Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/217



MOOT POINTS IN SOCIOLOGY 203

survival, is constantly reproduced by the process of invidious comparison.

Again, we commonly hear contemporary aristocracy inter- preted as a remote historical phase petrified into a rigid insti- tution. But it is, in point of fact, the visible product of an unceasing process of economic differentiation. Save as it attaches itself to permanent forms of wealth, a superior caste cannot endure without taking in new blood. Should it close its doors on the rich, it would soon cease to dominate. The differentiation process is continually bringing to the top a new crop of successful men, who will undermine the position of the nobility unless they or their children are admitted into its ranks. The studied archaism which a nobility habitually affects should not blind us to the fact that it is the product, not of a remote past, but of a continuing process.

In fact, institutions, however hoary their brows, are not really old, for they are ever re-created. The authority of pope or kaiser persists, not from the momentum accumulated in the far past, but because our generation builds it up as rapidly as it is torn down. The power of noble or prelate endures only because it is ever renewed. The load the past rolls upon us is not its institutions we shake them off impatiently enough when we find them really burdensome but its ideas, which constrain us to go on and on reproducing an arrangement unsuited to our present needs.

The mistaken endeavor to make social life hinge on a single typical or characteristic process has stamped with one-sidedness nearly everything that has been written on sociology. The economists, preoccupied with competition, overlook combination. Mr. Spencer, busy with the division of labor, disregards imita- tion. Gumplowicz, engrossed in the struggle of races, fails to note the process of pacific assimilation between peoples. Tarde is so interested in the propagation, opposition, and adaptation of ideas that even war appears to him as a collision of ideas rather than a clash of desires. Accommodation so monopolizes Durk- heim's vision that he has no eyes for innovation. In short, each of the paladins has seen a part of the truth and only a part.