Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/529

Rh of feudalism into the new monarchies; or the overthrow of the aristocracies and the enfranchisement of the democracies in the early part of the present century. From such great movements we ought to learn something about what would be involved in a social change of equal magnitude today; as, for instance, a solution of the labor problem which would give wage-earners a more direct and decisive influence in the economic order.

Suppose we are asking how such a change in modern industrial society is to be brought about, and we go to history for the answer. We find a class of interpreters of history ringing the changes on this one theme, namely: "Great social changes are the product of individual factors alone." Now, this answer is not as simple as it sounds. One man means by it that a few great, perhaps almost superhuman, men—Solon, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Bismarck—have been the mainsprings of social movement, and the rest of the human herd have been inert masses moved by them. Others mean that social movements are simply the slow accretions of volume or force by addition of one human individual to another—the drop added to drop that wears the rock away, or the atom added to atom in one scale which at last overbalances the huge mass in the opposite scale. The individualistic view would say to the wage-earners of our present generation who want their class to become the dominant type in the state: "To bring about the industrial revolution that you want, either 'labor' must incarnate itself in a giant or hero, who will perform some modern labors of Hercules and make the world over; or the mere multiplication of the numbers of the wage-earners, regardless of combinations or changes of their ideas, or the cooperation of other classes, or the limitations of the constructive capacity of the operative class, will in time effect the desired social transformation, or it is impossible altogether."

This view of social forces makes individuals alone—whether the few great and forceful ones or the multitude of average ones—the sole factors in social complications.

Now, there is a sense in which this must be true. Society is made up of individuals, just as matter is supposed to be made