STUDIES IN THE THEORY OF HUMAN SOCIETY jl^g^ THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO.. LIMITED LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA. LTD. TORONTO Studies in the Theory of Human Society BY FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS, LL.D. • « PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AND THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND LETTERS. FELLOW OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSO­ CIATION. Il3eto ^otk THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1926 All rights reserved PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1922 Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A. PREFACE These consecutive studies are a book of Sociology without the form or the formality of a text. The discursive manner has permitted me to reiterate cardinal ideas and principles, exhibiting them in many lights and relations. I have thought this important in these days of loose thinking on social themes. The theory of human society into which these ideas are or­ ganized is stated in Chapter XVI, as follows: "If I can be said to have a system of sociology it is briefly this: "i. A situation or stimulus is reacted to by more than one individual; there is pluralistic as well as singularistic behavior. Pluralistic behavior develops into rivalries, competitions, and con­ flicts, and also, into agreements, contracts, and collective enter­ prises. Therefore, social phenomena are products of two vari­ ables, namely, situation (in the psychologist's definition of the word) and pluralistic behavior. "2. When the individuals who participate in pluralistic be­ havior have become differentiated into behavioristic kinds or types, a consciousness of kind, liking or disliking, approving or disapproving one kind after another, converts gregariousness into a consciously discriminative association, herd habit into so­ ciety; and society, by a social pressure which sometimes is con­ scious but more often, perhaps, is unconscious, makes life rela­ tively hard for kinds of character and conduct that are disap­ proved. "3. Society organizes itself for collective endeavor and achieve­ ment if fundamental similarities of behavior and an awareness of them are extensive enough to maintain social cohesion, while differences of behavior and awareness of them in matters of de­ tail are sufficient to create a division of labor. "4. In the long run organized society by its approvals and dis­ approvals, its pressures and achievements, selects and perpetuates vi PREFACE the types of mind and character that are relatively intelligent, tolerant, and helpful, that exhibit initiative, that bear their share of responsibility, and that effectively play their part in collective enterprise. It selects and perpetuates the adequate." I have endeavored to bring discussion and exposition to date. The nearly completed first quarter of the Twentieth Century has not been marked by discoveries comparable to those that lifted the second half of the Nineteenth Century above all other years in the history of knowledge; but it has been a time of rectifica­ tion in science. Logic has abandoned absolutes for variables, and pigeon hole classifications for frequency distributions. Physics and chemistry have begun to build from electrons. Bi­ ology has become experimental and Mendelian. Psychology has become experimental and objective. It has discriminated between reflex and conditioning; between original nature and habit. Anthropology has discovered elements of religion older than ghosts, and found more variates of primitive social organization than Morgan and McLennan knew. These corrections of fun­ damental notions and of inductions that are data of sociology have made the revision of sociology obligatory. I offer here an individual contribution to that formidable undertaking. A large part of the content of the volume is entirely new. Materials that in a cruder form have been printed in various journals and pro­ ceedings, and a small portion taken over from Democracy and Empire now out of print, have been worked over to the extent of being nearly rewritten. The chapter on "Order and Possibility" is not strictly a part, but it sets forth prolegomena (as I conceive them) of a scientific theory of human society. Many students of both psychology and sociology continue to worry over "determinism," and in par­ ticular over "mechanistic" theories of life. Just what happens to their apprehensions when the discriminations of a statistical way of thinking are applied to them has not, I believe, before been pointed out. I am grateful to friends and colleagues for helpful criticisms and suggestions; and especially grateful to student members of my research group for untiring aid in "checking up" and "trying out." CONTENTS I HISTORICAL CHAPTER FAGB I. THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE .... 3 II. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CULTURE 19 III. THE ECONOMIC AGES 33 IV. THE QUALITY OF CIVILIZATION 57 V. A THEORY OF HISTORY 66 VI. THE HISTORY OF SOCIAL THEORY 94 II ANALYTICAL VII. ORDER AND POSSIBILITY 127 VIII. A THEORY OF SOCIAL CAUSATION 144 IX. THE MIND OF THE MANY 154 X. THE GROUP-MAKING ROLE OF IDEAS AND BELIEFS 175 XL FOLKWAYS AND STATEWAYS 190 XII. SOCIAL SELF CONTROL 197 XIII. SOCIAL THEORY AND PUBLIC POLICY 209 XIV. THE COSTS OF PROGRESS 224 III SYNTHETIC XV. PLURALISTIC BEHAVIOR 249 XVI. FURTHER INQUIRIES OF SOCIOLOGY 291 INDEX 303 PART I HISTORICAL STUDIES IN THE THEORY OF HUMAN SOCIETY CHAPTER I THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE REVOLUTIONIZING as the life work of Charles Darwin was in the fields of biology and psychology, one may doubt if his writings disturbed the intellectual peace anywhere more profoundly than in the already perturbed realms of pre-Darwinian social philos­ ophy. Borrowing a shocking thought from the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, Mr. Darwin, in due course of time, gave it back to Malthusians and Godwinites, to Ricardians and Ruskinites, to Benthamites and Owenites, with a new and terrific voltage. Nine years before The Origin of Species was published, Herbert Spencer, in the concluding chapters of Social Statics, had offered an explanation of society in terms of a progressive human nature, adapting itself to changing conditions of life. These chapters are the germ of that inclusive conception and theory of evolution which were elaborated in the ten volumes of the Synthetic Philosophy. Five years later, or four years be­ fore The Origin of Species saw the light, Mr. Spencer, in the first edition of his Principles of Psychology, set forth an original interpretation of life, including mental and social life, as a cor­ respondence of internal relations to external relations, initiated and directed by the external relations. Finally, in April, 1857, Mr. Spencer pubHshed, in The Westminster Revieiv, the provo­ cative paper on "Progress: Its Law and Cause," in which a law of evolution was partially formulated, and evolution was declared to be the process of the universe and of all that it contains. 3 4 STUDIES IN THE THEORY OF HUMAN SOCIETY Mr. Spencer thus had seen evolution comprehensively, as adap­ tation and differentiation. He had not yet mentally grasped the universal redistribution of energy and matter, wherein every finite aggregate of material units, radiating energy into surrounding space, or absorbing energy therefrom, draws itself together in order-making coherence, or distributes itself abroad in riotous disintegration. That universal equilibration, which in fact is the beginning and the end of material transformation, was the aspect of the world which in thought Mr. Spencer arrived at last of all- It is not given to any one human intellect to discover all truth, and there is more in evolution than even Mr. Spencer perceived, either at the beginning of his great work, or in the fulness of his powers.^ Intent upon the broader aspects of cosmic change, his mind did not seize upon certain implications of rearrangement. In the concrete world of living organisms, equilibration becomes the relentless struggle for existence, in which the weakest go to the wall. Natural selection follows. It was this intensely con­ crete aspect that Mr. Darwin saw, and intellectually mastered. The distinction here indicated between evolution as a universal process, comprehensively described by Spencer, and Darwinism, or Mr. Darwin's account of one vitally important and concrete phase of that process, has often been noted, and is usually ob­ served by careful writers. It is of particular importance in any discussion of social evolution. One cannot hope to get far in a theoretical study of human society if he does not heed the extent to which our explanations of social origins, our philosophies of history and of human institutions, have become not only evolution­ ist, in the Spencerian sense of the word, but also Darwinian. It was not until the publication of The Descent of Man, in 1871, when controversy over The Origin of Species had raged through twelve years of intellectual tempest, that the full signifi­ cance of natural selection for the doctrine of human progress was apprehended by the scientific world. Mr. Spencer saw it when * And he did not finally reduce his general formula to its lowest terms As "universal," evolution is but a progressive emergence of order out of turbulence, and therefore a progressive complication of relationships. All other aspects of evolution are particularistic, for example, they are astro­ nomical or biological, or psychological or political, and no two of them are of quite identical pattern. THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE S The Origin of Species appeared. Mr. Darwin himself had per­ ceived that he must offer a credible explanation of the paradox that a ruthless struggle for existence yields the peaceable fruits of righteousness. But it was neither Mr. Spencer, nor Mr. Dar­ win, who first recognized the specific phase of the life struggle in which the clue to the mystery might be sought.