Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/20

 8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Where the small group absorbs the personalities in consider- able measure into its unity, especially in political groups, it strives, precisely for the sake of its unity, for definiteness of status toward persons, material tasks, and other societies. The large group, with the number and variety of its elements, demands or tolerates such definiteness much less. The history of the Greek and of the Italian cities, as of the Swiss cantons, shows that small communities, in case they do not proceed to federa- tion, habitually live in open or latent hostility to each other. Moreover, warfare and martial law are between them much more bitter and sharp, and especially more radical, than between great states. It is precisely that absence of organs, of reserves, of undefined and transitional elements, which makes modification and adaptation difficult for them, and, apart from their external conditions, forces them, on account of their fundamental socio- logical configuration, much oftener to confront the question, " To be or not to be?"

By the side of such tendencies in smaller circles I cite, with the same unavoidable arbitrary selection from innumerable cases, the following for the sociological characterization of greater circles. I start from the fact that these, compared with smaller circles, seem to show an inferior degree of radicalism and obstinacy of attitude. This, however, requires a limitation. Pre- cisely where great masses must be set in motion in political, social, and religious movements, they show a ruthless radicalism, a victory of the extreme parties over the mediating. This is primarily for the reason that great masses are always filled merely with simple ideas, and can be led by such only. What is common to many must for that reason be of a sort which the lowest, most primitive minds among them can entertain. And even higher and more differentiated personalities will approach each other in great numbers, not in the more complicated and highly elaborated, but only in the relatively simple universal human conceptions and impulses. Since, however, the actualities in which the ideas of the mass strive to become practical are always articulated in a very multifold way, and are composed of a great assemblage of very divergent elements, it follows that simple