The elements of social science

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER »

I. THE NATURE OF SOCIETY

What Society Means -.•-"»- The Division of Labour - Community, Association, and Institution Sociology, the Science of Society The Method of Social Science

Chapter I The Nature Of Society

I. WHAT SOCIETY MEANS

*X "JT T^HEREVER there is life there is society. For ^/^/ life can arise and continue only in its own % ▼ presence, in the society of like beings* In the lowest stages of development the society whence new life arises is incredibly brief and slight, a mere moment of conjunction or proximity, but in the higher stages life is always obviously social. It is born and nurtured in society, it finds its degree of fulfilment, its character, its limitation, in society. Society is more than our environment : it is our nature. It is within us as well as around us. Aristotle revealed this truth long ago when he defined man as a " social animal." All animals are in their degree social, but the highest is of necessity the mojt social.

i Society means likeness. It exists among like beings, like-bodied and like-minded. Otherwise they could not join to pursue their purposes, they could not in any sense live together. Comradeship, intimacy, association of any kind or degree would be impossible without some understanding of each by the other, and that understanding depends on the likeness which each apprehends in the other. I Likeness may exist without creating society. There are serious qualifications of the principle that

" God always brings the like to the like," or that " birds of a feather flock together," since the limitations of intelligence as well as the psychical (no less than the physical) difficulties of free communication may prevent their recognition. On the other hand, there cannot be society without likeness. Difference is also necessary to society, but difference by itself creates no society, only difference which is felt to be subordinate to likeness, thus affording the ground for reciprocal service towards common ends. [Primary likeness and secondary difference create the greatest of all social institutions — the division of labour.}

Society means interdependence. The first society, the family life, rests on the biological interdependence of the sexes. Each by itself is incomplete, and seeks fulfilment by aid of the otjier. As society advances this principle is vastly extended. > The area of interdependence grows. The forms of interdependence multiply. In the primitive world the small group, the clan or tribe or village community, is self-contained ; it contributes nothing and it owes nothing to the world outside. On the outskirts of that narrow circle lies the hostile, a peril and a possible prey ; beyond that the unknown. To-day not only countries but also continents depend upon one another, and when communications are interrupted, as by war, they all suffer together. This growing interdependence is intensive as well as extensive. " TheJustory_of man," as I have elsewhere expressed it, "is in one aspect the history of the growth of an organization which diversifies the work of each, making each more dependent on others, in order that by the surrender of self-sufficiency he may receive back a thousandfold in fullness of life."1

Society means co-operation, and therefore also econom}'. Society is the exact antithesis of war. War means mutual destructiveness of units or groups animated by the sense of opposing interests ; society means the mutual constructiveness of units or groups animated by

1 " Labour in the Changing World," C. i.

some sense of common interests. The wastefulness of war is likewise in direct antithesis to the economy of society. The nature of this social co-operation and its resultant economy will be more fully considered in the next section, on the division of labour.

Society means likeness, interdependence, co-operation, economy, but in so saying we have not penetrated to the meaning of society. For society is an infinitely interwoven series of relationships, issuing from the wills and purposes of beings who realize their likeness and their interdependence, in a word, their community. It is, therefore, in the first place a state or quality of mind, not a mere means or agency for the comfort or convenience of the beings so minded. The social relation of mother and child, for instance, consists in an attitude of mother to child, expressing the nature of both ; and in an attitude of child to mother, also expressing the nature of both. This is the social fact, as distinct from the mere biological fact, and a myriad of such social facts constitutes society.

Herein we must find the true nature of society, and having understood it we can pass to consider the attributes which flow from it. Society is then revealed as the extension of individuality, the transcendence of selfenclosedness, the vehicle of personal identity, the means of the continuation of personality through the generations, the nurse of youth, the arena of manhood and woman- '^ hood, the organization of the human conquest of nature \ and the refuge of the human spirit against its unpitying I law, the repository of the gathered customs and filtered f traditions of men, the summed experience of life, the sphere of a thousand lesser conflicts and unities within the embracing purpose of one community.

II. THE DIVISION OF LABOUR

Of all social institutions the division of labour is the most universal, being co-extensive with society itself. The term division of labour obscures the character of the institution, for it is in the first place a form of co-operation. It is more, however, than co-operation. Men may co-operate without division of labour, as when a group of navvies dig a ditch or a group of sailors haul a rope. Division of labour involves the assignment to each unit or group of a specific share of a common task. It may be so ordained by elementary nature, as in the family division of labour between father and mother in the nurture of children. Or at the other end it may be due to a deliberate calculation which assigns men distinct tasks for the sake of foreseen economies. The double advantage of specialization, that it enabled men both to acquire skill, ease, and reliability in their work, and also to select their work in accordance with varying natural aptitude, was the chief economic stimulus which led to the extension of this institution. But the division of labour could extend only as the area of effective society extended. It is limited, as Adam Smith put it, by " the extent of the market." Thus it proved from the first an important agent of social evolution, tending always to widen the range of society. The enormous economy of co-operation fought, here as elsewhere, against the waste of exclusiveness.

As the division of labour permeates further, it creates a new type of social cohesion. M. Durkheim, in his clever study, " La Division du Travail Social," calls this new solidarity " organic " as distinct from " mechanical." While the appropriateness of the terms may be questioned, the idea is important. This new solidarity arises from the recognized dependence of each on each, not simply from the general sentiment of likeness or kinship. Take one member or group of members away from a primitive society, and it makes little difference to the functioning of the whole. The member or group of members does not as a rule need to be replaced in order that the normal life of the community should continue. Take one member or group away from a society in which the division of labour is advanced, and it makes generally a greater difference. Each part is dependent on every other. Nearly every class of workers, as it becomes specialized, becomes necessary to every other. If it dropped out altogether or ceased to function there would be ruinous disruption, and even its partial or temporary withdrawal, as in the case of a strike, may have the most serious consequences for the community. This is the other side of the new " solidarity." Under the division of labour each specialized interest organizes itself and learns its power. Where each is necessary to every other each has power over all. This common lever of power makes for a kind of equality. In a very literal sense it pulls down the mighty from their seats and exalts those of low estate. For the mere threat of the withdrawal of service becomes a formidable weapon, and its strength depends, not on the social estimation, but on the immediate social necessity of the threatened service. The need of society is more immediate (which does not of course mean greater) for dustmen than for judges and for dock-labourers than for members of parliament. Here is a significant challenge to the old bases of authority. It points to a new kind of social order, broader-based than any that has. existed in the past. But in the process of obtaining it there arise conflicts which shake society. The new solidarity does not come as an automatic result of the division of labour, but only through the recognition, which must be slowly and painfully achieved, of the readjustments imposed by interdependence .

It has been well pointed out by Marshall1 that in the industrial sphere it is not skill but work which is being specialized. Industrial skill is to-day more generalized than it was in the handicraft age. It is no longer the special aptitude acquired by long years of initiation into a particular art that counts, but the general capacity to utilize, control, and develop the common technique of 1 " Principles of Economics," iv, vi, 2.

production. The remarkable diversion of workers from other industries into munition-making during the great war would have been quite impossible before the age of machinery. In the handicraft days a great barrier separated each art from every other — the art of the smith, say, from the art of the shoemaker. A long and necessary period of apprenticeship stood between. To-day the process of production demands, not an acquired dexterity in the working of a particular material by particular tools, but the common intelligence, whether it be great or small, that can learn and control the operations of a machine. This is one of the factors which have led towards a unification of interest on the part of the " working classes."

The division of labour is too apt to be identified with certain of its extremer industrial manifestations and its social significance accordingly misunderstood. The truer view is attained when we reflect that there is division of labour, not only between specialized mechanics in the production of a manufactured good, but also between mechanic and farmer, between those who organize and those who operate, between all these and doctor and teacher and actor and artist and magistrate ; in fine, between all who contribute to their society any service that their society requires. So comprehended, it appears that the social benefits of the division of labour are inherent or essential, while its disadvantages are, however great they be, incidental. Much that is set down to the account of the division of labour is more justly attributable to the changing technique of mechanical industry through which, at a particular time, the division of labour is realized. Should we blame the division of labour for the lack of sanitation or the exploitation of childhood associated with the early stages of the factory system ? But these evils have been to a very great extent removed while the division of labour has grown. In like manner we should beware of condemning this fundamental institution for the monotony to which the modern factory worker is subject, or again for the greater automatism which certain projects of " scientific management " have sought to impose. Specialization as such may mean not less but more interest. It is significant that in the professions and in the arts every one prefers to be a specialist. Given the right conditions a man may be " bounded in a nutshell " and find himself " king of infinite space." It may also be significant that to-day the least specialized occupations, those nearest to an earlier age, are the least attractive. Witness the shortage of domestic servants and of farm workers. The career of all others which is least specialized (though slowly moving in that direction), the service of the home, is the fullest of drudgery of them all. It is shunned as a paid occupation, and is assumed by the wife because, and because only, of motives associated with the life of the family.

We have therefore to distinguish between the essential character and service of the division of labour and the conditions imposed at any period by the technique of production. That technique will change and the conditions it imposes — or is suffered, sometimes needlessly, to impose — but the division of labour will not on that account be stayed. The division of labour goes hand in hand with man's conquest of knowledge and of nature. It is an index of civilization. It is the necessary way by which men find release from the rigour of the command : " In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." It permits that liberation from material necessities, that leisure of the toiler for other and higher pursuits, that emancipation of intelligence and sensibility which broadens the bases of civilization. This will appear more clearly when we come, in the next chapter, to describe the procession of social stages.

III. COMMUNITY, ASSOCIATION, AND INSTITUTION

It is most desirable that every student of social science should learn to attach a definite and single meaning to the primary terms of his vocabulary. Just as the physicist gives precision to such terms as "atom," "force," "momentum," etc., and the biologist to such terms as " cell," "life," "organism," etc., so must the sociologist to the terms which express social characters and relations. It is even more necessary to insist on such precision in our study, because our terms are not themselves technical. They are terms of everyday speech, and so are often employed loosely and interchangeably. We must begin, therefore, by attaching distinct meanings to our essential terms " society," " community," " association," and " institution."

" Society " we shall use in the very widest sense, to include every kind and degree of relationship entered into by men — and any other social creatures — with one another. All our other terms will then express particular types or varieties of social fact or situation. Society, when used without qualification, means the whole system of social relationships.

"Community" properly signifies any whole area of social life, such as a village, or town, or country, li is any circle in which a common life is lived, within which people more or less freely relate themselves to one another in the various aspects of life, and thus exhibit common social characteristics. It is inevitable that people who over any length of time enter freely into social relationships should develop social likenesses, should have some common social ideas, common customs, common traditions, and the sense of belonging together. A community may be small or great. A great community, such as a nation, will enclose a number of smaller communities, localities, and groups with more intense and more numerous common qualities. Small communities are sometimes semi-isolated in the midst of greater ones, especially in countries to which immigrants flock and where they form, as it wrere, islands of their own peculiar life. Thus it is seen that community is a matter of degree. What we should particularly bear in mind is that community means any circle of common life. Common life is more than organization or relationship. When we use the term " society " we think more particularly of organization, but when we use the term " community " we should think of something greater — the life whence organization springs and of which organization is but the means.

The distinction between " community " and " association " is apparent if we take one or two examples. We should call a city a community, but not, in our sense, a church or a college or trade union or a local or city council. We should call a country a community, but not a national association of traders or manufacturers. The church or the trade union or the manufacturers' association or any corporate body is an organization existing within some community. It is an organization deliberately formed for the collective pursuit of some interest or set of interests which the members of it share. But such interest or set of interests is always narrower than the whole range of a common life. It is partial, however important it may be. Hence it has to be specially organized. It pursues in a definite way definite purposes which are not comprehensive of all the purposes of its members, still less of all the purposes of the whole community to which they belong. A community, on the other hand, is integral, not partial. It does not exist for the pursuit oi special interests. It is not deliberately created. It has no beginning, no hour of birth. It is simply the whole circle of common fife, more comprehensive, more spontaneous than any association.

One remarkable feature of more recent social development has been the multiplication of associations within the community. In former times a few types of associations seemed to suffice : state and church and guild, for example. To-day there are myriads in every developed community Every single interest or purpose that men share with any other men now prompts to an association. These are of all kinds and degrees of permanence. Some exist to achieve an immediate purpose, say the passing of some piece of legislation, and if and when that purpose is achieved the association ceases to exist. Others stand for permanent purposes of human life, in which class come the Jamtty and thejsiaie. We shall have occasion later to classify the various types of association, and shall then see more fully the infinite ramifications of associa tional activity in the modern community.

We have called the family and the state associations. These offer good criteria of the distinction between association and community. In the primitive social world the family — or more strictly the kin-group — was almost comprehensive with community. To-day the family is very distinctly an association. It is not the whole common life of its members, but a specially organized part of it, deliberately established in the first instance by the marriage contract. All associations, unlike community itself, rest on a specific covenant, whether expressed or implied, of its adult members.

So with the state, the most comprehensive of them all and therefore the most easily confounded with community. It is highly important that we should realize that the state is not a community, nnt a w|]o^ common life, but only a, particular association for its furtherance.

le identmcation of community and {he state nasTed, alike in theory and in practice, to disastrous conclusions. This false conception, accepted by a long line of political theorists, has lent support to the principle of the unlimited sovereignty of the individual state, such that it owes no express obligation to others, being by nature a completely independent and morally unlimited power. It has justified the exclusiveness of governments by which, under the stimulation of selfish interests, they have denied the common interest which binds people to people, and striven to isolate, only in fact to frustrate and to destroy, the conditions of the welfare of each. Within the state it has led to tyrannous encroachment over the free life of other associations, to a coercive uniformity in respect of religion, education, language, and opinion, against which the creative spirit in man has had to wage incessant war. The state is an association of fundamental value, because to it belongs the establishment and maintenance of the whole system of enforceable rights and obligations, the basis of order and of liberty. It is an essential association of community, but it is not community. Nor can it fulfil its vast social function aright unless that distinction is realized.

A further distinction may now be made, between " community " and " association " on the one hand and " institution " on the other. To illustrate, we should call monogamy an institution, but the family an ftssori^- tion : the "party-system an institution, but the state an association ; baptism an institution, "but the church an association. Institutions are established anfl recognized forms of relationship between social beings. They may be so established either by particular associations, as in the instances above-mentioned, or by the community in general. Established customs or " folkways " belong to the latter class. Not infrequently an association takes over for special protection some institution which originally was a spontaneous creation of community. This is specially the way of the state. It has, for example, taken over the institution of property, originally a communal institution, and made it a legal institution. Social institutions make a great network of organization, which both serves and controls the life of men in society. There is always a danger of institutions becoming stereotyped, of their coming, by age or habituation, to seem to exist in their own right, or of their growing into an engine of power quietly manipulated by a dominant few or many, and thus exercising a social control divorced from the principle of social service. Every progressive community needs therefore continuously to examine its institutions so that they shall the better serve the changing needs of the age.

IV. SOCIOLOGY, THE SCIENCE OF SOCIETY

There is a group of sciences which study particular aspects of social life. Of these politics is perhaps the most ancient, while economics is the youngest and most aggressive. Others are jurisprudence, penology, comparative ethics, and perhaps eugenics. None of these sciences studies society as a whole. They are not concerned with its whole structure, with the character or evolution of the whole interdependent mass of its functions and relationships. They select for study the working of particular social motives, such as the economic, particular associations such as the state, particular institutions such as law. They thus leave room for, in fact they invite, a more comprehensive science. This is the science now named sociology.

The name is a very modern one. It was coined by Auguste Comte, who was the first thinker of the modern world clearly to set out the fact that all the aspects of social life are bound in a unity and to show that this unity has an evolutionary character. But the comprehensive study of society is much older than its name and its re-establishment by Comte. It was the object of Plato's masterpiece, " The Republic," really an analysis of the city community in all its aspects. It was pursued confusedly in many treatises on " politics," before the distinction between state and community was apprehended. Later it appeared under the guise of the " philosophy of history," which was little more than the pre-scientific study of social evolution. It was the great service of Comte that he removed these confusions, and put forward a distinct method for the scientific study of society.

There are some who still deny the right of sociology to be named a science, but this is itself an unscientific attitude. For the reign of law does not stop at the borders of society. Society is a living whole, every part bound to every other. It has laws peculiar to itself, appropriate to its character as a unity of consciously related beings. It reveals a process of evolution, with stages as clearly marked as, though even more complex than, those of plant or animal or the earth itself. All manner of false ideas, which Comte described as " theological " and " metaphysical," have stood in the way of this study. We naturally think of ourselves in society as free agents, but we misinterpret this idea of freedom if we imagine that our past does not change our present, that our character and experience does not determine our actions, or that our environment does not reflect itself in our thoughts and in our destinies. We are all bound up in law, the law of our own nature — which is but another name for our freedom — and the law of the outer world, which we call necessity. It has been said that a shudder ran through men when they first read in the pages of Buckle, one of the followers of Comte, that the rise and fall in the price of wheat was directly correlated with the marriage-rate, and that the number of suicides, illegitimate births, and lost parcels was relatively constant. What the ordinary man accepts — customs, institutions, social divisions, and other phenomena — as simply manifestations of an inscrutable human nature, the social scientist pursues further back, seeking their origin and their principle, believing that human nature too has its laws, and that it is always both reacting to and reshaping its environment, social and physical.

The task of social science is to find guiding threads of principle through the infinite variety of processes and activities which make up social life. It has to avoid the danger of becoming a mere summary or smattering of the particular social sciences. It has to be a general or " architectonic " science, unfolding the nature of community, that greater common life which is the matrix of the particular associations, family, state, economic corporation, church, and all the rest.

V. THE METHOD OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

Social science has hitherto suffered greatly from the attempt to make it conform to methods derived from the older and more abstract sciences. It has led us, for one thing, to look for impossible results, and to be disappointed at not getting them. We inquire, for example, after the manner of physical sciences, which of two related social phenomena is cause and which effect. It usually turns out, in the social sphere, that both are cause and both are effect. Does the kind of education account for the standard of intelligence in a community ? True, but does not the standard of intelligence account for the standard of education ? Was slavery in the ancient world due in part to the lack of technical development ? Doubtless, but was not the lack of technical development due in part to the institution of slavery ? Was the severity of the criminal code a hundred years ago due to the amount of crime ? May it not be replied that the amount of crime was also due to the severity of the criminal code ? Are low wages a cause of poverty ? Yes, but is not poverty a cause of low wages ? Intemperance is a source of destitution, but destitution is also a source of intemperance. Such examples could be multiplied indefinitely. One can reverse, with some degree of truth, almost any statement of social causation. Social causation is nearly always reciprocal. Unless we realize this fact we will be asking wrong questions and finding wrong answers — though questions of a type that might be legitimately asked in other scientific spheres where another kind of causation prevails.

Let us then illustrate the true nature of social law. Suppose we take some social phenomena in which we are interested, say the declining birth-rate. The problem is to bring it into relation to a complex of interactive factors of more or less importance. To understand it we have to see how it is bound up with changes in education, in the standard of comfort, in the applications of hygiene and medical science ; how again it is connected with the development of city life, with the breaking down of old class distinctions and the development of democratic institutions, with the decay of militarism, with the legal and social emancipation of women, with the decline in religious beliefs. At whatever point we start in a social investigation we discover a complex of interdependent factors somehow bound up in that all- too-little-understood process which we call social evolution. The uninitiated is ready to ask, What is the cause of the decline of the birth-rate ? expecting an answer as simple as might be given to the question, What is the cause of an earthquake ? In social science phenomena are not nearly so isolable as in the mathematical and physical sciences. Not only because of their own peculiar nature but also because of the way they interact, they must be studied on a different plan.

It is a common view that science begins and ends with measurement. Whether or not this is true of physical science it is certainly not true of social science. Even in the physical sphere the mind that discovers measure is really seeking something more. It seeks to understand, not merely to compute. Light and colour mean more to the mind than vibrations and wave-lengths, and that more, always eludes measurement. Heat is not to be understood as the dance of atoms. It is something we feel. Music is more than combinations of sound waves, nor will all the computation in the world bring the knowledge of harmony. Or take our knowledge of time itself. The real time we live through refuses to be broken up into a succession of mathematical points. We are apt to think we know what time is because we can measure it, but no sooner do we reflect upon it than that illusion goes.

So it appears that the range of the measurable is not the range of the knowable. There are things we can measure, like time, but yet our minds do not grasp their meaning. There are things we cannot measure, like happiness or pain, and yet their meaning is perfectly clear to us. Perhaps, after all, we can measure only the external, the unknown, and can know only the internal, the conscious state, the incommensurate. In which case science, if it is limited to the measurable, is limited to the unknown, perhaps even to the unknowable. It is then a means to power, not to understanding. It is our weapon to conquer and control nature, not to comprehend her. It is only quantity we can measure, but it is only quality we can experience. Science then counts the throbs of nature, but does not feel them. They are to her as the beats of a vast mechanism, fulfilling eternally eternal laws. But the question, Why ? — the only question that matters, the first question of childhood, the last of age — that she cannot answer.