Chapter XVII

Stages of the Social Process

Our present argument is not an attempt to demonstrate the series of stages through which the social process has passed. We are rather concerned with showing that the work of making out such series remains to be done, and that until it is done the gaps in our social knowledge are serious. The problem is a distinct advance upon the work done by Herbert Spencer, for instance in Parts III-VIII, inclusive, of his Principles of Sociology. Whatever his own estimate may have been of the results there set down, he neither succeeded in making out a sequence in stages of the social process in any selected case, nor did he collect sufficient evidence about any given step in the process to justify an induction as to the method of transition from one stage of the process to another. He exhibited assorted types of the several chief social institutions, as they have appeared among different peoples. How it comes about that one of these types of institution gave place to another type of institution does not appear in the evidence.

We are not yet in a position to supply that lack to any large extent. The purpose of this chapter is to emphasize the fact that the operation of interests in human groups tends, from the beginning, to motion within the groups, and that the motion sooner or later gathers strength enough to change the form and tone and tendency of the process which the groups carry on. We have pitifully little insight as yet into the precise steps of such transitions. We have to make our way toward knowledge of them by first making the lack of information as conspicuous as possible.

It has been taken for granted over and over again that a change in a form of government or in the personnel of ruling bodies is an affair so vital that nothing profounder could be told of a society. .We have accordingly been satisfied not to look deeper or wider. In fact, political revolutions are quite as likely to be effects as causes, and, whether effects or causes, they do not necessarily register the most important social changes of. which they were incidents. For example, it has been claimed that the reason why the Revolution broke out in France rather than in Germany was that social changes had already occurred in the former country, which came much later in the latter.¹ Still further, it is an open question whether the total political changes involved in exchanging Louis XVI for the first Napoleon amounted to as much socially as the change of relations that has occurred between the people of France and the papacy under the present republic.

Accordingly, we are bound to be on. our guard against assuming that the social process is identical with the building up or tearing down of governments, or ecclesiastical systems, or economic orders, or any other mere structure. Each and all of these are means, machineries, by which the process of realizing interests is carried on. Changes in the means are worth what they are worth for the total process. We may and nust depend on these changes to mark advances in the process, but we must not.assume that the external sign is the only reality.

Our main proposition is that human groups either reach certain degrees of achievement in the satisfaction of interests and then stop, or they make any given plane of achievement the base of operations in developing successive stages in the process of realizing interests. That is, the social process, so long as it lasts, is a succession of stages in the correlation of human activities, each stage marked off from those before or after by certain distinguishing traits.

How the social stages may be most appropriately indicated, is a question about which there are almost as many opinions as there are social theorists. These disagreements at all events make the essential fact the more evident, viz., that stages of the social process differ from each other in so many ways that the task of procuring unanimity about the best way to analyze them seems almost hopeless. This deadlock among theorists need not trouble us in our present undertaking. We are simply pointing out that the social process, involving distinct stages, is a reality; and that progressive social knowledge will persist in attempts to discriminate and to trace the precise order of these stages, and to. determine the laws that have governed transitions from one to another stage.

For illustration we may cite the familiar classification of "the principal stages of human development" by Lewis H. Morgan.² It is based on progress of invention and discovery, and the summary is as follows:

1. Lower Status or Savagery: From the infancy of the human race to the commencement of the next period.
2. Middle Status or Savagery: From the acquisition of a fish subsistence, and a knowledge of the use of fire, to the invention of the bow and arrow.
3. Upper Status or Savagery: From the invention of the bow and arrow to the invention of the art of pottery.
4. Lower Status or Barbarism: From practice of the art of pottery to domestication of animals in the eastern hemisphere, to the cultivation of maize and plants by irrigation, and to the use of adobe, brick, and stone in house-building, in the western.

2. Middle Status or Barbarism: From the end of the previous stage to the invention of. the process of smelting iron ore.
3. Upper Status or Barbarism: Beginning with the manufacture of iron, and ending with the invention of a phonetic alphabet, and the use of writing in literary composition.
4. Status or Civilizarion. From the beginning of the use of writing to the present time.³

Since we shall presently follow Ratzenhofer's guidance in our general account of later stages of the social process, his classification of the social stages should be noticed.

He makes out two distinct series in the social process. It will do most complete justice to his idea to present these series in parallel columns, thus:

COLUMNS

Stages of Conflict Development⁴

Stages of Ethical Development⁵

7. Aggressive combinations crossing state boundaries.
8. Balance of power.
9. Coalitions.
10. Hegemony and world-control. 3. State as exclusive socicty.
11. Settled race.
    I. Horde and race.
    STAGES OF ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT'
    8 Ethical satisfaction.
12. Preservation and multiplication Of -sources of supply.
13. Intensive production.
14. Diplomacy between States.
    $^{4}$ Universal freedom, with equality of legal rights.
15. Political self-restraint for the
    LAS sake of peace.
16. Community of interest.
    I. ' Care for fellow-beings.

In spite of his extended analysis of these two series, or perhaps more properly because of the very minuteness of his analysis, their relation to each other in Ratzenhofer's own mind is by no means clear. His idea, on the whole, seems to be, not that the one series follows the other, nor that they are precisely parallel with each other. The conflict series has the start of the ethical series, and for a long time seems to be wholly decisive. Indeed, Ratzenhofer devotes so much space to exposition of this series that his briefer discussion of the ethical series probably does not have the effect of making it seem as important in his system as he intended. The trite figure of the warp and the woof in the web might be of some service in conveying his thought, but the analogy would not be very close. The conflict series represents rather a progression in forms of social reaction, while the ethical series represents rather the content of this visible reaction. Just as the nost evident facts in a factory are the motion, and the noise, and the heat, and the dirt; while all this is merely incidental to the less evident progress of raw material from one stage of manufacture to another; so the conflict series is rather an exhibit of social machinery and its motions, while the ethical series is the content of the movement.

Without expressing a judgment about the comparative value of the classifications of social stages just referred to, we may expand our general theorem 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. As we have seen, human life, in the individual or in associations, is 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 associations 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 the ends at issue in the particular situation in which those associations function.

Returning to the question of criteria by which to distinguish social stages, we may say with confidence that, in the nature of the case, no simple criterion can be adequate. We have seen that the social process is a perpetual equating of interests. We have classified all the specific interests which men have been known to betray in six generic groups. Social stages concern each of these groups. At any selected stage the element contributed by each interest, not by one or two alone, may vary both in quality and in quantity from the corresponding element in every other stage. This is merely a more abstract way of saying that an adequate standard for measuring social stages would have to be a multiple standard. To illustrate: Suppose we represent social stages by X, X', X'', X''', etc., and the generic interests by a,b,c,d,e, and f. Then the simplest symbol that could be used for a given socia! stage, in terms of its component interests, would be the equation:

X', X'', X''' etc., would differ from X because.of changes in the value of either variant, n or q in either term.

Expressing the same thing literally, one social stage may differ from another because the term representing one generic interest only may have a value different from that which it has in other social stages. The probability is that a variation in the value of one term will be accompanied by variation in the value of one or more of the remaining terms. Still further, it is by no means certain that the most important differences between social stages will be marked by variations of the same term. Thus a stage X may be most strongly characterized by the value of term a; a change in the relative importance of term b may set off another stage X'; the altered significance of term c may justify discrimination of a stage X''; and so on. .If, therefore, we attempt to classify social stages by use of either of the simple criteria above noticed, we are sure to make an arbitrary series: A social stage that.is marked chiefly by alterations in the index value of hygienic, or social, or scientific, or aesthetic, or ethical interests cannot be fitted into an economic classification. All attempts to reduce social stages to a common economic denominator are foreordained falsifications. Since they assume the constant superimportance of the economic element, they estop discovery of the greater importance of other elements, when the latter are in turn decisive. The same must be said of each of the six generic interests. Neither of them is a competent measure of a process in which each may from time to time occupy places shifting from top to bottom of the scale of relative value.

Returning to Ratzenhofer's scheme for illustration, we may say that he appears to have respected the foregoing conclusion more in substance than he did in form. His "Stages of Ethical Development" are evidently not variations of activities within our group "rightness" merely. They cover in a way the whole gamut of interests. On the other hand, his "Stages of Conflict Development," if held to strict account, would prove to be based on the assumption that a more or less of a certain form of the social process is the distinctive mark of social stages. More precisely, according to his assumption, one social stage differs from another by variations in the mass and manner of conflict among the people concerned.

The first and more impressive half of Ratzenhofer's work is constructed on the basis of this assumption. Yet the more we read between the lines, the more we discover that this conflict explanation is in effect a rhetorical recourse, rather than a strictly fundamental hypothesis. Conflict turns out to be a symptom, an incident, a means—we may even say for the greater part of known history the most evident symptom, incident, means—to that very accommodation of interests which makes up the ethical series. But to. make divisions of social stages turn upon the kind of conflict that is carried on may be reduced ad absurdum by formulation in a particular case, thus: "The progress of European civilization from Charlemagne to Wilhelm II is gauged by the changes in equipment, discipline, tactics, and strategy of European armies"!

No! Human interests are always the. essential thing. Clashings or conjunctions of interests are external and tributary. These latter may be accepted as milestones of progress, but only in the sense in which we use popes or kings to mark historic zones. The popes and the kings are not the social process. They may be merely punctuation marks in the record of the process. So struggle, as such, means nothing. The persons struggling, and the interests for which they struggle, are the meaning terms. Still we may use even this most-questionable part of Ratzenhofer's scheme to emphasize the fact of social stages; while we must decline to accept his rating of conflict as the final index of the stages.

Reduced to the simplest form of expression, Ratzenhofer's theorem is that stages of conflict development, or at any rate the earliest of them, belong in a scale produced by variations in the type of regulative authority. That is, if we make the tribal condition, as described in the previous chapter, the lowest stage in. the scale, other stages will rise above it in the order of differentiation of hostile interests, and of institutions for holding hostility in check. Later chapters must supply details that will do more complete justice to his whole theory. This initial proposition alone would seem to call for a classification of social stages on the basis of variations of a factor that composes our term "sociability," or c in our algebraic formula.

We have stated the general principle which challenges all such simple explanations.⁶ It would carry us too far into detail if we should attempt to analyze the particular applications of the principle in this instance. It is enough to say that Ratzenhofer's supposition not merely attributes to this element an importance that no single factor in the social process can claim, but, still further, the supposition is supported by-a highly imaginative account of the passage from tribal to civic conditions.

Thus Ratzenhofer implies that the tribal condition and the nomadic state necessarily go together; that tribal authority is a negligible quantity; and that the organizations of authority in subsequent stages necessarily involve advances upon the tribal condition in respect of social control. So far as positive evidence appears, each of these assumptions contains. less Wahrheit than Dichtung.

The hypothesis develops in this form: After tribes. have taken permanent possession of lands, there follows division of the land, either temporary or permanent, among families. At the same time there occur struggles to destroy or to drive out other tribes. The settled tribe begins to manifest the essential traits of a mature community. We find, for instance, first a patriarchal authority, and, second, a recognized tradition, or body of customs, in accordance with which the authority is exercised. By these means, violence is restrained within the group, and, on the other hand, the power of the group is concentrated for exertion upon outside forces. Thus the marks of the second stage of conflict development are the separate family and the settled tribe. . In such a community as this there develop authority, defense, and judicature. Public business is confined to provision against crime, i. e., violation of custom ; to protection against attack, and to wars for extension of territory, i. e., to insure means of support.

The third stage in conflict development is marked by the State and civic society. The subjugation of already settled tribes by nomads, and thereby the conquest of lands and Iaborers, brings in this stage. Authority becomes sovereignty. Defense and judicature remain the prerogatives of the victor. The vanquished become slaves.

From this time on conflict falls into two divisions: first, the struggle for the exercise of the sovereignty against the opposition, i. e., internal politics; second, the struggle of the community with foreign groups to secure and extend the community possessions, i. e., external politics. In the former division hostility is limited. In the latter case it is absolute.

This highly idealized scheme is an excellent illustration of the abstract conception "social stages," but it would be, to say the least, premature to accept the description as a valid generalization of the actual process from savagery to legal States. The surmise does rot fit our present knowledge of the

Notes