Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/646

 630 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

away from us in all directions, and where they become faintest to us they are center points for new processes of radiation. No comprehensive society can be isolated from others except by a bleeding abstraction. The only distinct societies are distinguished by particular activities, not by the total complexus of social activity in which its members are engaged. A state is a political unit, but not a unit in the comprehensive sense imagined.

There is nothing in national lines to hem the social process as such. London, Berlin, and New York may be in the same market. A technical invention made in Paris is a social fact for the American electrician. A scientific discovery made in Jena is a social fact for the scholars of Christendom. The ethical, artistic, scientific, and fashion resemblances and interactions between the ethical, artistic, scientific, and fashionable elite of different nations may be greater, though oceans intervene, than between the people of different wards of the same metropolis. It may be that, as a rule, the total social impact of things American upon a Bostonian of Beacon Street is greater than the total social impact of things cosmopolitan ; but even that would be a question of doubt. The man in Beacon Street may be the intellectual offspring of Scho- penhauer, Darwin, and Spencer; aesthetically and ethically he may be most akin to Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tenny- son, Browning, and Goethe. If it be true that, as a rule, the American most affects and is most affected by things American, this difference in degree is no organic line of separation. There is no such difference in kind, no such essential distinction, as to justify a definition of the society in which he lives, including all that is American and excluding all that is cosmopolitan. And as to the mere matter of difference in degree, what is to be said of the comparative degree of social separation between the man of Beacon Street and the man of the wharves? Tarde avers that

In fact, the principal obstacle to free imitative radiation of inventions in our day is far less the frontier of states, formerly so high and so opaque, at present so transparent and low, than the partitions that separate different strata of the population, different classes, different parties, different religions, etc."

Most of the groups that engage in more or less permanent activi*-

11 Let transformations dtt pouvoir, p. 185.