Robert M MacIver - Community: A Sociological Study, Being an Attempt to Set Out Native & Fundamental Laws

COMMUNITY

A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY

Jeter les bases abstraites de la sociologietel est le but manifeste et dj presque sympathique aux foules, dj escompt par leur optimisme impatient, vers lequel convergent les efforts des esprits rflchis de lpoque.

De Roberty, Nouveau Programme de Sociologie.

Nous assistons aujourd-hui lavnement de la sociologie, qui est le commencement dune re nouvelle dans la philosophic mme.

Fouille, Le Mouvement Positiviste.

Published by

FRANK CASS AND COMPANY LIMITED

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
by arrangement with Macmillan and Co. Ltd.

New Preface Copyright 1970 R. M. Maciver

First edition 1917

Second edition 1920

Third edition 1924

Reprinted 1936

Fourth edition 1970

Transferred to Digital Printing 2006

ISBN 0 7146 1581 1

NEW PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION

I called it a sociological study. At the time it was written sociology hadnt yet become a conglomerate of multifarious researches, mostly ending at the statistical stage, with the theoretical side reduced mainly to methodological discussion. At that time the major figures in the development of the new subject were French and German, and it had not taken on the proportions of the great academic industry it has now reached in the United States. At that time it was conceived on broad lines, with an historical perspective. It sought to interpret major social trends and movements, the rise of capitalism, the influence of slave labour on the Roman economy, the forms of religious experience, the plight of workers in industrial development, variations in the rate of suicide, and so forth. It was primarily social theory, though by no means abstracted from the social realities, and such social theory as we still possess owes a major legacy to the contributions of Max Weber and Durkheim and, one way or another, to the writings of Marx and Freud.

It is under such influences that the author, who never in his rather lengthy academic training had heard the word sociology, wrote Community. It was meant to be a contribution to social theoryor, if you prefer, to the philosophy of society. Reading it again after a lapse of around half a century, he realises with a kind of shock how different was the climate of opinion in which it was written from that which prevails in the chastened middle of the twentieth century. Nevertheless he believes that the main principles for which it contends, if stated too simply and too absolutely, remain unscathed. Were he writing such a work now, he would dwell on the complexities, the resistances of narrower interests, the overriding drives of power, and so forth, that interfere alike with the internal cohesion of community and its expansion in the international area.

The book in effect centres on two major principles. One concerns the conception of what a state is and what its relation is to the other organizations that enter into the structure or framework of all society. We must think of the state as a special type of association, with unique wide-ranging functions and the sole legitimate repository of coercive power, since it is the guardian of law and order. But it is still an association, not to be identified with community or with the society as a whole whose order it maintained and whose laws it guards, changes, and augments. This principle, which I later developed in other works, especially The Web of Government, is most clearly fulfilled in a genuine democracy. It is repudiated by the Hegelian type of philosophy and it is rejected by totalitarian governments. The fact that some governments refuse to accept the principle does not invalidate it. The state is never the sole focus of organization in a society, never equivalent to the community. We do not say the state should be a particular type of organization distinct from others, but that it actually is so. The most totalitarian system the modern world has known, Soviet Russia under Stalin, could not abrogate all other associations or make them merely the servants of its will. The oldest of organizations, the family, was still in important respects self-regulating under him. Even the church survived in a muted way. The economic organizations the state controlled still had to possess some measure of autonomy to be at all efficient. Trends and movements developed in the spontaneous life of the community that were beyond Stalins reach and that surged into the open as soon as he passed away. A dictatorship can distort the principle but cannot destroy it.

The second major principle is that individualization and socialization are intimately interdependent, that a developed society stimulates the development of the personality of its members, and vice-versa. This principle still seems to the writer to have high significance and to be capable of application for the interpretation of many phases of social change. A difficulty that may impede its acceptance is a failure to appreciate the significance of the word socialization. A society is not more socialized because it has achieved a high technological level. It is conceivable that a fully automatized society might be run by semi-robots, directed by a group of cunning technocrats. A society might through plunder and conquest acquire great wealth and still remain semi-barbarous. High socialization means that the social relationships between the members of a society are many-sided, woven intimately into the pattern of their lives, expressive of and calculated to advance the variety of interests, cultural, educational, recreational, civic, economic, in all their aspects, that appeal to the many-sided nature of the diversity of human beings. Such a society can be built and sustained only by a people who reject conformism, who have the strong urge for the freedom of thought that resists domination, and the intelligence to share with others the advantages of the freer life they claim for themselves. All of which means again that socialization and individualization are two sides of the same shield.

Sociology today makes great claims to being scientific. But a science is a systematized articulated body of knowledge, and the pillars of the system are principles or laws. What are they for sociology?

R. M. Maciver