Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/386

 3?2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

XV. Security. It is one of the boasts of popular social science that we have passed the stage of status and have entered upon the stage of contract. The fact referred to is substantially that we no longer doom a man to stay in the social rank or the economic vocation or the political class of his parents. A man is not foreordained from birth, by the mere accident of birth, to a certain artificial rating in the social order. We have broken from these arbitrary designations, and a man may place himself, by voluntary disposal of himself, wherever his merits entitle him to belong. There is freedom to contract without conventional veto of the contract. The landless man may become a landlord if he can work and save and find a landowner who prefers dollars to acres. The peasant, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew, may become a civil or military officer, a lawyer, a teacher, a preacher, a banker, an editor, if he can gain the necessary personal quali- fications. No social ban now vetoes his efforts toward change of status. This is in itself something to be very highly esteemed. It is an immeasurable social gain. But it is not an unqualified gain, and it is not a gain that is indicated with perfect accuracy in the popular antithesis between status and contract.

The rejoicings of theorists over abandonment of the regime of status have tended to fix the impression that status itself is an unsocial and inequitable element in human conditions. The fact is that, while fixity of status is a violation of certain essen- tial conditions, security of status is in turn itself one of those essential conditions. We cannot think human association with- out the category of status, although human associations are in constant movement, and status is thus a moving equilibrium at most ; yet in actual associations certain precision of status among the members is universal. If it should be eliminated in any case, there would at once be confusion and danger, if not anarchy. The social end is not abolition of status, but, first, security of status, and, second, flexibility or exchangeability of status.

Comte, La Play, Schaeffle, DeGreef, and, indeed, all the modern sociologists, have either expressly or by implication insisted on the function of order in the achievement of progress. 1

1 Vid. WARD, Dynamic Sociology, Vol. I, pp. 125 sq.