Social equilibrium

“ But equilibrium and stability are never perfect. Permanent social equilibrium would be social stagnation and decay. Therefore, we must study society also in its onward movement—the equilibrium ever disturbed, only to be readjusted on a higher plane with more and more complexly inter-related parts. This is dynamics—social progress. It is evolution. ”

“ It would be constantly displaced and shifted by the movement of all sorts of social forces—by changes of fashion, by abundance or scarcity of crops, by alterations in the technique of industry and by the cohesion or the slackening of the organization of any group of workers. But the balanced forces once displaced would be seen constantly to come to an equilibrium at a new point. ”

“ This duty when conscientiously performed re-establishes that economic and social equilibrium which strict justice alone is not able to create. For, the inequitable distribution of wealth greatly depends on the inequality of power of production. ”

“ That such an equilibrium is not unthinkable we may gather from the conceptions of a balance of income and expenditure, of the ‘stationary state’ of economics and of perfect justice as a social harmony in which each maintains his own position in society without aggression on others. Surely in none of these cases could it be asserted that there was a cessation of social or industrial relations. Once more the apparent paradox arises merely out of the habit of interpreting ἐνέργεια ἀκινησίας as a cessation of activity. ”

“ An organization which is composed of competing individuals and of competing groups of individuals is in a state of unstable equilibrium, and this equilibrium can be maintained only by a process of continuous readjustment. This aspect of social life and this type of social organization are best represented in the world of business which is the special object of investigation of political economy.
The extension of industrial organization, which is based on the impersonal relations defined by money, has gone forward hand in hand with an increasing mobility of the population. ”

“ The variations of the underlying (economic) structure of society which, at first sight, show themselves intuitively in the agitation of the passions, develop consciously in the struggles against law and for law, and become realized in the shaking and in the ruin of a definite political organization, have in reality their adequate expression only in the change in the relations which exist between the different social classes. ”

“ One of the difficulties, therefore, which capital has to meet, by the aid of such administrative ability as it can command, is how to keep order when society no longer rests on the cohesive family, but on highly volatilized individuals as incohesive as grains of sand. ”

“ Consider how by a thousand actions and interactions the members of every community are linked together, and how in the present condition of things even the fortunate few who stand upon the apex of the social pyramid must suffer, though they know it not, from the want, ignorance, and degradation that are underneath. Consider these things and then say whether the change I propose would not be for the benefit of every one—even the greatest land holder? ”

“ Most of what is orderly in society and in science is the outcome of the adjustment of just such oppositions: our civilization is an unstable equilibrium of objects, through the coöperation, antipathy, and fusion of value-relations. ”

“ From the point of view of political economy, then, social progress consists in a continuous solution of the problem of the constitution of values, or of the proportionality and solidarity of products.
But while in Nature the synthesis of opposites is contemporary with their opposition, in society the antithetic elements seem to appear at long intervals, and to reach solution only`after long and tumultuous agitation. ”

“ How It Has Met Its Responsibility.—This problem of prosperity which is both economic and social, is the concern of all the people of the nation, and any attempt to solve it in the interest of one section or a single group cannot bring success. That is one reason for many of the social weaknesses everywhere visible. ”

“ 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.
The strength and the weakness of the existing economic and social system consist, as we have observed, in the fact that it is based upon the realities of contemporary human nature. ”

“ Political economists had to contemplate a social strife and struggle for existence among men as fierce and relentless as that holding sway in the brute kingdom. And in this struggle society as a whole stood on the side of external nature as opposed to the mass of striving individuals. ”

“ Along with the good which a society derives from this self-asserting and self-preserving action, by which each division and subdivision keeps itself strong enough for its functions, there goes, among other evils, this which we are considering—the aptness to contemplate all social actions in their bearings on class-interests, and the resulting inability to estimate rightly their effects on the society as a whole. ”

“ The elucidation of economic relationships, depending as it does on the nature of the hypothesis of human aggregation actually in operation at any time, is considered to be subordinate and subsequent to this general science of Sociology. Political economy and economics, in our world now, consist of a hopeless muddle of social assumptions and preposterous psychology, and a few geographical and physical generalisations. ”

“ In its deepest aspect, consequently, the social problem is the problem of preventing such divisions from dissolving the society into which they enter—of keeping such a highly differentiated society fundamentally sound and whole. ”

“ For, while the integration which accompanies growth tends in itself to set free mental power to work improvement, there is, both with increase of numbers and with increase in complexity of the social organization, a counter tendency set up to the production of a state of inequality, which wastes mental power, and, as it increases, brings improvement to a halt. ”

“ Struggles against external enemies, internal conflicts of interest, and the varied interests and relations created by agriculture, industry and trade, necessitated a complicated system of laws and the formation of public bodies destined to keep the social machine in orderly motion and to settle disputes. ”

“ You have attained nearly all that our most advanced political economists regard as the perfection of economical order—a population nearly stationary, and a soil much more than adequate to their support; a general distribution of property, total absence of permanent poverty, and freedom from that gnawing anxiety regarding the future of ourselves or our children which is the great evil of life upon Earth and the opprobrium of our social arrangements. ”

“ But there must be division of labour in the vast society of human beings, and any man who endeavours to neglect this principle, and who tries to fill two places in the social economy, does so at his peril. ”

“ No longer is the per capita wealth of the nation a real index to the prosperity of the average man. Labor on the other hand has shown an increasing self-consciousness, is combining and increasing its demands. In a word, the old pioneer individualism is disappearing, while the forces of social combination are manifesting themselves as never before. ”

“ Even under a profit-sharing system they are parts in a close concert.
How to strike the balance between the needful individualism and social crystallization is probably the most difficult question before society. ”

“ If it is granted that the economic conditions of social groups, like those of individuals, constitute the fundamental, determining cause of all the moral, juridical and political phenomena, it is evident that every social group, every individual will be led to act in accordance with its or his economic interest, because the latter is the physical basis of life and the essential condition of all other development. ”

“ The Chances of Progress.—Every economic problem resolves itself into a social problem. The satisfaction of human wants is the province of the manufacturer, the merchant, and the transporter, but it is not limited to any one or all of these, nor is society under their control. The range of wants is so great, the desires of social beings branch out into so many broad interests, that no one line of enterprise or one group of men can control more than a small portion of society. ”

“ The same manifold character of economic mechanism that exists to-day is possible in a socialistic society. Only the hunting and the hunted, the struggling and resisting, the annihilated and being annihilated of the present competitive struggle are excluded and therewith the contrast between exploiter and exploited. ”

“ These problems of job control, of wealth and income distribution, of industrial inter-relations and of the relation between the state and industry are pressing for solution in every important centre of modern economic life. Each constitutes a disturbing element and contributes its mite to the aggregate of social instability and unrest that are racking the economic world. ”

“ If the society does not keep up its power, if it lowers its organization or wastes its capital, it falls back toward the natural state of barbarism from which it rose, and in so doing it must sacrifice thousands of its weakest members. Hence human society lives at a constant strain forward and upward, and those who have most interest that this strain be successfully kept up, that the social organization be perfected, and that capital be increased, are those at the bottom. ”

“ Indeed, the highest or ruling class nowhere appears to keep up its numbers without considerable recruitment from below. So society, as at present organized, is always dying off at the top, and proliferating at the bottom, of the social pyramid.
The disastrous consequences of this sort of social organization may easily be apprehended, with a little reflection. (1) All societies, even those whose social structure is most rigid, have need of ability, discover it, and reward it by social promotion. ”

“ It is the tendency of all social burdens to crush out the middle class, and to force the society into an organization of only two classes, one at each social extreme. ”

“ The multiplication of activities, the choice of occupation, and the division of labor have multiplied the economic groups by the thousand. Following this, natural voluntary social groups spring up on every hand. ”

“ She saw that, if the universal interest of society was allowed to be the moving spring of the social economy, all would be served; and that if many yet remain unserved, it is on account of other movements being made to interfere with it—the petty springs of narrow and mistaken interests; so that partial protection brings on general hardship, and arbitrary stimulus, a condition of general suffering. ”

“ At the opposite pole of the social scale to that about which shareholding is most apparent, is a [Pg 79] second necessary and quite inevitable consequence of the sudden transition that has occurred from a very nearly static social organization to a violently progressive one. This second consequence of progress is the appearance of a great number of people without either property or any evident function in the social organism. ”

“ Our social system, say the devout among these men, is based on the selfish desires of men, their wish to get the most for themselves with the least service to their fellow-men. It is inconceivable that a system founded on any thing less than the noblest attributes of humanity can be intended as a permanent basis for society. The system founded on competition was adapted to the conditions of men during the formative period of civilization: but modern inventions, processes, and methods are revealing a strange want of elasticity in its action. ”

“ The less people are excluded from the contemporary productive forces, the greater the social fund of accumulated Capital in which their labor is materialized, the smaller their need for the social relations that forced the accumulation of the productive forces. ”

“ As long as the world is progressing, wide class distinctions are inevitable; their discontinuance will be a sign that equilibrium has been reached. Then human civilisation will become as stationary as that of ants and bees. ”

“ To the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms will succeed an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all. [32]
“The relations of bourgeois production are the last antagonistic form of the social processus of [Pg 245] production—a form antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of the antagonism which proceeds from the conditions of the social life of individuals ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it is infinitely easier to change the political envelope of a social organization,—because such a change has little effect on the economic foundation of the social life,—than to completely revolutionize this social life in its economic constitution.
The processes of social transformation, as well as—under various names—those of every sort of transformation in living organisms are: evolution,—revolution,—rebellion,—individual violence. ”

“ Besides that, however, the ruling classes are often internally deeply divided through the struggles between themselves for the social surplus, and over the means of production. One of the strongest causes of that kind of division we have learned in the battle of competition. ”