisely what are the functions which the society is carrying on ? and, Precisely what structure has the society adopted as its equipment for performing the functions?
It cannot be too often repeated that every person who is trying to exert an influence of any sort upon other people, whether for good or evil, is concerned to know, first, just what objects in life those people are pursuing, and, second, just what social adjustments they have adopted in pursuit of the objects. As we shall see presently, these two aspects of the situation are not only important in themselves, but they powerfully affect each other. It follows that ability to comprehend the particular society with which one is dealing, in terms of social structure and social function, is a part of the necessary outfit of both theoretical and practical sociologists.
We may return to Spencer for our illustrations of the ways in which these conceptions have been developed and applied. In the simplest terms, the sociologists long ago discovered that they must learn how to find out what communities are really doing and how they are doing it. That is, we must be able to go behind the visible and the conventional and discover the real aims and methods which the visible and the conventional often conceal. For example, Spencer divides social institutions, for certain purposes, into, first, domestic institutions; second, ceremonial institutions; third, political institutions; fourth, ecclesiastical institutions; fifth, professional institutions; sixth, industrial institutions. Now every society, except the most primitive, and quite minute portions of every society, may have some parts of each of these sorts of institutions. It is necessary to know them by their general traits and to know them in particular. In every age each of them has done much that does not appear on the surface. The family, for instance, is not a “domestic” institution alone. It has always been, more or less, each of the other kinds of institution—ceremonial, political, ecclesiastical, professional, industrial. The same thing is true of each of the other groups of institutions. The paterfamilias, the priest, the king, the artist, the farmer, the blacksmith, do not have one and the same meaning in all times and places. In one society the farmer may be little more than a part of the clod he tills, while in another he may be maker of political constitutions and a prophet of new civilizations. The priest may be either a minister of religion or a pander to political and personal corruption. The king may be either a creator and developer of the state, or a parasite sapping the material and moral power of his people. Institutions are but the shell of social activities. Analyses of them simply as institutions are necessary; but that sort of analysis is merely a step toward more real analysis of the place which they actually occupy in working social arrangements, and of the social content which their operation actually secures.
While Spencer’s account of social structure and functions is not to be recommended as the final form which those concepts should take in our minds, it is historically and pedagogically expedient to approach more literal renderings of actual social structure and function through Spencer’s version. All the sociologists have obtained their present insight by means of preliminary analyses more or less like Spencer’s. It is doubtful if anyone will reach the limits of our present perceptions of social relations without making some use of the Spencerian mode of approach. This does not mean that there is any logical relation of antecedent and consequent, of premise and conclusion, between the method of biological analogy and literal interpretation of social structures and functions. It simply means that, as a practical matter, there is no way of making the intimacy and complexity and interdependence of social structural and functional relations so vivid as by making biological structures and functions illustrate them. This latter device, however, is not the social interpretation itself. It is merely a convenience tributary to the end of social interpretation. If it does not serve that end in any case, it is to be brushed aside accordingly.
It would occupy more space than is available to pursue the discussion of social structure and function into particulars. We might begin with Spencer’s primary classification of social structure into the sustaining system, the distributing system, and the regulating system. We might show that the functions of production, transfer, and regulation go on, in some manner or other, in every group, from the parts of the animal body considered as a group, to the whole of the human race. We might show how the work performed by these great structural or functional systems17 varies indefinitely in content and proportions from time to time and from place to place, and that the same essential functions go on in social structures so different that only trained insight can discover the identity in the difference. We might show that much experience in analyzing social situations, so as to demonstrate the actual structure and functions concerned, is necessary to form mature and reliable sociological judgment. We might go through a critical analysis of the structure and functions of some selected society, as a sample of the work which every sociologist must be prepared to perform upon the situation with which he has especially to deal. In a conspectus of this sort, however, all this must be omitted.
One further consideration hinted at above may be added. One of the most frequent problems encountered in the practical affairs of social life is, in most general terms, a problem of the relations between social structure and function. It is a universal principle that function develops structure, and that structure limits function. For example, need of defense against men develops the military or police structures; need of defense against fire develops the fire department; per contra, the kind of a military, police, or fire department which a community possesses determines the sort of work which will be done in their lines, and indirectly the sort of work which other parts of the society can perform in discharging other functions.
Now, it is a further general fact that social structures, although differentiated to perform functions, tend to assert themselves, even when the function is no longer necessary, or when the structure is no longer adequate to the function. The parts of social structures are persons. Selfish interests are closer than social interests. The persons who compose a social structure get their living or their repute by doing the work of that structure, or by perpetuating the assumption that they do the work. To the persons in this situation the structure is something desirable in itself, because from it their livelihood and their social prestige are derived. Every revolution in history has accordingly been, wholly or in part, a throwing away of some social structure which once performed a needed function; which had ceased to do the work; which useless people nevertheless wanted to perpetuate because it was a good thing for themselves; which the rest of society wanted to abolish because it stood in the way of their personal interests.
Accordingly, one of the most radical inquiries suggested by any strained social situation, whether it is merely the case of a local church which fails to prosper, or the case of a national government against which the people revolt, or anything intermediate between these extremes, is: What social structure is involved? What functions are its ostensible charge? Are the functions performed? What changes of structure would promote the performance of the functions? What interests insist upon the permanence of the structure at the expense of the functions?
IX. Social forces.
No treatment of this subject is so full and clear as that of Ward.18 What we have said and suggested in the section on interests should, however, be recalled as the basis for analysis of the social forces.
We must guard at the outset against an illusion that has exerted a confusing influence at this point. There are no social forces which are not at the same time forces lodged in individuals, deriving their energy from individuals, and operating in and through individuals. There are no social forces that lurk in the containing ether and affect persons without the agency of other persons. There are, to be sure, all the physical conditions of which we have spoken above, that affect persons just as they affect all other forms of matter. So far, these are not social forces at all. They do not get to be social forces until they get into persons, and in these persons take the form of feelings which impel them to react upon other persons. Persons are thus transmuters of physical forces into social forces; but all properly designated social forces are essentially personal. They are within some persons and stimulate them to act upon other persons, or they are in other persons and exert themselves as external stimuli upon otherwise inert persons. In either case social forces are personal influences passing from person to person and producing activities that give content to the association.
The conception of social forces was never challenged so long as it was merely an everyday commonplace. When it passed into technical forms of expression, doubts began to be urged. If anyone in the United States had questioned the existence of Mrs. Grundy fifty years ago, he would have been pitied and ignored as a harmless “natural.” Social forces in the form of gossip, and personified in Mrs. Grundy, were real to everybody. But the particular species of social forces which Mrs. Grundy represented were neither more nor less real than the other social forces which had no name in folk-lore. Persons incessantly influence persons. The modes of this influence are indescribably varied. They are conscious and unconscious, accidental and momentary, or deliberate and persistent. They are conventional and continuous, the result of individual habit, or of custom crystallized into national or racial institutions.
It is difficult to imagine how there could be any reality, or at least any significance, in the fact which we have named ” the spiritual environment,” if that environment did not have means of affecting persons. The ways in which the spiritual environment comes to be an environment at all in effect are simply the modes of action followed by the social forces. Yet our analysis of the social forces must not be treated as though it were in any sense a deduction from the idea of a spiritual environment. The reverse is the case. We do not get the idea of a spiritual environment until we have found out that there are many distinct social forces, and then it becomes convenient for some purposes to mass them in one conception, to which we give the name ” spiritual environment,” or some equivalent. The simple fact which the concept “social forces” stands for is that every individual acts and is acted upon in countless ways by the other persons with whom he associates. These modes of action and reaction between persons may be classified, and the more obvious and recurrent among them may be enumerated. More than this, the action of these social forces may be observed, and the results of observation may be organized into social laws. Indeed, there would be only two alternatives, if we did not discover the presence and action of social forces. On the one hand, social science at most would be a subdivision of natural science. On the other hand, the remaining alternative would be the impossibility of social science altogether.
But social forces are just as distinctly discernible as chemical forces. The fact that we are not familiar with them no more makes against their existence and their importance than general ignorance of the pressure of the atmosphere takes that phenomenon out of the physical world. The social forces are the atmosphere of the moral world. They are not only the atmosphere, but they are a very large part of the moral world in general. If we could compose a complete account of the social forces we should at the same time have completed, from one point of attention at least, a science of everything involved in human society.
As suggested above, a preface to Ward’s analysis of the social forces should be found in antecedent analysis of interests. As Ward correctly observes:
All beings which can be said to perform actions do so in obedience to those mental states which are denominated desires. . . We will, therefore, rest content to assume that desire is the essential basis of all action, and hence the true force in the sentient world (American Journal of Sociology, Vol. I, p. 468).
But we have gone back a step beyond desires, and have found it necessary to assume the existence of underlying interests. These have to desires very nearly the relation of substance to attribute, or, in a different figure, of genus to species. Our interests may be beyond or beneath our ken; our desires are strong and clear. I may not be conscious of my health interests in any deep sense, but the desires that my appetites assert are specific and concrete and real. The implicit interests, of which we may be very imperfectly aware, move us to desires which may correspond well or ill with the real content of the interests. At all events, it is these desires which make up the active social forces, whether they are more or less harmonious with the interests from which they spring. The desires that the persons associating actually feel are practically the elemental forces with which we have to reckon. They are just as real as the properties of matter. They have their ratios of energy, just as certainly as though they were physical forces. They have their peculiar modes of action, which may be formulated as distinctly as the various modes of chemical action.
The only scientific doubt which is admissible about the social forces concerns the division of labor in studying them. If the social forces are human desires, is not the study of them psychology, rather than sociology? We may answer both “yes” and “no.” In the sense that both psychology and sociology either begin or end in each other, the study of the social forces belongs to psychology. In the sense that either psychology or sociology can be supposed to treat a whole situation, if its distinctive point of view is held apart from the other point of view, neither psychology nor sociology can be credited with sole responsibility for interpretation of the social forces. The emphasis of psychology is upon discrimination of the mental activities (in this case the desires) and the mechanism of their action. The emphasis of sociology is upon the social stimuli of the desires, upon the various content which they carry in different situations, and upon their operation within associations of persons. The relations of psychology and sociology to knowledge of the social forces are consequently complementary, not competitive.
Ward’s briefer classification of the social forces is as follows (p. 472):
| Essential forces | Preservative forces | a. Positive, gustatory (seeking pleasure) b. Negative, protective (avoiding pain) |
| Reproductive forces | a. Direct—the sexual and amative desires b. Indirect—parental and consanguineal affections | |
| Nonessential forces | Aesthetic forces | |
| Emotional (moral) forces | ||
| Intellectual forces | ||
Whether we assume or not that Ward has found the final classification of the social forces, his analysis is a point of departure which affords the readiest approach to the subject.
It is hardly necessary to enlarge upon the importance of the concept social forces, because the argument was virtually fore. shadowed in our discussion of interests. Every desire that any man harbors is a force making or marring, strengthening or weakening, the structure and functions of the society of which he is a part. What the human desires are, what their relations are to each other, what their peculiar modifications are under different circumstances-these are questions of detail which must be answered in general by social psychology and in particular by specific analysis of each social situation. The one consideration to be urged at this point is that the concept “social forces” has a real content. It represents reality. There are social forces. They are the desires of persons. They range in energy from the vagrant whim that makes the individual a temporary discomfort to his group, to the inbred feelings that whole races share. It is with these subtle forces that social arrangements and the theories of social arrangements have to deal.
X. Social Ends.
To suggest the notion of “ends” is to invite metaphysical argument. Our philosophical traditions incline us to speculation about ends as they exist in the absolute mind; ends proposed at the beginning of things; ends to which all events within our knowledge are tributary, whether we discover it or not; ends toward which the whole creation moves, whether men consent or not. If it were practicable to enter into greater detail at this point, we might easily show that what we have said about the unconscious phase of human interests, as contrasted with specific desires, lends itself to a theory of ends that are not immediate and visible, but many steps removed, and so not consciously proposed by all or many of the members of society. For instance, to take the classic American illustration, the colonists in the seventh decade of the eighteenth century wanted “redress of grievances” from the mother-country. That meant certain specific things, which they plainly stated. To get redress of grievances they adopted a series of concerted measures—committees of correspondence, continental congresses, non-intercourse agreements, insurrection. But these steps did not avail. To get the specific things that all wanted, it became necessary to strike for another thing, independence, that none wanted. Having obtained independence, it soon became apparent that another thing, which few wanted, was the only alternative with loss of what had been gained. Accordingly the colonies founded that other thing, nationality. Now, there is a use of the conception of ends, in which independence and nationality may be said to have been the “ends” of American activities from the beginning. That is, they were consummations which the logic of events must bring to pass, whether any individual could foresee them or not. In this sense every stage of development through which men and nations pass in reaching more complete life is an ” end” of all previous stages, and human experience is a scale of means and ends, regardless of men’s thoughts about the meaning of their acts. This is the sense in which we think of all life as being a preparation for some undefined end-“that far-off divine event toward which the whole creation moves.”
The conception of ends thus indicated has a place in social philosophy, but our present business is with a much more restricted concept. In a word, human associations always have reasons for existence as associations, and those reasons are conscious ends for the association, in a way which differs somewhat from that in which they are ends for the individuals in the association.
Take, for example, the family, either primitive or modern. From a variety of motives a man and a woman unite to form a family. They thus secure certain reciprocal services. They assure to themselves certain comforts, conveniences, safeguards. dignities, which unattached persons lack. To each of these persons individually independence is a desired end. These other goods are also desired, and for the sake of them the individuals exchange a certain kind of independence for that kind of interdependence which the family relationship involves. That very interdependence now becomes an end for the persons united in the family. The continued existence of the family is an end in itself. Both man and woman may shortly become aware that this end, which is decisive for them as a family, comes into sharp collision with ends that are dear to them as individuals. Each says in his heart, “I would like to do so and so;” but each is restrained by the thought, “That would break up the family.” Whether the conflict between the individual ends and the family ends becomes sharp enough to be thus realized by the members of the family, or not, it is always there in principle. Each society, large or small, has ends which may have every degree of harmonious or inharmonious relation with the interests and desires of the individual members.
For our present purposes it is not worth while to dwell upon the relation of social ends to individual ends. The present proposition is that social ends exist. Societies exist for purposes that are distinctive. Accordingly, the first end of every society, as of every individual, is self-preservation. Whether it is one of the most permanent species of association, like the family or the state, or an accidental and unimportant association, like a bicycle club or a reading circle, every human society has its peculiar degree of tenacity of life. The end of perpetuating its existence asserts itself with corresponding force against the reactions of its individual members, on the one hand, and against collisions with the rest of the world, on the other.
This fact of social ends, more or less at variance with the ends that the individuals who compose the society might, could, would, or should pursue if they were outside of the society, is another of those cardinal realities in which we find clues to the mysteries of human experience. From the savage, who is merely a wolf in the human pack, to the court circle of London or Berlin or Vienna or the Vatican, every individual is carried along, partly by his own desires, partly in spite of them, in the current of the social ends pursued by the society to which he belongs. All human experience is thus not merely a fabric of personal desires, but those personal desires operate in a very large measure impersonally. That is, the desires get organized into institutions, and those institutions then in turn make requisitions upon persons, just as though the institutions actually had an existence of themselves, outside of and above the desires of the persons who make the institutions. We have just seen this in the case of the family. As members of the family the man and the woman composing it enforce demands upon both which may sharply antagonize each. These institutionalized demands become the ends which associations of persons pursue. The acts which individuals perform would be unaccountable if we did not know the social ends that dominate individual ends. Why do I obey the laws? Why do I perform jury service? Why do I pay taxes? Why do I observe certain conventional proprieties? My strictly individual preferences may take up arms against each of these every time it demands my conformity. To remain in society at all, or to remain in good standing in society, which may seem to me more important, I must subordinate some of my individual ends to the social ends.
Later chapters of sociology have to consider a great number of relations which depend upon the fact here involved; e.g., when are social ends and when are individual ends progressive, or retrogressive? Our present object is merely to give the fact of social ends its proportionate emphasis.
Since social ends are organizations of the desires of persons, since they are the demands enforced by common elements in the desires of numbers of persons increasing with the size of the society, the presumption is strong that the social ends which control at any time correspond more closely with the real interests of the persons in the association than their individual desires. That this has been the case, in the aggregate, more than the contrary, is evident if we believe that real human interests have, on the whole, been promoted by the course of events thus far in history. It would be a generalization much too sweeping, however,if we should say that social ends are an expression of genuine human interests, while individual ends express merely apparent or approximate interests. The contrary is often the case. It is more nearly true to say that the social ends are more likely to express the demands of essential interests when they emphasize functional wants, and less likely to correspond with these interests when they converge upon social structure.
Without attempting to reach an equation of the social and the individual ends, we may further illustrate the existence of the former by use of a diagram.
The interests implicit in every individual are scheduled in the horizontal line at the bottom of the diagram. Each of these interests may assert itself in desires that form a rising scale, through innumerable gradations. The diagram merely indicates these variations of the desires within the six interest-realms represented by the capital letters A-F, by the small letters a-f, with exponents from i to xiv.
The left-hand column of the diagram follows Ratzenhofer. It means that there is a visible scale of progress in human society at large. To state Ratzenhofer’s thesis we must use terms which come later in our schedule. But, in brief, the proposition is that men arrange themselves from the beginning in groups, which are at first small and exclusive. These groups grow larger, both by growth from within and by various sorts of assimilations and mergings. Starting at the bottom of the column, there are two distinguishable lines of development: first, that in which conflict between groups is the cardinal activity; second, that in which reciprocal interests of groups are recognized. These two lines of development are not absolutely separable in time. In general, the former is first in historical order; but, after a certain stage of progress, the latter development begins to overlap the former.
The Social Interests and Their Stages of Development
| Stages of Ethical Development | A: Bodily Well-being | B: Control of Natural Resources | C: Adjustment of Personal Relations | D: Discovery and Dissemination of Knowledge | E: Artistic and Creative Enjoyment | F: Satisfaction of Conscience. | |
| VIII. | Ethical satisfaction | a xiv | b xiv | c xiv | d xiv | e xiv | f xiv |
| VII. | Preservation and multiplication of sources of supply | a xiii | b xiii | c xiii | d xiii | e xiii | f xiii |
| VI. | Intensive production | a xii | b xii | c xii | d xii | e xii | f xii |
| V. | Diplomacy between states | a xi | b xi | c xi | d xi | e xi | f xi |
| IV. | Universal freedom with equality of legal rights | a x | b x | c x | d x | e x | f x |
| III. | Political self-restraint for the sake of peace | a ix | b ix | c ix | d ix | e ix | f ix |
| II. | Community of interest | a viii | b viiii | c viii | d viii | e viii | f viii |
| I. | Care for fellow-beings | a vii | b vii | c vii | d vii | e vii | f vii |
| Stages of Conflict Development | |||||||
| VII. | Aggressive combinations crossing state boundaries | a vi | b vi | c vi | d vi | e vi | f vi |
| VI. | Balance of power | a v | b v | c v | d v | e v | f v |
| V. | Coalitions | a iv | b iv | c iv | d iv | e iv | f iv |
| IV. | Hegemony and world-control | a iii | b iii | c iii | d iii | e iii | f iii |
| III. | State as exclusive society | a ii | b ii | c ii | d ii | e ii | f ii |
| II. | Settled race | a i | b i | c i | d i | e i | f i |
| I. | Horde and race. | a | b | c | d | e | f |
| Unsocialized Individual Interests | |||||||
| Health Minimum | Wealth Minimum | Sociability Minimum | Knowledge Minimum | Beauty Minimum | Rightness Minimum | ||
Human groups, then, begin early to be conscious of distinct group-ends. The lowest in the scale is that of the horde, and then presently of the race. Each may be hard pressed in the struggle for food. It has, consequently, an intense group-desire to keep the group intact, as the means of defending the sources of food; and, for the same reason, to weaken and beat off or destroy all rival hordes or races.
The ends which the groups pursue, as they develop from the horde, vary in two ways, which we may call extension and content. The former is represented somewhat ideally by the rising scale in the left-hand column. The latter may be represented by combinations of terms in the other columns.
We may find a group at Stage III of conflict-development, for instance. Suppose we take Sparta or Athens as our illustration. The society leads a very close and exclusive life. Its purposes are bounded by its own political confines. People beyond these boundaries are slightly esteemed. When accident brings the Spartans or Athenians into intercourse with outside individuals or states, the standard of conduct toward them is distinctly less sympathetic and humane than the public and private standards which the state or the population shows in domestic intercourse. Thus the social end, as such, is restricted in its extent. Meanwhile, in Athens, at the age of Pericles, many individuals have desires which we might represent as follows:
Accordingly, the social end of Athens, compounded of many individual desires, might be symbolized, as to its content, in this way:
I. e., every society whatsoever will have, in addition to its primary social end of self-existence, a qualitative end, which is the algebraic sum, so to speak, or, better, a chemical compound, of the desires cherished by its individual members within the realm of the several great interests.
Having thus pointed out the meaning of the phrase “social ends” in general, and having indicated that every human association, however minute, has its peculiar social ends, subordinate, as the members and the association itself may be, to a hierarchy of more inclusive ends, we are prepared to see that identification of the precise ends cherished and pursued by any society is a very considerable item in the program of getting an understanding of that society. The desires of individuals and of societies, from least to greatest, give us, on the one hand, our means of interpreting the social process as a whole; and, on the other hand, our conception of the social process as a whole gives us a basis of comparison by which to pass judgment upon the wisdom or the unwisdom, the progressiveness or the obstructiveness, of the social ends actually in view in the particular societies with which we are dealing.19
All that has been said thus far in this paper is an argument to the effect that, for a long time to come, the chief value of sociology will be derived from the use of its distinctive point of view, rather than from a subject-matter to which sociology can maintain an exclusive claim. Our argument is that human life cannot be seen whole and real unless it is construed in the terms which we have discussed. We do not know anything unless we know it in its relationships. The details of human experience are as meaningless as a form of type knocked into pi, unless we have the clues which enable us to distribute and reset the events. We have called the terms treated in this paper “the primary concepts of sociology.” It is hardly worth while to offer here a justification of that designation. In brief, it will be found, after a little experience in studying society with the use of these concepts, that the others to which we now turn, are either details which are met so soon as analysis grows precise, or they are notions necessarily implied by the larger conceptions. Indeed, we have used most of them already, whether they have been named or not.
It is not necessary to offer any general principle about the relative importance of the different concepts. It is sufficient to say that every one of those named in our schedule is actually present, in some degree or other, in every stage or part or episode of the social process large enough to be observed. Analysis of a given section of experience involves use of these categories, then, not in any mechanical way, as though they were equally prominent and equally significant. It involves their use just as the different phases of reaction known to chemistry are employed in analyses of physical substances, i. e., in precisely the proportions in which they prove to have significance in the case in hand. We proceed to mention a series of concepts which are not of one and the same order of generality. Indeed, we have been obliged to employ most of them in the foregoing discussion. Although it would be desirable to place them more definitely in hierarchical relations, we must be content merely to schedule them provisionally.
XI. Contact.
-This concept has been emphasized earlier in this series. We have said that the most general and inclusive way in which to designate the subject-matter with which sociology must deal is by saying that it is concerned with all human contacts. One detail which cannot possibly be eliminated from the social condition, or from the idea of the social, is contact of one person with others.20
XII. Differentiation.
We might recall Spencer’s formula of evolution, viz.:
Evolution is an integration of matter and a concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the relative motion undergoes a parallel transformation (First Principles, sec. 145).
Reduced to a single word, this formula would be that evolution is differentiation. The rest of the formula merely characterizes certain features of this differentiation.
The social process, as a part of the world-process in general, is likewise a collection of differentiations. One way of telling the story of every individual life, or of universal history, or of anything intermediate, would be to narrate the differentiations that occurred from beginning to end of the career. Discussion of this concept could hardly be reduced to a few concise statements. We might choose from numberless societies the material for illustration. For instance, we might adopt Ratzenhofer’s classification of the concrete interests differentiated in a modern state, as follows:
- The universal interest : sustenance
- The kinship interests
- The national interests.
- The creedal interests.
- The pecuniary interests.
- The class interests.
- Extraction.
- Artisanship.
- Manufacture.
- Wage labor.
- Trade.
- Professional and personal services.
- Begging.
- Pseudo-classes.
- Capital
- Massed capital
- Massed labor
- The rank interests
- The corporate interests
With the differentiation of each of these forms of interest there naturally follows corresponding differentiation of social structures and functions.21
XIII. Groups.
The fact of social groups is so obvious, and is of such constant import, that we have necessarily referred to it more than once in the foregoing discussion. All that need be said further in this rapid survey is that the term “group” serves as a convenient sociological designation for any number of people, larger or smaller, between whom such relations are discovered that they must be thought of together. The ” group” is the most general and colorless term used in sociology for combinations of persons. A family, a mob, a picnic party, a trade union, a city precinct or ward, a corporation, a state, a nation, the civilized or the uncivilized population of the world, may be treated as a group. Thus a “group” for sociology is a number of persons whose relations to each other are sufficiently impressive to demand attention. The term is merely a commonplace tool. It contains no mystery. It is merely a handle with which to grasp the innumerable varieties of arrangements into which people are drawn by their variations of interest. The universal condition of association may be expressed in the same commonplace way: people always live in groups, and the same persons are likely to be members of many groups. All the illustrations that we need suggest may be assembled around the schedule of interests in the last paragraph.
XIV. Form of the group.
This conception has been pushed to the front by one of the keenest thinkers in Europe— Professor Simmel, of Berlin.
Simmel distinguishes two senses of the term “society”: ” first, the broader sense, in which the term includes the sum of all the individuals concerned in reciprocal relations, together with all the interests which unite these interacting persons; second, a narrower sense, in which the term designates the society or association as such; that is, the interaction itself which constitutes the bond of association, in abstraction from its material content” (American Journal of Sociology, Vol. II, p. 167).
Using his own explanation:
Thus, for illustration, we designate as a cube, on the one hand, any natural object in cubical form; on the other hand, the simple form alone, which made the material contents into a ” cube,” in the former sense, constitutes of itself, independently and abstractly considered, an object for geometry. The significance of geometry appears in the fact that the formal relations which it determines hold good for all possible objects formed in space. In like manner, it is the purpose of sociology to determine the forms and modes of the relations between men, which, although constituted of entirely different contents, material, and interests, nevertheless take shape in formally similar social structures. If we could exhibit the totality of possible forms of social relationship in their gradations and variations, we should have in such exhibit complete knowledge of “society” as such. We gain knowledge of the forms of socialization by bringing together inductively the manifestations of these forms which have had actual historical existence. In other words, we have to collect and exhibit that element of form which these historical manifestations have in common abstracted from the variety of material– economical, ethical, ecclesiastical, social, political, etc.- with respect to which they differ.22 (Loc. cit., p. 168.)
“The thesis of Simmel, that sociology must be the science of social forms, has at least this effect upon the present stage of correlation: viz., it makes us conscious that we have no adequate schedule of the forms of social life.”’
XV. Conflict
The facts referred to in sections 12 and 13 above, and yielding the concepts ” differentiation” and ” group,’ have other relations which the present term brings into focus. In a word, the whole social process is a perpetual reaction between interests that have their lodgment in the individuals who compose society. More specifically, this reaction is disguised or open struggle between the individuals. The conflict of interests between individuals, combined with community of interest in the same individuals, results in the groupings of individuals between whom there is relatively more in common, and then the continuance of struggle between group and group. The members of each group have relatively less in common with the members of a different group than they have with each other.
The concept ”conflict” is perhaps the most obvious in the whole schedule. It has not only been a practically constant presumption of nearly all social theory and practice in the past, but it has had excessive prominence in modern sociology. The central conception in the theory of Gumplowicz, for example,23 is that the human process is a perpetual conflict of groups in which the individuals actually lose their individuality. The balance between ” conflict,’’ on the one hand, and co-operation and correlation and consensus, on the other, has never been formulated more justly than by Ratzenhofer.24 His thesis is that conflict is primarily universal, but that it tends to resolve itself into cooperation. Socialization, indeed, is the transformation of conlict into co-operation.25 Sociological analysis accordingly involves discrimination and appraisal of the kind and quantity of conflict present in each society with which it deals.
XVI. Social situations.
Certain concepts which might have been placed in this schedule were listed in the sixth paper of this series, under the title “Some Incidents of Association.”26 Still other concepts must be employed in later stages of our discussion. Some of them have a working value in excess of that which can be claimed for many of those assembled in this paper. They are not elementary enough in logical rank, however, to require mention in this catalogue. We therefore close the list with a concept which is, of course, essentially psychological. Indeed, any attempt to conceive of association in terms of activity, or psychologically, presupposes the idea for which the term ” social situation” is a symbol.
In a word, a “social situation’ is any portion of experience brought to attention as a point in time or space at which a tension of social forces is present. More simply, a”social situation”is any circle of human relationships thought of as belonging together, and presenting the problem: What are the elements involved in this total, and how do these elements affect each other? This term, again, like the term “group,”’ carries no dogmatic assumptions. It is not a means of smuggling into sociology any insidious theory. It is simply one of the inevitable terms for the sort of thing in which all the sociologists find their problems. A “social situation’ is any phase of human life, from the least to the greatest, which invites observation, description,’explanation. For instance, the Hebrew commonwealth, when hesitating between the traditional patriarchal order and a monarchical organization, presents a”social situation;” a quarrel between a husband and wife, threatening the disruption of a single family, presents a “social situation;” the existing treaty stipulations between the commercial nations constitute a “social situation;” the terms of a contract and the disposition of the parties toward those terms, in the case of a single employer and his employees, present equally a “social situation.” That is, the term is simply a convenient generic designation for every kind and degree of social combination which for the time being attracts attention as capable of consideration by itself. The term is innocent of theoretical implications. It is simply serviceable as a colorless designation of the phenomena which the sociologist must investigate.
Sociology is not a mechanical forcing of the facts of life into these categories. On the contrary, the more we generalize the facts of life, the more they force us to think of them under these forms. Our thought in these forms may prove to be a passing stage in progress toward more complete and positive knowledge. Meanwhile these concepts certainly stand for a stage, whether permanent or transient, in approach to apprehension of social fact and social law. Intelligent use of these concepts is the condition of attaining that measure of insight into social reality which sociology at present commands. As this paper has implied throughout, it is a very simple matter to get a list of the important sociological concepts. It is quite another thing to get so used to applying them that they are the natural forms in which the ordinary facts of experience present themselves to the mind. On the other hand, merely flling one’s sentences with terms from the sociological vocabulary does not, in itself, give evidence of sociological insight. The state of mind which sociological study should produce is that in which the activities of society present to the mind simultaneously all these relationships. Then the mature sociological judgment will instinctively select the one or more of these relationships which may be peculiarly significant for the case in hand, and will take the others for granted. In other words, it is necessary to get so much experience in analyzing societies in terms of these concepts that we can readily tell which of them we must continue to consider and which of them we may throw out of the account.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO.
ALbion W. SMaLL.
[To be continued.]
Notes
- The first seven papers of this series appeared in this Journal , Vol, V, Nos. 3, 4, and 5; and Vol. VI, Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4↩
- American Journal of Sociology, Vol. VI, pp. 47-60.↩
- American Journal of Sociology, Vol. VI, pp. 761.↩
- Vid. above, Vol. VI, pp. 354-6, "A Subjective Environment."↩
- It has recently been made use of in a very forcible way by Professor John Dewey in a paper entitled "Interpretation of the Savage Mind," Psychological Review, May, 1902.↩
- Vid. Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations.↩
- Vid. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. VI, pp. 177-93.↩
- Vid. p. 200.↩
- Probably it is needless to say that the term " interest " in this connection, whether used in the singular or the plural, has nothing to do with the economic term " interest."↩
- American Journal of Sociology, Vol. VI, pp. 177-200.↩
- For a somewhat more highly generalized expression of them as interests, vid. ibid., Vol. VI, pp. 60-66.↩
- American Journal of Sociology, Vol. V, pp. 784-8 and 796-802.↩
- Vid. Giddings, Principles o.f Sociology, Book IV, chap. i, "The Social Process, Physical ;" chap. ii, " The Social Process, Psychical. "↩
- Vid. Small and Vincent, Introduction, pp. 87-96; American Journal of Sociology, Vol. II, p. 311; Vol. IV, p. 411; Vol. V, pp. 276 and 626-31.↩
- Thus the Century Dictionary has, among others, the following definition of the term: " In the widest sense, any production or piece of work artificially built up or composed of parts joined together in some definite manner; any construction An organic form ; the combination of parts in any natural production ; an organization of parts or elements . . . . . Mode of building, construction, or organization ; arrangement of parts, elements, or constituents; form; make : - use of both natural and artificial productions."↩
- Vid. Small and Vincent, Book IV, "Social Physiology and Pathology," and Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Book II, chap. v, "Social Functions."↩
- They are the one or the other according as we think of them from the side of mechanism or from the side of the work that they perform.↩
- Dynamic Sociology, Vol. I, 468-82 ; and The Psychic Factors of Civilization.↩
- A group of hypothetical illustrations of social ends of different grades, in the case of states, is proposed in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. VI, pp. 51 2-3 1. Formulas of the social end in general are proposed loc. cit., pp. 20 1-3.↩
- Vid. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. V, pp. 798, 799, and Vol. VI, pp. 328, 329.↩
- The profoundest discussion of this concept is in Simmel's Sociale Differenzierungen, unfortunately out of print. Ratzenhofer devotes a chapter to much more concrete description, Die sociologische Erkenntniss, chap. 15. Specific phases of differentiation are referred to above under the titles "Individualization" and "Socialization," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. VI, pp. 35 1-4.↩
- For list of possible social forms vid. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. VI, p. 390.↩
- Grundriss der Sociologie.↩
- Particularly Wesen und Zweck, Part II, secs. 17-27, and Soc. Erk., sec. 30.↩
- This thesis is represented in the left-hand column of the diagram above, p. 242.↩
- American Journal of Sociology, Vol VI, p. 324. ↩