Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/806

 790 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

consumers who do not perform an industrial function, they either perform some other equivalent social function which is properly exchanged for the output of productive labor, or they are parasites whose existence has no justification in the social process. In a word, we have reached the perception, so simple that it seems too commonplace for mention, so sagacious that it has eluded the wise until very recently, that the world of people is a community of individuals associating. We have discovered that each of these terms — "community," "individual," "associating" — is a function of each of the other terms. We have learned that our conceptions of the content of these terms have been unreal: that is, we have not penetrated far into the essentials of their meaning. The psychologists are just beginning to restate the problems of the individual. The ethnologists, historians, politi- cal scientists and economists are trying to formulate the facts of community in different aspects, and the sociologists are just learning to state the problems of association in its most universal aspects as the largest generalization of human relationships.

The sociologist wants to discover a program by which he may begin to learn better than they have been learned before the things that are most characteristic of the world of people. He wants to get all that we can learn about the world of people into such correlation that the different parts of our knowl- edge will complement each other as a credible reproduction of the reality. He wants to know the regularities that recur wherever there are human associations. He also wants to know the kinds of variations that are actual and possible within these regularities. The sociologist finds that our concepts of the world of people are so conventional that they frequently mask the most essential relationships among people. For instance, in order to understand "industry" we may need to investigate much wider categories, viz., "interdependence" and "coopera- tion." In order to understand "government" we may need to see it as an accident of the more universal form "coordination " or "control ; " etc., etc. Sociology therefore finds it necessary to start with the universal phenomenon association ; to analyze it, in the first instance, without reference to the conventional social