VI. Some Incidents of Association.
Nov., 1900 entry in the serialized work
"The Scope of Sociology"
American Journal of Sociology 6(3):324-380.
In the five foregoing papers we have indicated some of the large ideas, both of fact and of method, which sociologists are learning to take for granted as necessary preliminaries to their special work. We come then to the threshold of sociology itself. Within the horizon which we have outlined we encounter the reality of human associations, in countless numbers and in bewildering orders, all making up the comprehensive fact of association in general. Our task as sociologists is to analyze, classify, and interpret these different phases of association in their relations to each other and in their bearings upon the interests of living men.
When we reach the stage of maturity at which we recognize the need of the sociological order of generalization, we are already in possession of facts in great abundance about human associations. This material may be chiefly the spoil of accidental observation, or it may have been inherited from the less general social sciences. From the sociological standpoint, it is unassorted and uncriticised. We assume that the analyses of the more special social sciences may be made tributary to sociological synthesis, but we must mark out a procedure of our own before this aid can be used to full advantage.
The point of departure which we propose for sociology is the viewpoint from which all known human associations present certain characteristics in common. Whether we have in view the conjugal association of one man with one woman in the family, the casual association of buyer and seller in the market, the intermittent association of priest and layman in the religious assembly, or the permanent association of citizens in the nation, certain relationships are universal among the persons associated. The intensity of these relationships varies indefinitely. They are often discernible only as tendencies. They might not be suspected if other experience did not point to them. Many of them are in a given association rather potential than actual. With such qualifications, however, it is true that all human associations whatsoever betray characteristics in common. Enumeration of these characteristics is one way of presenting the problems which must be solved before there will be a science of sociology.1
When we assert, therefore, that certain incidents are common to all human associations, and when we proceed to specify certain of these incidents, we are not proposing sociological solutions. We are not professing to exhibit the incidents as they will appear after criticism. We do not claim that this first enumeration shows the most precise or profound relations between these incidents. Indeed, if sociology were more ripe, such protestations as these would be entirely superfluous. In point of fact, however, it is so nearly the rule among sociological writers to propose solutions before considering what is to be solved, that a different program requires tedious explanation. The problems of sociology are encountered when we arrive at the sort of generalizations which we are about to indicate. An adequate theory of the problems may seem, after the schedule that we present, more distant than before. We need not presume that the incidents to be specified are the most important sociological categories. We need not assume that they will be the final terms in sociological equations. All that we at present claim or imply is that when we survey human associations as such we discover certain incidents, attributes, properties, or qualities in them all. From this preliminary perception we must proceed to verify, to analyze, to systematize, and to explain. Instead of starting with an arbitrary definition of association, we begin by putting together our observations that wherever we find individuals associating we discover such incidents of the relationship as the following, namely:
I. Plurality or multiplicity of individuals.
At first thought this specification may seem too obvious for mention. Of course, it takes more than one person to make an association, and many persons to form a society. It should go without saying that our theories of association must be theories of conditions among which numerousness of persons is taken for granted. Be this as it may, we should seriously limit our perceptions of the facts within which the social process takes place if we failed to take notice of certain implications of this primary fact of multiplicity.2
The Germans have the proverb, “One man is no man.” Probably the fact which this aphorism expresses to most people is that without cooperation we fail to get the utmost use of ourselves. This is certainly true, but it is not the elementary truth. The mere existence of other people beside self is a condition which qualifies the conduct of the self. DeFoe pictured one of the mainsprings of social action when he portrayed the workings of Crusoe’s mind on discovering the footprints in the sand. Henceforth Crusoe was in contact once more, not merely with nature, but with nature plus man. The problem of life was now more involved, more uncertain, more formidable; but at the same time more hopeful and inspiring. There is now more to lose and more to gain, and more to stimulate personal effort to avoid the loss and secure the gain. The story of the frontiersman who abandoned his claim and moved on into the wilderness when another settler squatted within six miles of his location, because he “wanted breathing room,” is a piece of American humor; it nevertheless rests on a permanent psychological basis. The mere presence of other people is in the first instance a constraint. Whether or not all want the same piece of ground, or the same routes of travel, or the same material things, the fact that the many people exist is a bar to the free action of each. The Hebrew story of Cain, the tiller of the ground, unable to live comfortably by the side of Abel, the keeper of sheep, portrays a constant feature in human relationships. The popular saying, “No house was ever big enough for two families,” is merely a partial report of the profounder fact that the world is not big enough for two persons, until a process of adjustment accommodates each to the other. If the persons number more than two, the adjusting process is much more imperative and more difficult. Multiplicity of persons, therefore, is a condition in which means of correlation have to be invented. Multiplicity of persons presents its own problems to the persons. They vary from the primitive problems of shepherd and farmer to the present reaction of the public opinion of the world upon French justice and British war.
Multiplicity of persons is, on the other hand, at the same time an enlargement of self. There was good science in the Levitical promise: ” And ye shall chase your enemies . .. and five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight” (Lev. 26:8). Both for good and for evil, five men may have twenty times the resources of one, and one hundred may have not twenty, but one hundred times the resources of five. To be sure, the question arises: “But why does it not work in the same way with the hundred and the ten thousand as with the five and the hundred?” It does; the one group manifests the working of the same laws which operate in the other. But the dominant forces evidently differ in the two sides of the comparison. This simply serves to illustrate an element upon which stress is to be laid at every point in our analysis, namely: No single factor in association is sufficient to explain the general features of association. On the contrary, association is a function of the most complex variety of variables that science has anywhere encountered. Our business is to detect as many of these variables and to learn as much about them as we can, qualitatively at all events; and not to allow our theories of proportions to outrun our knowledge of qualities. Moreover, we may find the division of the facts frequently remarked in the effects of the physical environment duplicated in the case of the personal environment, namely: The multiplicity of persons has an effect, first, upon the bodily and mental structure of men; and second, upon the thoughts, the actions, and the experiences of men. All the phenomena of sexual and social selection, in the physiological sense, would be evidence under the first head, and it is unnecessary to enlarge upon this phase of the facts. Multiplicity of persons is the sine qua non of that wide range of selection which promotes rapid and radical modification of individual type. The opposite condition—that is, paucity of persons—tends to produce rapid and radical degeneration. For example, intermarriages, such as those of the Jukes (described by Dugdale), the tribe of Ishmael (described by McCulloch), the Smoky Pilgrims (described by Blackmar, American Journal of Sociology, January, 1897), the Bavarian royal family, the Virginia poor whites, etc., etc. Groups like these abstract themselves from the larger world and virtually live in a world of few people. Under the second head we may simply remark that the modifying effect of multiplicity of persons upon the thoughts, actions, and experiences of men is now so notorious that it has given rise to that section of social science which we name “mass-psychology.” The scope of this science will be more particularly discussed in later papers. But we have to observe at this point that very familiar facts betray to the most casual observation the subtle action of mere numbers. Such instances as “students’ night” at the Y. M. C. A. furnish cases in point. Whatever may be our opinion of the individual characteristics of the members of the crowd, we know that certain of these traits would not come to expression without the reinforcement of numbers. Again, it would be easy to fill a volume with observations upon the modifying effects of city life upon the manners and the characters of persons. This change is both positive and negative. There are stimulating and disciplinary results from mingling with large numbers of people, and there are the opposite effects of being lost in the crowd, the sense of irresponsibility, the feeling of license, the repudiation of former standards of morality, etc. No one has attempted to fix the precise point of equilibrium between small and large numbers in their healthful and unhealthful effect on persons. The probability is that this point varies in relation to different factors; but that there is such a point above and below which increasing or diminishing numbers exert rapidly changing influence is familiar to every student of society.
Accordingly, as we have argued before,3 when Durkheim, for instance, assigns to sociology the sphere in which there is the exercise of social constraint, and when DeGreef makes the subject-matter of sociology the phenomena of contract, each arbitrarily limits the province of the science. The only permissible limitation is the boundary within which there is human contact. This is not, like constraint and contract, a supposed clue to the character of human associations, or a dictum about the content of association. It is merely a recognition of the formal scope of association, and an assertion that we may not with scientific sanction restrict our science of human association to any limits narrower than the utmost bounds within which human contacts occur. Association is contact, and contact is association. This does not mean that contact and association are identical concepts, but that contact, physical or spiritual or both, is the absolute condition of association, and that variations of contact are among the factors in the modification of all human association. More specific analysis of these terms will be necessary under the title ” Dynamic Sociology.” We have sufficiently indicated for present purposes the conditioning function of the fact of larger or smaller numbers. This fact, in turn, has to have due consideration whenever we try to comprehend any larger or smaller social situation.
II. Attraction.
What we see when we observe any human association whatever from a certain angle is a group of phenomena that may be described as ” attraction.” This detail is not an attempt at speculative subtlety, but an expression of the most familiar commonplace. It is nevertheless worthy of serious notice. Whenever two or more people associate, something in each draws them toward each other. Each is a magnet acting upon the rest. However it may be explained, each finds himself better satisfied by joining himself to the others than in isolation from them. The total reason for the association is probably not to be found, in a large proportion of instances, in the phenomena of attraction; or, at any rate, these latter are manifestations of deeper influences. Conditions external to the person and subjective conditions not included within this relation are not overlooked when we concentrate attention upon attraction. Nor are we attempting to use the term “attraction’ as a metaphysical explanation of associations. We are simply pointing out the objective fact that wherever two or more persons associate each exercises in some sort and degree an influence by which the others are drawn. In many cases the energy of this attractive force may not be apparent, or it may emerge only on rare occasions. These occasions reveal the relation that is qualitatively constant, although it may be concealed by more efficient factors in the situation. The affinities that hold the horde together; the sexual impulse that stimulates the union of men and women in families; the bond of proved prowess that unites the predatory band; the profession of a common faith; the betrayal of common impulse—the touch of nature that makes all men kin — consciousness of common need or common fear or common hope; the sense of good-fellowship; the honor among thieves; the discipline of the regiment; the finesse of the salon; the eloquence of the rostrum; the prestige of the court; or, on the other hand, the discovery of uncommon traits; the perception of superior strength or skill; complementary elements, lacking in one party and present in the other–these may in turn be both sign and means of social attraction. Persons draw persons. There are affinities, sympathies, by which one person supplements another. Whatever the ultimate reasons for associations, individuals are the channels through which many of these reasons work. The gravitation of person to person throughout associations is as real as though it were the only movement involved in society.
III. Repulsion.
It is difficult to speak of the more obvious incidents of association without introducing premature hypotheses or theories of their relations to each other. We must presently refer to facts of association in which this incident is involved, in which it may be resolved into more fundamental forms. Our present purpose, however, is to schedule, not to explain. The schedule is to present the facts as they appear before we make serious attempts to interpret them or to place them in their proper order. This setting forth of the data to be studied is, however, an important step in the scientific process. If it seems to ignore plain and obvious simplifications, it may prove to estop many explanations that are more simple than true. The phenomena of social repulsion are worth tabulation as such, whatever may prove to be their relation to other phenomena.
In every human association, from the monogamous family to international concerts, individuals and groups move centrifugally with reference to each other. The desires of which one individual is conscious set bounds to the conduct of others. Convergence is simultaneous with divergence, cooperation with competition, confidence with distrust, sympathy with antipathy, fidelity with treachery, allegiance with rebellion, loyalty with treason. So prominent is this phase of association that Tarde, for instance, has been forced to abandon the original form of his thesis in explanation of social facts. Instead of relying upon ” imitation” as the sole and sufficient clue to social truth, he has reluctantly admitted the fact of ” opposition ” to equal consideration.4 The family is not wholly a sympathetic synthesis of father and mother, parents and children, brothers and sisters; it is at the same time an unsympathethic antithesis of contrasted units. The clan is no more a closed circle against other clans than it is an arena of collisions between its members. The camp is one vast weapon against the enemy; at the same time it is a chaos of counter-ambitions and jealousies and conflicts and intrigues. The industrial community is a peaceful association of men disposed to live and let live; at the same time it is a collection of men keen to discover each other’s weakness, alert to detect each other’s selfishness, and intent upon defeating each other’s aggression. The religious fellowship is a communion of spirit, to the limit of common belief; then it is a more or less intolerant and violent disunion at the points of inevitable variance of belief. The nation is an association in which the greatest good of the greatest number may be the alleged principle of cohesion; but the illusions of individual and group egotism incessantly confuse judgments of this greatest good, and the nation is always a thinly disguised anarchy of supposed interests asserting themselves in costly ignorance of fit policies of accommodation. The facts and laws of social repulsion contain phases of sociological problems coordinate with those of social attraction.
IV. Interdependence.
The phenomena represented by this title bring constantly to view the essential thesis of the organic concept of society, namely: ” Every point in every man’s life is related to every point in every other man’s life.”
All the incidents and conditions to which this chapter calls attention are abstractions from the social fact. In reality they do not have separate existence. Each is in some fashion both cause and effect of all the rest. Consequently we find that each of these incidents is in some sense a phase of each of the others. It is impossible to abstract them so completely that this partnership with the others is removed from view. Nor is it desirable that such falsification of reality should be possible. The desideratum in social analysis is ability to concentrate attention in turn upon thinkable phases of the social fact, while constantly remembering the surrounding phases to which this temporarily prominent phase is actually subordinate.
Thus when we have said that multiplicity of persons is a condition of association, we have said by implication that every form in which persons influence each other is also a condition of association. In other words, interdependence, for example, is merely an aspect of the reality present in the fact of multiplicity. Conversely, multiplicity is merely a form in which the reality of interdependence is realized. Each is something more than a form of the other, because, as we are pointing out, each is a condition of the other as well as a consequent of the other. If this reciprocal relationship can be read out of reality in the case of any title in our schedule, it will be proof that it is erroneously listed as a universal incident of association. Each of these incidents is in turn an aspect of the prevalence of cosmic law throughout the world of people. We shall find, therefore, that each of the incidents named is in turn an aspect of each other condition. This gives occasion for reiterating a fundamental proposition, namely: To think the social reality, or any incident within the social reality, we have to learn how to think together all the incidents and conditions, all the forces, all the forms of correlation of forces, and all the processes of action among the forces, that always constitute association. The intellectual ideal for which sociological discipline strives is judgment so firm that whenever a social incident, issue, problem, or situation is encountered, the mind will hold that object before itself, first, as conditioned by all these universal influences which we are beginning to schedule, and, second, as a particular resultant of certain specially effective forces that have operated within these conditions. The greater part of this balancing process unquestionably is, and should be, subconscious. But the sociologically intelligent mind will know how to bring any force or process concerned out of subconsciousness into active consciousness, so soon as the detail in question threatens to be treated in any doctrinaire or irresponsible fashion.
To illustrate: It would be very crude and pedantic for every person who wants to improve the physical, industrial, political, educational, aesthetic, social, or religious conditions of a modern city to be constantly shuffling over in his mind the technical names of the different categories with which we are dealing in this argument. There is something more practical. At the same time, every person who exercises an influence upon forms of social amelioration will have a use for these categories incessantly. Suppose, for instance, the subject in hand is a proposed change in the public-school curriculum. A little coterie of a dozen persons might put their heads together and decide what they think is the best curriculum. Then they might start out upon a crusade to introduce that curriculum. It might contain, for instance, some religious catechism upon which the dozen might be unanimous. It is morally certain, however, that no group of twelve persons in any American city could agree upon a religious catechism that would be accepted by the majority of the voters in their community. The crusade would be a very naive campaign against the incidents already named. The wise people of the city would at once mobilize in their consciousness these conditions that exist, although scarcely one in a hundred thousand of them may ever have used the technical categories by which we designate the conditions.
The point of emphasis is that the desideratum of theoretical sociology is such familiarity with the mechanism of the social process that we shall have this abstract knowledge for practical use whenever it is called into requisition by the particular piece of work which we have in hand. The humor and the pathos in the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is precisely their innocence of this elementary insight into human conditions and proportions. There is both humor and pathos in some of the most ambitious sociological theories, as well as some of the most earnest social effort today, from like ignorance of relations that foreordain disappointment all along the line of unsophisticated effort.
These observations are equally applicable to each of the categories in the present schedule and others that will follow. We return then to the particular category with which we are now concerned, namely, interdependence, although under the title “multiplicity” we have implied all that can be said in brief to emphasize the present detail.
It is one of the commonplaces of physical science that if a stone be thrown into a mill-pond, the waves produced will beat on the outer rim of space. Nobody professes that science has means of measuring the force of these waves beyond very restricted limits. But the motion once started affects all matter, although, for the most part, in an inappreciable degree. Similarly, the presence of each man in the world is a force that conditions the life of each other man. Each man diminishes the amount of available space in the world; he increases the demand for food; he augments the potential supply of labor; he multiplies the complexity of desires which must be coordinated if there is to be accommodated human action.
Within the economic realm this relation has been made familiar by an enormous body of literature and by the informal discussions of every interested group, whether of specialists or laymen. Beginning with the rudimentary facts of the division of labor, and enlarging the survey until it takes in theories of the reciprocal dependence of production, distribution, and consumption, economic doctrine has been the skirmish line of the perception which is still wider than the economic formulations. This perception is that every man is a contributing cause of every other contemporary and subsequent man; and, conversely, that every man is a composite product of every antecedent and contemporary man. Not only what we may do, but what we may think and what we may be, is partly decided for us—not wholly by us. Still further, each elementary desire, shared and shaped by many persons, becomes a modifying factor in the activity of all other persons and in all other situations. That is, the effective desires of people for the chief satisfactions–health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, rightness—are in turn modifying conditions which help to fix the directions and prescribe the limits of all activity aimed at satisfaction of either of these desires.
We may concede without argument that the health and the wealth interests are essential, while the other interests are dependent. The most pressing problem of society is how to secure these essential conditions for all the members of society. We may, therefore, confine our elaboration of the present proposition to its relation with the industrial activities. We may repeat our theorem, then, in a more specific form, namely: The details of men’s economic activities are fixed by the status of their own and other people’s desires for health and sociability and knowledge and beauty and rightness, in combination with their desires for wealth. We will elaborate this proposition, not chiefly for its own sake, but to illustrate the general fact of “interdependence.” We may give full value to the environment condition; we may admit that in the large the environment determines what the economic activity shall be. At the same time, the character of the man environed and the character of all other men also determine what this economic activity shall be. Our industry cannot vary beyond the limits that are set by the traits of the men who have lived before us and those who live round about us. It is too obvious and familiar for more than passing remark that the physical labor force of any generation depends upon the degree of bodily capacity inherited from the preceding generation. What the bodily resources of our day shall accomplish is limited by the inherited capital of health and bodily development. Not pausing for illustration or further statement of this factor, we may turn to less familiar phases of the same condition.
Let us assume, for instance, a certain intensity of the wealth desire. Operating in a vacuum it would impel the peoples of Europe to labor until that desire is satisfied, or until they dropped down exhausted. But the sociability desire is to be reckoned with. This not only dictates customs in business, like the closing of banks for three hours at noon; it not only dictates family and group merry-makings on birthdays and other anniversaries; it causes whole populations to adjourn business on numerous feast- and fast-days, thus making industry in a large measure impossible even for those who prefer to work. The notorious American intensity in pursuit of wealth is not proof that Americans want wealth more than other people, but merely that for the present we want other things less. If all of us cared for sociability as much as some Frenchmen do, and in the same way, we should spend a couple of hours on the boulevards each afternoon, taking turns parading up and down the sidewalks, and sitting at the cafe tables commenting on other paraders between our sips of café au cognac or absinthe. If we cared for sociability as much as the Italians do, and in the same way, we should have our St. Mark’s squares, and spend our evenings listening to the music and exchanging gossip; or, like the Neapolitans, we should haunt the streets half our days and drive dull care away all our nights by wassail with our friends. If we cared for sociability as much as the English do, and in the same way, we should be more like them in making business tributary to sport and politics and country life. If we had the quality of sociability that the Swiss and the Australasians have, we should be much farther advanced toward democratizing all our economies. The emphasis in this case is on the fact that in the countries named business is as certainly modified by certain qualities and tendencies of sociability as it is by the physical environment or the desire for wealth. The intensity of effort that may go into business enterprise is limited by social instincts as truly as by material resources. That there must be economic effort of some sort is decreed by the conditions which are antecedent to the social desires, and more persistent. But given a certain minimum of material resource, and the industrial activities at once encounter as real barriers and deflectors in the social characteristics of persons as seas and rivers encounter in dikes and levees and breakwaters. In a word, the quantity and energy and direction of economic action in a society depend, among other things, upon the social quality of that society. The fact that Carthage grew rich by commerce, while Rome did not, is due in part to the contrast in social conditions, not to the excessive greed of the Carthaginians. On the contrary, the rapacity of the Romans was more relentless than that of their rivals. The means which it adopted to satisfy itself was determined in part by different conceptions of the social worthiness of war as compared with production and peaceful exchange. Similar results have been seen in modern Europe from the operation of the aristocratic taboo upon business. Since capitalistic business has risen to such unique importance, the German, French, and English aristocratic classes have been stricken with dismay at the rising power, commercial and political, of the class controlling money. The aristocrats have simply handicapped themselves in the commercial race by social traditions that have proscribed business careers. They have improvidently bred business capacity out of their ranks. This is one clue to the anti-Semitic movement in France and Germany. The Jews have been forced into trade, commerce, and banking by the policy of the Christian nations since Christianity came into political power. They have developed business instincts which were not originally peculiar marks of the race. They are the superiors of the social leaders in ability to carry on the kinds of business that predominate in our day, and they are consequently the objects of impotent jealousy on the part of the classes that demand artificial prestige. The chief reason why there is no anti-Semitic movement in England is that democracy is so much more intelligent and thorough there than in France and Germany. The predominance of the aristocracy has been more or less a fiction for a long time, and the failures of the aristocracy to succeed in the capitalistic game do not move the nation to any strong sympathetic emotions in their behalf. The other elements have learned to stand on their own feet in business, and to acknowledge the rights of more capable men, whatever their race or religion.
One of the ablest portions of von Holst’s Constitutional History of the United States is that in which he shows the impossibility of combining the social ideas on which slave labor was founded with free industry in the same political society. The dependence of economic activity on social conditions was never more clearly depicted. From the earliest details that the ethnologists collect of social decrees of the sex line in industry down to the distinctions between wholesale and retail trade as passports to different strata of polite society, history bristles with illustrations of the present thesis, namely: What economic activity may be is decided, not by economic interests alone, but invariably by conformity of economic action to internal and external social conditions. It was not our natural environment, but the colonial policy of Great Britain, that set limits to our industrial development before the war of independence. Again, it was not our home resources, but the attitude of foreign nations toward our commerce, that crippled our trade until after the war of 1812. If it be answered that this was really one industrial society pitting itself against another industrial society, that it was thus an industrial conflict pure and simple, and so not a case in point, we may concede that this is largely, but not wholly, true. We may then cite the clearer instances of our long knocking at the door of China and Japan for admission of our trade. The exclusion of foreign nations from these countries was not primarily economic; it was social. The objection to foreigners was not in the first instance opposition to foreign goods, but to foreign people. There was social antipathy which refused to mix with Europeans. So long as that antipathy existed, trade relations were impossible. In China the barrier has been broken down to a considerable extent by force. In Japan it has been removed from within as well as from without. And since the new social atmosphere has existed, new possibilities of economic action have arisen. Our present relations with Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines are not chiefly determined by economic, but by social conditions on both sides. The present status of the labor and capital question is an indication of our social conceptions much more than it is an exhibition of inevitable economic reactions. In short, the kind of economic activity that any society may carry on depends not alone on its physical habitat and the economic quality of its members; it depends upon the social wants of its members and of its neighbors. What it can do industrially depends upon what itself and the rest of the world want socially.
It would be equally possible to treat the present division of our subject by showing various classes of interdependencies between a society as a whole and neighboring societies. The method followed thus far may, however, be continued with equal advantage through the discussion. We are considering, namely, the dependence of the business element in a society’s activities upon the desires either within or without the society that are not primarily economic. We may repeat the thesis, then, in this form: The economic activities of individuals or groups are conditioned by the status of the knowledge interest in themselves and in their neighbors. In his Development of English Thought Professor Patten has elaborated the thesis that national thinking is the product of the nation’s economic activities. He is quite right if he organizes his generalization into harmony with its converse, namely, a nation’s economic activity is a product of the nation’s thinking. Otherwise the generalization is a half-truth that hardly needs to be exposed. The world was just the same essentially six thousand years ago that it is today; electricity would have run along a wire in Adam’s time just as it does at present if opportunity had offered; steam expanded just as forcibly in Noah’s day as it does now; lyddite would have exploded just as terrifically while the Hebrews were making bricks in Egypt as it did on the Tugela or before Pekin; the sun would have printed a picture on a plate just as distinctly in Solomon’s palace as in a modern photographer’s parlors. The reason why Adam did not talk to his wife and children over a telephone, the reason why the ark was not propelled by triple expansion engines and triple screws, why Moses did not snoot down Pharaoh’s soldiers with rapid-fire guns, why we have no photographs of Solomon and his court, is primarily that these people had not sufficiently observed and thought through the facts of nature and the wants of men. We have ten thousand comforts that antiquity did not enjoy, simply because we have the results of ten thousand times as much knowledge of the resources of life as antiquity commanded. These truisms are indexes of the conditions we are now considering. Specifically, the economic actions of men are conditioned by the knowledge and the knowledge-desires of themselves and other men. Perhaps the illustration that most readily suggests itself to American minds is the case of Catholic Europe in the fifteenth century. Europeans were as greedy of gain and as eager for adventure as they have ever been. They were crowding upon each other, and were anxious to find new sources of wealth. Mexico and Peru were rich enough to create greed if it had never existed. The ocean washed European shores just as it does now. The trade winds blew the same favoring gales. Sun and moon and stars were the same safe guides to the sailor’s path. Why were this and that not put together? Primarily because the state of knowledge in Europe prohibited a breaking out of the bounds of the known world. Men did not dare to trust the compass. They had not yet invented quadrant or sextant. But, more than all, the theologians dominated men’s minds with warnings that it was heresy to explore for regions unknown to ecclesiastical cosmology. The Genoese sailor who at last summoned effrontery enough to believe in western exploration had to contend more desperately against biblical texts and monkish interpretations than against economic obstructions. Indeed, in all the dealings between more and less enlightened peoples, from the beginning to the present moment, the status of knowledge in each party has conditioned the economic activities of the other. The aborigines’ ignorance of relative values has been the temporary spur to adventure. Ignorance of natural resources or of means of utilizing them has in a thousand ways modified economic action. Ignorance of the traditions of peoples has resulted in ruinous policies of intercourse.5 At present Americans hardly need to be informed that between two societies which are in contact the decisive factor may be the mental content of each group respecting the other. If the Americans knew the Filipinos and the Filipinos the Americans as well as Americans and any European nation know each other, there would have been no bloodshed in the process of organizing a permanent government and restoring order and industry.
Emerson’s aphorism, “No man can be heroic except in an heroic world,” is an overstatement of an under-apprehended truth. No man can be his best in a world unappreciative of that best. No group can be its best in a world not correspondingly at its best. A worldly-wise man shows some, but not all, of his wisdom when he dilutes it with folly in dealing with fools. Societies must perforce conform their economic policies to the state of knowledge in the other societies that make up their area of contact.
We repeat, then, our leading proposition in this section, namely: Interdependence is a constant condition within which human association occurs. We are illustrating this proposition through one of the many series of ways in which it is exemplified. We are observing that the conduct of any society with respect to any of its elementary desires is conditioned by the status of that society and of other societies with reference to each of the other elementary desires. We come to the beauty-desire. It is, of course, impossible to show that the beauty-desire has exerted as strong inter-societary influence as some of the other factors, because it is not true. It is true, however, that this factor has always exerted a subtle and pervasive influence ever since there has been human intercourse. For a generation we have been pursuing in the United States a policy of tariff protection, ostensibly in the interest of home manufactures. At the same time, the fact that the love of beauty as applied to the arts is so much more advanced in Europe than in America has given to many kinds of European manufactured goods a prestige that carries them over our tariff obstructions. The reputation for finish that European goods enjoy, together with the reputation for taste that some Americans affect, gives foreign products a vogue that forces peculiar trade methods in our own markets. To sell a piece of Connecticut worsted in many an American tailor shop, it must bear a south-of-England or a west-of-France label. Parallel cases might be repeated indefinitely. In all trade relations between exporting and importing countries the aesthetic standard is a prime factor. Even Italian and French art squints toward the taste of American parvenus instead of aiming solely at aesthetic ideals. Every tourist in Europe today will be shown in England churches denuded of statuary and otherwise mutilated by the troops of Cromwell, while at Versailles the desire for revanche does not prevent the keepers of the palace from praising the Germans for protecting the art treasures at their mercy during the occupation. Just as the state of aesthetic appreciation softens the rigors of war, so it modifies the economic process of nations in peace. The annual hegira of Americans to the Old World, saving thousands of complacent Europeans from poverty, and maintaining whole groups of occupations, must be attributed in part to the aesthetic interest of Americans. The crowding of people from country to city throughout the world is economic and social, but also, though unconsciously and pervertedly, aesthetic. The recent Massachusetts law prohibiting building in Copley square to a height above ninety feet is a local illustration of the principle before us; namely, in general, that all human conduct is dependent upon conditions extrinsic to the immediate motive of the conduct; and specifically, that all economic conduct is subject to the limitation that aesthetic standards may enforce.
Lastly in this series of illustrations we specify the particular that economic action conforms in the final analysis to the group conception of rightness. A German economist has said that “economic demand is a section of the moral standard of the community.” The African slave trade lasted as long as Boston shipowners could keep their consciences quiet enough to accept their share of its profits. The early policy of our settlers toward the Indians tended to a level corresponding with the assumption that no Indian has any rights which a white man is bound to respect. The colonial policy of most European nations today, and of England until after the lesson of the American revolution was taken to heart, illustrates the conception that colonists are not only subjects of the government, but a species of common slaves of the more favored subjects, to be exploited in the interest of the ruling people. It is needless to multiply instances. We are dealing with an element in the situation that has made its impression in various ways upon theories, and is already modifying deliberate programs. The discovery has been made too often to be any longer debatable that one of the factors which fix the metes and bounds of economic action is the moral standard of the people who make the market. We repeat, then, the main thesis of this section, which the foregoing discussion has perhaps needlessly elaborated, namely: Every social incident whatever, be it the daily experience of an individual within a restricted group, or the secular career of a continental society, is determined by forces not wholly within itself. It is a function of a great number of variables, working within conditions that are constant in essence, but changeable in their manifestation in particulars. Every social situation is the product of everything else that exists in the world. To change the situation it is necessary to break the equilibrium of forces that preserves the status by setting free some new kinetic factor. The dependence of each and every social element, whether larger or smaller, upon outlying elements of which it is a part, requires this first step in every process of understanding the social situation, namely: the effort to determine precisely what the particular conditions are that exert a significant influence upon the element in question.
This program is instinctively adopted after a fashion by every man who tries to deal with concrete social questions. For instance, in all our current treatment of trusts we either seek or we assume an explanation of their origin. How do trusts come to exist? One man says that they are brought about by the tariff, another that they spring from competition, another that they are produced by criminal collusion with the railroads, another that they are the product of class legislation, etc., etc. The least intelligent of these explanations implies recognition of the dependent and resultant character of trusts. Few agitators seem to realize how many and complicated are the elements which have conspired to produce trusts, and consequently how many influences must cooperate to change the equilibrium of forces represented in trusts. All the attention that men are paying to the subject today, however, enforces the sociologist’s claim that scientific analysis of conditions in which each social problem has its setting is the sine qua non of practical social intelligence. We have to learn in each particular case not merely that interdependence, as an abstract concept, describes the situation; we must proceed to analyze and measure the particular elements upon which the situation in question depends. We then have the terms of our problem with approximately known contents, and may proceed to deal with them accordingly.
V. Discreteness or discontinuity of the individuals.
The intervals in space and in time between individuals that make up associations have been commented upon in various ways by different branches of social science. To the economist they have been interesting, for instance, as accounting for the diffusion of economic effects. The contrast between the effects of a blow upon a heap of grain and upon a solid body has become a classic illustration in this connection. To the political scientist the fact affords clues to the phenomena of political inertia and momentum. To the psychologist it presents problems concerning the distribution of mental stimuli. To sociology it has supplied an essential modifying term in the organic concept. Expressed psychologically the incident now in question reveals the fact that there is no social sensorium. Stimuli actually reach, not society, but individuals. There is imperfect transference of impulse from one person to another, because persons who are closest to each other in space are always more or less distant, and often effectually insulated, in thought. All the processes of assimilation have to go on in many individuals before they can combine for any conduct. There is something analogous to involuntary muscular action in the phenomena of mass movements, to be sure, but it is long before any new impulse becomes a permanent stimulus in masses, and constantly influences their action.
Intelligent reading of history, or observation of current events, should suffice to procure a proportionate place for this social incident in our theories. It is written large in every passage of human experience, and wisdom must recognize its importance.
Among the commonplaces of experience that are partially accounted for by this incident we may mention slow assimilation of modifying influence throughout human associations. As a rule men move with what often seems to the theorist irrational sluggishness in assimilating progressive forces. The fact of the discreteness of the units makes this inertia of masses not only intelligible but natural. It was six centuries before Englishmen realized in full on the investment they made when they wrested Magna Charta from King John. Baptists and Quakers, as well as Jews and Catholics, are still living who can testify from personal knowledge how long it was after the declaration of the principle before there was security of religious toleration. Our country was a nation on paper in 1789; it only decided definitely to begin to be a nation in reality in 1865. Two million inferior human beings were made the legal equals of fifty million superiors in this country a generation ago; but legal fictions cannot work miracles, and the race problem in America is in some respects more difficult than ever. For a hundred years we have had the right in America to be a self-governing people; but when we weigh our municipal administrations in the balance, we are tempted to believe that we have accepted the ballot, a symbol of liberty, in substitution for the actual exercise of civic liberty. Here, then, is a constant condition of human relationship, to be placed in calculation most carefully when we are most convinced of the illimitable possibilities of human improvement. The enormous time necessary to secure a single item of social gain is perpetual prophecy against doctrinaire programism.
The contribution of social analysis to the overcoming of this inertia must be made through due appreciation of the fact now before us, viz., the distance, moral and intellectual more significant than physical, between the elements that make up society. How this distance may be bridged, how channels of intercommunication may be opened and kept open, is one of the foremost problems of social technology.
VI. Solidarity or community.
In distinction from the incident “interdependence,”’ the fact in view when we make note of “solidarity” or ” community” is not primarily the dependence of one part of an association upon other parts, but the common relation of all parts to certain conditions which may at first appear to be wholly external, or to influence only a certain select few within the association. Thus, not alone the individuals who must coast our Atlantic seaboard, or the great lakes, or the gulf, or the Pacific, are affected by the storms from year to year; those storms limit the life-conditions of the whole population of the continent. We are in a common lot, so far as we are affected by climate, by the health of the world at large, by its industrial system, its political institutions, its moral ideas, etc., etc. The temporary curtailment of the output of gold in the Transvaal does not affect the brokers of South Africa and London alone; it does not confine its influence to the banking or business world. It distributes its influence over the whole of every civilized country. The world’s demand for gold changes the conditions of life for every factory, shop, and farm in the United States. The particular fact to be impressed here is that, whatever be the effect of an external influence upon an association, and whatever counter-influences may operate within the association, an influence bearing upon that association, as, for instance, depression of the national credit, is not an impersonal affair; it presently comes home in some way to all the individuals in the association. The machinery by which this is accomplished has been suggested in part in our discussion of interdependence, but this incident of community or solidarity is separable in thought from the antecedent incident of interdependence by virtue of which community becomes more specific.
It is this fact of community which has most enforced the organic concept in its essential features. The universality and intimacy of relations between men is a fundamental element in social theory. It is not a fact completely distinct from the facts already pointed out, but it is a distinguishable aspect of those facts. Whatever be the relations that press upon some men, those relations are a part of the lot of all men. The oppression of the Jews in Russia and of the Armenians in Turkey becomes a make-weight in the politics of England and America. The difficulties of farmers in East Prussia help make the “eastern question” in China, and threaten the Monroe doctrine in South America. The local politics in Ireland may hold the balance between parties in the United States. The state of crops in Russia is reflected in prices on the Chicago board of trade. It would be possible to rewrite history in terms of this single condition. Of course, it would be a one-sided view of history, but it would correctly report one of the correlations of facts that is involved in history. We might urge the thesis: “History is the incessant distribution of conditions from centers where they are evident to the rest of society in which they are gradually assimilated and lost from view.” The classic illustration would be the political absolutism of the eighteenth century, as affected by the French Revolution. The revolution was in one sense local to France; in another sense it re-created the world. It is doubtful if the spirit of French administration has been changed more than that of Germany by the assimilation of the Revolution by each. Again, we might review the different classes of satisfactions, and the activities which appetite for them stimulates, and we should find that the desires of one part of the world, and the means of satisfying them, presently become equated with the same class of desires and satisfactions in all the rest of the world. The health of Calcutta and the Arabian peninsula is presently the health of London and New York. The commercial system of Asia, Africa, and South America is both cause and effect of the commercial and fiscal system of England and America. The social customs of the Bushmen and Fuegians may not supplant those of European nations, but they supply material for revision of our ideas and for broadening our conceptions of social utility. The knowledge gained by rude races and that derived by the keenest science are interchanged, and the culture of the world tends to become one. When the fashion of our chief cities sets apart a week for devotion to the chrysanthemum, we need look no farther for proof that the asthetic life of alien civilizations coalesces and harmonizes. The Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 was merely a symptom of a condition that is as old as human intercourse. Religion is not a local nor a racial but a human want, and the want will not be satisfied until it has reached a universal expression. Every movement of man to satisfy the religious yearning has been a vicarious sacrifice for all humanity, in expressing its want and in experimenting with means for achieving its desire. The transfusion of religious conceptions has been going on since the first human consciousness of awe and fear. We need not argue that one religion is the product of another, but, assuming the independent origin of several families of religions, there has been progressive modification of religion by religion, parallel with the progress of intercourse between peoples. The Buddhist and the Jew, the Mussulman and the Christian, each has a different actual religion today from that which would have been his religion if the other faiths had not contributed to the content of his consciousness.
In other words, the world has gone on realizing what was partially but fundamentally expressed by St. Paul in his famous sociological lectures to the Roman and Corinthian Christians (Rom. 12:4 and 1 Cor., chap. 12). He may not have intended to carry his proposition, “We are members one of another,” beyond its application to membership in Christian communities. At all events, the truth turns out to be as broad as the most liberal interpretation of his language suggests. As intercourse and means of communication and exchange of goods and thoughts have become developed, world-wide community has become more intimate and obvious. The peculiar consequence of this fact today is that there are no local questions; every social problem is a general problem. We cannot make wise programs without adjusting their relations with the affairs of the world. There are no social solutions which do not rest upon settled relations in society at large.
VII. Coordination or correlation.
Disregarding its relationships to the other incidents in our schedule, and considering it in itself, we encounter in the fact of coordination that aspect of reality which has thus far furnished more material to political economy than to any other branch of sociology. Indeed, if we are to become as familiar as our present means of knowledge make possible with the phenomena thus designated, economic science is the indispensable interpreter. Not even in political science is the fact of coordination so minutely analyzed. Yet we are left with a partial and unbalanced conception of human associations on the whole if we stop with knowledge of coordination as it is displayed by the industrial or the civic department of human activities. Desire to avoid the extravagances and trivialities of the so-called “biological sociologists’ has caused a reaction among cautious students of society, to the extent that they are shy about employing the most obvious organic metaphors in reporting the more general facts of human coordination. We cannot adequately express the results of already accomplished analysis of human association, however, unless we take advantage of terms filled with meaning from lower orders of coordination. There is articulation of parts, there is interlacing of structure, there is intercommunication of persons and of products between activities that proceed within an association. All this complexity is due to various correlating principles, the study of which is perhaps both the”immediate” and the “paramount” task of sociology. We are observing at this stage merely that what we see in other aspects of associations depends upon facts of another order, which are distinguishable in thought by abstraction, whether we have made the remaining generalizations or not. These facts are both structural and functional. The whole system by which communication of thought and influence takes place in association is a combination of material and spiritual devices, which gives to human associations a coherence and regularity or a unique sort.6 Objective description or this incident of association is still an unsatisfied demand. Attempts to accomplish it have resulted in much clarifying analysis, along with vast waste of energy in debate over physiological analogies. In the absence of agreement about the terms in which the fact and the means of coordination in association shall be described, one is liable to irrelevant and confusing criticism when using the readiest and simplest explanation. Without wishing to raise any of the mooted questions about the terms which will best apply to the facts here in view, we have to note that what men do industrially, for instance, is not merely conditioned by what they do artistically, scientifically, politically, and religiously; but it is controlled by a network of interrelations that are a part of association. Social coordination is not like a mechanical coordination of grains of sand dumped in a heap; it is the operation of interacting spiritual energies and material devices, as consistent and constant after their kind as the principles of military tactics. We see the fact illustrated in different degrees in the case of Chicago industries after the fire, the industries of the southern states after the war, and the industries of France after the Revolution. In each case both the form and the volume of the industries were determined, first and foremost, by immediate local circumstances and by essential personal wants. They were determined, secondly, by larger connections extending to the whole form and spirit of the world-association of which these groups were parts. Thus Chicago could not start afresh on the basis of communism of land, for the laws of Illinois would not permit it, even supposing that the people of Chicago wanted it. Chicago could not build a city without streets, or depend on the moon for light at night, or revert to the household system of industry, because the whole commercial system, as illustrated forcibly for instance in the insurance factor, would have vetoed such irregularity. The same fact of traditional and contemporary social determination of activity might be illustrated at length in the other cases just named. What goes on among associated men is partly a consequence of physical conditions which are primarily outside the category “social.” It is partly individual action. It is, however, in great part a function also of the association in which it occurs. Thus our economic conduct is a function of the domestic, artistic, scientific, ethical, political, legal, and theological order and tradition, organized in the association of which we are parts. So of each of our activities in turn; they are all functions of each other. The means by which this coordination is procured are both natural and artificial. They have partly gravitated into operation, partly come to have their present efficiency by voluntary adaptation of devices invented without far-reaching purpose, and partly grown out of deliberate intention to organize association. They have been expounded in part by Professor Ross in his series of papers on social control.7 The single fact to be insisted on here is that human associations of all grades are contacts of individuals correlated by a system of coordinating agencies, not a jumble of individuals free to transform their association by extemporary volition. The correlation of the units is a phase of association as distinct and significant as any incident in our schedule.
VIII. Individualization.
In dealing with this schedule of incidents, our method is to state and illustrate in each case the fact that the incident exists, not to enter upon discussion of reasons for its existence. Upon mention of the present detail there is at once provocation to join issues with the collectivistic or the individualistic philosophy, and to struggle for mastery in the name of one of these conceptions. That, however, would be far from our present program. Our concern in this analysis is not with individualism or collectivism as an idea, but with individualization as a fact. There are views of human association which make it the same sort of resultant that occurs when the fat of a herd of swine is boiled down and cooled off as a mass of lard. But human associations are not homogeneous masses; they are heterogeneous collections. Diversity of individuals is no less actual than community of relation of individuals to the universal conditions. Human associations are invariably composed of unlike individuals. It is true that in the ideal monogamous family man and wife are one; it is more literally and evidently true that, whether the family is ideal or not, man and wife are two. So also in a rising scale in other, more complex associations. We are, of course, repeating a commonplace, with the modification that it is not commonplace. We shall lay further emphasis presently under another rubric upon the fact that individuals are different and remain different. The specification upon which we now insist is rather that the associated state is a process of making them different. Association diversifies personalities. It puts premiums upon special developments. It encourages a trait in one, it represses a trait in another. It rewards this man’s performance, it penalizes that man’s propensity. It gives more scope to each of the activities normal to all individuals and to the rare activities peculiar to exceptional individuals. If we take the genetic view of the social process, we may describe it in this aspect as a progressive production of more and more dissimilar men. Each change in the social situation affords a new outlet for personal idiosyncrasy, and presents new incitements to variation of conduct and character. The proverb that “it takes all sorts of people to make the world’ is only one side of the reality. It takes the world to make all sorts of people, is equally true of the same reality. The limits of the possibilities latent in people will not be discovered until the social world has reached the limits of its development. The social movement takes place through propagation of untold varieties of persons. Production of personal differentiations might be fixed upon as an approximate expression for the whole output of the social process. Our whole schedule is cumulative warning that such a view is partial. Human association is a process made up of processes, of which the present detail is a sample, each of which seems to cover the whole range; all of which together, however, are necessary to the completeness of each.
IX. Socialization.
The same facts otherwise viewed yield the apparently antithetical proposition that association not only fits the units into accommodation with each other, but that association is essentially assimilation of the individual life-process to the social life-process. It is integration of the process in the units with the process in the whole. Association is the fact in which individuals, on the one hand, become more distinguishable from each other; while the same individuals, on the other hand, get their distinctive individuality by becoming more intimately merged into each other. Socialization is, accordingly, not in opposition to individualization, except in words. It is the condition and the means of individualization, and vice versa.
An analogy may possibly indicate the truth at this point better than literal description: When the prairie schooner is the only vehicle owned by the family, the social activities of the family are rude and undeveloped. Specialization of activity on the part of the family goes on pari passu with more highly individualized means of travel and transportation. When the prairie schooner has become half a dozen different kinds of farm wagon, and half a dozen different sorts of conveyance for persons, each of the dozen vehicles is not merely different from the rest, but it is different by virtue of its nicer conformity at some point than the prairie schooner could reach with some specific detail of the life-process maintained by the family. The family life becomes more diversified by commanding the service of more highly specialized implements. The implements are more highly specialized by virtue of more intimate and exclusive connection with the whole of the family life.
The case is similar in form with men. If a young man comes from the farm to the city, he may bring a wealth of invisible social qualifications, but for the moment they are not available because they are not sufficiently individualized, and they are not individualized because they are not socialized in the way and the degree suited to his new conditions. The city has no room for farmers, but it has abundant work for the resources that accumulate in men on the farm, if these resources can be geared to the proper adjustments for which the city has uses. Presently the young man finds a place where he is permitted to show what is in him. He learns to do new work. All that is common to him and the sorts and conditions of men of whom he is a specimen remains as before, but the specialist begins to appear in him; and when he has reached the limit of his opportunity or of his power, he is no longer recognizable as a child of the soil. He is the manufactured product of urban conditions. His apparent personality is that of an actor almost lost to view on the world’s stage, but if it is closely scrutinized, it appears to be a personality formed for and formed by some minute division of the city’s labor. The farmer has become the city man, not alone by virtue of changing his location; he remains the farmer still, until he specializes his individuality. He accomplishes this change by adjusting his individuality more minutely with some minutiae of the social process. Indeed, objective morality is socialization. The unmoral or the immoral man is the social unfit or misfit. The moral man is the man so nicely adjusted to the social conditions that the life-process proceeds within and by means of him with relatively high precision. Association may again be described truly but partially as the integration of distinct individuals into the common process.
X. Subjective Environment.
This phrase seems to have been coined by Lester F. Ward.8 The argument in which it occurs attempts to refute a certain dogma of the freedom of the will, and to show that all volitions depend upon antecedents. These are principally internal, and constitute what may be called the “subjective environment.” Professor Ward discusses at length what is involved in this conception. It is so much more familiar in essentials than some of the other categories in our schedule that elaboration may be omitted. Professor Patten has made use of the same phrase, though in an argument which seems on the whole somewhat gratuitous9 Unless we desire to weave a tissue of esoteric mystery, there seems to be no more reason at this point than elsewhere in social analysis for anything but straightforward description of the familiar. The fact that corresponds with the phrase which we have chosen as a name for this incident is so obvious and so commonplace that it is difficult to realize that it deserves high rank among scientific data. We instinctively grope after something beyond to take the place of this everyday knowledge. The machinery and the consequences of the fact do lie beyond our observation, but the fact itself is hardly hidden from the most unobservant. Every individual begins to be a repository of feelings, notions, ideas, prejudices, beliefs, theories, purposes, so soon as he begins to be conscious. When we force a truce in psychology to the extent of assuming a distinction between the individual and these his mental equipment, we are aware that the individual as we know him is an agent whose scope is defined just as evidently by these mental furnishings on the one hand as by the forces of the external world on the other hand. The born Fenian is as really limited in his conduct by an assortment of hereditary assumptions about England as he is by the soil and climate of Ireland. The bred Protestant acts within the prescription of certain impressions about the Papists that are just as real as the mechanical or chemical reactions of his body. The little mathematics and the less science and the faint odor of ethical philosophy that American children take with them from the common schools form a matrix whose properties the social psychologist will one day be able to describe with relative accuracy. Meanwhile the politicians already know how to count upon it with a high degree of precision.
In other words, just as the individual carries within himself certain conceptions that constitute one of the cardinal conditions of his action, so groups of individuals in association are foci of similar influences The association is the radiation of a common mental content through an aggregate of individuals. That content may be almost a negligible quantity. It may amount to scarcely more than common desire for food, common assumption that the food must be got, if at all, within this particular territory, and common acquiescence in the necessity of allowing these the persons born also in this territory to use it for their food getting. On the other hand, the content that makes up the subjective environment may be that highly elaborated collection of perceptions and judgments common to the members of the British Association or the French Academy. Expressing the whole fact again in terms of an incident abstracted from the fact association is the process of realizing the subjective content of the associates. Association is implicit objectification of that which is in the minds of the associates. Association is practical adjustment between the subjective and the objective conditions of the persons associated. More simply still, the members of any association have certain notions in common. Their association is the common response to the stimulus of these notions. No association is merely the football of external conditions, whether social or physical. Each association is what it is by virtue of a common spiritual possession. The fact ought to be too clear for serious dispute. The only open question pertains to the propriety or utility of naming the fact “subjective environment.”
XI. A social consciousness.
Tarde has remarked:
It is not true that there is a social mind distinct from individual minds, and in which the individual minds are contained as the ideas are within the individual mind. This is an entirely chimerical idea of social psychology. The social mind, like the individual mind, includes nothing but ideas–states of consciousness. The states of consciousness that make up the social mind are scattered among the individuals that make up the society. They are not assembled in one brain. This difference should be neither exaggerated nor ignored. There are two sorts of associations: first, that of different individual minds united in the society; second, that in each of them of states of consciousness which accumulate gradually, and proceed for the most part from other minds. In each individual man there is reproduced to a certain extent that more or less systematic aggregation of states of consciousness that constitutes the social type. The social mind consists in this very repetition.10
Mention of the incident “social consciousness” is the signal for attacks at various points along the sociological line. What is social consciousness? Where is it? Does it have a place in every human association? Is it merely a late and rare development? It is not necessary at this point to enter very far into formulation of all that answer to these questions would involve; but it will be an advance for all the social sciences when we shall have perceived that a reality is here recorded, and when we shall have resolved to make due account of all that the reality contains.
Assenting in full to the general purport of the citation from Tarde, we furthermore concede at once that the fact to which we apply the term “social consciousness” is in one sense included in the fact which we have called above “subjective environment.” All the content of the social consciousness in a given case is a part of the subjective environment of the persons in whom it occurs. At the same time, a very replete subjective environment in an individual or in an aggregation of individuals may contain but a minimum of social consciousness. Although the latter may be placed schematically as a species under the former as genus, each seems to be in fact a direct phase and expression of association, no more dependent on the other than each incident in our schedule is dependent upon all the rest.
The phrase “social consciousness” has been construed in various ways, and survival must render the verdict of fitness; but there are certain plain facts which must not be confounded with each other, however we apply terms in dealing with them. The fact which is of most importance in this connection, to which we now apply the term “social consciousness,” is that at some time or other, and with some degree of clearness or other, members of every group perceive that the group exists, that they condition it and are conditioned by it, that their individual interests are more or less bound up with the affairs of the group, and that the existence and prosperity of the group are dependent upon the conduct of its constituent individuals. All of this mental state, with its varying scope and intensity, that is in any individual’s mind, is his social consciousness. If the group is composed of a thousand persons, and if in each of them the fact of the group-relationship has risen above the threshold of consciousness, to that extent social consciousness is a part of the subjective environment of that group. For instance, assuming that there is a common something in the minds of all the Frenchmen in an arrondissement when they shout, Vive la France! that common element may be called the group-opinion, the group-feeling, or the group-sentiment, and it would be a part of the subjective environment of the group. It might or might not contain elements of social consciousness. It is conceivable that Vive la France might in a given instance be more of an individual than a social watchword. In one man’s mouth ” France” might stand merely for a lively sense of the advantage of a job on the public works; in another’s, for a notion that “France” is a patron saint, to be conciliated by zealous shouting; in another’s, for a vague feeling that “France” is his glorified and triumphant self, asserting miscellaneous superiority. In so far as either of these notions is common to the members of the group, or goes to make up the motives that actuate the group as a whole, it belongs in the category ” subjective environment.’ In so far, on the other hand, as an element of this common mental content is the feeling or perception of the reality of the association, that factor is also the “social consciousness,” first of the individual and then of the group.
In the most general terms, then, we may describe the incident in question as a state of mind, primarily in the individuals and then diffused throughout the association, consisting first of perception that the group exists. If we may suppose that this perception may occur without any corresponding valuation of the fact so perceived, we may describe a more advanced development of this incident by adding, second, that the members of the group place a certain appraisal of value upon the group-relation, as something to be cherished and guarded. In this stage of social consciousness we have clannishness and tribal exclusiveness; at later stages, class-consciousness, esprit de corps, patriotism, or, as the Germans phrase a kindred, but not necessarily quite identical conception, Nationalitätsgefühl.
Social consciousness need not, of course, in all individuals be restricted to the limits of national bounds. A few people have a lively sense of the oneness of the whole human race. International law is a certain sort of proclamation of more than national consciousness. It is not a universal rule that the intensity of social consciousness is inversely as the diameter of the association. The law is much more intricate than that, and cannot as yet be formulated. Our present purpose is satisfed by pointing out that wherever there is a relatively permanent association some form and force of consciousness of association begins to give character to the association. It is probably at its nadir in the horde. Perhaps it has never been at once more intensive and extensive than in the feeling of the “chosen people” toward the ” gentiles,” andof the Greeks and Romans toward the rest of the world jumbled together as “barbarians.” The ethnologists and folk-psychologists have the task of locating and measuring this incident in particular cases of primitive men. The historians must furnish data for detection and estimate of its workings in later societies. A decisive factor in sociology as a scientific basis for social action must at all events be found in the operations of social consciousness. Study of the content of social consciousness, and of the processes that take place in individual minds as causes and effects of the prevailing state of social consciousness, is pivotal in sociological theory.
XII. Vicariousness.
So much has been said during the sociological half-century just closing about interdependence of one upon another in society that it is scarcely possible to present this constant aspect of universal social conditions in a new light. The theorem to be emphasized, however, under this title, is that the social fact and the social consciousness presuppose, not merely constant reactions of unit upon unit and part upon part in associations, but, beyond that, incessant interchange of service between the associated individuals and groups that thus react upon each other. The social process cannot continue unless there is unimpeded give-and-take between the elements. With the reservation, as before, that it is the expression of an element temporarily viewed as the whole, we may express the fact even more strongly. Since the condition here alleged is posited as general and universal, we may formulate all the reality of which it is a condition in terms of the condition itself. Thus: The social fact is perpetual vicariousness. When the amount of vicarious action is small, the social process is embryonic; there is merely the dormant potency of society; association is realized only in a minimum degree. When vicarious action is interrupted or disordered, association by so much ceases or becomes negative (antipathetic). As vicarious action diversifies itself, the social process correspondingly evolves.
Again, this being the case, it would be possible to rewrite history in terms of this condition, and the version would be much truer than many of the pretentious attempts to read the deepest lessons of human experience. The career of human industries is merely the story of one man learning to do something which makes it possible for another to do something else, and for each to get some of the results of the work of both. Differentiation of the non-industrial pursuits and classes— warriors, rulers, artists, priests, scientists–is merely a higher elaboration of this economy of reciprocity. No human vocation has existed as a tolerated institution, without apparent justification in its supposed utility to others besides those who pursue the vocation.
There is no clearer illustration of this than in the reciprocal feudal incidents of “commendation” and “protection.” The feudal relation was a balancing of services, and was mutually advantageous so long as the exchange was real and proportional. Revolutions have been upheavals due to interruption of the vicarious function, or to tardy or premature belief that the function was arrested. At one point there has been excess of advantage, at another point defect of advantage. The exchange process that would normally equalize levels of advantage has been somehow clogged, and the consequence has been that normal human interests have asserted themselves by breaking through an abnormal order. We should have a juster account than has ever been rendered of every episode in history if we could get a correct answer in each case to the question: Who performed or shirked the vicarious function called for at that point?
When we approach the problem of present society, we must sooner or later confront the question of the state of vicariousness in our society, namely: Who depends upon whom for what service, in order that the interests represented by the members of present society may be satisfied? Is the responsibility discharged with a reasonable degree of success? These questions propose the inevitable test of our present social aims, and of the structure of society by which we are trying to reach those aims. Who fails in performing what service? is the question which calls for exhibit of the whole social unbalance, whether in judgment of a past or of present society. The world is not a gift enterprise; it is not constructed on the free-lunch plan. The world owes nobody a living. It is true that no one can earn the kind of living that all civilized men want today, because the best of us have to be pensioners on the past to an extent which no one can compensate. The most skillful “architect of his own fortune” in spite of himself comes into the greater part of his fortune by inheritance from other men. On the other hand,it is true that, as against the other persons of his own generation, nobody has any claim that sociology can recognize to good things except in proportion to the utility which his personal service in the world bears to the service performed by all other men. Wherever this proportion is disarranged there is in some way a disturbance of the vicarious relations.
Accordingly we may say of the present as of the past: It may be formulated in terms of vicariousness. The present social order is normal and permanent to the degree in which it secures natural vicarious interaction between all the associated persons. Present social order is provisional and insecure in proportion to its toleration of partial reciprocity or repudiation of the dues of vicariousness on the part of any of the associated persons. Thus the labor problem, the currency problem, the tariff problem, the civil-service problem, the expansion problem, the liquor problem, the social-evil problem, the revenue problem, the trust problem, and so on through the whole list–each may be analyzed in terms of partially realized vicariousness. In so far as reciprocity is approximately normal we have corresponding social equilibrium. In so far as a false balance of reciprocity is involved in social programs there is unstable equilibrium. While this is merely,in the first instance, another of our technical abstractions, it is at the same time a category without the aid of which there can be no adequate penetration into the essential social situation in its most practical aspects.
XIII. Persistence of the Individuals.
The fact to which we now refer may be symbolized by what goes on in a mixture of chemical elements. Let us suppose a case of a mixture containing five or more elements–say chlorine, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and fluorine. The volumes of the elements are in various proportions. One of the elements is present in such small quantities that it may be discoverable only after the last refinement of analysis. Yet when that obscure element is found, it is itself; it exercises its own reaction; it is not forced to abdicate its peculiarity; it is equal with each of the other elements in reacting with each of its own essential properties at their actual value within the mixture. Hydrogen and oxygen have the same affinities when immersed in nitrogen as when they are undisturbed by a third party. In a mixture of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen with other elements, each retains its proportional force and its own peculiarities, subject only to the preponderating force and quality of the other constituents of the mixture. Oxygen does not become nitrogen, though it may be lost in the volume of nitrogen. Hydrogen does not become chlorine, though in almost pure nitrogen it may be unable to join with enough oxygen to distinguish itself from chlorine in its relation to combustion. Such force and value as each element has, however, it retains in the mixture, and whenever the conditions of the mixture are such that the several elements are called to show themselves, the known characteristics of all alike reappear. There is similar permanency of character, or similar retention of identity, even when that identity is concealed in the mass of other elements.
In the social reality we have discovered the like interest of all individuals in the means of satisfaction symbolized by the terms health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, rightness. We do not find that persons have equal intensity of desire for these satisfactions, nor that the distribution of these desires is uniform, nor that they present to themselves the same specific objects or experiences as satisfactions of the desires. What we do find is that when any man or class of men arrives at the stage of development at which these desires, any or all, emerge, the individuality of the man or the class is like the individuality of every other man or class in demanding the object of desire as the satisfaction of want.
Brief inspection of this detail leads to the suspicion that, though its universality in observable associations is no less demonstrable than that of the other incidents in our schedule, it is nevertheless an incident of a different order from most of those of which we have spoken. However this may be, we are at present able to make out the reality of this incident rather as a statical principle, as a condition of equilibrium in a relatively developed association, than as a fully actualized condition in all associations. Perhaps we have here a clue to the consummation foreshadowed in the mystical term “equality.” Major Powell finds the essence of the equality that is indicated as a condition of a stable civic situation, in “Equality of voice or vote in the council . . . . The law of equality in demotic bodies is the law of equality to assert judgments.”11 We would extend the concept somewhat. We would say that individuality has normal scope in an association only when each individual is the equal of every other individual in liberty to find expression for his whole personality. Stable equilibrium, the permanence of order, is secured in proportion as each man’s consciousness of interest is on an equality with each other man’s consciousness of interest in freedom from arbitrary restraints upon attempts to get satisfaction. The semblance or degree of order in a society depends upon the approximation of that society to the practical realization of this equality. In other words, social order rests upon the feeling among members of the society that they enjoy approximate equality of freedom to realize each his own individuality. The condition of equality, and likewise the order of society, is disturbed when consciousness of interest of any one class is permitted to suppress the like interest of another class.
For instance, the priestly conception of religion as manifested in the theory represented by Gregory VII. and Innocent III. put a fantastic fiction of religious authority residing in one class of men in place of the inborn religious need of all men, and the indicated equality of all men in adjusting themselves to that need. So long as men do not actually recognize their religious needs, but take them on credit from others, hierarchical suppression of religion in the laity is possible; but so soon as the religious interest begins to become conscious and reflective in the laity, then the imposition of priestly authority becomes such a violation of equality that the prevailing order is presently overthrown.
The same formula expresses what takes place in the realm of the sociability-desires when the governing class fails to perceive that political consciousness has dawned in the governed classes, and that the desire of self-determination has emerged in opposition to the desire of the rulers to be masters. When the policy, if not the spoken words, of Louis XIv. said, “L’etat, c’est moi,” the social or political existence of Frenchmen outside the administration was by implication denied. The peasant in the Vendée and the sans-culotte in Paris had not the knowledge of statecraft that the king possessed, but he was beginning to feel himself a political person. A century later he thought he was a political person in the same class with the king, and perhaps he was. At all events, the dogma of his political nonentity was the spark in the explosive sense of equality. The reaction shattered the artificial order which the dogma had made precarious for generations. Men actually have social interests. When these interests come to consciousness in political desires, they are real forces in the world as much as the affinities of chemical elements. They are not to be read out of the ranks of recognized forces without consequences as fatal to order as those which occur in the laboratory when the properties of chemical elements are ignored.
Still again, in the realm of the wealth interests, each man is a potential economist. Each man has not only wealth-interests and-wealth-desires, but economic ideas. When class-consciousness becomes definite, as in modern groups of wage-earners, the ideas of the group may be crude and unwise, but they exist; they are the ideas of persons desiring to count as persons, and actually counting as persons, in the social reaction, just as surely as other persons count whose ideas are more mature. Social order involves accommodation of all other factors to this factor of the workingman’s individual and class-consciousness. If other social elements presume to push the workingman back into the status of constructive infancy; if the attempt is made to place the workingman under the tutoring or governoring of other industrial classes; if it is assumed that the workingman does not know what makes for his own good, and should, therefore, be restrained from manifesting his own feelings about what is for his good, and should be compelled to accept as a substitute for his own thoughts and feelings the thoughts and feelings which other classes want him to have—personal persistence is ignored and vetoed, equality is denied, and order is endangered.
It is extremely difficult to discuss this incident “persistence,” with its corollary “equality,” without confusing it with the condition scheduled next in order. The two abstractions, though necessarily so intimately associated, must, however, be kept apart for purposes of clear thinking, even if the process of keeping them apart is somewhat arbitrary. The equal freedom of every man to be himself, such as he is, must be regarded not merely as a specification of ideal order; it must be recognized as in some degree a postulate of all order and an incipient element of all order. The fatalism of India, the acquiescence in the decrees of caste, the calm assumption of superiority by the brahmin and the equally unruffled acceptance of inferiority by sudrah or pariah–each expresses a certain legal-tender conception of valuation. Castes visualize the class-consciousness of their members, and the system approximately represents the judgments of personal valuation in the people as a whole. The same psychological phenomenon appears in the United States in the popular fiction that each man is a sovereign. So long as each man believes that he is exercising his sovereignty this appraisal of individuality is compatible with the existence of a social order which actually nullifies the appraisal. Wherever men begin to believe that the social order actually deprives them of equal privilege to be themselves, at that time and place social stability and equilibrium are forthwith in danger.
Accordingly, as in the case of each condition in our schedule, we have in this specification a test of all past and present societies. That flash of precocity which we call Hellenic culture, for instance, begins to be more accountable when we consider that it was the concentration of excellence of a fragmentary sort in a fraction of the people, while the mass of the people merely furnish material support for its premature and disproportionate development. On the other hand, Russian nihilism, German socialism, French and Italian anarchism, and English and American trade-unionism, are symptoms of dawning mass-consciousness, often proceeding to senseless extremes in demands for deferred payments of the dues of partially comprehended equality.
Neither social philosophy nor social practice is yet able to take this fact of persistence of individuals for granted and to make consistent use of it. Human associations are collections of individuals with certain common traits, but with different and differentiating forms and intensities and combinations of these traits. Human associations are, accordingly, different sorts of adjustments accomplished between individuals who always remain diverse, no matter how intimate the adjustment.
It is possible for an apparently individualistic philosophy to ignore this incident, although that provincialism is more characteristic of collectivism. When we bring the concept “society” to the front, the individualist is likely to challenge us with the claim that “’ society’ is only a mental image; ‘society’ is merely a conception. The individual alone exists.” This most seeming harmless dogma sometimes means, however, a conceptualism quite as artificial as that which it challenges. It has to be brought down to reality by the perception that “the individual” is only a mental image; “the individual” is merely a conception. Individuals alone exist. Human societies are diversified adjustments of unlike individuals. The play of individuality is as constant among them as the play of cosmic law.
As in the case of the other incidents of association, this element in the situation is both fact and force; it is both reality and tendency. It in turn furnishes, first, its own material for study in the analytical stages of the sociological process, and it presents a problem of accommodation in the telic division of social or sociological activity.
The sociological theory of Gumplowicz reads the individual out of the list of meaning terms in the societary equation. His thesis is that the individual is so assimilated by the group as to be no longer significant; and the social process is consequently a process of the determination of resultants between conflicting group-energies. His mistake is one of the most familiar in all discursive thinking. He tries to dogmatize a factor into the place of all factors. The “group-individuality, as Ratzenhofer phrases it, is a real and mighty force in the social reaction, but it is impossible to find an association in which the individuality of the members is an entirely negligible quantity. Even in such an artificial and abnormal association as that of a body of prisoners in a penitentiary, among whom the power of individual initiative is reduced close to the minimum, the reaction of the group upon the officials and upon the outside world often betrays the peculiar quality of some individuals. In normal associations, larger or smaller, conventionality is no more actual than heightened individuality.
In this connection we have then one of the groups of marks of a stable or unstable association, of greater or less permanence in the social order, of a healthy or unhealthy state in its organization. We have discovered as yet no absolute ratio between the elements of individuality and of collectivity in associations. It is not a part of the present argument to propose a theorem to establish such a ratio. We have merely to register the observation in this primary division of our subject, that just as interdependence and community are general facts of associations, so the persistence, the differentiation, the accentuation of the separateness and variety of individuals are also universal in associations. Those associations in which individuality is least encouraged, such as the army, are merely functional devices that serve certain purposes of larger associations of which they are organs. They do not monopolize the life of the individuals in their membership. On the other hand, all schemes of society and human life are evidently passed upon by the world’s ultimate tribunal, experience, according as they furnish scope for the elemental and final factor, the individual. The incident of the persistence of individuals in association is accordingly an element never to be eliminated from formulas of societary reactions.
XIV. Justice.
It may be impossible to give so clear an account of this incident that its distinctness from the foregoing will be apparent; but the following is a first step toward that end: Equality, as we used the term under the last head, is a concept of absolute values. Justice is a concept of proportion among absolutes, or, to be more exact, among values previously treated by abstraction as absolute. Crusoe and Friday are equal in actuality of conscious interests. Both want to live, to eat, to keep warm, to sleep, to escape pain, to rejoin kinsmen, to satisfy curiosity, and to profit by each other’s cooperation. They are unequal in diversity of desires, and in perception of means likely to satisfy them. It would be a violation of the condition of equality on Crusoe’s part if he should wantonly inflict bodily pain on Friday. It would also violate justice, but not for the same reason. It would be no violation of the condition of equality if Crusoe inflicted enough bodily pain on Friday to compel him to do his share in defending both against enemies. On the contrary, if Friday persisted in wasting the supply of gunpowder for the sake of amusement, while Crusoe’s prudence foresaw that Friday’s amusement would cost both their lives, justice would demand an equation of desires. Without denying to Friday the right to be Friday, to think Friday’s thoughts, to want Friday’s wants, Crusoe may assert his right to be Crusoe, to think Crusoe’s thoughts, to want Crusoe’s wants. So far equality is satisfied. But if there comes to be a conflict of thought and of want between Crusoe and Friday, it at once appears that there are relativities among interests and among conceptions of ways to satisfy interests. It appears also that there are dependencies between Crusoe and Friday. Each not only needs the other, but each may so act as to sacrifice the other’s welfare entirely. Given, then, an absolute value in each contending person, how shall the conflict be reconciled? The equation between persons, so as to respect their equality of right to be persons, so as to adjust the proportionality of their individual desires, is justice. In other words, justice is the condition in which there is a balanced proportion between the interests of different persons who are equally entitled to the possession of interests. Equality is a conception corresponding to each one’s right to be himself. Justice is a conception corresponding to each one’s duty to be no more than himself. Equality is a concept of individualization; justice is a concept of coordination.
In this light the formula of justice, or of “equal freedom,” which Spencer so egregiously overworked, is available, namely: “Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.”12 Taken together with our formula of equality, this formula of freedom or justice would not require the author’s subsequent explanation that it does not permit policies of perpetual aggressiveness on the rights of others, provided the others are free to resent in kind. A part of individuality is initiative, self-choice of the direction which the activities of self shall take. Aggression violates equality, whether it violates justice or not, because it takes away from the man who wants to be peaceable the privilege of choosing to be peaceable, and compels him to repel aggression. Even if he proves better able than the aggressor to maintain himself, he has meanwhile been deprived of the use of his right of choice by the aggression. That is, the condition of equality has been disturbed. We might add, therefore, to Spencer’s formula of justice, ” Provided also that he infringes not the equality of any other man.”
Whatever be the content which our theories put into the term “justice,” some vague valuation of the term is a too common element of all social theory to need vindication in this connection. However questionable any other term in our schedule of incidents may be,a dispute about the term ” justice” as a necessary condition of stable social order could at this late date scarcely be provoked. All social order has presumed that justice is behind and beneath the laws defending and the sanctions sustaining the order. All questions of social institutions have been heralded in terms of justice violated and justice demanded. All disintegration and reintegration of societies may be described in terms of less and greater approximation to justice. The patria potestas at the basis of Roman law was the expression of the Roman sense of just balance and proportion between the paterfamilias and the members of his household. The gradual limitation in practice of the right thus recognized in theory, and then the elimination of certain elements of the patria potestas from other codes, illustrate the same prevalence of the sentiment of justice on the one hand,together with the companion fact of change in the idea of justice on the other hand. The medieval contract between lord and vassal, ratifying and including subcontracts between vassal and minor vassal, and then the status outside of and beneath contract forced upon the non-feudal masses, were in the same sense theorems of justice. They represented the estimate of proportion between interests and classes of persons that the medieval intellect had been able to form. The English system of primogeniture and entail, as contrasted with the French system of division of estates, is an exhibit again of justice in unlike forms, as it is conceived in two neighboring societies.
It goes without saying that all our contemporary social problems may be stated in terms of justice. Not only is this true as an academic proposition, but it is further true that all our social problems are arraignments both of our abstract ideas of justice and of the social order which is supposed to embody justice. We have social problems because the conditions of order and progress are partially unsatisfied. This must be reiterated at every step, lest we seem,in dealing with one of the conditions of order, to forget that there are other equally essential conditions of order. Reserving for this qualification full force, we may maintain that every system of customs and laws by which the social order is controlled is a provisional theorem of justice. It formulates at least a sort of rule-of-thumb standard of justice. It is an hypothesis of justice. Experience tests the correctness of the hypothesis. If the assumption is measurably close to the reality, the customs and the laws remain elements of order. If the assumption is wide of the reality, the customs and the laws presently prove to be factors of disorder. These general propositions are not affected in principle by the fact that changes of circumstances rather than original misconception of justice may produce incongruity between regulative customs and laws, and the interests which they essay to control. Nobody can foresee all the shiftings of advantage and disadvantage which a given legal rule may permit or promote. Its purpose may be just; its immediate effects may be just; its remote effects may be unjust.
For instance, the present Illinois law of workmen’s liens is prima facie calculated to protect the weak against the strong. “The law provides that all debts or claims for materials furnished or labor expended shall constitute a lien on the ownership of the land, a lien on the fee. If a workman has a claim for services, or a steel manufacturer a claim for material provided, he has a right upon the fee itself and not merely as against the contractor who employed him or who used his steel.”13 The effect of the law is said to have been, among other things, to throw a large part of the building business in Chicago into the hands of irresponsible contractors, and this fact doubtless has had much to do with the recent disorders in the building trades, involving many sorts of injustice to many classes of people.
In contemplating a society writhing in disorder to break the fetters of the constraining order, one of the lenses through which we must look is furnished, then, by the idea of justice. If we attempt to understand the disorder as a theory and a feeling in men’s minds, then our task is to make out what objective facts fail to correspond with the standards of justice which the men in question entertain. If we attempt to understand the disorder as a somewhat unconscious outburst of the social forces, as a natural but not necessarily as a deliberate phenomenon, then our task is to find objective disarrangements of justice. And in this case of course our own standard of justice has to serve as a temporary criterion. In all cases the incident that we term justice is a tendency, a gravitation, an outcropping of persistent moral quality, the full force of which has yet to appear.
XV. Security.
It is one of the boasts of popular social science that we have passed the stage of status and have entered upon the stage of contract. The fact referred to is substantially that we no longer doom a man to stay in the social rank or the economic vocation or the political class of his parents. A man is not foreordained from birth, by the mere accident of birth, to a certain artificial rating in the social order. We have broken from these arbitrary designations, and a man may place himself. by voluntary disposal of himself, wherever his merits entitle him to belong. There is freedom to contract without conventional veto of the contract. The landless man may become a landlord if he can work and save and find a landowner who prefers dollars to acres. The peasant, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew,may become a civil or military officer, a lawyer, a teacher, a preacher, a banker, an editor, if he can gain the necessary personal qualifications. No social ban now vetoes his efforts toward change of status. This is in itself something to be very highly esteemed. It is an immeasurable social gain. But it is not an unqualified gain, and it is not a gain that is indicated with perfect accuracy in the popular antithesis between status and contract.
The rejoicings of theorists over abandonment of the régime of status have tended to fix the impression that status itself is an unsocial and inequitable element in human conditions. The fact is that, while fixity of status is a violation of certain essential conditions, security of status is in turn itself one of those essential conditions. We cannot think human association without the category of status, although human associations are in constant movement, and status is thus a moving equilibrium at most; yet in actual associations certain precision of status among the members is universal. If it should be eliminated in any case, there would at once be confusion and danger, if not anarchy. The social end is not abolition of status, but, first, security of status, and, second, flexibility or exchangeability of status.
Comte, La Play, Schaeffle, DeGreef, and, indeed, all the modern sociologists, have either expressly or by implication insisted on the function of order in the achievement of progress.14 Now, status is merely order recognized and secured. If it is secured so rigidly that the order cannot resolve itself into a different status, there is evidently an arrest of function in the social process. Perhaps we may suggest the reality by use of the analogy of the governor on the safety-valve of an engine. There is a certain statical relation between the steam-pressure, the weight of the balls on the arms of the governor, the speed of revolution, and the friction of the parts. If, however, the valve or the bearings of the governor be rusted into fixity, the entire functional value of the device is lost. It is useless, both as an end unto itself and as a structural element of the engine. The like is true of the social elements.
On the other hand, if there are no statical relations, no proportional values, no functional assignments among men, the whole social process is by so much reduced to what Spencer phrases as “indefinite, incoherent homogeneity.” It is the absence of order and the negation of progress. This condition might be symbolized to a certain extent by pieces of metal sufficient to make the parts of an engine, but scattered promiscuously, instead of being manufactured and assembled in a working machine.
The bearing of all this upon the present term in our schedule may not be perfectly evident. The point is this: Assured constancy of the conditions involved in association, and assured safety of individual and social accomplishments, is the concept symbolized by the term “security.” This set of relations among men is another universal incident of association. It is, primarily, a condition of order. It is, secondarily, like all static conditions, tributary to progress. Reduced to more concrete expression the present theorem is that human association not only furnishes but is a guarantee of security-on the one hand to the association, on the other hand to the individuals assimilated in the association.
Primitive association, say in the horde, realizes little more than security of the species-interest, as in the case of any other animal association. Changes in types of associations from less to more civilized are both effect and cause of security in a more complete sense. Presently association becomes to such a degree psychical that the security is more and more conventional—that is, artificial—and consequently weak with the defects of human knowledge and feeling. From that time forward the social problem may be stated in terms of security, namely: How may that security for the individual and for the association without which the individual cannot remain satisfied in the association be so sanctioned and safeguarded that it will not destroy itself?
Let our first concrete illustration be the institution of political sovereignty. Sovereignty, in fact, is power to claim obedience from the persons composing the society, and to be free from liability to render obedience in turn to any other persons. Sovereignty in its workings is a realization of security. There are gradations in amounts of goods secured and of degrees of certainty with which they are assured, marked by transit from the fist-law of the horde to the blood-feud of the tribal state, and to the legal sanction of the civic state. The attainment of sovereignty, however, by any sort of ruling power, marks the realization of security for some things in higher degrees, and henceforth there is order of some sort. There is some certainty in the place of total uncertainty; some conventionality in place of complete arbitrariness; some uniformity instead of utter irregularity. With all this, and in virtue of all this, there is heightened intensiveness of association.
In his Study of Sociology Herbert Spencer has insisted on the necessity of becoming familiar with the concept of the certainty of relations in the real world. In the social section of the real world there is a tendency to realize in practice certainty of objective relations, and to develop corresponding consciousness of that certainty. This certainty of relations in its lowest forms is merely an aspect of the general cosmic law. Human association tends to establish relations of an order peculiar to itself, and these objective relations, with the corresponding subjective facts in view of them, are first demonstrations that society exists, then essentials of association, then conditions of improved association. We have the permanent dilemma, with the terms changing their content at every step: Without association no security; without security no association.
The principle underlying the institution of sovereignty is visible again in all the phenomena of authority of other types. In matters of belief, social security is found in a prescribed consensus of creed, until the associated persons learn to find more security in each other’s “will to believe” than in a perfunctory formula of what to believe. Modern liberalism is not a surrender of intellectual and moral security; it is discovery of more security in voluntary loyalty to truth than in forced obedience to authority. We are not living without security of intellectual and moral sanctions; we are testing the virtues of different sanctions from those that were relied upon in former times. Today we say that “truth is mighty and it will prevail,” instead of saying, “Such and such is the truth, therefore our brute force shall make it prevail.” Today our social security in matters of belief is found in the affinity of all men for truth, and their gravitation toward agreement about truth, rather than in the power of some men to force conceptions of truth upon others.
The same principle may be illustrated in the case of our industrial order. Whatever indictments we may bring against modern industrial systems, they secure certain definite things and relationships to all members of industrial society. The balance may be unjust and temporary, but while it lasts it is a recourse even for those who want to substitute a different order at the earliest moment. The anarchist agitates for a society in which there will be no police. Meanwhile his agitation has the security of police protection. The socialist crusades for a society in which there will be no private ownership of land; but he is guaranteed protection of the courts in using the products of his own piece of land to maintain his campaign for its socialization.
Security is a fact, a static principle, a kinetic factor, and a developing ideal in human association. It is not quantitatively nor qualitatively constant, but in some form and degree it is universal. It is both order and a condition of order; and, for reasons already noticed, it is consequently both progress and a condition of progress.
XVI. Continuity of influence.
The fact that this incident has repeatedly been suggested, and is implied in those aspects of association already discussed, would not justify its exclusion from separate mention in our analysis. No association is eternal. Associations vary incaculably in permanence. Every association whatsoever is a channel through which some part of the social tradition is perpetuated. Association is projection of the earlier moment into the later. Association is preservation of the past in the present and its production in the future. Association is the means by which continuity of human action is realized and guaranteed. Association is the reagent that makes successive social situations parts of each other.
There is a story that during the early summer of 1898, when there was great excitement throughout the country over a possible descent of the Spanish fleet upon our Atlantic coast, a western man asked a Boston citizen what he thought about the danger of Cervera’s bombarding the city. ” Bombard Boston!” was the response. “You talk as though Boston were a locality. Boston is not a place; Boston is a state of mind. You can no more shoot it with a gun than you could shoot wisdom, or justice, or magnanimity. Whether the tale is fact or fiction, there is profound truth underneath its humor. Boston is essentially a state of mind. Destroy the custom-house and the city hall and the state house and the art museum and the public library, and Boston will not be touched. Level Beacon Hill, and plow up the Common, and close historic Cornhill and Brattle street, yet Boston will remain. Remove the storied tower of old South Church, and tear down Fanueil Hall, and topple over Bunker Hill monument, yet Boston will be left. Increase and Cotton Mather, Governor Winthrop and Sam Adams, John Hancock, Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and Emerson, are more of today’s Boston than its geographic site, and its material structures, and its mayor, and its commissioner of public works, and its superintendent of schools, and its editors and its teachers and its ministers. Boston is a standard of thinking, a set of conceptions and emotions, a body of conclusions about the conduct of life. This is the fact about every community that has not forfeited its birthright in the human family. Our generation is a parliament of timeless persons of whom we, the living, are the least. By the fiction of death those are supposed to be absent who actually hold the balance of power. This immortality of personal influence is mediated within and through association. Social effects vary in visible force with the character and constancy of the associations which are their vehicles. The fortuitous association of the matinee audience merely scatters a few impressions that are presently diffused beyond trace in the multitude. The association that maintains certain forms of religious worship at a given point may for generations affect the community with a philosophy of life radically opposed to the conception prevalent in the population at large. The State may so extend the time-consciousness of the citizens that the now of their thought may include many centuries of national life.
In this incident we have another of those insights into the social process which are symbolized by that pregnant phrase “the organic concept.” The implications of this detail are too extensive even for preliminary suggestion within our present limits. It must suffice merely to reserve for the item of ” continuity” its proper place in social analysis.
Mobility of type.
Any change marks a difference of social type which consists of (a) reorganization of the constituent parts of the association, or (b) redistribution of power among the different elements of the association, or (c) shifting of the prevailing principles in the association , or (d) substitution of qualitatively different aims of the association. The social state, that is, the fact of human beings in contact with each other, is inseparable from constant procession of these changes. They are going on while men wake or sleep. If men imagine that social order is fixed, they deceive themselves. If they imagine that by taking thought they can arrest variation of balance and of type, they show their ignorance of the terms with which they theorize. The very opposition of a person or a group to a social tendency is in itself an accomplished change of greater or less importance in the equilibrium or type of the group in which the effort occurs.
Altogether apart from judgments of the actors primarily concerned, or from our own judgments, of the desirability or undesirability of changes, there is the elemental fact of perpetual transition from one order of association to another. Possibly the phrase “redistribution of the elements” would better describe this condition than the term we have selected. We might enlist the term “evolution,”15 if that had not come to be so closely associated with theories of method of change rather than with the fact of change itself. We might partially paraphrase Spencer’s famous formula of evolution, and say that one of the dynamic conditions of society is “integration of persons, and concomitant dissipation of motion.” We might simply say that change is incessantly taking place in the types of association which men compose. Making the letters from A to Z represent the members of an association, we may say that the order of the letters is never long constant. Even if the association is in the savage state, the facts of sex and age always produce among the individuals a certain rhythm, although the type of the society itself may remain constant.
With every development of individual needs beyond the crude animal interest the impulse to movement presently becomes differentiation of employments. The priest, the warrior, the artist, the food-procurer visualize the previously latent tendency to move individuals into other balance, or into other relation of forces in the combination.
Type after type of arrangements of persons have succeeded each other throughout human experience. No sooner are persons adjusted to each other in any form whatever— as, for example, in the matriarchate—than interests begin to push and pull them toward other arrangements–as, for instance, the patriarchate. Perhaps if we simply say that there has been ceaseless variation of types of association we shall sufficiently indicate the reality for our present purpose.
We may single out by way of illustration those sorts of rearrangements which we are disposed to call progressive. The word “progress” is the fifth term in Lester F. Ward’s famous series of social means and ends,16 namely, (1) education, (2) knowledge, (3) dynamic opinion, (4) dynamic action, (5) progress, (6) happiness. It need not be said that in this series the term “progress” has implications which are not necessarily involved in the abstraction with which we are now dealing, but our illustration calls attention merely to one group of such changes. We are not thinking of progress as a term in a dynamic series, but rather as a phase of the whole social fact, itself conditioned in turn by all the other traits of the reality of which it is an aspect. To vary our expression, we may say that a universal phase of association is instability of the relationships of the associates. Reformation, readjustment, readaptation, abandonment of forms of association less fitted to changed circumstances, is one of the general and constant incidents of the social fact. To proceed farther in description of this incident would involve entrance upon analysis of the causes and forces maintaining this and the other incidents which we have discovered in the social process. We accordingly close our schedule at this point, with repetition of the remark that among generalizations such as these we have the data for the larger problems of sociology.
Ratzenhofer has said that the fundamental phenomena of the social process are (a) sustenance and propagation, (b) perfecting (Vervollkommnung), (c) variation of individual and social types, (d) struggle for existence, (e) absolute hostility, (f) distribution in space and racial differentiation, (g) mastery and subjection, (h) alternate individualization and socialization of structures, (i) variation of interests, (j) social necessity, (k) the state, (l) general society. 17 It is impossible to discuss at present the divergencies between this schedule and our own, or to inquire whether they might be harmonized. The point of immediate interest is that sociologists are everywhere pressing toward discovery of the social essentials. There is growing ambition to arrive at generalizations of the relationships which are most universal and most characteristic in human conditions. There is progressive perception that supposed knowledge of society is pitiful dallying with incoherent details, until we learn how to construe these fragments in their functional relations.
As we have tried to make evident throughout this chapter, the terms in our schedule are merely tentative formulations of social facts which it is the task of sociology to make more exact. These incidents are merely data which certain types of sociologists recognize the need of testing. Having these syntheses of many observations, we are in a position analogous with that of the physicists when they had gone far enough to describe “matter” as “that which has extension, density, specific gravity, cohesion, adhesion, inertia, momentum, etc.” The science of physics was not completed in such formulas. It was virtually just proposed. The generalizations which we have brought together are not scheduled as a closed system of social science. They are statements of apparent and approximate truths in the region of which earnest efforts to develop tenable sociology are in progress.
Albion W. Small.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO.
[To be continued.]
Notes
- cf. American Journal of Sociology, vol. v, p. 796.↩
- On the effect of the element of number see Giopings, “Exact Methods in Sociology,” Popular Science Monthly, December, 1899, especially pp. 153 sg. on quantity as quality see Ratzenhofer, Sociologische Erkenntniss, pp. 88, 90.↩
- American Journal of Sociology, vol. v, p. 798.↩
- vid. Social Laws, chap. 2.↩
- cf. Macaulay’s Essay on Warren Hastings.↩
- vid. Small and Vincent, Introduction to the Study of Society, pp. 215-36 and 237–66.↩
- About to appear revised and enlarged in book form.↩
- Dynamic Sociology, vol. ii, p. 321.↩
- Annals of the American Academy, November, 1894, pp. 404 sg.↩
- les Transformations du Pouvoir, p. 197.↩
- American Anthropologist, July, 1899, pp. 498, 499.↩
- Ethics, vol. ii, p. 46.↩
- vid. Henry Ives Cobb, in Chicago Times-Herald, November 2o, 1899.↩
- vid. Ward, Dynamic Sociology, vol. i, pp. 125 sq.↩
- First Principles, p. 396.↩
- Dynamic Sociology, vol. ii, p. 108.↩
- Sociologische Erkenntniss, pp. 244-50.↩