Introduction to the Science of Sociology Part 61

1. Social Forces in American History[157]

That political struggles are based upon economic interests is today disputed by few students of society. The attempt has been made in this work to trace the various interests that have arisen and struggled in each social stage and to determine the influence exercised by these contending interests in the creation of social inst.i.tutions.

Back of every political party there has always stood a group or cla.s.s which expected to profit by the activity and the success of that party.

When any party has attained to power, it has been because it has tried to establish inst.i.tutions or to modify existing ones in accord with its interests.

Changes in the industrial basis of society--inventions, new processes, and combinations and methods of producing and distributing goods--create new interests with new social cla.s.ses to represent them. These improvements in the technique of production are the dynamic element that brings about what we call progress in society.

In this work I have sought to begin at the origin of each line of social progress. I have first endeavored to describe the steps in mechanical progress, then the social cla.s.ses brought into prominence by the mechanical changes, then the struggle by which these new cla.s.ses sought to gain social power, and, finally, the inst.i.tutions which were created or the alterations made in existing inst.i.tutions as a consequence of the struggle or as a result of the victory of a new cla.s.s.

It has seemed to me that these underlying social forces are of more importance than the individuals that were forced to the front in the process of these struggles, or even than the laws that were established to record the results of the conflict. In short, I have tried to describe the dynamics of history rather than to record the accomplished facts, to answer the question, "Why did it happen?" as well as, "What happened?"

An inquiry into causes is manifestly a greater task than the recording of accomplished facts. To determine causes it is necessary to spend much time in the study of "original doc.u.ments"--the newspapers, magazines, and pamphlet literature of each period. In these, rather than in the "musty doc.u.ments" of state, do we find history in the making. Here we can see the clash of contending interests before they are crystallized into laws and inst.i.tutions.

2. Social Tendencies as Social Forces[158]

The philosophy of the eighteenth century viewed external nature as the princ.i.p.al thing to be considered in a study of society, and not society itself. The great force in society was extraneous to society. But according to the philosophy of our times, the chief forces working in society are truly social forces, that is to say, they are immanent in society itself.

Let us briefly examine the social forces which are at work, either concentrating or diffusing the ownership of wealth. If it is true that, necessarily, there is going forward a concentration of property, that the rich are necessarily becoming richer, that wealth is pa.s.sing into fewer and fewer hands, this gives a strong reason for believing that those are right who hold to the fact that every field of production must soon be controlled by monopoly. If, on the other hand, we find that the forces which make for diffusion are dominant, we may believe that it is quite possible for society to control the forces of production.

a) Forces operating in the direction of concentration of wealth: (1) The unearned increment of land, especially in cities, is no doubt a real force. (2) The trust movement is operating in its earlier phases, at least, in the direction of concentration. (3) In the third place, war, whenever it comes, carries with it forces which bring wealth to the few rather than to the many. (4) Arrangements of one kind and another may be mentioned by means of various trust devices to secure the ends of primogeniture and entail. (5) Another force operating to concentrate the ownership of wealth may be called economic inertia. According to the principle of inertia, forces continue to operate until they are checked by other forces coming into contact with them.

b) Forces which operate to diffuse wealth: (1) Education, broadly considered, should be mentioned first of all. (2) Next, mention must be made of the public control of corporations. (3) Changes in taxation are the third item in this enumeration of forces. (4) The development of the idea of property as a trust is next mentioned. (5) Profit-sharing and co-operation. (6) Sound currency is next mentioned. (7) Public ownership of public utilities is a further force. (8) Labor organizations. (9) Inst.i.tutions, especially in the interest of the wage-earning and economically weaker elements in the community. (10) Savings inst.i.tutions and insurance.

3. Public Opinion: School of Thought and Legislation in England[159]

Public legislative opinion, as it has existed in England during the nineteenth century, presents several noteworthy aspects or characteristics. They may conveniently be considered under five heads: the existence at any given period of a predominant public opinion; the origin of such opinion; the development and continuity thereof; the checks imposed on such opinion by the existence of counter-currents and cross-currents of opinion; the action of laws themselves as the creators of legislative opinion.

_First_, there exists at any given time a body of beliefs, convictions, sentiments, accepted principles, or firmly rooted prejudices, which, taken together, make up the public opinion of a particular era, or what we may call the reigning or predominant current of opinion, and, as regards at any rate the last three or four centuries, and especially the nineteenth century, the influence of this dominant current of opinion has, in England, if we look at the matter broadly, determined, directly or indirectly, the course of legislation.

_Second_, the opinion which affects the development of the law has, in modern England at least, often originated with some single thinker or school of thinkers. No doubt it is at times allowable to talk of a prevalent belief or opinion as "being in the air," by which expression is meant that a particular way of looking at things has become the common possession of all the world. But though a belief, when it prevails, may at last be adopted by the whole of a generation, it rarely happens that a widespread conviction has grown up spontaneously among the mult.i.tude. "The initiation," it has been said, "of all wise or n.o.ble things comes, and must come, from individuals; generally at first from some one individual," to which it ought surely to be added that the origination of a new folly or of a new form of baseness comes, and must in general come, at first from individuals or from some one individual.

The peculiarity of individuals, as contrasted with the crowd, lies neither in virtue nor in wickedness but in originality. It is idle to credit minorities with all the good without ascribing to them most, at least, of the evils due to that rarest of all human qualities--inventiveness.

The course of events in England may often, at least, be thus described: A new and, let us a.s.sume, a true idea presents itself to some one man of originality or genius; the discoverer of the new conception, or some follower who has embraced it with enthusiasm, preaches it to his friends or disciples, they in their turn become impressed with its importance and its truth, and gradually a whole school accepts the new creed. These apostles of a new faith are either persons endowed with special ability or, what is quite as likely, they are persons who, owing to their peculiar position, are freed from a bias, whether moral or intellectual, in favor of prevalent errors. At last the preachers of truth make an impression, either directly upon the general public or upon some person of eminence, say a leading statesman, who stands in a position to impress ordinary people and thus to win the support of the nation.

Success, however, in converting mankind to a new faith, whether religious or economical or political, depends but slightly on the strength of the reasoning by which the faith can be defended, or even on the enthusiasm of its adherents. A change of belief arises, in the main, from the occurrence of circ.u.mstances which incline the majority of the world to hear with favor theories which, at one time, men of common sense derided as absurdities or distrusted as paradoxes. The doctrine of free trade, for instance, has in England for about half a century held the field as an una.s.sailable dogma of economic policy, but a historian would stand convicted of ignorance or folly who should imagine that the fallacies of protection were discovered by the intuitive good sense of the people, even if the existence of such a quality as the good sense of the people be more than a political fiction. The principle of free trade may, as far as Englishmen are concerned, be treated as the doctrine of Adam Smith. The reasons in its favor never have been, nor will, from the nature of things, be mastered by the majority of any people. The apology for freedom of commerce will always present, from one point of view, an air of paradox. Every man feels or thinks that protection would benefit his own business, and it is difficult to realize that what may be a benefit for any man taken alone may be of no benefit to a body of men looked at collectively. The obvious objections to free trade may, as free traders conceive, be met; but then the reasoning by which these objections are met is often elaborate and subtle and does not carry conviction to the crowd. It is idle to suppose that belief in freedom of trade--or indeed in any other creed--ever won its way among the majority of converts by the mere force of reasoning. The course of events was very different. The theory of free trade won by degrees the approval of statesmen of special insight, and adherents to the new economic religion were one by one gained among persons of intelligence. Cobden and Bright finally became potent advocates of truths of which they were in no sense the discoverers. This a.s.sertion in no way detracts from the credit due to these eminent men. They performed to admiration the proper function of popular leaders; by prodigies of energy and by seizing a favorable opportunity, of which they made the very most use that was possible, they gained the acceptance by the English people of truths which have rarely, in any country but England, acquired popularity. Much was due to the opportuneness of the time. Protection wears its most offensive guise when it can be identified with a tax on bread, and therefore can, without patent injustice, be described as the parent of famine and starvation. The unpopularity, moreover, inherent in a tax on corn is all but fatal to a protective tariff when the cla.s.s which protection enriches is comparatively small, whilst the cla.s.s which would suffer keenly from dearness of bread and would obtain benefit from free trade is large, and, having already acquired much, is certain soon to acquire more political power. Add to all this that the Irish famine made the suspension of the corn laws a patent necessity. It is easy, then, to see how great in England was the part played by external circ.u.mstances--one might almost say by accidental conditions--in determining the overthrow of protection. A student should further remark that after free trade became an established principle of English policy, the majority of the English people accepted it mainly on authority. Men who were neither land-owners nor farmers perceived with ease the obtrusive evils of a tax on corn, but they and their leaders were far less influenced by arguments against protection generally than by the immediate and almost visible advantage of cheapening the bread of artisans and laborers.

What, however, weighed with most Englishmen, above every other consideration, was the harmony of the doctrine that commerce ought to be free, with that disbelief in the benefits of state intervention which in 1846 had been gaining ground for more than a generation.

It is impossible, indeed, to insist too strongly upon the consideration that whilst opinion controls legislation, public opinion is itself far less the result of reasoning or of argument than of the circ.u.mstances in which men are placed. Between 1783 and 1861 negro slavery was abolished--one might almost say ceased of itself to exist--in the northern states of the American Republic; in the South, on the other hand, the maintenance of slavery developed into a fixed policy, and before the War of Secession the "peculiar inst.i.tution" had become the foundation stone of the social system. But the religious beliefs and, except as regards the existence of slavery, the political inst.i.tutions prevalent throughout the whole of the United States were the same. The condemnation of slavery in the North, and the apologies for slavery in the South, must therefore be referred to difference of circ.u.mstances.

Slave labor was obviously out of place in Ma.s.sachusetts, Vermont, or New York; it appeared to be, even if in reality it was not, economically profitable in South Carolina. An inst.i.tution, again, which was utterly incompatible with the social condition of the northern states harmonized, or appeared to harmonize, with the social conditions of the southern states. The arguments against the peculiar inst.i.tution were in themselves equally strong in whatever part of the Union they were uttered, but they carried conviction to the white citizens of Ma.s.sachusetts, whilst, even when heard or read, they did not carry conviction to the citizens of South Carolina. Belief, and, to speak fairly, honest belief, was to a great extent the result, not of argument, nor even of direct self-interest, but of circ.u.mstances. What was true in this instance holds good in others. There is no reason to suppose that in 1830 the squires of England were less patriotic than the manufacturers, or less capable of mastering the arguments in favor of or against the reform of Parliament. But everyone knows that, as a rule, the country gentlemen were Tories and anti-reformers, whilst the manufacturers were Radicals and reformers. Circ.u.mstances are the creators of most men's opinions.

_Third_, the development of public opinion generally, and therefore of legislative opinion, has been in England at once gradual, or slow, and continuous. The qualities of slowness and continuity may conveniently be considered together, and are closely interconnected, but they are distinguishable and essentially different.

Legislative public opinion generally changes in England with unexpected slowness. Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ was published in 1776; the policy of free exchange was not completely accepted by England till 1846. All the strongest reasons in favor of Catholic emanc.i.p.ation were laid before the English world by Burke between 1760 and 1797; the Roman Catholic Relief Act was not carried till 1829.

The opinion which changes the law is in one sense the opinion of the time when the law is actually altered; in another sense it has often been in England the opinion prevalent some twenty or thirty years before that time; it has been as often as not in reality the opinion, not of today, but of yesterday.

Legislative opinion must be the opinion of the day, because, when laws are altered, the alteration is of necessity carried into effect by legislators who act under the belief that the change is an amendment; but this law-making opinion is also the opinion of yesterday, because the beliefs which have at last gained such hold on the legislature as to produce an alteration in the law have generally been created by thinkers or writers who exerted their influence long before the change in the law took place. Thus it may well happen that an innovation is carried through at a time when the teachers who supplied the arguments in its favor are in their graves, or even--and this is well worth noting--when in the world of speculation a movement has already set in against ideas which are exerting their full effect in the world of action and of legislation.

Law-making in England is the work of men well advanced in life; the politicians who guide the House of Commons, to say nothing of the peers who lead the House of Lords, are few of them below thirty, and most of them are above forty, years of age. They have formed or picked up their convictions, and, what is of more consequence, their prepossessions, in early manhood, which is the one period of life when men are easily impressed with new ideas. Hence English legislators retain the prejudices or modes of thinking which they acquired in their youth; and when, late in life, they take a share in actual legislation, they legislate in accordance with the doctrines which were current, either generally or in the society to which the law-givers belonged, in the days of their early manhood. The law-makers, therefore, of 1850 may give effect to the opinions of 1830, whilst the legislators of 1880 are likely enough to impress upon the statute book the beliefs of 1860, or rather the ideas which in the one case attracted the young men of 1830 and in the other the youth of 1860. We need not therefore be surprised to find that a current of opinion may exert its greatest legislative influence just when its force is beginning to decline. The tide turns when at its height; a school of thought or feeling which still governs law-makers has begun to lose its authority among men of a younger generation who are not yet able to influence legislation.

_Fourth_, the reigning legislative opinion of the day has never, at any rate during the nineteenth century, exerted absolute or despotic authority. Its power has always been diminished by the existence of counter-currents or cross-currents of opinion which were not in harmony with the prevalent opinion of the time.

A counter-current here means a body of opinion, belief, or sentiment more or less directly opposed to the dominant opinion of a particular era. Counter-currents of this kind have generally been supplied by the survival of ideas or convictions which are gradually losing their hold upon a given generation, and particularly the youthful part thereof.

This kind of "conservatism" which prompts men to retain convictions which are losing their hold upon the ma.s.s of the world is found, it should be remarked, as much among the adherents of one religious or political creed as of another. Any Frenchman who clung to Protestantism during the reign of Louis the Fourteenth; any north-country squire who in the England of the eighteenth century adhered to the Roman Catholicism of his fathers; Samuel Johnson, standing forth as a Tory and a High Churchman amongst Whigs and Free Thinkers; the Abbe Gregoire, retaining in 1830 the att.i.tude and the beliefs of a bishop of that const.i.tutional church of France whereof the claims have been repudiated at once by the Church and by the State; James Mill, who, though the leader in 1832 of philosophic Radicals, the pioneers as they deemed themselves of democratic progress, was in truth the last "of the eighteenth century"--these are each and all of them examples of that intellectual and moral conservatism which everywhere, and especially in England, has always been a strong force. The past controls the present.

Counter-currents, again, may be supplied by new ideals which are beginning to influence the young. The hopes or dreams of the generation just coming into the field of public life undermine the energy of a dominant creed.

Counter-currents of opinion, whatever their source, have one certain and one possible effect. The certain effect is that a check is imposed upon the action of the dominant faith.

_Fifth_, laws foster or create law-making opinion. This a.s.sertion may sound, to one who has learned that laws are the outcome of public opinion, like a paradox; when properly understood, it is nothing but an undeniable, though sometimes neglected, truth.

B. INTERESTS, SENTIMENTS, AND ATt.i.tUDES

1. Social Forces and Interaction[160]

We must guard at the outset against an illusion that has exerted a confusing influence. There are no social forces which are not at the same time forces lodged in individuals, deriving their energy from individuals and operating in and through individuals. There are no social forces that lurk in the containing ether, and affect persons without the agency of other persons. There are, to be sure, all the physical conditions that affect persons just as they affect all other forms of matter. So far, these are not social forces at all. They do not get to be social forces until they get into persons, and in these persons they take the form of feelings which impel them to react upon other persons. Persons are thus trans.m.u.ters of physical forces into social forces; but all properly designated social forces are essentially personal. They are within some persons, and stimulate them to act upon other persons; or they are in other persons, and exert themselves as external stimuli upon otherwise inert persons. In either case social forces are personal influences pa.s.sing from person to person and producing activities that give content to the a.s.sociation.

The conception of social forces was never challenged so long as it was merely an everyday commonplace. When it pa.s.sed into technical forms of expression, doubts began to be urged. If anyone in the United States had questioned the existence of Mrs. Grundy fifty years ago, he would have been pitied and ignored as a harmless "natural." Social forces in the form of gossip, and personified in Mrs. Grundy, were real to everybody.

But the particular species of social forces which Mrs. Grundy represented were neither more nor less real than the other social forces which had no name in folklore. Persons incessantly influence persons.

The modes of this influence are indescribably varied. They are conscious and unconscious, accidental and momentary, or deliberate and persistent; they are conventional and continuous, the result of individual habit, or of customs crystallized into national or racial inst.i.tutions.

The simple fact which the concept "social forces" stands for is that every individual acts and is acted upon in countless ways by the other persons with whom he a.s.sociates. These modes of action and reaction between persons may be cla.s.sified, and the more obvious and recurrent among them may be enumerated. More than this, the action of these social forces may be observed, and the results of observation may be organized into social laws. Indeed, there would be only two alternatives, if we did not discover the presence and action of social forces. On the one hand, social science would at most be a subdivision of natural science; on the other hand, the remaining alternative would be the impossibility of social science altogether.

But social forces are just as distinctly discernible as chemical forces.

The fact that we are not familiar with them no more makes against their existence and their importance than general ignorance of the pressure of the atmosphere takes that phenomenon out of the physical world. They are not only the atmosphere but they are a very large part of the moral world in general. If we could compose a complete account of the social forces, we should at the same time have completed, from one point of attention at least, a science of everything involved in human society.

"All beings which can be said to perform actions do so in obedience to those mental states which are denominated desires." But we have gone back a step beyond the desires and have found it necessary to a.s.sume the existence of underlying interests. These have to desires very nearly the relation of substance to attribute, or, in a different figure, of genus to species. Our interests may be beyond or beneath our ken; our desires are strong and clear. I may not be conscious of my health interests in any deep sense, but the desires that my appet.i.tes a.s.sert are specific and concrete and real. The implicit interests, of which we may be very imperfectly aware, move us to desires which may correspond well or ill with the real content of the interests. At all events, it is these desires which make up the active social forces, whether they are more or less harmonious with the interests from which they spring. The desires that the persons a.s.sociating actually feel are practically the elemental forces with which we have to reckon. They are just as real as the properties of matter. They have their ratios of energy, just as certainly as though they were physical forces. They have their peculiar modes of action, which may be formulated as distinctly as the various modes of chemical action.

Every desire that any man harbors is a force making or marring, strengthening or weakening, the structure and functions of the society of which he is a part. What the human desires are, what their relations are to each other, what their peculiar modifications are under different circ.u.mstances--these are questions of detail which must be answered in general by social psychology, and in particular by specific a.n.a.lysis of each social situation. The one consideration to be urged at this point is that the concept "social forces" has a real content. It represents reality. There are social forces. They are the desires of persons. They range in energy from the vagrant whim that makes the individual a temporary discomfort to his group, to the inbred feelings that whole races share. It is with these subtle forces that social arrangements and the theories of social arrangements have to deal.

2. Interests[161]

During the past generation, the conception of the "atom" has been of enormous use in physical discovery. Although no one has ever seen an atom, the supposition that there are ultimate particles of matter in which the "promise and potency" of all physical properties and actions reside has served as a means of investigation during the most intensive period of research in the history of thought. Without the hypothesis of the atom, physics and chemistry, and in a secondary sense biology, would have lacked chart and compa.s.s upon their voyages of exploration.

Although the notion of the atom is rapidly changing, and the tendency of physical science is to construe physical facts in terms of motion rather than of the traditional atom, it is probably as needless as it is useless for us to concern ourselves as laymen with this refinement.

Although we cannot avoid speaking of the smallest parts into which matter can be divided, and although we cannot imagine, on the other hand, how any portions of matter can exist and not be divisible into parts, we are probably quite as incapable of saving ourselves from paradox by resort to the vortex hypothesis in any form. That is, these subtleties are too wonderful for most minds. Without pushing a.n.a.lysis too far, and without resting any theory upon a.n.a.logy with the atom of physical theory, it is necessary to find some starting-place from which to trace up the composition of sentient beings, just as the physicists a.s.sumed that they found their starting-place in the atom. The notion of interests is accordingly serving the same purpose in sociology which the notion of atoms has served in physical science. Interests are the stuff that men are made of. More accurately expressed, the last elements to which we can reduce the actions of human beings are units which we may conveniently name "interests." It is merely inverting the form of expression to say: _Interests are the simplest modes of motion which we can trace in the conduct of human beings._

To the psychologist the individual is interesting primarily as a center of knowing, feeling, and willing. To the sociologist the individual begins to be interesting when he is thought as knowing, feeling, and willing _something_. In so far as a mere trick of emphasis may serve to distinguish problems, this ictus indicates the sociological starting-point. The individual given in experience is thought to the point at which he is available for sociological a.s.sumption, when he is recognized as a center of activities which make for something outside of the psychical series in which volition is a term. These activities must be referred primarily to desires, but the desires themselves may be further referred to certain universal interests. In this character the individual becomes one of the known or a.s.sumed terms of sociology. The individual as a center of active interests may be thought both as the lowest term in the social equation and as a composite term whose factors must be understood. These factors are either the more evident desires, or the more remote interests which the individual's desires in some way represent. At the same time, we must repeat the admission that these a.s.sumed interests are like the atom of physics. They are the metaphysical recourse of our minds in accounting for concrete facts. We have never seen or touched them. They are the hypothetical substratum of those regularities of conduct which the activities of individuals display.

We may start with the familiar popular expressions, "the farming interest," "the railroad interest," "the packing interest," "the milling interest," etc., etc. Everyone knows what the expressions mean. Our use of the term "interest" is not co-ordinate with these, but it may be approached by means of them. All the "interests" that are struggling for recognition in business and in politics are highly composite. The owner of a flour mill, for example, is a man before he is a miller. He becomes a miller at last because he is a man; i.e., because he has interests--in a deeper sense than that of the popular expressions--which impel him to act in order to gain satisfactions. The clue to all social activity is in this fact of individual interests. Every act that every man performs is to be traced back to an interest. We eat because there is a desire for food; but the desire is set in motion by a bodily interest in replacing exhausted force. We sleep because we are tired; but the weariness is a function of the bodily interest in rebuilding used-up tissue. We play because there is a bodily interest in use of the muscles. We study because there is a mental interest in satisfying curiosity. We mingle with our fellow-men because there is a mental interest in matching our personality against that of others. We go to market to supply an economic interest, and to war because of some social interest of whatever mixed or simple form.

With this introduction, we may venture an extremely abstract definition of our concept "interest." In general, _an interest is an unsatisfied capacity, corresponding to an unrealized condition, and it is predisposition to such rearrangement as would tend to realize the indicated condition_. Human needs and human wants are incidents in the series of events between the latent existence of human interest and the achievement of partial satisfaction. Human interests, then, are the ultimate terms of calculation in sociology. _The whole life-process, so far as we know it, whether viewed in its individual or in its social phase, is at last the process of developing, adjusting, and satisfying interests._

No single term is of more constant use in recent sociology than this term "interests." We use it in the plural partly for the sake of distinguishing it from the same term in the sense which has become so familiar in modern pedagogy. The two uses of the term are closely related, but they are not precisely identical. The pedagogical emphasis is rather on the voluntary att.i.tude toward a possible object of attention. The sociological emphasis is on attributes of persons which may be compared to the chemical affinities of different elements.