Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/564

 SOCIAL CONTROL. XX.

THE VICISSITUDES OF SOCIAL CONTROL.

NEVER do we find the social pressure uniform through a long period. There are times when society holds the individual as in a vise, and times when he wriggles almost from under the social knee. There are epochs when the corporate will is ascend- ant, and epochs when the individual is more and more. In other words, social control is in no wise fixed, but varies between strong and weak, between more and less. To describe and to account for these vicissitudes is the purpose of this chapter.

The most likely and obvious cause of such vicissitudes is change in social need. The function of control is to preserve that indispensable condition of common life, social order. When this order becomes harder to maintain, there is a demand for more and better control. When this order becomes easier to maintain, the ever-present demand for individual freedom and for tolera- tion makes itself felt. The supply of social control is evoked, as it were, by the demand for it, and is adjusted to that demand.

The changes that rack the social frame, and so lead to a tightening of all the nuts and rivets in it, are nearly all connected with economic conditions. The multiplication of numbers or the decline of prosperity may make the struggle for existence more wolfish and harder to keep within bounds. New methods of production which sharpen the economic contrasts within the social group may relax the natural bonds among men, and so throw more strain on the artificial bonds. A static condition of industry may allow differences in wealth to be aggravated by accumulation through a number of generations. A bad insti- tution a defective system of land tenure, or inheritance, or tax- ation working worse and worse as time goes on, may require stronger props to support it. Alien ethnic elements introduced among a people, one in blood and culture and hence fitted to get along smoothly, may increase the tension among them. Social

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