Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/271

 SOCIAL CONTROL 257

arises a buzz of insistent suggestion intended to win for the many the homage of your imitation. Fashion becomes vocal and presses itself with considerable emphasis and pertinacity upon the nonconformist.

But social suggestion becomes imperative only in the field where individual and social choices clash, i. e., in the field of conduct, of social behavior. Here from a medium of social influence it becomes an agent of social control and a hand-maiden of morality.

No little care is needed to discriminate between control by sug- gestion and the fear of public opinion, the ascendancy of what everybody thinks from dread of "what people will think." Nor is it easy to mark the difference between a social standard that one obeys because he feels he must, and a social ideal that one works towards because he has learned to admire it. Again it is necessary to distinguish one's tendency to gravitate towards the social imperative, from his readiness to adopt and to act upon ready-made social judgments.

A concrete case will indicate the true nature of social sug- gestion. A wife continues to live with a respectable husband for whose person, however, she has an inexpugnable loathing. She is deterred from desertion by no fear of consequences legal or social. She does not dread the disapproval of the community. Her ideal of womanhood does not include unconditional sub- mission. She has no theory of conduct which subordinates per- sonal happiness to abstract virtue. Yet withal she may smother back her repugnance, and sacrifice her impulses to the perpe- tuity of the marriage tie. Why ? Because her impulse is emphatically inhibited by the communitv will. If the bar to her will is simply the veto of society, as it appears to her through her friends, intimates and associate's, she acquiesces with a sense of necessity. If, a^ i- more usual, she yields, not solely to pres- sure from outside, but rather to the inner tension that results from accumulated past suggestions, ingrained "shalts" and shalt nots," she succumbs to a feeling of obligation.

The "sense of duty," then, is the emotional state that ans\s