Introduction to the Science of Sociology Part 74

The ecological conception of society is that of a society created by compet.i.tive co-operation. Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ was a description of society in so far as it is a product of economic compet.i.tion. David Ricardo, in his _Principles of Political Economy_, defined the process of compet.i.tion more abstractly and states its consequences with more ruthless precision and consistency. "His theory,"

says Kolthamer in his introduction, "seems to be an everlasting justification of the _status quo_. As such at least it was used."

But Ricardo's doctrines were both "a prop and a menace to the middle cla.s.ses," and the errors which they canonized have been the presuppositions of most of the radical and revolutionary programs since that time.

The socialists, adopting his theories of value and wages, interpreted Ricardo's crude expressions to their own advantage.

To alter the Ricardian conclusions, they said, alter the social conditions upon which they depend: to improve upon subsistence wage, deprive capital of what it steals from labour--the value which labour creates. The land-taxers similarly used the Ricardian theory of rent: rent is a surplus for the existence of which no single individual is responsible--take it therefore for the benefit of all, whose presence creates it.[202]

The anarchistic, socialistic, and communistic doctrines, to which reference is made in the bibliography, are to be regarded as themselves sociological phenomena, without reference to their value as programs.

They are based on ecological and economic conceptions of society in which compet.i.tion is the fundamental fact and, from the point of view of these doctrines, the fundamental evil of society. What is sociologically important in these doctrines is the wishes that they express. They exhibit among other things, at any rate, the character which the hopes and the wishes of men take in this vast, new, restless world, the Great Society, in which men find themselves but in which they are not yet, and perhaps never will be, at home.

4. Compet.i.tion and the "Inner Enemies": the Defectives, the Dependents, and the Delinquents

Georg Simmel, referring, in his essay on "The Stranger," to the poor and the criminal, bestowed upon them the suggestive t.i.tle of "The Inner Enemies." The criminal has at all times been regarded as a rebel against society, but only recently has the existence of the dependent and the defective been recognized as inimical to the social order.[203]

Modern society, so far as it is free, has been organized on the basis of compet.i.tion. Since the status of the poor, the criminal, and the dependent, has been largely determined by their ability or willingness to compete, the literature upon defectiveness, dependency, and delinquency may be surveyed in its relation to the process of compet.i.tion. For the purposes of this survey the dependent may be defined as one who is unable to compete; the defective as the person who is, if not unable, at least handicapped, in his efforts to compete. The criminal, on the other hand, is one who is perhaps unable, but at any rate refuses, to compete according to the rules which society lays down.

Malthus' _Essay on the Principle of Population_ first called attention to the pathological effects of the struggle for existence in modern society and emphasized the necessity of control, not merely in the interest of the defeated and rejected members of society, but in the interest of society itself. Malthus sought a mitigation, if not a remedy, for the evils of overpopulation by what he called "moral restraint," that is, "a restraint from marriage, from prudential motives, with a conduct strictly moral during the period of restraint."

The alternatives were war, famine, and pestilence. These latter have, in fact, been up to very recent times the effective means through which the problem of overpopulation has been solved.

The Neo-Malthusian movement, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Francis Place, Richard Carlile, and Robert Dale Owen in the decade of 1820-30 and of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in the decade of 1870-80, advocated the artificial restriction of the family. The differential decline in the birth-rate, that is, the greater decrease in the number of children in the well-to-do and educated cla.s.ses as compared with the poor and uneducated ma.s.ses, was disclosed through investigations by the Galton Eugenics Laboratory in England and characterized as a national menace.

In the words of David Heron, a study of districts in London showed that "one-fourth of the married population was producing one-half of the next generation." In United States less exhaustive investigation showed the same tendency at work and the alarm which the facts created found a popular expression in the term "race-suicide."

It is under these circ.u.mstances and as a result of investigations and agitations of the eugenists, that the poor, the defective, and the delinquent have come to be regarded as "inner enemies" in a sense that would scarcely have been understood a hundred years ago.

Poverty and dependency in modern society have a totally different significance from that which they have had in societies in the past. The literature descriptive of primitive communities indicated that in the economic communism of a society based on kins.h.i.+p, famines were frequent but poverty was unknown. In ancient and medieval societies the dependency, where it was not professional, as in the case of the mendicant religious orders, was intimate and personal. In this respect it differed widely from the organized, official, and supervised philanthropy of our modern cities.

With the abolition of serfdom, the break-up of the medieval guilds, and the inauguration of a period of individual freedom and relatively unrestricted compet.i.tion (laissez faire) which ushered in the modern industrial order, the struggle for existence ceased to be communal, and became individual. The new order based on individual freedom, as contrasted with the old order based on control, has been described as a system in which every individual was permitted to "go to h.e.l.l in his own individual way." "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will,"

said Mill, "is to prevent harm to others. His own good either physical or moral is not a sufficient warranty." Only when the individual became a criminal or a pauper did the state or organized society attempt to control or a.s.sist him in the compet.i.tive struggle for existence.[204]

Since compet.i.tive industry has its beginnings in England, the study of the English poor laws is instructive. Under the influence of Malthus and of the cla.s.sical economists the early writers upon poverty regarded it as an inevitable and natural consequence of the operation of the "iron laws" of political economy. For example, when Harriet Martineau was forced to admit, by the evidence collected by the Factory Commissioners in 1833, that "the case of these wretched factory children seems desperate," she goes on to add "the only hope seems to be that the race will die out in two or three generations."

Karl Marx, accepting the Ricardian economics, emphasized the misery and dest.i.tution resulting from the compet.i.tive process, and demanded the abolition of compet.i.tion and the subst.i.tution therefor of the absolute control of a socialistic state.

Recent studies treat poverty and dependency as a disease and look to its prevention and cure. Trade unions, trade a.s.sociations, and social insurance are movements designed to safeguard industry and the worker against the now generally recognized consequences of unlimited compet.i.tion. The conceptions of industrial democracy and citizens.h.i.+p in industry have led to interesting and promising experiments.

In this connection, the efforts of employers to protect themselves as well as the community from accidents and occupational diseases may be properly considered. During and since the Great War efforts have been made on a grand scale to rehabilitate, re-educate, and restore to usefulness the war's wounded soldiers. This interest in the former soldiers and the success of the efforts already made has led to an increased interest in all cla.s.ses of the industrially handicapped. A number of surveys have been made, in different parts of the country, of the crippled, and efforts are in progress to discover occupations and professions in which the deaf, the blind, and otherwise industrially handicapped can be employed and thus restored to usefulness and relative independence.

The wide extension of the police power in recent times in the interest of public health, sanitation, and general public welfare represents the effort of the government, in an individualistic society in which the older sanctions and securities no longer exist, to protect the individual as well as the community from the effects of unrestricted compet.i.tion.

The literature of criminology has sought an answer to the enigma of the criminal. The writings of the European criminologists run the gamut of explanation from Lombroso, who explained crime as an inborn tendency of the criminal, to Tarde, who defines the criminal as a purely social product.

W. A. Bonger,[205] a socialist, has sought to show that criminality is a direct product of the modern economic system. Without accepting either the evidence or the conclusions of Bonger, it cannot be gainsaid that the modern offender must be studied from the standpoint of his failure to partic.i.p.ate in a wholesome and normal way in our compet.i.tive, secondary society which rests upon the inst.i.tution of private property and individual compet.i.tion.

The failure of the delinquent to conform to the social code may be studied from two standpoints: (a) that of the individual as an organization of original mental and temperamental traits, and (b) that of a person with a status and a role in the social group. The book _The Individual Delinquent_, by William Healy, placed the study of the offender as an individual upon a sound scientific basis. That the person can and should be regarded as part and parcel of his social milieu has been strikingly ill.u.s.trated by T. M. Osborne in two books, _Within Prison Walls_ and _Society and Prisons_. The fact seems to be that the problem of crime is essentially like that of the other major problems of our social order, and its solution involves three elements, namely: (a) the a.n.a.lysis of the apt.i.tudes of the individual and the wishes of the person; (b) the a.n.a.lysis of the activities of our society with its specialization and division of labor; and (c) the accommodation or adjustment of the individual to the social and economic environment.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. BIOLOGICAL COMPEt.i.tION

(1) Crile, George W. _Man an Adaptive Mechanism._ New York, 1901.

(2) Darwin, Charles. _The Origin of Species._ London, 1859.

(3) Wallace, Alfred Russel. _Studies Scientific and Social._ 2 vols. New York, 1900.

(4) ----. _Darwinism._ An exposition of the theory of natural selection with some of its applications. Chap. iv, "The Struggle for Existence,"

pp. 14-40; chap. v, "Natural Selection by Variation and Survival of the Fittest," pp. 102-25. 3d ed. London, 1901.

(5) Weismann, August. _On Germinal Selection as a Source of Definite Variation._ Translated from the German. Chicago, 1896.

(6) Malthus, T. R. _An Essay on the Principle of Population._ Or a view of its past and present effects on human happiness, with an inquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which it occasions. 2d ed. London, 1803. [1st ed., 1798.]

(7) Knapp, G. F. "Darwin und Socialwissenschaften," _Jahrbucher fur Nationalokonomie und Statistik_. Erste Folge, XVIII (1872), 233-47.

(8) Thomson, J. Arthur. _Darwinism and Human Life._ New York, 1918.

II. ECONOMIC COMPEt.i.tION

(1) Wagner, Adolf. _Grundlegung der politischen okonomie._ Pp. 794-828.

[The modern private industrial system of free compet.i.tion.] Pp. 71-137.

[The industrial nature of men.] Leipzig, 1892-94.

(2) Effertz, Otto. _Arbeit und Boden._ System der politischen okonomie.

Vol. II, chaps, xix, xx, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, pp. 237-320. Berlin, 1897.

(3) Marshall, Alfred. _Principles of Economics._ Appendix A, "The Growth of Free Industry and Enterprise," pp. 723-54. London, 1910.

(4) Seligman, E. R. A. _Principles of Economics._ Chap, x, pp. 139-53.

New York, 1905.

(5) Schatz, Albert. _L'Individualisme economique et social, ses origines, son evolution, ses formes contemporaines._ Paris, 1907.

(6) Cunningham, William. _An Essay on Western Civilization in Its Economic Aspects._ Medieval and modern times. Cambridge, 1913.

III. FREEDOM AND LAISSEZ FAIRE

(1) Simmel, Georg. _Philosophie des Geldes._ Chap. iv, "Die individuelle Freiheit," pp. 279-364. Leipzig, 1900.

(2) Bagehot, Walter. _Postulates of English Political Economics._ With a preface by Alfred Marshall. New York and London, 1885.

(3) Oncken, August. _Die Maxime Laissez Faire et Laissez Pa.s.ser, ihr Ursprung, ihr Werden._ Bern, 1886.

(4) Bastiat, Frederic. _Harmonies economiques._ 9th ed. Paris, 1884.