Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/234

 222 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Third : To understand the Revolution as a section of the social process we have to follow out the details of analyzing these several classes of wants down to the concrete demands which each interest urged, and of tracing the relations of each occur- rence worth noticing during the whole episode to the whole complicated interplay of these desires throughout the whole complex movement.

Fourth : To complete our insight we have to reach at last a new expression of the new situation in France, at a selected period after the crisis. We have to discover the form and the manner and the degree in which these wants that expressed themselves in the upheaval realize themselves in the situation that remained after the upheaval. We thereby have a measure of the absolute motion accomplished by the French as a result of the relative motion between the units during the period. That is, we have followed the process from something to some- thing else through intermediate correlations of actions.

Of course, everyone who has written history or read it has had some more or less vague instinct of the program just indi- cated. It would be hard to find a recent writer of history who might not maintain a plausible argument that his plan of work implied all, and more than all, just specified. Whether a given writer or reader gives due place to the process-category is a question of fact, to be decided on the merits of each case. Our present business is to bring the necessity of the concept into clear view. If it should prove that everybody in practice uses the concept already, our contention that it is necessary will surely not be weakened. If it should prove that the concept is not as distinctly before our minds in studying history as the contents of experience require, our contention will in the end not be in vain.

Recurring to our proposition above, that we must employ the concept social process, whether we are getting intelligence about society by studying strictly past events or present problems, we may put the case again in more concrete form by applying the argument to the present " labor problem" in the United States.

To some people the case of the coal operators and the work-