Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/647

 SOCIOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION LINES 63 1

ties, like families, clubs, churches, or schools, are relatively only points, foci from which radiate in narrower or wider circles activities that are finally merged and lost to view in the total cur- rent of associative activity. Cities are vortices made up of great numbers of such smaller whirls. Most of the facts that the soci- ologist needs to study are limited and local, and belong to classes of facts that are international. Social interactions disregard national boundaries in every way. Some overleap national boundaries, but not class lines within the nation, and are international without including the whole of any nation ; others are confined within a single group within a single nation. The social units they create are international, infra-national, and in every way non-national.

A "social whole," a "true totality," as defended by Professor Tarde, unified and distinct with reference to the whole complex of social activities, is a fancy ; it does not exist. There is nowhere in the world a society unified within and distinct without in the sense that has been commonly understood in the definition, "Sociology is the science or study of society." This assertion need cause no dismay. It is by no means removing the sociolo- gist's right to exist, but is a step toward making that right evident.

The protest here entered is not against the study by sociolo- gists of national societies, but it is against holding a concept of a society which appropriates the name to great and imposing unions of whole populations and which imagines that groups are united in their multiplex social life as a whole, instead of seeing that the larger the group, the more likely is their bond of actual union and criterion of differentiation from all other peoples to be comparatively simple, if not tenuous. If it is correct to think that people become a society, not by being united in all the prominent forms of their associative activity, but whenever they are united in any one of them, then surely they are a society when united in so important a form of association as the political activities, and the state is of course one form of a society. The study of what is national is an immensely important subdivision of sociology, though very far from being the whole of it. The study of exten- sive and permanent groups, whole populations, is important because it reveals the radiating pcrwcr of social influences, which