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Physics and Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Robert E. Park
Robert E. Park*
Affiliation:
The University of Chicago
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Extract

Some seventy years ago, sixty-eight, to be exact, Walter Bagehot published a notable little volume entitled Physics and Politics, described in a subtitle as “Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of ‘Natural Selection’ and ‘Inheritance’ to Political Society.” Actually the volume sought to sketch in outline a natural history of political society, and to describe the process or processes by which later, more elaborate, and more liberal forms of association have emerged, from the dissolution of earlier, simpler, and more rigid, if not oppressive, forms.

Society, or at least political society, as Bagehot conceived it, is a kind of super-organism, having a social structure which is maintained by a social process. This structure is imbedded in and cemented by custom. Man is a custom-making animal. The process in this instance which is not otherwise defined, is what we know elsewhere as “the historical process.” Its function is to weave and reweave the web of custom and tradition in which the individuals who are destined to live together and eventually act together as a political unit, are ineluctably bound together.

Always there is a more or less inflexible tradition which imposes upon each new generation the pattern of the inherited social order. But always there are the liberating and individuating influences of other social processes—competition, conflict, and discussion—which represent what Bagehot describes as man's “propensity to variation,” or, to use a political rather than a biological term, his propensity for non-conformity, “which,” he adds, “is the principle of progress.”

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , May 1940 , pp. 135 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1940

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References

1 Slavery, because it is one of the institutions to which, “at a certain stage of growth all nations in all countries cleave to,” is described by Bagehot as “a provisional instituution.” In accordance with this conception “a slave is an unassimilated atom; something which is in the body politic, but yet hardly part of it.” Physics and Politics (London, 1872), p. 171.Google Scholar

2 The notion that society and intellectual life have advanced as a consequence of events that disturbed a pre-existing social equilibrium and undermined an inherited social order is the catastrophic theory of progress. It is not Bagehot's invention but has been put forward, in one form or another and at one time or another, by a long line of humanists and non-professional students of society and human nature. (See Teggart, Frederick J., Theory of History (New Haven, 1925), ch. xvGoogle Scholar, “The Method of Hume and Turgot.”)

3 Mead, George H., Mind, Self and Society (Chicago, 1934), p. 133.Google Scholar

4 After 1870 or thereabouts, men thought instinctively once more in terms of organization, authority, and collective power. To enhance their prospects business men looked to tariffs, to concentrated corporate control, to the suppression of competition, to large scale business administration. To relieve the poor and lift up the downtrodden, reformers looked to an organized working class, to electoral majorities, to the capture of the sovereign power and its exploitation in their behalf. Though great corporate capitalists continued to invoke the shibboleths of liberalism when confronted by the collective demands of the workers or the hostile power of popular majorities, yet they were thoroughly imbued with the collectivist spirit through their attachment to protection and to the concentration of control. Lippman, Walter, The Good Society (Boston, 1937), p. 47.Google Scholar

5 Science, vol. XC, Sept. 29, 1939, p. 294.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 294

7 Adams, Brooks, The Theory of Social Revolutions, quoted by Mayo, Elton, in The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York, 1938), p. 175.Google Scholar

8 Smith, Elliot, Human History (New York, 1929), p. 183.Google Scholar

9 Bridgman, P. W., The Intelligent Individual and Society (New York, 1938).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Science, Jan. 5, 1940.

11 Park, Robert E., “News as a Form of Knowledge: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge” (American Journal of Sociology, vol. XLV, March, 1940, p. 671).Google Scholar

12 New York, 1933.