Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/571

 SOCIAL CONTROL 557

drifting toward disorder. Anarchy is, however, so insupportable that a very little experience of it stimulates powerfully the regulative organs of society. The more that past security has tempted property and economic organization to expand, the fiercer is the demand that the apparatus of control be reconsti- tuted and order restored. Civil wars led the Greek cities to welcome the Roman yoke. The Social War in Rome paved the way for Caesar and the empire. The French Revolution made Napoleon acceptable. The disorders after the close of the American Revolution provoked the establishment of a federal government. But this revived control is likely to be less suasive than the old, trusting more to the sword, and less to ideas and ideals. At times, indeed, institutions will be bathed and the recesses of the nation flooded, with the sense of a common life. There will come gusts of national feeling, when souls are as straws in the wind. But if conditions continue static, we are likely to get at the end a society like that of the later Roman empire, split into classes and devoid of public spirit and patriot- ism, yet enduring, because held in the massive framework of a centralized state.

Another cause of vicissitude in social control is change in the culture and habits of a people. The beliefs in the Unseen, religious convictions, personal ideals, canons, maxims, ceremonies, moral philosophies, and social valuations, which serve for control, are a secular growth and as such are adapted to collective needs. Let these be greatly deranged by fresh knowledge, new ideas, foreign influences, or novel experiences, and there will ensue during the time of convalescence an outburst of individualism. There will be a temporary emancipation from restraints and a reversion toward primitive and egoistic modes of behavior. In such cases we have what might be called molecular dissociation, that is, an increase of evil, crime, and strife, without any cleav- age of the social mass.

With the partial paralysis of social control, whether from the^fading of ideals, the decay of religion, or the degeneration of the state, there is found normally a greater energy of indi- vidual reaction against wrong. The unbinding of the ego makes