Proposal (social)

“ Here a word must be said about the subjective aspect of society, which, in its objective aspect, as we have seen, is merely the struggle and process of adjustment. What is the relation of adjustment to sympathy and to understanding, to communication and to concerted purpose, to the evolution of a social constraint through which the community controls and shapes the individual, to cooperation and to social organization? ”

“ There will be two main methods to this end: first, to produce social institutions under which the interests of different individuals or groups conflict as little as possible; second, to educate individuals in such a way that their desires can be harmonised with each other and with the desires of their neighbours. ”

“ Can I say our social laws are generally better, or show a nobler insight into the wants of man and woman? I do, indeed, say what I believe, that voluntary association for improvement in these particulars will be the grand means for my nation to grow, and give a nobler harmony to the coming age. ”

“ The reduction of all aims to a common level, the equalising of social conditions, the direction and control of all private interests and personal endeavours, are to be means to one end—the material good of the community. ”

“ We shall have, of course, to enlarge our family and social life, not in the petty spirit of present day Social Reform, hammering at small details and belittling our immediate past, but with a larger idea and more generous impulses. ”

“ The common element in these different interests is what forms the social tie; and, were there no point of agreement between them all, no society could exist. It is solely on the basis of this common interest that every society should be governed. ”

“ Such a task, sometimes small in its details, but difficult and grand in its comprehensiveness, required that creative, organizing, building kind of statesmanship, which to large and enlightened views of the aims and ends of political organization and of the wants of society must add a practical knowledge of details, a skilful handling of existing material, a just understanding of causes and effects, the ability to compose distracting conflicts and to bring the social forces into fruitful coöperation. ”

“ It was therefore necessary to give them a few positive precepts, moulding and regulating their moral and social conduct, to make them 'new creatures' with new notions and new purposes, and to remodel the national life. ”

“ When the aim of society is seen to be that each of its members shall employ and develop his powers to the highest possible extent for the highest possible ends, then it will no longer be in abstract constructions of constitutional law, but rather in the laws of human life, that the criteria of social well-being will be sought. ”

“ Scientific principles are applied to the solution of an intricate social problem, and result in the most equitable division of burdens. The aims and purposes are most exalted, too. Other associations combine individuals to cooperate with a view to their own present support and immediate enjoyment, while this institution is based upon abstention, self-imposed for other future beneficiaries. ”

“ When, therefore, the instructed in general can be brought to recognize one social arrangement, or political or other institution, as good, and another as bad—one as desirable, another as condemnable, very much has been done towards giving to the one, or withdrawing from the other, that preponderance of social force which enables it to subsist. ”

“ It meant that the interest of the many instead of the few, the welfare of the whole instead of that of a part, were henceforth to be the paramount purpose of the social order and the goal of its evolution. ”

“ To keep in view this general end, to ascertain the way in which the powers composing that social necessity act, and their variable ingredients, and to maintain that end in them and against them, is the work of an institution which assumes on one hand, to the concrete of civil society, the position of an external universality. ”

“ Hence one of the chief needs of a society which desires to reconstitute itself on eugenical principles is a thorough revision of social status. It must bring the social position of various services into closer agreement with their present value. ”

“ SOCIAL WILL AND SOCIAL HABITS.—Within the province of the social will fall what may not inaptly be called the habits of a community—ways of acting acquired largely without premeditation and followed to a great extent through mere inertia. The province of the social will is a broad one. Deliberate choices; those half-conscious choices analogous to the unheeded expressions of preference which fill the days of the individual; impulses and tendencies which scarcely emerge into the light—all are expressions of the social will. ”

“ All definite and dogmatic schemes of social reform prove upon challenge to need adjustment and modification, to fit the actual workings of a society already infinitely complex. It is as the sentiment which for want of a better word we call socialistic works along with that broad and candid study of fact which we call scientific, and toward an ideal in which the material is but an instrument of the spiritual,—that there is solid promise of advance. ”

“ We may nevertheless look in the direction of improvement by taking account of any neglected factor in the problem of social arrangement.
Without inquiring now what further tests are necessary, I shall point out two principles which men must learn to apply more precisely before there can be approximately stable social order. The present social system, or the reorganizations that may follow each other in its place, will be justified or condemned according to their success in providing for at least these two postulates of human association. ”

“ The exigencies of life render it necessary that the different elements and forms of society should coöperate together for common interests. They strengthen the desire for social order, they quicken the spirit of organization. ”

“ If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity. ”

“ Ample opportunity and inducement for such discussion are especially necessary, when different social classes, upon whose harmonious coöperation their own prosperity and to a great extent the well-being of the whole community depend, are by the nature of their relative situations liable to become distrustful of each other's motives and aims, and thus apt to drift into unwholesome irritations and dangerous conflicts. ”

“ At the same level of importance is the need to establish a viable unity of economic, cultural, and psychological significance, a framework, sanctioned by religious and political entities, for carrying out obligations significant to the community. These, and a number of additional elements, such as morality based on the pragmatics of health, inter-generational exchange of information and aid, social functions ensuring survival and continuity through cooperation and understanding with other families, are tightly connected. ”

“ That co-adjustment of social survey and social service which has been above argued for as the essential idea of civics as applied sociology is thus no abstract principle, but a concrete and practicable method. ”

“ When such a standard of individual competence has been attained by a sufficient number of individuals and is applied to economic and social questions, some attempt at social reorganization is bound to be the result,—assuming, of course, the constructive relation already admitted between democracy and the social problem. ”

“ Many thereupon fall back into the ranks of the do-nothings and the care-nothings; while others, in whom the fire of purpose is not entirely quenched, reluctantly exchange their radical and comprehensive plans of social changes for more narrow and immediate purposes,—the giving of small charities, the doing of near-at-hand services, and the occasional support of a particular public measure. ”

“ Thus the theory that society is founded upon a Social Contract, which, if taken as a description of the historical process of genesis, is false, is true, if accepted as the constitutive principle of the ideal State towards which progressive nations are tending. ”

“ In these letters will be found, along with many crude ideas, the same belief in the conformity of social phenomena to unvariable laws; the same belief in human progression as determined by such laws; the same belief in the moral modification of men as caused by social discipline; the same belief in the tendency of social arrangements “of themselves to assume a condition of stable equilibrium;” the same repudiation of state-control over various departments of social life; the same limitation of state-action to the maintenance of equitable relations among citizens. ”

“ Again, I find that there are rules of social life, which take the form of what are called "laws," and these are imposed by the will of some governing authority; they are always the product of some one human will, or of the collective will of a greater number of persons. ”

“ Hence, in a commercial and industrial society, a claim or want or demand of society that promises be kept and that undertakings be carried out in good faith, a social interest in the stability of promises as a social and economic institution, becomes of the first importance. This social interest in the security of transactions, as one might call it, requires that we secure the individual interest of the promisee, that is, his claim or demand to be assured in the expectation created, which has become part of his substance. ”

“ Hence it was that so many plans for general reform produced so little definite result, except on the one hand setting before the then rising generation a higher standard of social responsibility which was destined deeply to tinge the after conduct and social activities of that generation, and on the other hand much social experimenting upon a small scale which stored up information and experience for the future. ”

“ The social reformer who adopts the fallacy of provisionalism is apt to be absorbed in the mechanical details of his work,—the settlement or the municipal reform society, or the charitable association tend to become highly organized and efficient pieces of machinery. ”

“ The view of theoretic civics as concrete sociology, and of practical civics as applied sociology may be more simply expressed as the co-adjustment of social survey and social service, now becoming recognised as rational, indeed in many cities being begun. ”

“ It is not the citizen, or a taxpayer, or voter, or office-holder, but the cultivated, free individual who is the true aim of all social progress. ”

“ By a method different from that employed in either case or group work, though with the same end in view, social reform seeks to improve conditions in the mass, chiefly through social propaganda and social legislation. ”

“ It furnishes the prescribed rule for dealing with the ordinary occasions of life, which is for the most part accepted without inquiry and applied without reflection. It furnishes the appropriate institution for providing for each class of social needs, for meeting common dangers, for satisfying social wants, for regulating social relations. It constitutes, in short, the framework of society's life which to each new generation is a part of its hereditary outfit. ”

“ We are therefore compelled to relinquish the hope of a definition of absolute social ends, and must be content with something more modest and manageable. We may at least attempt to indicate certain proximate social aims. ”

“ Investigates, in an orderly, scientific manner, the principles of association, and whatever relates to the interests and improvement of men in communities. It has its basis in psychology, as that science of the soul reveals most clearly the elements of a social nature. By instinctive longings for sympathy and fellowship, men are drawn together, and readily consent to the [381] restraints of society, whose earlier tacit agreements and maxims are at length formulated into rules and laws for their better government. ”

“ Now most of the political and social discussion of the last hundred years may be regarded and rephrased as an attempt to apprehend this defensive struggle of the Normal Social Life against waxing novelty and innovation and to give a direction and guidance to all of us who participate. And it is very largely a matter of temperament and free choice still, just where we shall decide to place ourselves. ”

“ There is question only of imposing ready-made ideas on it, of preventing it from ever thinking otherwise than is required for the maintenance of existing social institutions—of making it, in a word, an individual rigorously adapted to the social mechanism. ”

“ Social organisation, as well as political, ought now to undergo a complete re-creation, with the aim of giving the greatest possible range for each individual to act according to his own views of what regard for the whole requires. ”

“ Finally, we propose special attention to the quality and scope of social services to the eleven basic needs of man to ensure that our development will meet the test of social justice and democratization. ”

“ In their private capacities each and all of the family have been distinguished for their ready and liberal support of measures calculated to improve the moral, social, and religious condition of their fellow-townsmen, and an appeal for support to a deserving object has never been made to them in vain. ”

“ It is indeed by going back to these simpler forms of social life and seeking means of coordinating the group in fundamental activities that the greatest headway will be made in the solution of wider social problems. ”