VII. Classification of Associations.¹

Jan., 1901 entry in the serialized work

"The Scope of Sociology"

American Journal of Sociology 6(4):487-531.

If our exhibit of the scope of sociology were to be continued upon the scale of minuteness adopted in chap. vi, it would be necessary to cover ground which has long ago been cultivated so well that there is little hope of improving the work at once. To continue the argument from the point now reached we have only to cite such well-known discussions as the following, viz.: Ratzenhofer, Die sociologische Erkenntnis; Part IV, ” The Social Process of the Human Race;” Part VI, “The Social Forces;” Part VII, “Social Evolution in the Light of Sociological Perception;” Ward, Dynamic Sociology, second edition, Vol. I, pp. 468-706, ” The Social Forces;” Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, Part I, chap. xxvii, and Part II.

It will not be superfluous to add one more general statement, as a reminder of the relations between general classifications of sociological material and the various divisions of sociological interpretation.

In presence of the same material, that is, the same body of specific facts about men, intellectual interests in organizing and interpreting the material concentrate in several distinct ways. For instance, one variety of thinkers will look out over human associations, and they will be moved to ask: “How did men come to associate as they now do?” This is the typical question of those whose primary curiosity is about the genetic aspect of human experience. Thinkers of another variety will survey the same facts, and they will ask: “How do men manage to preserve the status quo?” This question voices the peculiar interest of the men who care more for insight into the present social situation, for analysis of present social arrangements and the way they work, than for knowledge of how they came into existence. A third variety of thinkers are relatively indifferent to both these questions, and they ask rather: “What are the visible indications about the ways in which men will associate in the future?” This is the question that rallies the men who are trying to make the things which are seen disclose those that are unseen. It is the question of the seer, the idealist, the constructive philosopher. To him past and present are nothing except as they contain and reveal the future. Still another variety of men take for granted all the answers to these questions that seem to them worth considering, and their question is: “What is the thing to do here and now, in order to make the better future that is to be?” This is the query of the men who want to be more than mere scholars. They want to accomplish something. They want to organize rational movements for making life yield increasing proportions of its possibilities.

The fact that these lines of cleavage exist between men who deal with sociology calls for attention to several things that have caused much confusion. In the first place, men of these different varieties have expressed or implied descriptions of the scope of sociology which perhaps seem irreconcilable. The truth is that they have merely emphasized, and in some cases overemphasized, the particular phase of the vast reaches of sociology which is peculiarly interesting to themselves. They have very naturally placed special stress upon their own division of labor, and they have incidentally slurred over the other divisions of labor. It by no means follows that these men would explicitly eliminate or disparage these other portions of science, nor that the final answer to the different types of question will contain anything irreconcilable. The fact, however, that men have actually pursued these different inquiries under the name of sociology accounts for the wide divergencies between treatises and monographs that have used this title. In one case we find plain anthropology or ethnology; in another, simply oldfashioned philosophy of history, with little except its arrogation of a new name to redeem it from the condemnation under which the older thinking rests; in other cases we have had political or economic or ethical philosophy; and again we have had the same rule-of-thumb policy that experimenters have time out of mind adventured, sometimes to worse than no purpose, and sometimes with fortunate results.

Now the truth is that human associations have aspects and implications that are at one and the same time genetic and static and teleologic and technologic.² Probably very few sociologists, however special the studies which have given them most prominence, have entirely neglected the other aspects of social reality. At all events, sociology will be an abortion until it is a successful integration of the genetic and static and teleologic and technologic elements involved in the social process, and consequently in sociological theory. It is by no means desirable that division of labor within the sociological field should cease. On the contrary, our problems are demanding further differentiation without visible limit. The desirable thing is that the workers of the types just mentioned shall keep within sight of each other, shall remember that they are parts of each other, and shall acquire more facility in correcting themselves by each other.

To whichever type of investigators we belong, our dependence upon ability to catalogue and classify associations is equally real. In the monograph which we shall quote below Dr. Steinmetz has not too severely characterized the poverty of resource from which we derive most of the generalizations that do duty as “inductions” in the social sciences. For discovery of methods in the evolution of associations, or of laws of reaction within and between associations, or of ends implicit in associations, or of means adequate to hasten achievement of those ends, we have no other source of knowledge than the facts displayed by associations past and present. Whether our immediate purpose is the partial aim of the specialist, or the comprehensive aim of the philosopher who wants to outline the most extensive and intensive view obtainable of the meaning of human life, our alternatives are, on the one hand, resort to speculations, or, on the other hand, analytic and synthetic organization of the facts presented by every known phase of human association. It is hardly to be expected that a final classification of associations can be proposed, for associations themselves are not finalized. What we may expect is such use of analyses and classifications appropriate to separate types and phases and stages of association that our knowledge of the actual social process may move toward completer comprehension. The present discussion is an attempt to point out certain approaches to such use of classification.

Wherever men have reflected about men they have instinctively paid more or less attention to the facts recited and the interpretations suggested in the foregoing chapters and in the passages named in the first paragraph of this chapter. Whether thinkers have carried generalization and abstraction to the point of mentioning “association,” or even associations, is immaterial. They have perforce dealt with men in groups, in reactions, in combinations of some sort. The most naive writing about society has had its expressed or implied classifications of men, and these represented actual or conceptual associations (populi romani and gentes; plebs and patricians; elect and reprobate; clergy and laity; civilized and uncivilized; orientals and occidentals; Latins and Saxons; etc., etc.).

As the social sciences grew more systematic and sophisticated, their classifications gradually took account of more and more species of association. Ethnology schedules racial associations; history, by preference political associations; economics, industrial and incidentally other associations. All these classifications have their uses, which cease when they begin to obstruct discovery of relations which the traditional categories do not disclose. After we have looked out over the human race, and have seen the people of the world divided into geographical, political, racial, vocational, and countless minor groups, we come back to the reflection that these people are, after all, merely variations of the same sort of personal unit that we find in our individual selves. We remember that these diversified associations are merely incidental to the working out by other men of the same life-purposes which we are pursuing in our particular associations. We recall that these associations are all more or less essential means to ends. They are devices for reaching the same ultimate aims that we clearly or vaguely seek. Thereupon we begin to ask: Is it possible so to classify men’s associations that the relativity of their meaning will appear? Is it possible to see how the human unit works into one association within another, distinctly enough to discover the kind, and at last the degree, of significance of each association for the essential interests out of which and into which life develops?

The sociologists have assumed an affirmative answer to these questions, and have made beginnings of descriptive classifications of men in their universal activities. Comte tried to provide for such descriptions by the proposal of ” social physics.” His idea, like that of Quételet, was of society as a vast machine made up of human units whose acts obey strictly mechanical laws. He would describe human beings and their associations as parts within parts of the social machine. We need not waste words upon the futility of this attempt.

There followed a generation of sociologists who perceived that men associate with each other more intimately than parts of a machine play into each other. The beginnings of scientific biology had been made. They caught the imagination of social philosophers. These men said: Society is not a machine; society is a living body. Thereupon three notable attempts were made to describe human associations under the analogy of an animal organism.³ This too, after all that is true is said, was in some respects a crude and dangerous experiment, but even those who are most contemptuous toward it would admit that while this attempt to describe the essentials of society has held the attention of sociologists some progress has been made, and deeper insight has been gained. Suppose it be granted that this gain is in spite of a certain fanciful element in the surroundings of biological analogy. Let it even be admitted, for the sake of argument, that the gains have been made merely in the line of refuting errors incident to the use of this analogy. It remains true that the intricacy and intimacy of human associations are better understood than when they were treated by Comte in terms of mechanics. We have progressed from the assumption of a mechanical or physiological principle, as the bond of human associations, to the assumption of an evolutionary principle, operating through means partly vital, partly psychical. In accordance with this principle, whatever it may prove to be, men arrange themselves in correlated groups, the whole forming a system of activities which is organic in a higher sense than that of biology. There is no consensus about definition of this principle, but description of what actually occurs among associations is gradually narrowing down the limits of definition, just as description of what occurs in the animal world first resulted in the formula of natural selection, and then haled that formula before the scientific courts of review, where it is now having a second hearing.

With something of this idea in mind, a large number of men have proposed more or less exhaustive classifications of associations, or of “society,” or of what occurs in society. The present discussion will not review these in detail, but references to them will lead rather to certain methodological eliminations and substitutions as a result of dealing with them in principle.

All the schemes hitherto proposed for classifying men in association have somehow fallen short, by narrower or wider margins, of satisfying instant demands. All descriptions of objects merely as objects leave them undescribed at last. The objects of our knowledge are related to each other. Our knowledge of the objects becomes real in proportion as it discovers their relations. All objects of knowledge are functioning parts in the whole cosmic reality. Within the world of people each man and each association of men has a functional meaning. Human associations are created by persons in the course of their efforts to attain ends. These associations all have their meaning, as well as their being, in connection with their implicit personal purposes. The associations are incidental to the attainment of purposes by individuals. More than this, they are the partial attainment of the purposes pursued by individuals. The suggestion is natural that, if we knew the purposes of individuals, we should have a key to the associations produced by these purposes. This leads to the suggestion that associations might be classified on the basis of the ends to which they are tributary. Recurring to our working analysis of human interests and desires,⁴ and adopting it by way of illustration as a starting point for discussion, we might plan our description of human associations under the following titles:

1. Health associations.
2. Wealth associations.
3. Sociability associations.
4. Knowledge associations.
5. Beauty associations.
6. Rightness associations.

In other words, the most direct way ideally to get at the reality of what is going on in human associations would be to find out what men as individuals want-not merely in detail, but in the principles implied in details-then to discriminate the associations that cater to these several wants.⁵

Are there insuperable difficulties in the way of adopting such a method? Having in mind all the phases of societary differentiation thus far referred to in these papers, our main inquiry in the present chapter is: May human associations be more adequately described and classified than by use of the already familiar schemes? May we discover methods of classification which will more nearly satisfy the requirements of the evolutionary, functional, teleological conceptions which, in some manner or other, demand recognition in all formulations of social reality? Our answer is decidedly in the affirmative, but it would be foolish to disguise the tremendous difficulties of the undertaking.

It ought not to embarrass us if we at once discover, for instance, that there is likely to be relatively little material in the health series, as compared with the wealth series which has been worked out so elaborately during the last century. Possibly we shall find that the economic series will always occupy the major part of the social domain. This, however, signifies nothing prejudicial to our perception. We are not bent on flling out a schedule of sciences that shall be schematically uniform. All we want is to find a way of reporting what actually is. If one of these elements absorbs more life-force than another, we certainly do not want it to figure in sociology as equal to each of the other terms in the social equation. Our starting-point is that men carry into all their associations tacit or express requisitions for all these kinds of satisfaction. All the activities that go on among associated men are the actual response that action makes thus far to these implicit desires. The associational activities are the process of satisfying these desires in so far as the process goes on at all. If we are right in our hypothesis that associated human life is to be understood in the large only as the entire system of functionings with reference to the ends indicated by the six desires which we detect; and if we are right in presupposing that associated human life will become a process that approaches completeness in proportion as it functions with reference to the several satisfactions in accordance with some ratio not yet discovered, we should expect to find, meanwhile, that the several ends are very unequally and disproportionately provided for in present society. Specific exhibits of the actual situation, however, will serve not merely to describe what is. They will at the same time amount, at least in a general way, to teleological indications.

The foregoing suggestions afford another view of the appalling complexity of our subject-matter. It may be further indicated with the help of an illustration drawn from one of Herbert Spencer’s doctrines. In discussing the ethics of voting Spencer declares that equity would be most fully realized in a state in which ” there is not a representation of individuals, but a representation of interests.”⁶

The obvious reply is that interests are essentially individual. All human interests are primarily individual interests. They are inseparable, in fact, from the individuals to whom they pertain. Interests that are more than individual get that plus character, not by differing in kind from individual interests, but by being permutations of individual interests. There is no way, therefore, to represent interests without representing or misrepresenting the individuals who are the ultimate repositories of the interests.

This particular case brings to view the rock on which the profoundest attempts to analyze human associations may split; viz.: When we try to divide human associations in accordance with the impulses that create and maintain and move them, we soon confront the apparent dilemma that we must either give up the attempt in despair, or we must find a way of dismembering individuals and of distributing the parts among the associations that they compose.

The same individual, for example, might schedule himself as a farmer for his health; a lawyer for his wealth; a member of a “four hundred” for his sociability; of an academy of sciences for his knowledge; of a musical society or an art league for his beauty; of a lodge, or ethical-culture society, or reform club, or church for his rightness. Unhappily for the purposes of science, our live individual is not accommodating enough to get all the satisfactions of any single desire in the activities which answer primarily to that desire. On the contrary, each of these desires may satisfy itself in part in every activity that answers to each other desire. Accordingly, there are very few individual activities, and perhaps still fewer associations, that can be referred exclusively, even in a superficial way, to a single desire. More than this, if we think of individual interests as merged into the interests of associations, we find that the actual persons in whom the interests have their local lodgment are bodily in one association and spiritually in a dozen or a thousand other associations at the same time. Moreover, there seems to be no way of so bringing the different phases of their interest together that interests and the personnel of associations will coincide.

For instance, the members of a dairy association may be divided in health programs between Christian Science and Mormonism, and Ann Leeism and frank libertinism. In response to social impulses they may distribute themselves between the Republican, Democratic, Populist, Prohibitionist, and Socialist

Labor parties. In their knowledge associations they may form other groups around certain more or less learned publications that enter some of the homes, or the grange, or the university-extension center. Their beauty associations may be confined to certain cooperations with the artistic departments of the state or county fair, or the support of a singing school or a villageimprovement society. In rightness associations they may arrange themselves visibly in a score of religious connections, or lodges, or fraternities; while in actual types of conduct, in the real moral tendencies that they promote, they may be distributed among a hundred varieties of action-from those that are survivals of the predatory state to those that anticipate the millennium.

What resort is open, then, if sociology is to advance beyond the “game, vermin, and stock” order of classification? It is, of course, lèse-majesté toward the sovereignty of tradition, but the truth must be told that, tried by the tests of serious logic, the categories in current use in the social sciences hardly rise above that amateur grade. Sociology has nothing to gain by concealing the perplexities which we at once confront when we try to get better categories. It surely looks as though we had formulated, in the abstract, a set of problems and a program of investigation impossible in the concrete. If we are counting on quantitative knowledge as precise and extensive as that of physics and chemistry, these doubts are amply justified. If, however, we appreciate the value of qualitative knowledge; if we recognize the importance and utility of more profound and accurate insight into all the regularities manifested by human associations; we are very far from having exhausted our means of search. The categories which we have indicated will be available both in extending and in enriching social science. Without waiting for the development of the new sciences suggested below (p. 499), we may make qualitative analyses of actual associations. We may discover more and more precise laws of the adjustments that take place beween persons when one or other of the desires is evidently foremost. We may also in many cases determine the order of rank and force among the other desires represented by the same persons. How fast this search will yield results that will appeal to the multitude should be none of the sociologist’s concern. It is the search in which we shall push the frontier of knowledge about society beyond its present bounds. The few who should find a vocation in general sociology will in the end serve society best if they free themselves from the present eagerness of most sociologists to produce doctrines that will have popular vogue. Their merit as well as their ultimate success will be more secure if they rather devote themselves to some part of the fundamental work of which we are now sketching the outline. The first step toward understanding men in the associations that constitute universal conditions of human life is to make accurate descriptions of these associations in terms of their func tional relation to the whole social process. This can be done only by rigid attention to the precise facts, without distraction of attention in the beginning to theories about the facts, or to the bearings of the facts upon persons or classes in our immediate surroundings. Just as geologists describe rock deposits in order to discover what they reveal about the process of building the world, so we must learn to describe human associations in such a way that they will reveal the most truth about the past and present process of forming society.

We must refer to another type of proposal which has important bearings upon our present subject. In working toward adequate analysis of society, Simmel has contended that the essential task of sociology is to make out and exhibit merely the forms under which men arrange themselves in different associations. That is, a certain number of variations are possible in the forms of relationship which personal associations may assume. For instance, persons may be on terms of equality with each other in numerous associations for as many different purposes. For example, the huntsmen in a tribe, in the matter of equal freedom in given hunting grounds; or the “powers” recognized by each other as alike entitled to the “open door” in China; or the members of a church with respect to all its privileges; or the members of a book club, a traffic association, a postal union, a learned society, etc., etc. Regardless of the purposes of the association, the form of relationship between its members may be identical with the form of relationship in other associations; i. e., in this case the form of equality. Again, perhaps the most familiar form of relationship in association is that of superiority and subordination. There are countless hierarchies among people, from that of mistress and maid in the household, of employer and operative in the mill, of master and apprentice in the trade, of teacher and pupil in the school, of officer and private in the army, of bishop and priest in the church, of manager and salesman in the department store, to the protecting and the protected state in worldpolitics. Whether there are other forms of association which are coordinate with these, or of similar practical importance, is a question which has attracted much attention among sociologists since the publication of Simmel’s thesis.⁷

We have thus noticed three orders of categories, viz.:

1. The impulses of association; i. e., the six elementary interests (chap. v and p. 493 above).
2. Certain incidents of association; i. e., characteristics always manifested in associational activity; the facts referred to as ” data” of sociology in a special sense (chap. vi).
3. The forms of association (Simmel’s schedule).

Now, whatever be the dictates of abstract logic, in actual practice we are likely to find ourselves unable to learn very much more about the content of either of these categories, unless we keep both of the other groups of terms at the same time within easy call. We shall probably increase our knowledge of each incidentally while we are studying another directly. A rigid abstraction of each from the others is both impossible and undesirable. For instance, the problems that descriptive sociology encounters today may be indicated by the question: In what forms and with what relative force do we actually find the interests of individuals organizing themselves in associations? In working toward a geometry and calculus and logic of association that will ultimately serve as a practical means of analyzing actual society, the procedure that in the end will yield the largest returns seems to be precisely the method to which physical scientists settled down long ago, viz., the examination of cases and the tabulation of results. We have to collect cases of the individual desires in all their associational reactions. The degree of precision with which the work can be done at present may not seem to promise results of high scientific respectability, but that has been the case at the outset with most of the larger problems that scientists have confronted. We have reached the necessity, at all events, of tackling the problem: How do men conduct themselves in actual associations when each of the six desires is in turn uppermost? This is virtually a demand for six abstract-concrete sciences, instead of one of the order of political economy. That is, the things which we want to know about associated men call for an advance beyond the abstraction of the economic man, to similar abstractions which we may indicate in the rough as the physical man, the social man, the scientific man, the asthetic man, the ethic man. We need to know how each of the other elementary desires works, when it has the right of way, just as we have been learning since Adam Smith how the wealth desire acts when it is decisive. No isolated human interest furnishes the wherewithal to move and mold individuals or associations. The interests have each certain tendencies which must be known seriatim before we shall be equipped with the rudiments of knowledge about the social situation. Supposing, however, that we have these series of knowledges about abstractions from human activity, each of them represents merely one ward of the complex lock which guards the whole secret of a concrete social situation. How to bring all into working conjunction is the problem of real sociology.

In the present state of knowledge the suggestion of new sciences to constitute a six-fold series coordinate with political economy in its orthodox scope will hardly be taken seriously. Nevertheless we shall point out before the close of this paper that in all probability we shall find some application of these interest categories necessary in working out those subdivisions of associations which will prove most important in the next stages of societary analysis.

We have thus sufficiently emphasized the diffculties of analyzing and classifying associations. Progress in sociology depends, however, upon overcoming the difficulties.

The importance of classification as a stage in the progress of science has been common fame since Aristotle. The necessity of finding categories of classification adequate to the differentiation of social facts has been recognized, in the abstract, by all the important sociologists, and it has been insisted upon with great force by not a few. The demand for sociological classification has never been presented with greater clearness and energy than by Dr. Steinmetz in a recent monograph.⁸ Certain passages are so timely that we epitomize at some length:

The first fault that strikes every critical mind, even in the best works on sociology, with very rare exceptions, is the lack of universal and systematically completed knowledge of their whole domain. We rarely get the impression that the author is oriented on all sides or even upon many. .. . . It is exceptional for a sociologist, when trying to demonstrate the universal applicability of a law, to base his induction on more than a single category of societies. He usually neglects with a liberality truly naive. … . We may sum up our charges in the following judgment: for all sociology which deals with humanity in general, or with both barbarous and civilized peoples, that is to say, which is not identical with ethnology proper, the comparative period is not yet begun. The comparative method is not yet an absolute essential in all the researches worthy of the name, which pretend to be more than rhetoric or chatter (causerie). Now, I believe the principal reason why this method is so little in favor is the absence of a classification and a catalogue of all peoples according to their social status and the degree of their civilization.

. . . .In point of fact, there are very few sociological propositions which are true of Germans and of Bushmen, of Athenians and Chinese and Esquimaux. Yet sociologists do not confine their assertions to a special class . . nor do they trouble themselves to discover the domain within which a fact prevails. They seem indifferent to the capital question whether the phenomenon is only an exception, or a general fact common to numerous classes, if not to all. The reasonings of sociological works are almost always entirely vague and without sufficient foundation.

On the other hand, in historical works there is great care taken to describe and authenticate the pertinent facts. Comparisons figure with the historians rather as distractions, or at most as means of better comprehending the other facts in question. The establishment of a general law upon a sufficient induction is never their end. The sociologists are too abstract and too little positive; the historians are too concrete, and indifferent to generalizations. Yet the latter only are the object of science. The sociologist sees neither different classes nor types, because he is insufficiently precise. The historian sees them little better, because he is too narrow in his knowledge and tendencies, because he has not the scientific spirit in the highest sense of the word. The sociologist wants general ideas without trying to found them on facts. The historian hunts for facts, but simply as facts they teach nothing The sociologist needs to learn that there are different social species, that humanity is not a homogeneous abstraction. The historian needs to recognize that the body of people which occupies his attention is only an individual, a member of a class, by the side of which there are many others, also interesting, and that the aim should be to know them all.

Because, with rare exceptions, the best works upon ethnology or comparative sociology do not try to make an induction as complete as possible, they do not succeed in delimiting classes with any precision. Adequate induction and precise limitation of classes imply each other. . . .

If there were more general appreciation of the logical value of the experimentum crucis,⁹ neglected by almost all the sociologists, there would be more serious attention to induction. It is a notorious fact that few sociological arguments have weight with critical minds. The reason is: first, the insufficiency of the inductions, in place of which there is mere reasoning by example; in the second place, there is almost invariable lack of the experimentum crucis. When the sociologist has cited a few examples in support of his hypothesis, he is satisfied. He does not try to extend the research over the whole class in question. He does not ply his explanation with objections. He does not hunt for apparent exceptions to the supposed rule. Consequently he never convinces.

. . . .There is only one means of remedying this situation in sociology. The demands of method should be raised, in order that the work of the dilettante may be distinguished at once from that of the genuine scholar. Now, the first advance needed in method-a stage for which, too, our science is ripe—is the introduction of classification.

The greatest benefit which I anticipate from classification in sociology will be the final and total break with that abstract and philosophical sociology which consists merely of sonorous affirmations. It will aid us to attain this end that every contribution which will count among genuine experts will be truly a contribution to our positive knowledge. It will be real knowledge,

Literary sociology must be banished beyond recall. So soon as classification of peoples and of types of culture shall have made a place for itself in our habits of research, and shall have come to control our minds, it will rout abstract and baseless deduction. It will at each moment recall to our attention the mass of classified facts which we are called to explain and to elaborate in order to discover laws.

Chaos is in itself so abhorrent that the mind turns away from it spontaneously and attends to some abstraction which it gathers out of the confusion. On the contrary, a mass of facts once classified is so admirable, and at the same time so attractive, that it fixes the attention. So soon, then, as we shall have succeeded in introducing a little order in the chaos of social facts, the way will be open for others. We shall always, however, have in view the facts, the veritable problems. We shall no longer reason in a vacuum, far from the problems. Classification will present to us so many questions, it will plunge us so deep into that sea of positive and limited problems, that the desire will never more leave us to discover all their most secret depths. Then we shall realize that our science, like every other, has to explain facts, not entertain the imagination with phrases.

The second advantage of this work once accomplished or merely undertaken in a serious fashion, will be the following: Classification presupposes and facilitates collection. Whoever wants to classify must collect. Whoever wishes to collect must complete. To complete the collection becomes an indomitable passion. Now this is precisely what we need. In natural history specialists collect with enthusiasm; in sociology, with indifference. Nothing will be more effective in changing this state of things than classification. It will be a beginning merely to mention some of the gaps in the description. I will mention only some of the most serious:

1. Primitive peoples are disappearing. If we do not collect facts about them now, they will presently be lost forever.

2. We lack complete and profound descriptions of the social and moral life of civilized peoples. We may indicate our needs in this respect under three heads: $(a)$ folklore; $(\boldsymbol{\delta})$ description of component groups of the population—industrial centers, great cities, etc. We have brilliant samples of this sort of work, but compared with the material they are rare. $(c)$ Description of the life and all sorts of peculiarities proper to special classes of the population –prostitutes, the criminal and dangerous classes, soldiers, sailors, ecclesiastics, bohemians and wandering artists, nobles, millionaires, etc. It is only within recent years that, thanks to the Italian school, the two first classes have been studied somewhat profoundly, but even these researches ought to go deeper, and they should be extended to other countries. How little we know about these classes! It will be a long time before studies in this field can be truly scientific. There are great entomological societies for the study of insects, but we do not give ourselves any trouble to know the people who surround us. $(d)$ Characteristic traits, more descriptive than reasoned, of entire peoples, like those of Russia by Tikhomirow,¹⁰ of the United States by Tocqueville¹¹ and by Becker,¹² of Italy by Niceforo,¹³ etc.

It is fortunate that, at least for economic facts, this work has been done more or less completely by descriptive political economy and by statistics. For the rest of social life there are voluminous materials, meritorious attempts, but nothing more. But throughout this domain the passionate desire to complete the collection will be stimulated by collection itself. It will presently make changes of which sociology is in pressing need.

The same will be the case in another, closely related sphere, viz., social history, in the large sense of the word, or the history of civilization. Social history is made up of a continual series of descriptions, which have for their subject-matter the social situation of a people or of a group of peoples. It thus contains the most important problems which are presented to us. I would not undervalue the important and admirable work which has been done here by the historians, especially by the historians of political economy, but the sociologist who has had occasion to compare the social histories of various peoples upon some special social questions knows how far we are from a satisfactory condition of knowledge. It is not merely because many sides of social life are neglected, nor because the social history of many peoples is very incomplete or deserves little confidence. It is because the materials are not arranged so that they might be easily employed by those who try to compare them for the purpose of making them intelligible, that is, really useful. For, after all, the concrete materials of special histories do not serve their real purpose except through the use made of them by the sociologist, when he explains them and discovers their laws by means of the comparative method.

There will be no credible sociology until all these gaps are filled. Classification will stimulate scholars to do the needed work. Up to the present a sociologist who proceeded exclusively by means of exemplification and illustration has been able to flatter himself that our descriptive science is very rich and approximately complete. His view of the field is so confused that it is scarcely possible for him to make out the enormous gaps in the evidence, and the use which he makes of the fragmentary evidence at his disposal does not promote such discovery. Even into his mind, however, classification will shed revealing light. The absence of order is of itself sufficient to prevent perception of lack of knowledge.¹⁴ Classification once introduced into scientific custom, the exigencies of veritable induction will force us, more than any other power, to remedy the evil which they will themselves have brought to light with cruel evidence.¹⁵

Classification will of itself render impossible the method of reasoning from isolated examples. It will force the most recalcitrant intellects to genuine induction, because it will show that there are different groups of social types, and that what is true of one may not be true of another. Nothing will aid us better to avoid premature generalizations, the actual scourge of our science. Under the dominance of classification the presumption will be against crediting a group with a trait unless it has first been observed in that group. The present tendency is precisely the contrary. We now pass by involuntary shocks from generalization to limitation. Then we shall advance more prudently from the latter to the former.

It cannot be denied that there is at present among the sociologists a certain horror of admitting an exception. We shall outgrow this repugnance after the habit of classification has become firmly fixed. . . . We shall at last develop a passion for the experimentum crucis, a passion which is the severe and infallible touchstone of the genuine scientist. With this perfection of method there will be no chaos of facts that we cannot reduce to order. What real experimentation is to the physical sciences, the experimentum crucis is to those sciences that cannot make use of genuine experimentation. Without it there can be no complete induction. We may not accept a law as certain without having discovered and satisfactorily explained the exceptions to the rule. What is the value, for example, of the assertion that woman is in a servile and degraded condition among hunters, if I am unable either to demonstrate by a complete induction that there are no exceptions to the law, or to explain the exceptions by the increasing influence of some other circumstance ?

This careful search for exceptions will, moreover, have the further advantage of putting us on the track of new laws, for the exceptions must themselves be manifestations of some law. There is no rest for the genuine scientific investigator until the exceptions are reduced to new laws. Hence we shall advance to the demonstration of laws that will be more precise and more true, because we shall have determined the conditions under which they prevail,i.e., the sphere of their action. We shall discover their dependencies upon each other and their relation to more general laws. The laws then formulated will be no longer vague and ambitious assertions. They will rather contain candid expression of all the certainty and all the generalization to which our evidence entitles us. Then at last chatter will be banished from sociology, as it already is from other, more fortunate sciences. The chatterers will be stigmatized as dilettantes, who have no lot with true science, which is devoted to discovery.

In the constructive portions of his monograph Steinmetz discusses proposed classifications of society by use of selected schemes grouped as follows:

1. Artificial classifications; e. g.:
1. Coste: according to the relations of urban to absolute population.¹⁶ (Steinmetz, p. 83.)
2. Ward: according to social stages distinguished as: (1) the solitary or autarchic stage; (2) the constrained aggregate or anarchic stage; (3) the national or politarchic stage; (4) the cosmopolitan or pantarchic stage.¹⁷ (Steinmetz, p. 87.)
3. Fouillee: according to the relation of the whole to the parts.¹⁸ (Steinmetz, p. 85.)
2. Morphological classifications:
1. Spencer: according (1) to the degree of integration; and (2) to the degree of militancy and industrialism.¹⁹ (Steinmetz, p. 88.)
2. Durkheim: a variation of Spencer.²⁰ (Steinmetz, p. 91.)
3. Giddings: according to genetic relations indicated by degrees of differentiation; another variation of Spencer.²¹
3. Economic classifications
1. Hildebrand: according to the internal organization of economic life, in the manner in which products are distributed.²² (Steinmetz, p. 99.)
2. Bücher: according to the general organization of industry.²³ (Steinmetz, p. 101.)
3. Grosse, Hahn, Lisst, and many others: according to the development of technique.²⁴(Steinmetz, pp. 98 sq.)
4. Geographico-ethnographic classifications
1. Ratzel: according to the influence of the geographic environment.²⁵ (Steinmetz, p. 134.)
2. Frobenius: according to diameters from a given center, with more deference to voluntary choice than in the other school.²⁶ (Steinmetz, p. 134.)
5. Psychological classifications
1. Comte: according to the “law of the three stages.”²⁷ (Steinmetz, p. 126.)
2. Sutherland: according to the general level of intelligence.²⁸ (Steinmetz, pp. 118 sq.)
3. Morgan: according to inventions.²⁹ (Steinmetz, p. 111.)
6. Mixed classifications
1. Vierkandt:³⁰ according to psychic and social differences.
2. Le Play and his followers.³¹ (Steinmetz, pp. 1o7 sq.)
3. Steinmetz: according to a combination of economic and psychologic criteria (pp. 137 sq.).

We have not reproduced the above schedule because it is exhaustive, or because its brief characterizations are entirely just, or because we propose to discuss these or like schemes in detail. Our immediate purpose in citing these propositions is merely to illustrate the multiplicity and variety, and more than all the futility, of attempts to classify societies up to date. We thus have a background for the remainder of the argument.

Before we proceed, another series of general propositions may be useful in binding together the divisions of our discussion.

We may concede that the generalizations referred to in the preceding chapter and at the opening of this paper are the product of observation and reflection which could hardly be called final. If we propose inductive verification and refinement of these provisional formulas, it is obviously necessary to have collected as a basis of induction a vast number of cases of all sorts of association, and to have examined these cases so closely that their distinguishing marks will serve as means of classification. In other words, general truths about association may be discovered by the sort of guesswork that may easily pass as intuition. Evidence, worthy of scientific repute, that the guesses are correct must consist of generalization of enough cases to exclude the probability of all contradictory or inconsistent formulas. This perception challenges sociologists to catalogue and classify human associations.

Our argument with reference to a program of classification cannot be presented in a word. Its successive steps may seem to wander from the path of direct reasoning. It may be well, therefore, to anticipate the conclusion at which it arrives. The theorem which we shall reach by a course of criticism now to be outlined is substantially as follows: Human associations are not things, they are processes. To know them we must ascertain their functional values, just as truly as we must know both the general and the special service to be rendered by a wheel or a shaft or a valve or a connecting gear, in order to be able to classify that part of a machine, first in its immediate relations to the machine as a whole, and then in a general mechanical scale. Human life, in the individual or in associations, is, as we have seen, a process of realizing latent interests. The life of a given primitive group, of a people at any stage of historical development, of any contemporary civilization, or of a minor association within an earlier or a later civilization, is a stage and a factor in that process. Human assocations must be classified then, not as though they were constant structures, but in view of the fact that they are variable functions. They must be distinguished by the part which they perform in the life-process. Inasmuch as that part varies according as the whole process is less or more highly developed, the classification of associations that would satisfy the facts of one stage of evolution would not fit the facts of another stage. Associations must therefore be classified functionally, and, more than that, our working test of all functional classifications must be our teleological concepts. That is, we are bound to schedule associations in accordance with our judgment of their relation to the scale of ends that are at issue in the particular situation in which those associations function.

In view, then, of the many previous efforts to classify social phenomena, and of their unfortunate failure to reach results at all satisfactory, it behooves everyone who ventures to renew the undertaking to do so with caution and modesty. It is probable that each type of classification thus far proposed has certain permanent uses. Much more has been accomplished in the aggregate by previous attempts, abortive though we may judge each of them to be, than is likely to be added by any single organizer of data. In all probability each of the attempts at classification named above, with many others of which they are types, contains something of value. At all events, the limitations which the attempts encounter are full of meaning, if we can learn how to interpret them.

It does not follow that the task of classification which remains is a problem of arranging harmony and synthesis between the various previous classifications. We are rather in search of a harmony and synthesis of the different portions of subject-matter with which these attempts have been concerned. Nothing is plainer than that the different schemes which we have reviewed have been concerned primarily with one of several different orders of facts. Some of them have seen society as it appears from the ethnologists’ point of view; others, as it appears from the economists’, the technologists’, the legists’, or the moralists’ point of view. Accordingly, as we have found to be the case throughout the social sciences, the makers of the respective classifications have each unconsciously based their calculations upon a very narrow abstraction from the social whole, and have tried to make this abstraction a secure nucleus about which the rest of the facts might gather.

The program now to be proposed for a more adequate method begins with our conception of the whole in and of which the facts to be grouped are parts. As we have said (chap. v, p. 202): ”Human association is a continuous process of realizing a larger aggregate and better proportions of the health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness desires.” Accordingly the classification of associations that we seem to want is one in accordance with the parts of this process which the different associations accomplish.

With this as our express requisition it is at once probable that an adequate scheme of classification will be highly complex. Association is a fact that is at any given time merely a passing phase of an immeasurable process. What association is accomplishing at a given moment can be seen only by setting the process of that moment in its appropriate place in the genetic series which the moment continues. On the other hand, human aims are constantly differentiating, and associations are pari passu changing the form and force and quality of their internal and external reactions. That is, the classification of associations as parts of a static order is one thing at one stage of evolution and a quite different thing at another. In this connection we hit upon one of the most obvious crudities in many familiar attempts to classify societies; viz., they start with categories which, for the sake of argument, we may assume to be adequate for rudimentary societies. Then, however, they stop short and fail to differentiate the categories to keep pace with the evolving characteristics of the associations to which they are applied. This is as though one should collect and classify birds’ eggs, and then attempt to make the groups into which they fall suffice as a complete scheme of classification in ornithology; or it is as though, without the concept “transportation,” one should attempt to classify all vehicles in accordance with-we will say—some absolute esthetic preconception. The dugout and the “Deutschland, the drag of poles and the limited express, with all the types of vehicle that have intervened, might be grouped according to variations from the assumed aesthetic norm. It is certain, however, that in either case the classifications would not go far toward fixing the real significance of the specimen parts in the process concerned, particularly in its more evolved stages.

Classification of human associations must therefore make a place for genetic, for morphological, and for functional categories, and the morphological and functional phases of the scheme must evidently at last fall into a genetic series parallel with the evolution of the associations themselves. The morphological and the functional categories in turn will have to be worked out by a process of adjusting perceptions of workings to conceptions of ends toward which the workings tend.

It might be held that such classifications of societary activities as those of Spencer, Schaeffle, and De Greef are functional, and that a functional criterion of activities is implicitly teleological. The reply is that, whatever may be the logical implications and correlations of the notion “function,” it by no means in actual use draws with it a working notion of end. Indeed, it is more than probable that sociological criticism will at last fix upon the absence of an adequate concept of the end, or the ” universal,” indicated in the visible parts of the social process, as the factor which limits the availability of the functional classifications of which those named are types. The best of them, such as that of Schaeffle, appear to be but unorganized catalogues of activities after all, so soon as we confront the final task of correlating the activities analyzed and scheduled. We discover incidentally that the idea of function treated as an abstraction, and held apart by itself, is as sterile as any other purely formal conception. The idea of a ” sustaining system,” a ” distributing system,” and a “regulating system,” for instance, is of itself something as far from touch with the realities of human association as the vulgar idea of “perpetual motion” is from embodiment of the realities of mechanics. To make terms of mechanism real it must be mechanism that functions in a real process. We must have companion-conceptions, in the case cited, first of what is sustained, what is distributed, what is controlled; and, second, of why the sustaining, distributing, and controlling, i. e., of the end to which the mechanism and the process are incidental. This is the setting in which we find most use for the formula to which we have constant recourse, viz.: Society, or human association, must be considered as a continuous process of realizing an increased aggregate and better proportions of the health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness satisfactions. Analysis of associations so considered should be in accordance with the teleological criterion. Associational activities must be classified with reference to their respective relations to different parts of this complex end.

In other words, human association is always, from smallest to largest, from lowest to highest, a process of producing utilities of one sort or another; i. e., of catering to human desire for satisfactions of varying degrees of complexity. We have only two relatively developed examinations of associational activities from this point of view, viz., economics and philosophical civics. The latter may be said to organize a conspectus of social activities on the basis of their relation to a certain sort of moral utility, in brief and in chief the maintenance of conventional order, i. e., utilities which are in form apparently referable to the sociability interest; in content, however, they distribute themselves among all the interests. The former attempts to set forth all human activities on the basis of their relation to the production of utilities that have a material measure. Hardly an overt act performed by human beings escapes the notice both of civics and of economics, but from the point of view of either the same acts fall into an order of importance quite different from that which would emerge if we should attempt to scale the value of the same activities with reference to either of the other utilities.

For instance, if we were to name the most important activities of the last century, or thereabouts, the different human satisfactions being in turn the standard, we might decide that, from the point of view of health, all that men have done scales down from the value of the discoveries of anesthesia, and of the processes of disease propagation. We might say that the wealth interest has been most served by the engineering and mechanical workshops, from James Watt’s tea-kettle to Edison’s laboratory; and we might rank all else that men have done in proportion to its share in applying or inventing wealth-producing devices. We might say that sociability utilities have ranged in value from the new impulse launched into the world by the American Declaration of Independence to the quietest “pleasant Sunday afternoon” in any slum district in England. We might decide that, from the point of view of knowledge utility, the center of human action has been Darwin’s collection of observations, and all other actions have had rank according to their relation to the emerging evolutionary concept. Without presuming to imagine what would be a plausible theory of aesthetic graduation, we may suppose, in the case of the rightness utilities, that the transference of the moral meridian from heaven to earth, and the substitution of positive for speculative criteria of values, will prove to be the summit from which to scale the relative significance of other activities in this realm.

What is the meaning of the actions of associated men, the different utilities in which men are interested being in turn the criterion? What then is the meaning and value, at any given time, of the whole plexus of activities carried on by an association, in view of the interest of each and all of the members in each and all of these distinguishable utilities ? These are the questions that set the tasks of distinguishing and classifying associations.

Our present limits permit only a sketch of the plan of classification to which these suggestions point. In the first place, we would distinguish four phases which human association on a large scale presents:

1. Biologic association.
   
2. Economic association.
   
3. Civic association.
   
4. Ethic association.

Whether these phases are in any association chronologically separable is not a capital question. They mark associations with different ratios of prominence at different stages of societary evolution. In phase I there may or may not be marks of distinction from the associations of lower animals. At all events it is the phase in which the physical and physiological factors predominate, in contrast with the factors that hold the balance in the other phases. It is the kind of association in which the classifications of physical anthropologist and ethnologist are of paramount importance.

Phase 2 is that marked by contacts between people incidental to their common zeal to make the most of the world’s material resources. Here the categories of economics and mechanical technology must primarily be decisive.

Phase 3 is that characterized by realization of the need of control, regulation, organization beyond that spontaneously adopted in the course of applying labor power to the development of material resources. The classifications of political science must here be fundamental.

Phase 4 is that in which conduct in association recognizes the authority of some standard not given in physical impulse or material economy or civic necessity per se, but presupposing some utility to which all these and all the individuals concerned are subordinate and mediate. We cannot say here, in symmetry with the propositions immediately preceding, that the categories of moral science must be taken as standard. On the contrary, the fundamental utility of sociology is in its prospective furnishing of a criterion for criticism of ethical categories. The different moral systems, whether obsolete or still effective, posit standards of obligation more or less external to the lifeprocess. Doubtless complete historical analysis of human experience would have to employ a great many variations of morphological and functional classification corresponding to the ethical presumptions that actually prevailed. Ethic association of many different qualities has been actual. There must be many reciprocal relations between these social phenomena and our objective analysis of them, on the one hand, and our conceptions of absolute ethical criteria, on the other. At this point we may simply say that our classifications of present associations in their ethical phase must conform to our fundamental theorem (vid. p. 5o9) as to the whole social process.

As we have hinted above, there may have been distinct periods during which each of these phases of association, or at least each with the one or more placed before it in the list, covered the whole field of association to the exclusion of later phases. Whether this is absolutely the case is not a matter of first-rate importance. For our present purpose we have no occasion to press back beyond the evident fact that human associations have exhibited these distinct phases. We need not even attempt to formulate the order in which the different motives have predominated. It is certainly not a constant order, though the variations from the order given may be exceptions easily explained.

In proposing these general divisions of social conditions we have had in mind the activities of the human race as a whole. though it is evident that neither periods of civilization nor geographical limits could be designated in which these distinctions would precisely classify the whole human family. If sociological theory is ever complete, its generalizations must cover the largest circuit of actual association. Up to date, however, the conditions of human contacts have been such that the extension and intention of the associational process have to be learned chiefly by observation of associations ranging from the family at one extreme to the state at the other. It is by no means certain whether the most fruitful method of settling upon a morphological and functional and teleological system of classifying associations will be found by those who start with the family and move outward through association after association until they reach the state, or by those who begin with the state and analyze down through association after association until they reach the family, and thence the individual. Perhaps there would be more superficial consistency with our introductory references to the individual assumption (chap. iv, pp. 60-62; chap. v, pp. 177-99) if we adopted the former course. For reasons which need not be detailed, however, we find the Iatter alternative more immediately promising, though by no means necessarily likely to accomplish so much that it will be final without verification and expansion through independent elaboration of the opposite method. We therefore propose a system which may be called a basis for national sociology. The theory so called will be related to the more inclusive sociology very much as the orthodox political economy, or, as the Germans have more appropriately phrased it, ” national economy,” has been related to the more general theory of utilities striven for by the so-called “Austrian school.” In other words, human associations that can be known and called such have, as a matter of fact,functioned chiefly within the organized state. Whether or not we can profitably generalize what is now known about human contacts in terms of association wider than that within the state, we shall doubtless for the present economize effort if we concentrate attention upon those reaches of association which are displayed by populations either organized in states or of sufficient size to make their potential statehood plausible.

On this basis, then, we begin with the seemingly somewhat self-contradictory classification of states, as follows:

1. Biologic states.
   
2. Economic states.
   
3. Civic states.
   
4. Ethic states.

That is, our subject-matter is not evolved into shape for our use until potential states of the first and second sorts are well advanced toward becoming actual states of the third or fourth sort. This perception should reinforce the position, all along insisted upon by the sociologists, that, however important the biologic and the economic elements always must be in association, they necessarily diminish in relative importance as association advances toward the unfolding of all its implications. Accordingly we are at once disposed to challenge the right of the anthropologist and the ethnologist to impose their classifications upon phases 2, 3, and 4 of national association. In the biologic states, anthropological and ethnological groupings are not to be challenged, but in the economic states associations immediately begin to cut through and through the lines of ethnic groups. Accordingly we must not persist in attempting to classify economic associations under ethnic categories, nor are we permitted to assume that the forces which produce the stigmata of anthropological and ethnological types are the same forces which produce economic associations. The sociologist has no right to dictate the classifications to be used by anthropologist and ethnologist. Their own centers of interest and objects of attention will give the needed categories. On the other hand, it cannot be asserted too emphatically that neither anthropologist nor ethnologist does or can classify associations when he classifies peculiarities of individuals in association. The associations are diversified by physiological and racial traits, but these do not exhaust the qualities of the associations.

Not to involve ourselves in discussions of anthropological technicalities, let us assume that the anthropologists have agreed upon a system of classification which carries out the general zoological scheme. Let us suppose that they have divided the human race into types designated as A, B, C, and D. Suppose that these types include classes indicated by the symbols a, b, c, and d .Suppose that orders of each class are represented by the terms aⁱ, bⁱ, cⁱ, and dⁱ.Suppose that subspecies, varieties, etc., are clearly made out and designated by aⁱⁱ, bⁱⁱ, cⁱⁱ, dⁱⁱ,aⁱⁱⁱ, bⁱⁱⁱ, cⁱⁱⁱ, dⁱⁱⁱ etc., etc. Now, our point is that when the anthropo-sociologist has applied these categories toa given population, as Demolins has done to the population of France³², or as Lapouge has indicated an ambition to do in a comparative way to populations in general,³³ he has not classified the state. He has merely classified certain details of more or less importance abstracted from the whole body of conditions and activities which constitute the state.

The same propositions hold true of the ethnologists. Without carrying out our illustration in detail in their case, let us suppose a hierarchy parallel with the foregoing, designated by the symbols $E,F,G,H;\ell,f,g,h;\ell^{\mathrm{i}},f^{\mathrm{i}},g^{\mathrm{i}},h^{\mathrm{i}}$ etc.These, as before, are symbols of abstractions from associations. They are not subdivisions of real associations.

The sociologist, on the other hand, does and should try to classify societies. He must decide for himself which groups of anthropological and ethnological results are of value as data for sociological elaboration.

An approach to formal indication of the sorts of judgments likely to be passed may be made by considering the relation of anthropological and ethnological categories to economic classification, i. e., classification and analysis of economic states, and of all states subsequent to that phase considered as economic. In the latter we have contacts inspired by differentiating impulses. Our classifications of associations in the economic state must be in accordance with the functional relations of the associations to the economic end. Such classifications, both genetic and morphologic, are already worked out to a very nice degree of precision in economic science. Now let us assume that we have grand divisions of economic states in accordance with no matter what accepted principle.

For the sake of clearness let us suppose that classifications of economic activities are reduced to the same forms which we have presupposed in the cases of anthropology and ethnology, i. e., to type, class, order, species, subspecies, variety, etc. Thus we might make out four types of economic association, $J,K,$ $\qquadL,M,$ distinguished, we will say, by hand-to-mouth economy, provident economy, intensive economy, and humanitarian economy. Each of these types might include classes $j,k,l,$ and m, distinguished by the kind of natural resource primarily cultivated; each class in turn might include the orders $j^{\mathrm{i}},\:k^{\mathrm{i}},\:l^{\mathrm{i}},\:m^{\mathrm{i}};$ determined by the organization of labor force within the society’ say between production, transportation, exchange, and nonproductive activities, etc., etc. Now, these economic activities are carried on by people, and wherever there are people the anthropologist and the ethnologist find material for their abstractions. Our present aim is to make the proposition as monotonous and commonplace as possible that the analyses of each of these and coordinate specialists deal with abstractions, and that we run into fatal fallacy when we begin to accept them as bases for classification of societies themselves. In every association the people have ethnic relationships and anthropologic peculiarities. These ethnic and anthropologic variables may or may not constitute differentiating factors in the economic state. If they do not, the associations within the economic state should evidently be classified just as though the people composing them were perfectly similar and homogeneous. That is, the groups within the economic state, and the divisions and subdivisions within the groups, will turn primarily upon economic differences.

It thus becomes a question of fact, in the case of any particular economic state, whether the anthropologic and ethnic factors pres. ent in the state affect the associations most characteristic of the state. If so, and to that extent, we have within the state, and we must learn how to distinguish and designate, varieties of each grade of association, according to variations produced by the physical and racial peculiarities of the members. Thus in each of the grades of economic association above supposed it might be necessary to distinguish subgrades dependent upon either anthropologic or ethnic peculiarities. In an economic state made up of Celtic, Saxon, Latin, and African elements, for example, the racial factor might cause in every grade in the whole hierarchy of association variations of actual combination from what it would be as resultant of economic influences pure and simple. In other words, the physical and racial make-up of the state is a factor of the whole association which constitutes the state, but when considered by itself it is an abstraction from the state, and therefore not a possible classifier of the state, except in particulars which are subordinate in a degree to be determined in each case by the peculiar facts.

Now, we might say the same thing, in principle, of the civic state, and of its relations to the economic and the biologic state respectively. The civic state, considered as an abstraction from the actual association of which, in a given case, it is a phase, is an association having as its characteristic end control. Let us assume that types of the civic state may be made out in accordance with the predominant purpose of control, thus: $N_{;}$ exploitation of the many; $o$, offense and defense; $P$ preservation of balance among individuals within the state; $\boldsymbol{Q}$ development of physical and human resources. Let us assume further that these types of civic states fall into classes in accordance with Bluntschli’s categories of origin, viz.: $\scriptstyle n$ , original; $o$ , secondary; $\boldsymbol{\mathscr{p}}$ derived. Suppose further that Aristotle’s categories of the forms of states apply to their divisions into orders, thus: $\varkappa^{\mathrm{i}}$ , monarchy; $o^{\mathbf{i}}$ aristocracy; ${\mathcal{P}}^{\mathrm{i}}$ polity. Let us assume once more that species of civic states are formed by relative prominence of one or another division of administration, thus: $\varkappa^{\mathrm{ii}}$ , control of territory; $o^{\mathfrak{i}}$ , control of persons; ${\boldsymbol{\phi}}^{\mathrm{ii}}$ , control of external relations; etc., etc.

With analysis of civic states carried to this point we are surely in a position to see that the relation of this civic analysis to the previous economic analysis, and then to the antecedent biologic analysis, is precisely like the relation previously described between the economic and the biologic. With reference to the civic ends the subdivisons of the economic and of the biologic factors involved in procuring the ends are significant in ways that give them a civic standing entirely different from their logical place in their peculiar hierarchy. At every step we encounter the questions of fact: Does the civic association dominate the economic and the biologic, or does the biologic or the economic element dominate the civic? Assuming that we have states in which the civic motive dominates–i. e., the intention to maintain order for the sake of order—-the facts of economic or biologic modification of the associations and subassociations so motived would as before constitute varieties and subvarieties of the civic associations.

Let us imagine now that we have states which may be described as ethical in the special sense above indicated, i. e., they have posited a certain estimate of conduct values as making for some conception of life, in the individuals and in the whole, that is held to be superior to civic order or to economic success, or to both combined. In fact, we would neither claim nor admit that such states exist today. The category is highly speculative, but we shall hereafter attempt to justify it as a category. In the hypothetical quality of state now in question the motive which is foremost and uppermost and undermost is realization of the controlling conception of life. We may suppose that one of these ideas of the social end is the assurance of felicity after death; another, the development of maximum justice among the members of the association; another, the production of a few of the most highly evolved individuals possible; another, the production of a population as large as possible composed of individuals all of whom exercise the franchise of self-expression in the highest measure permitted by their endowment. Again, and to the degree in which the several motives dominate, we shall have four distinct types of the ethical state, and we might at last have classes, orders, and species as in the case of the other prime divisions of states. It need hardly be repeated that, in proportion as the differentiating motive is severely and purely ethical, the subsidiary means, involving the machinery and personnel of the civic and economic and biologic substrata merged into the ethic association, would furnish merely the stigmata of subordinate groups in the ethical hierarchy, coordinate with similar groups in the previous hierarchies.

We are now ready for the observation that in all actual states, whether biologic, economic, or civic, there has doubtless been a certain emergence of the impulses characteristic of all the states logically subsequent. Even the biologic states have had their incipient economic, civic, and ethic systems, or at least factors. Accordingly we could not develop a comparative national sociology without classifications in which subdivisions would be formed by variations borrowed from social conditions which would have to be scheduled as later in both genetic and logical order.

Applying all this formal and hypothetical analysis to the task before us, we have the following indications:

1. There has been and still is an evident vocation for social sciences that describe and classify parts of the activities of men which prove to be only abstractions from the whole social process. It is an important step toward knowing the whole process to work out systems of classifications in which the different phases of these abstractions are exhibited in logical relations to each other. Thus we have facile tools in the classifications of anthropology, ethnology, political science, economics, and ethics respectively.

2. In attempting to describe any national society whatever, whether inchoate or developed, we find that it is not an abstraction of the same sort as that made by the sciences just mentioned. It is an abstraction from the rest of the people of the world, but not from the activities that the other social sciences in turn formulate. It is necessary in each case of such concrete abstraction, therefore, to have in mind the categories of each of the social sciences, and then to discover which sort of activity is really primary, secondary, tertiary, etc., among the distinguishing activities of the association.

3. With our present knowledge it is obviously impossible to make a classification that will assign to the leading modern states fixed positions in a sociological hierarchy. We cannot say, for instance, that Great Britain is an economic state of Type J , class kⁱ, order lⁱⁱ, species mⁱⁱⁱ, etc while Germany is a civic state, Type N, class oⁱ, order pⁱⁱ, species qⁱⁱⁱ etc., etc., for the reason that we have no differential calculus of civic qualities, and no standard of measure that can be applied with precision to one state after another.

4. The indicated order of procedure in sociological analysis of modern states is therefore, first, a universal conception of the social process; second, mastery of the principles and systems of classifications agreed upon, or still under discussion, in anthropology, ethnology, economics, and civics; third, mastery of some principles and systems of morphological and functional classification of activities within the state considered as part of an ethical process; fourth, specification of the associations within the states, and determination of their functional values relative to the whole process which the state maintains. It is in this connection that we look for immediate progress from use of the interest categories as suggested above (p. 493). We shall thus be able to work out rather classifications of associations within states than classifications of states themselves. It should be added that in order to get the good out of all this analysis at last, it is necessary to cultivate parallel with it adequate perceptions in the field of the logic and the psychology of ethics. Formal ethical categories will get their content from our knowledge of actual functions in concrete association, and per contra we shall be able to classify our valuations of associational functions by application of logical and psychological criticism.

It will make a great deal of difference in the course of our inquiry whether we assume that the state which we study is a biologic state, with economic, civic, and ethic variations; or an economic state, with biologic, civic, and ethic variations; or a civic state, with biologic, economic, and ethic variations; or an ethic state, with biologic, economic, and civic variations. At the same time, if we see and keep distinctly in mind that each state is all of these at once in some proportion or other, not one of them alone, we shall have adopted a point of view which will insure more certain approach to adequate classification and comparison of associations than has yet been reached.

In other words, the most promising program in the interest of ultimate classification of societies is the program of assorting associations within states in accordance with their structural and functional relations to the whole process maintained by the states. This program may be undertaken in two ways: first, historically and genetically, by analyzing the least differentiated states and then the more and more differentiated states; second, contemporaneously, by analyzing the activities maintained by the different associations within a state of the most highly developed group. The results of analysis of this latter sort would then be in a measure available as norms for comparison of less developed processes in earlier states.

The former program is doubtless implicitly in all historical, and particularly in all ethnological, investigation. We need not now inquire why it has been so abortive, from the sociological point of view. Even the sociologists have not invariably seen the advantages of the latter program, and many of them have sooner or later lapsed into impotent imitation of the former. The consequence has been that they have failed to get the proper benefits of either. The most vital tendency in sociology since Comte has appeared in the attempts to analyze modern society functionally. This is the content which gives to Schaeffle’s work its permanent value despite the limitation which we have pointed out above (p. 5io). Structural and functional analysis of activities within the state, or within society as a whole, is prerequisite to classification of the associations that make up the state or society.

Briefly, this analysis of actual association in modern states was what Schaeffle attempted in his Bau und Leben, 1875. With merely the necessary minimum of attention to the other phases of the situation, he carried through a minute static analysis. He showed in great detail how different parts of the associational process interpenetrate each other and together maintain the entire individual and social life-process. He was far ahead of his time in prevision of the scientific and practical demand for this analysis. It has been the rule, ever since the first edition of his work appeared, to abuse and misrepresent it and its author in a fashion which indicates more plainly than anything else that people had not read the volume. They could not have originated or repeated such stupid judgments if they had made themselves familiar at first hand with the treatise itself. There are numerous and gratifying signs that the provincialism manifested in this treatment of Schaeffle is giving place to more critical and liberal appreciation. The respect with which such a man as Schmoller³⁴, for instance, refers to Schaeffle shows that people who have less ability to make up sane opinions on the merits of evidence, but who are not above echoing secondhand judgments, will soon be obliged to acquire a new set of estimates of Bau und Leben³⁵

At the same time it must be repeated that Schaeffle’s analysis is, after all, only an incident in progress toward teleological analysis and classification of associations within states.

In accordance with all that has preceded, we may make a somewhat specific prospectus of the sort of knowledge which has to be gained before we shall have the materials for respectable beginnings of national sociology. Let us assume at the start a basis of generalization no wider than that which would be furnished by the facts about the five nations commonly known as the foremost political powers of the world, viz.: Russia, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States. In each case the knowledge that we need would have to be sufficient to fill out the following schedules:

National Conditions and Activities

It is perhaps superfluous to repeat that the classifications in the antecedent sciences are not in such shape that even the abstractions from one of these states, represented by one of the vertical columns in the blank, could at once be transferred to these groupings. We have conducted our formal process of eliminating proposed principles of classification by assuming schemes of classification which, so far as we know, are not advocated in their entirety by specialists in the divisions of social science discussed. Although we thus do a certain seeming injustice to those sciences, the essential justice of the procedure is beyond question. The main point is that, even if activities within the biologic, the economic, the civic, and the ethic series were severally reducible to classifications which could be paralleled in each of the other series, the ultimate classification of a particular state would be a matter of placing it in a scale, not of abstract, but of concrete activities. In the concrete these series are complicated almost beyond recognition. The categories adequate for the abstracted series of conditions and activities would be entirely inadequate for states, and even for minor associations within states. On the contrary, the principle of classification for concrete associations must be found in their functional relations to the whole life-process in which they have value. This amounts to the conclusion that the cardinal divisions of associations are ethical. We do and must assort associations according to the part which they appear to play in the largest whole to which we can trace their relations.

The sense in which we use the term “ethical” should be precisely described. We mean to indicate by it those actions which seem to the actors to be performed in response to the demands of a whole to which they regard themselves as accountable; in contrast with all other activities in which utilities are treated as frst and last the concern of the actor alone. The “whole” implicitly regarded in a given case may be the individual or the group self, so conceived as to be considered a more complete or authoritative whole than the actual self. “Ethical” does not here connote a judgment of subjective moral quality. It relates to the range of relations to which actors refer their action, or to which it is conceived as being referred by those who are tracing its tendencies. It distinguishes conduct dictated to individuals by notions of a whole beyond themselves, within which they are parts or incidents, from conduct in which individuals virtually assume that they are the whole.

Applying the above conclusion to states, and referring once more to our formula of the social universal (p. 5o9), our proposition is that, if we are seriously bent on getting nearer to a real sociology of the order of generality which would cover the activities of the leading modern states, we have the task of making out in each case, not the popular shibboleths, not the current moral formulas, but the actual assumptions of social ends which distinguish activities within the countries in question. It becomes, then, a series of questions of fact how elaborate and complex that ethical assumption is in each case. The details in

1”Wie jeder Mensch in seiner Familie, in seinem nachsten Kreise geschatzt wird nach dem, was er durch seine Personlichkeit, seinen Besitz, seine Leistungen, diesem Kreise ist, so hat zu allen Zeiten die offentliche Meinung die arbeitsteiligen Berufsgruppen und -klassen des ganzen Volkes nach dem gewertet und in ein Rangverhaltnis gebracht, was sie dem Ganzen der Gesellschaft waren oder sind.” (ScHmoLLER, Die gesellschaftliche Verfassung der Volkswirtschaft, ester Teil, p. 393.)

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this connection would furnish the primary subdivisions of these states within the ethical series of our scheme (p. 524). Then the further questions follow, viz.: How, and to what extent, do the tributary civic, economic, and biologic interests further diversify these associations? In other words, when we consider states with reference to the largest conception of the life-process that we can form, their total attitude toward the implications of this life-process is the primary criterion of classification. Then the specific activities within each state, with reference to subdivisions of human interests, as contained in the civic, economic, and biologic series, will furnish the differentia of the states and of their constituent associations. In each case, and at every step, the functioning of the group with reference to the ends that account for its existence is a matter of fact, and its determination would settle the problem of its place and classification. To represent this proposition schematically we may vary the schedule above (p. 524). The general description of a national association on the basis which we propose would bring out its distinctive marks in a scale of subordination indicated as follows:

Chart of National Traits.

It goes without saying that a classification of states by means of this descriptive material would start with ethic traits, but the variations forming class, order, species, etc., would not necessarily be ethic as in the chart. They would be civic, economic, and biologic.

It will not be supertuous to add at this point the positive statement that the program thus suggested by no means proposes to cut loose from results derived from investigating primitive and minor associations. Whether sociologists admit more or less of the teleological and the technological phases of theory into their conceptions of their science, they will all, if hard pressed, claim to be aiming at knowledge of association at its highest power. What they learn of inchoate or limited association is supposed to be worth learning because it reveals the meaning factors in all association. It is necessary, however, to bring these partial and primary perceptions to the test of applicability and sufficiency within the most evolved associations that we know. Otherwise there is no safety against the tendency to assume that knowledge of very limited abstractions is comprehensive of the whole social reality. If Newton’s generalization had turned out to cover the facts in the orchard, but not the facts in the solar system, it would hardly have served as a base-line in physics. So, if an economic formula or a psychological uniformity is made out in the horde or the tribe, or in a particular state or stage of civic development, but cannot be verified elsewhere, it does not deserve to rank as a cardinal social law. Still less does it deserve such rank if our acceptance of it as a formulation of facts in the undeveloped or partial association really rests on absence of full knowledge, rather than sufficient evidence about that association. Whatever help is to be had from investigation of the stages and the parts of the social process is wanted at its proportionate value, of course, in the last synthesis that we construct. It is time, however, for real sociology to force a clear understanding that by far the most knowledge of the societies which it is most important for us to know is to be had by direct study of those societies themselves, not by inference from associations remote from them in space and time and type. This involves, however, more intensive study 5f national sociology than has ever yet been proposed.

The partial products worked out by our discussion so far may be indicated as follows: All the human associations which it is worth while for sociologists to study at present scale up to or down from states. Not ignoring international and transnational associations, we find it probable that most progress will be made toward ultimate comprehension of the larger whole by limiting investigations pretty closely for a while to these grand divisions of the whole. Enough of the life-process is carried on within the state to make formulation of that process more accurately descriptive of the whole than any formulations which we are likely to reach for a long time by more ambitious generalization.

On the other hand, we have posited the conception that the portion of the life-process which takes place at a given time in a given state is a stage in the series of activities proceeding in that state toward further development; and we have posited further the conception that these same activities are portions of a whole human life-process in which all states and peoples cooperate toward a more evolved associational process carried on by the whole human family.

Now, in order to make out classifying distinctions between different sorts of association, we have chosen to consider them in their relations up to their fusion with states, and we have chosen to consider states themselves with reference to the ends beyond themselves, or probably we should say with more immediate propriety, first, beyond their present selves, and ultimately leading into the wider correlations toward which they function. These ends are presumably given in certain ideals of fitness held by individuals, and known as ethical conceptions. Every state acts consciously or unconsciously toward the realization of some moral situation. We call such a moral situation a civilization. When we reach the stage of reflection, we have certain judgments of the more or the less fit civilization. Our own standards of fitness being then necessarily the provisional criteria of judgment, what are the marks of low or high, of retarded or advanced, civilization? We thus enter necessarily upon a critique of morality. What characterizes the state which we pronounce high or low in the ethical scale? This is not equivalent to a critique of theories of morality, for we have assumed all that, and have adopted a formal conception of an ethical criterion which presupposes rejection of all the other formal ethical conceptions that are inconsistent with it (p. 5o9). What we are now afterisa content for our formal conception of the ethical. We want to find the marks by which we may be able to say of a given situation: This association is more highly moralized than that; or this activity of the state makes more entirely for a wholly harmonized situation than another.

The program which we propose cannot be outlined in further detail in this paper, but some of the clues which it will follow are indicated in the following propositions: The order of associational development may be symbolized by the terms: one, struggle; two, moralization; three, socialization. The differentia observed in the series are quantitative rather than qualitative, i. e., we trace a passage from less to more integration in a common process. The symbolic terms chosen are selected, not because they are supposed to be exclusive, but because they are evidently nonexclusive. Each connotes something of the others. One involves a minimum of three. Three contains a minimum of one. Two is merely an arbitrarily chosen stadium between one and three. It is potentially and in part actually in one; it is developed and extended in three. Morality, as we propose to use the term, is the type of modus vivendi recognized at any given stage of the associational process by the persons conscious of association, as appropriate to their association. Not the persons passing judgment, but the associational process itself which they implicitly judge, renders the last valuation of a morality which it is possible for men to justify. When struggle has become so moralized that it loses the outward marks of struggle in regularly coordinated interchange among all the persons in contact, under the prevailing idea that the good of the whole is paramount to the good of the parts considered as having an existence in antithesis with the whole, we have a quantitatively intense association, with a modus vivendi of its own which contrasts sharply with all the previous mechanical regulations of categorical morality.

Again, the stages between struggle and socialization may be distinguished qualitatively in this way: One connotes individuals convinced, either emotionally or intellectually, of an individuality which is predominantly antagonistic to other individuals. Not recalling now in detail our analysis of the content of the individual element, but assuming that this content is in principle constant, we restate the progress of individuals from struggle to socialization as a passage through (a) recognition of other individuals (or groups); (b) advance toward recognition of equal value in other individuals (or groups); (c) progressive discrimination of the elements of value thus to be recognized; (d) progressive extension of the diameter of these recognitions until it includes all men.

Now, the ethical rating of a state depends upon (1) the degree in which the individuality of each citizen is practically recognized; (2) the extent to which individuals approach demand for complete self-expression; (3) the degree and extent in which the activities that pass for moral in the state are articulated with the life-processes of other men.

There are thus dimensions of length, breadth, depth, and height in the ethical measure of a state. Its character depends on whether it takes account of the present moment only, or of a long past and a long future; whether it takes into view a small, or a large, or a universal association; whether it contemplates basic human wants, or ideal human conditions, or the whole scale of interests from base to summit.

It of course seems anomalous to declare on the one hand that no states are today properly ethical in the sense in which we use the term,’ and on the other hand to propose a classification of states on the basis of their ethical differences. In explanation we may say, first, that there have probably been states in the past which should be classed as ethical, e.g., the Hebrew commonwealth at certain stages of its history; second, while it would do violence to obvious facts if we were to assume that either of the leading states today is, as a state, “ethical” rather than “civic” or “economic,” it is true that the ethical factors in the minds of the people of these states are sufficiently potent to constitute differentiating traits of the states themselves. These factors also constitute cardinal traits of the states. While the civic and economic interests are foremost in the public mind, ethical elements which form the setting of these interests are decisive within certain limits. These ethical elements establish a standard of life to which the civic and economic elements must conform. While these ethical factors in the individuals are not so powerful that they change the visible type of states from the “economic’” or the “civic’” to the “ethic,” they vary to such a degree that there are obvious qualitative differences in the economics and the civics of these states. It may prove impossible so to formulate these ethical traits and to determine them as differentia of these variations that they can be made bases of tenable classification. Nevertheless we propose to make the experiment of adopting the length and breadth and depth and height of the ethical conceptions which fx the orbit of state activities, as the points of departure from which to describe and classify states and the minor associations partly or wholly within states. Probably no one now living will survive to see citizens of the leading states subscribe general assent to graduation of those states upon this basis. Quite likely we shall succeed with this device merely in classifying activities, not states at all. If so, we shall certainly not have gone backward scientifically, for, as we have seen, all that the social sciences have accomplished by way of classification so far proves to be 1 graduation of activities, not of associations. We shall certainly have grouped the activities of states with reference to a more comprehensive conception of the relations affected by the activities. We shall have related them to a larger whole. We shall thus have attempted at least to make out their meaning is functions of a universal that is closer than the circumference 3f these minor motions to the absolute social reality.

ALbIon W. SMALL.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO (To be continued.)

Notes

1. This paper is presented, not as an attempt to classify associations, but as a preface to such attempt. It does not belong in the main line of argument upon the scope of sociology. It goes back rather to necessary methodological preliminaries.↩
2. Cf. Professor Henderson's article in the present number of this Journal, "The Scope of Social Technology."↩
3. Lilienfeld, Schaeffie, Spencer. Cf. above, Vol. V, pp. 626-31.↩
4. Above, pp. 177 sq.↩
5. On the method of isolation vid. Dietzel, Theoretische Socialökonomik, pp. 16 sq,↩
6. Principles of Ethics, Vol. II, p. 192.↩
7. For Simmel's own statements vid. Annals of the American Academy, December, 1895, and American Journal of Sociology, September and November, 1896. For a schedule of the "forms" proposed or hinted at by Simmel vid. American Journal of Sociology, November, 1898, p. 390.↩
8. "Classification des Types sociaux," in Durkheim's L'Année sociologique, III,1900.↩
9. Cf. Jevons, Principles of Science, pp. 507, 518, and 667. ↩
10. La Russie politique et sociale, 1886.↩
11. Die hunderjährige Republik, 1879↩
12. Democracy in America, 1850.↩
13. L' Italia Barbara, 1898.↩
14. "From the classifications and definitions of a science one may form conclusions as to its accomplished results," says Wundt (Logik, 1883, II, p. 42). What a somber diagnosis would result if this rule were applied to current sociology!↩
15. Cf. Mill on classification (Logic, Vol. II).↩
16. Les Principes d'une Sociologie objective. Paris: Alcan, 1899.↩
17. Dynamic Sociology, first edition, I, pp. 464-7.↩
18. La Science contemporaine, I 897.↩
19. Principles of Sociology, passim. Professor Giddings has recently published a very clear exposition of this element in Spencer's system, International Monthly, November, 1900.↩
20. Les Règles de la Méthode sociologique, pp. 100 sq.; La Division du Travail social, p. I 89.↩
21. Principles of Sociology, pp. 63 sq.↩
22. "Natural- Geld- und Creditwirthschaft," in Jahrbücher für Nationaloekonomie und Statistik, II (1864), p. 4; also the important work, Recht und Sitte auf den verschiedenen wirthschaftlichen Kulturstufen, 1896.↩
23. Die Entstehung der Volkswirthschaft, 1898.↩
24. Grosse, Die Formen der Familie und die Formen der Wirthschaft, 1896; Hahn, Die Hausthiere (1896), pp. 385 sq.↩
25. Völkerkunde, 1885.↩
26. Der Ursprung der afrikaniscken Kulturen, 1898.↩
27. Cours de Philosophie positive, Vol. IV, pp. 463 sq., 503 sq., and the whole of Vol, V.↩
28. The Origin and Growth, of the Moral Instinct (1898),pp. 103-8.↩
29. Ancient Society (1877); Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines (1881), p. 43.↩
30. Naturvölker und Kulturvölker (1896); "Die Kulturformen und ihre geographische Verbreitung," Geograpkiscke Zeitsckrift, 1897 ; "Die Kulturtypen der Menschheit," Arckiv für Antkropologie, 1898,↩
31. Ouvriers Européens (1879), I, pp. 70, 210, 212, On the work of Le Play in general vid. Werckstein, in Jakrbücker für Gesetsgebung, Verwaltung und Vollawirtksckaft, 1894, and Vaguès, La Science sociale d'après les principes de Le Play et de ses continuateurs, two volumes, 1897.↩
32. Les Français d' aujourti' hui.↩
33. Vid. Lapouge, L'Aryen.↩
34. Vid. Grundriss der allgemeinen Volkswirtschaftslehre, erster Teil, pp. 63, 72, 123, et passim.↩
35. Vid. Bau und Leben, second edition, Book I, chaps. 2-5.↩
36. "Wie jeder Mensch in seiner Familie, in seinem nächsten Kreise geschätzt wird nach dem, was er durch seine Persönlichkeit, seinen Besitz, seine Leistungen, diesem Kreise ist, so hat zu allen Zeiten die öffentliche Meinung die arbeitsteiligen Berufsgruppen und -klassen des ganzen Volkes nach dem gewertet und in ein Rangverhaltnis gebracht, was sie dem Ganzen der Gesellschaft waren oder sind." (Schmoller, Die gesellsckaftliche Verfassung der Volkswirtsckaft, ester Teil, p. 393.)↩
37. Cf. above, p. 519.↩