Introduction to the Science of Sociology Part 69

[165] From Robert E. Park, _Principles of Human Behavior_, pp. 18-34.

(The Zalaz Corporation, 1915.)

[166] Adapted from Edwin B. Holt, _The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics_, pp. 3-56. (Henry Holt & Co., 1915.)

[167] Adapted from John B. Watson, "The Psychology of Wish Fulfillment,"

in the _Scientific Monthly_, III (1916), 479-86.

[168] A restatement from a paper by William I. Thomas, "The Persistence of Primary-Group Norms in Present-Day Society," in Jennings, Watson, Meyer, and Thomas, _Suggestions of Modern Science Concerning Education_.

(Published by The Macmillan Co., 1917. Reprinted by permission.)

[169] _Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction_, 1901, p. 300.

[170] See p. 219.

[171] H. A. Taine, _The Ancient Regime_, Preface, p. viii. (New York, 1891.)

[172] Karl Lamprecht, _What Is History?_ p. 3. (New York, 1905.)

[173] See chap. i, _Sociology and the Social Sciences_, pp. 6-12.

[174] See references, chap. ii, "Human Nature," p. 149.

[175] For a discussion of the philosophical background of Adam Smith's political philosophy see Wilhelm Hasbach, _Untersuchungen uber Adam Smith_. (Leipzig, 1891.)

[176] "The science of Political Economy as we have it in England may be defined as the science of business, such as business is in large productive and trading communities. It is an a.n.a.lysis of that world so familiar to many Englishmen--the 'great commerce' by which England has become rich. It a.s.sumes the princ.i.p.al facts which make that commerce possible, and as is the way of an abstract science it isolates and simplifies them: it detaches them from the confusion with which they are mixed in fact. And it deals too with the men who carry on that commerce, and who make it possible. It a.s.sumes a sort of human nature such as we see everywhere around us, and again it simplifies that human nature; it looks at one part of it only. Dealing with matters of 'business,' it a.s.sumes that man is actuated only by motives of business. It a.s.sumes that every man who makes anything, makes it for money, that he always makes that which brings him in most at least cost, and that he will make it in the way that will produce most and spend least; it a.s.sumes that every man who buys, buys with his whole heart, and that he who sells, sells with his whole heart, each wanting to gain all possible advantage.

Of course we know that this is not so, that men are not like this; but we a.s.sume it for simplicity's sake, as an hypothesis."--Walter Bagehot, _The Postulates of English Political Economy_. (New York and London, 1885.)

[177] H. G. Wells, _The Outline of History_, Vol. II, pp. 579-95. (New York, 1920.)

[178] _Pure Sociology_, p. 261. (New York, 1903.)

[179] _Dynamic Sociology_, II, 90.(New York, 1883.)

CHAPTER VIII

COMPEt.i.tION

I. INTRODUCTION

1. Popular Conception of Compet.i.tion

Compet.i.tion, as a universal phenomenon, was first clearly conceived and adequately described by the biologists. As defined in the evolutionary formula "the struggle for existence" the notion captured the popular imagination and became a commonplace of familiar discourse. Prior to that time compet.i.tion had been regarded as an economic rather than a biological phenomenon.

It was in the eighteenth century and in England that we first find any general recognition of the new role that commerce and the middleman were to play in the modern world. "Compet.i.tion is the life of trade" is a trader's maxim, and the sort of qualified approval that it gives to the conception of compet.i.tion contains the germ of the whole philosophy of modern industrial society as that doctrine was formulated by Adam Smith and the physiocrats.

The economists of the eighteenth century were the first to attempt to rationalize and justify the social order that is based on compet.i.tion and individual freedom. They taught that there was a natural harmony in the interests of men, which once liberated would inevitably bring about, in the best of all possible worlds, the greatest good to the greatest number.

The individual man, in seeking his own profit, will necessarily seek to produce and sell that which has most value for the community, and so "he is in this, as in many other cases," as Adam Smith puts it, "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

The conception has been stated with even greater unction by the French writer, Frederic Bastiat.

Since goods which seem at first to be the exclusive property of individuals become by the estimable decrees of a wise providence [compet.i.tion] the common possession of all; since the natural advantages of situation, the fertility, temperature, mineral richness of the soil and even industrial skill do not accrue to the producers, because of compet.i.tion among themselves, but contribute so much the more to the profit of the consumer; it follows that there is no country that is not interested in the advancement of all the others.[180]

The freedom which commerce sought and gained upon the principle of laissez faire has enormously extended the area of compet.i.tion and in doing so has created a world-economy where previously there were only local markets. It has created at the same time a division of labor that includes all the nations and races of men and incidentally has raised the despised middleman to a position of affluence and power undreamed of by superior cla.s.ses of any earlier age. And now there is a new demand for the control of compet.i.tion in the interest, not merely of those who have not shared in the general prosperity, but in the interest of compet.i.tion itself.

"Unfair compet.i.tion" is an expression that is heard at the present time with increasing frequency. This suggests that there are rules governing compet.i.tion by which, in its own interest, it can and should be controlled. The same notion has found expression in the demand for "freedom of compet.i.tion" from those who would safeguard compet.i.tion by controlling it. Other voices have been raised in denunciation of compet.i.tion because "compet.i.tion creates monopoly." In other words, compet.i.tion, if carried to its logical conclusion, ends in the annihilation of compet.i.tion. In this destruction of compet.i.tion by compet.i.tion we seem to have a loss of freedom by freedom, or, to state it in more general terms, unlimited liberty, without social control, ends in the negation of freedom and the slavery of the individual. But the limitation of compet.i.tion by compet.i.tion, it needs to be said, means simply that the process of compet.i.tion tends invariably to establish an equilibrium.

The more fundamental objection is that in giving freedom to economic compet.i.tion society has sacrificed other fundamental interests that are not directly involved in the economic process. In any case economic freedom exists in an order that has been created and maintained by society. Economic compet.i.tion, as we know it, presupposes the existence of the right of private property, which is a creation of the state. It is upon this premise that the more radical social doctrines, communism and socialism, seek to abolish compet.i.tion altogether.

2. Compet.i.tion a Process of Interaction

Of the four great types of interaction--compet.i.tion, conflict, accommodation, and a.s.similation--compet.i.tion is the elementary, universal and fundamental form. Social contact, as we have seen, initiates interaction. But compet.i.tion, strictly speaking, is _interaction without social contact_. If this seems, in view of what has already been said, something of a paradox, it is because in human society compet.i.tion is always complicated with other processes, that is to say, with conflict, a.s.similation, and accommodation.

It is only in the plant community that we can observe the process of compet.i.tion in isolation, uncomplicated with other social processes. The members of a plant community live together in a relation of mutual interdependence which we call social probably because, while it is close and vital, it is not biological. It is not biological because the relation is a merely external one and the plants that compose it are not even of the same species. They do not interbreed. The members of a plant community adapt themselves to one another as all living things adapt themselves to their environment, but there is no conflict between them because they are not conscious. Compet.i.tion takes the form of conflict or rivalry only when it becomes conscious, when compet.i.tors identify one another as rivals or as enemies.

This suggests what is meant by the statement that compet.i.tion is interaction _without social contact_. It is only when minds meet, only when the meaning that is in one mind is communicated to another mind so that these minds mutually influence one another, that social contact, properly speaking, may be said to exist.

On the other hand, social contacts are not limited to contacts of touch or sense or speech, and they are likely to be more intimate and more pervasive than we imagine. Some years ago the j.a.panese, who are brown, defeated the Russians, who are white. In the course of the next few months the news of this remarkable event penetrated, as we afterward learned, uttermost ends of the earth. It sent a thrill through all Asia and it was known in the darkest corners of Central Africa. Everywhere it awakened strange and fantastic dreams. This is what is meant by social contact.

a) _Compet.i.tion and compet.i.tive co-operation._--Social contact, which inevitably initiates conflict, accommodation, or a.s.similation, invariably creates also sympathies, prejudices, personal and moral relations which modify, complicate, and control compet.i.tion. On the other hand, within the limits which the cultural process creates, and custom, law, and tradition impose, compet.i.tion invariably tends to create an impersonal social order in which each individual, being free to pursue his own profit, and, in a sense, compelled to do so, makes every other individual a means to that end. In doing so, however, he inevitably contributes through the mutual exchange of services so established to the common welfare. It is just the nature of the trading transaction to isolate the motive of profit and make it the basis of business organization, and so far as this motive becomes dominant and exclusive, business relations inevitably a.s.sume the impersonal character so generally ascribed to them.

"Compet.i.tion," says Walker, "is opposed to sentiment. Whenever any economic agent does or forbears anything under the influence of any sentiment other than the desire of giving the least and gaining the most he can in exchange, be that sentiment patriotism, or grat.i.tude, or charity, or vanity, leading him to do otherwise than as self interest would prompt, in that case also, the rule of compet.i.tion is departed from. Another rule is for the time subst.i.tuted."[181]

This is the significance of the familiar sayings to the effect that one "must not mix business with sentiment," that "business is business,"

"corporations are heartless," etc. It is just because corporations are "heartless," that is to say impersonal, that they represent the most advanced, efficient, and responsible form of business organization. But it is for this same reason that they can and need to be regulated in behalf of those interests of the community that cannot be translated immediately into terms of profit and loss to the individual.

The plant community is the best ill.u.s.tration of the type of social organization that is created by compet.i.tive co-operation because in the plant community compet.i.tion is unrestricted.

b) _Compet.i.tion and freedom._--The economic organization of society, so far as it is an effect of free compet.i.tion, is an ecological organization. There is a human as well as a plant and an animal ecology.

If we are to a.s.sume that the economic order is fundamentally ecological, that is, created by the struggle for existence, an organization like that of the plant community in which the relations between individuals are conceivably at least wholly external, the question may be very properly raised why the compet.i.tion and the organization it has created should be regarded as social at all. As a matter of fact sociologists have generally identified the social with the moral order, and Dewey, in his _Democracy and Education_, makes statements which suggest that the purely economic order, in which man becomes a means rather than an end to other men, is unsocial, if not anti-social.

The fact is, however, that this character of _externality_ in human relations is a fundamental aspect of society and social life. It is merely another manifestation of what has been referred to as the distributive aspect of society. Society is made up of individuals spatially separated, territorially distributed, and capable of independent locomotion. This capacity of independent locomotion is the basis and the symbol of every other form of independence. Freedom is fundamentally freedom to move and individuality is inconceivable without the capacity and the opportunity to gain an individual experience as a result of independent action.

On the other hand, it is quite as true that society may be said to exist only so far as this independent activity of the individual is _controlled_ in the interest of the group as a whole. That is the reason why the problem of control, using that term in its evident significance, inevitably becomes the central problem of sociology.

c) _Compet.i.tion and control._--Conflict, a.s.similation and accommodation as distinguished from compet.i.tion are all intimately related to control. Compet.i.tion is the process through which the distributive and ecological organization of society is created.

Compet.i.tion determines the distribution of population territorially and vocationally. The division of labor and all the vast organized economic interdependence of individuals and groups of individuals characteristic of modern life are a product of compet.i.tion. On the other hand, the moral and political order, which imposes itself upon this compet.i.tive organization, is a product of conflict, accommodation and a.s.similation.

Compet.i.tion is universal in the world of living things. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances it goes on un.o.bserved even by the individuals who are most concerned. It is only in periods of crisis, when men are making new and conscious efforts to control the conditions of their common life, that the forces with which they are competing get identified with persons, and compet.i.tion is converted into conflict. It is in what has been described as the _political process_ that society consciously deals with its crises.[182] War is the political process par excellence. It is in war that the great decisions are made. Political organizations exist for the purpose of dealing with conflict situations. Parties, parliaments and courts, public discussion and voting are to be considered simply as subst.i.tutes for war.

d) _Accommodation, a.s.similation, and compet.i.tion._--Accommodation, on the other hand, is the process by which the individuals and groups make the necessary internal adjustments to social situations which have been created by compet.i.tion and conflict. War and elections change situations. When changes thus effected are decisive and are accepted, conflict subsides and the tensions it created are resolved in the process of accommodation into profound modifications of the competing units, i.e., individuals and groups. A man once thoroughly defeated is, as has often been noted, "never the same again." Conquest, subjugation, and defeat are psychological as well as social processes. They establish a new order by changing, not merely the status, but the att.i.tudes of the parties involved. Eventually the new order gets itself fixed in habit and custom and is then transmitted as part of the established social order to succeeding generations. Neither the physical nor the social world is made to satisfy at once all the wishes of the natural man. The rights of property, vested interests of every sort, the family organization, slavery, caste and cla.s.s, the whole social organization, in fact, represent accommodations, that is to say, limitations of the natural wishes of the individual. These socially inherited accommodations have presumably grown up in the pains and struggles of previous generations, but they have been transmitted to and accepted by succeeding generations as part of the natural, inevitable social order.