Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/364

* SOCIOLOGY. 310 SOCIOLOGY. ever, be yet another factor. The purpose achieved by the combined action must be of mutual benefit, and the utility must be perceived. Cooperation is public or private. It is public when all individ>ial members of an entire natural society act together with one purpose and au- thority, either because all have the same desire, or because one or a few take the lead and others acquiesce or obey. An entire natural society viewed as cooperating is a State. When only a part of the social population responds to the same stimulus, and engages in cooperation with- out the participation or command of the State, although not without its tacit or implied con- sent, the cooperation is private or voluntary. Cooperative activities, whether public or pri- vate, are of four kinds, namely cultural, eco- nomic, moral or legal, and political. The order in which these activities have been named is the order of their genesis and evolution. Seemingly, but not in reality, this order denies the primi- tive, fundamental character of economic rela- tions. Betrayed by a misconception of cultural activities, many sociologists have placed them wrongly in the series. Their true nature and history can be understood only when we remem- ber the distinction already mentioned between organic and industrial economy. The organic economy of the world of vegetation shades into the instinctive economy of animals, and that in turn into the rational economy of mankind. For ages before it becomes an industrial or business economy, tlic practical life of man in his struggle with the forces of nature is a ceremonial econ- omy, consisting chiefly of magic, incantations, and formal rites. Cultural activities are neither more nor less than ideas and practices of the early economies surviving in an industrial age. Language and manners begin among the lower animals as products of their eflforts to appro- priate the bounty of nature and of their strug- gles with hostile natural forces and with one another. Animistic ideas, the plastic and poetic arts, religious ideas and practices, originate in primitive human society, in attempts to under- stand and to master or propitiate the powers upon which man's life and comfort depend. They are all a part of the primitive economy. It is out of these primitive economic activities that systematic industrial and commercial activi- ties constituting the modern business economy are developed. Cooperation in the development of moral thought and activity, including juristic activity, which is the public development of moral ac- tivity, has antecedents in both cultural and eco- nomic interests, but it also has characteristic stimuli of its own. chiefly injuries and wrongs. Political cooperation on its public side is the governmental activity of the State. Private po- litical cooperation includes all such lawful ac- tivities as the functions of political parties, and the conduct of campaigns, and such unlawful activities as insurrections and revolutions. Among the stimuli of political cooperation are superior power, to which enforced obedience is yielded, the impressive power of a strong per- sonality manifested in leadership, and danger from foes. These are familiar causes that come readily to mind, but others less obvious are as important. Among them are those definite aims which political action seeks to achieve. They in- clude the preservation of the group, its safe- guarding, the maintenance of a certain char- acter or kind in the population (an aim revealed, for example, in our immigration laws), and cer- tain ideals of the preferred distinction or attain- ment of the comnumity, as. for example, power, or prosperity and splendor, or justice, or lib- erty and enlightenment. Approximate political ends, or means to the attainment of the remoter ends just named, also are stimuli of collective action. Among them are the permanent pos- sessions of the community, especially its terri- tory, and policies in respect of population, or in respect of the habits, customs, and activities of the people. Political cooperation itself, as distinguished from its stimuli or causes, is always a policy of some kind. Policies involve social choices, and these involve social valuations. The various ends which political action seeks to achieve are more or less useful to the community and such utilities are variousl,y valued. Highest in value are ranked those objects foi- which the society exists, namely the concrete living individuals who compose the community, the social type or ideal, and the attainment of the community. Lower in the scale of values are placed all those political relations and possessions which are but means to the attainment of social ends. The dominant stimuli of concerted volition are of the utmost importance in their relation to the unity, cohesion, and liberty of a people. A very large number of individuals resemble one another in only a few points, but some such points there always are. and a few stimuli are of such universal intlnence that they can bind very miscellaneous elements in a common pur- pose and action. IMen ditiVr widely in their re- sponse to the aspects and forces of nature, which appeal to emotion and to intelligence. They are more nearly alike in their response to economic opportunity, although some natures are more ap- pealed to by the dangerous and exciting oppor- tunities, others liy the safe and uneventful ones. There is one stimulus which above all acts upon minds otherwise most unlike. This is the im- pressive power of a strong personality. The impassive and the emotional, the dull and the keen, the dogmatic and the critical, all yield to the man of daring and resourceful leadership. Accordingly, we find that highly miscellaneous aggregations of human beings are usually bound together by personal allegiance rather than by agreeing ideas and s^nnpathies. Their social or- ganization is authoritative rather than demo- cratic. The character of concerted volition thus varies with the stimuli to which men most easily and in large numbers respond. It is instinctive if the stimuli touch only the ideo-motor processes, as in many of our responses to natural forces, to danger, to menace, or to injury ; obedient if the responses are of the ideo-motor sort and to a power which it is useless to resist, as in the relations of a conquered people to its conquerors ; spontaneous if the responses are chiefly ideo- emotional and to stimuli more or less sensational or exciting; deferential or loyal if the responses are dogmatically emotional to authority, to be- lief, or to dogma; independent and idealistic if the responses are deliberative and to such stimuli as ideals or intelligently made plans. When the like responses of many individuals have developed through the consciousness of kind