Type (social science)

“ Necessarily the essential traits of these two social types are in most cases obscured, both by the antecedents and by the coexisting circumstances. Every society has been, at each past period, and is at present, conditioned in a way more or less unlike the ways in which others have been and are conditioned. Hence, the production of structures, characterizing one or other of these opposed types, is, in every instance, furthered, or hindered, or modified, in a special manner. ”

“ In this volume not only the theoretical phases of sociology are treated with some degree of completeness, but the practical bearings of the science are also brought out in a series of chapters dealing with social pathology and methods of social investigation. This survey of the whole field, including both the theoretical and the so-called "practical," finds its justification in the unity it gives to sociology in the mind of the beginner. It prevents that vicious one-sidedness sometimes resulting from a study of one phase of a subject before a general survey has been made. ”

“ Hence, while the sociologist borrows his principles of interpretation from biology and psychology, he has his own distinctive problems, and it is this fact which makes sociology a distinct science.
Sociology is not so easily distinguished from the special social sciences like politics, economics, and others, as it is from the other general sciences. These sciences occupy the same field as sociology, that is, they have to do with social phenomena. ”

“ The sociologist then limits himself to drawing from these labors and coordinating the most general results. On the one side, social organisms being studied, he has only to classify them and to distinguish the type of each of the groups which they form, according to the complexity of its structure and of its functions. ”

“ We are to study the special forms of subordination, concurrence, imitation, opposition, division of labor, found in the various types of social groups. But we must bear in mind that phenomena are not social merely because they are parallel, nor do similarities and regularities established by statistics belong to our science if each has an individual cause. Not what takes place iti society but what takes by society is the field of sociology. ”

“ Sociology has for one of its aims, perhaps its chief aim, the improvement of the present condition of society. The sociologist is interested in the improvement of social conditions to-day and to-morrow. He wants to improve housing conditions, food and milk supplies, to reduce the curses of alcoholism, poverty, and crime, to take the children out of the factory and their mothers out of the sweatshop and put them into schools or under humane conditions of labor. ”

“ Sociology, too, represented down to recent times only by stray ideas about social organization, scattered through the masses of worthless gossip furnished us by historians, is coming to be recognized by some as also a science; and such adumbrations of it as have from time to time appeared in the shape of empirical generalizations, are now beginning to assume the character of generalizations made coherent by derivation from causes lying in human nature placed under given conditions. ”

“ On the other hand, if laws of social phaenomena, empirically generalized from history, can when once suggested be affiliated to the known laws of human nature; if the direction actually taken by the developments and changes of human society, can be seen to be such as the properties of man and of his dwelling-place made antecedently probable, the empirical generalizations are raised into positive laws, and Sociology becomes a science. ”

“ Yet more abundant are the statistical accumulations pertaining to that fourth and last division of descriptive sociology which treats of the social welfare—of the functioning of society, of the ends for which it exists. ”

“ In attempting to give a scientific view of social organization and social evolution, sociology has to depend upon the other natural sciences, particularly upon biology and psychology. It is manifest that sociology must depend upon biology, since biology is the general science of life, and human society is but part of the world of life in general. It is manifest also that sociology must depend upon psychology to explain the interactions between individuals because these interactions are for the most part interactions between their minds. ”

“ The ultimate aim of Sociology is doubtless the working out of the laws according to which stable communities are formed and maintained, and in which each component individual may enjoy and contribute the maximum of pleasure and profit. ”

“ Here, therefore, begins the office of Biology (or, as we should say, of Psychology) in the social science. The universal laws of human nature are part of the data of sociology, but in using them we must reverse the method of the deductive physical sciences: for while, in these, specific experience commonly serves to verify laws arrived at by deduction, in sociology it is specific experience which suggests the laws, and deduction which verifies them. If a sociological theory, collected from historical evidence, contradicts the established general laws of human nature ”

“ From that standpoint all problems that do not belong to physical science seem to fall within the scope of sociology. It is self-evident that this standpoint is untenable. It is plainly nonsensical to throw into one big pot labeled “sociology” all those researches which have been satisfactorily conducted by national economy, history of civilization, philosophy, political science, statistics, demography, juridical science, and ethics. ”

“ Any general movement away from social standards implies that these standards are no longer adequate.
A successful method of study will be wide and objective enough to include both the individual and the norms as an evolving process, and such a study must be made from case to case, comparatively and without prejudice or indignation. Every new movement in society implies some disorder, some random, exploratory movements preliminary to a different type of organization answering to new conditions. Individualism is a stage of transition between two types of social organization. ”

“ The limits of variation in the possible development of social, as of animal life, are a subject of which little is yet understood, and are one of the great problems in social science. It is, at all events, a fact, that different portions of mankind, under the influence of different circumstances, have developed themselves in a more or less different manner and into different forms; and among these determining circumstances, the individual character of their great speculative thinkers or practical organizers may well have been one. ”

“ The subject-matter of sociology is, therefore, the forms or ways in which human beings exist beside, for, and with each other. The purposes for the sake of which these socializations come into being—economic and social, [2] religious and criminal, sexual and military, political and ethical, etc.—will be treated by other sciences. ”

“ For making the classification into social types the objective principle to be adopted as our standard is that of simplicity, i. e., we ask whether a given group is made up of units which enclose other units more simple than itself. ”

“ But, since, in common with every other creature, Man is modifiable—since his modifications, like those of every other creature, are ultimately determined by surrounding conditions—and since surrounding conditions are in part constituted by social arrangements—it becomes requisite that the sociologist should acquaint himself with the laws of modification to which organized beings in general conform. ”

“ Turn we now from the indirect influence which Biology exerts on Sociology, by supplying it with rational conceptions of social development and organization, to the direct influences it exerts by furnishing an adequate theory of the social unit—Man. ”

“ It should be manifest, therefore, that the concept of instinct in the social sciences will give to those sciences a vital relation to life generally. Deduction from biological and psychological facts, if carried out with proper scientific safeguards, is not to be feared in the social sciences; for it is only by accepting the results of the other positive sciences, and especially of the biological sciences, that sociology can itself hope to become a positive science. ”

“ This is the situation we are generally in when the inquiry is of the kind called moral, that is, of the kind which has in view to predict human actions. To enable us to affirm any thing universally concerning the actions of classes of human beings, the classification must be grounded on the circumstances of their mental culture and habits, which in an individual case are seldom exactly known; and classes grounded on these distinctions would never precisely accord with those into which mankind are divided for social purposes. ”

“ In point of fact, most of the so-called sociological investigations belong within the field of one of these already existing sciences, for there is no content of life which would not be proper subject-matter of one or other of these. If, therefore, sociology is to have a peculiar and independent significance, its problems must consequently concern, not the contents of social life, but its form—the form which brings it to pass that all those contents which are treated by the special sciences are “societary.” ”

“ Doubtless with longer experience and clearer insight, a definite division of labor will take place according to individual points of view. Some such tendency is already evident. The main point of contention is as to the extension of the term Sociology to include more than the general laws of social structure and evolution. ”

“ If Man were uniform and unchangeable, so that those attributes of him which lead to social phenomena could be learned and dealt with as constant, it would not much concern the sociologist to make himself master of other biological truths than those cardinal ones above dwelt upon. ”

“ This is, however, a process very different from the interpolation of psychological facts as links in the chain of causation connecting social antecedents with social consequences. It is in no spirit of hostility to social psychology, but in the hope that it may help us to understand its proper place in the study of social institutions that I venture to put forward the method followed in these lectures as one proper to the science of sociology. ”

“ Practical sociology deals with precisely the same social phe- nomena, the same typical forms, the same uniformities or laws, the same forces, as theoretical sociology, but for a different purpose, and therefore with some difference of method. Prac- tical social science is ambitious to discover and present in systematic form principles which regulate social conduct in conformity with ends. ”

“ The subject-matter of sociology, regarded as a practical science, consists of those points in which the members, or {16} certain groups of members, of any given social aggregate differ from one another. And here we come to the reason why sociology, as a practical science, has failed. It has failed because hitherto it has not realised this distinction, and has persisted in applying to the phenomena, involved in practical social problems, the same terminology, the same methods of observation and reasoning, which it has applied to the phenomena involved in speculative social problems. ”

“ Human types, instead of being standardized, should be diversified , and their cultural differences maintained and exaggerated by different modes of education and life habits. Each type will find its place. ”

“ In particular, I have long felt that the prevailing tendency to regard all the marked distinctions of human character as innate, and in the main indelible, and to ignore the irresistible proofs that by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes, are such as not only might but naturally would be produced by differences in circumstances, is one of the chief hindrances to the rational treatment of great social questions, and one of the greatest stumbling blocks to human improvement. ”

“ If, however, the standard of living which one has inherited from his class is adopted as an individual standard, and is made the object of effort and self-denial, the individual and social results are of high value. ”

“ The loudest demand of sociology today is for the addition of description to description so that, with equally accurate observations of the various elements entering into social combinations, an intelligent view of their correlation is possible. ”

“ They had perverted the general logical precept of the sufficient reason for all inequalities by converting it into an assuming of the equality of concrete units. They fell into the fallacy of which I have spoken; and many radicals, utilitarians, and others have followed them. They assumed that all the varieties of human character, or all those due to the influence of the social environment, through whose structure and inherited instincts every full-grown man has been moulded, might be safely disregarded for the purpose of political and social construction. ”

“ But just as in psychology we separate out the content of the mental states and consider only the form, so sociology must isolate the distinctively social, and consider the form of association as such, leaving the content, i. ”

“ And I for my part cannot but consider the talk of the contemporary sociological school about averages and general laws and predetermined tendencies, with its obligatory undervaluing of the importance of individual differences, as the most pernicious and immoral of fatalisms. Suppose there is a social equilibrium fated to be, whose is it to be,—that of your preference, or mine? There lies the question of questions, and it is one which no study of averages can decide. ”