Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/260

 248 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the forms of socialization by bringing together inductively the manifestations of these forms which have had actual historical existence. In other words, we have to collect and exhibit that element of form which these historical manifestations have in common abstracted from the variety of material economical, ethical, ecclesiastical, social, political, etc. with respect to which they differ. ' (Loc. cit., p. 168.)

" The thesis of Simmel, that sociology must be the science of social forms, has at least this effect upon the present stage of correlation : viz., it makes us conscious that we have no adequate schedule of the forms of social life."

15. Conflict. The facts referred to in sections 12 and 13 above, and yielding the concepts " differentiation " and "group," have other relations which the present term brings into focus. In a word, the whole social process is a perpetual reaction between interests that have their lodgment in the individuals who compose society. More specifically, this reaction is dis- guised or open struggle between the individuals. The conflict of interests between individuals, combined with community of interest in the same individuals, results in the groupings of indi- viduals between whom there is relatively more in common, and then the continuance of struggle between group and group. The members of each group have relatively less in common with the members of a different group than they have with each other.

The concept "conflict" is perhaps the most obvious in the whole schedule. It has not only been a practically constant presumption of nearly all social theory and practice in the past, but it has had excessive prominence in modern sociology. The central conception in the theory of Gumplowicz, for example, 2 is that the human process is a perpetual conflict of groups in which the individuals actually lose their individuality. The balance between " conflict," on the one hand, and co-operation and corre- lation and consensus, on the other, has never been formulated more justly than by Ratzenhofer. 3 His thesis is that conflict is primarily universal, but that it tends to resolve itself into co- operation. Socialization, indeed, is the transformation of conflict

1 For list of possible social forms vid. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Vol. VI, p. 390.

2 Grundriss der Sociologie.

3 Particularly Wesen und Zweck, Part II, sees. 17-27, and Soc. Erk., sec. 30.