Social organization

by Charles Horton Cooley

This is so familiar a principle, especially among English and Americans, to whose temperament and traditions it is peculiarly congenial, that I need not discuss it at length. It is a phase of idealism that comes most vividly to consciousness when formal and antiquated systems of control need to be broken up, as in the eighteenth century. It then represented the appeal to human nature as against outworn mechanism. Our whole social and political philosophy still echoes that conflict.

The bearing of this view of human nature may perhaps be made clearer by considering its relation to the familiar but now somewhat discredited doctrine of Natural Right. This is traced from the speculations of Greek philosophers down through Roman jurisprudence to Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and others, who gave it its modern forms and through whose works it became a factor in modern history. It was familiar to our forefathers and is set forth in the Declaration of Independence. According to it society is made up, primarily, of free individuals, who must be held to create government and other institutions by a sort of implied contract, yielding up a part of their natural right in order to enjoy the benefits of organization. But if the organization does not confer these benefits, then, as most writers held, it is wrong and void, and the individuals may properly reclaim their natural freedom.

Now in form this doctrine is wholly at variance with evolutionary thought. To the latter, society is an organic growth; there is no individual apart from society, no freedom apart from organization, no social contract of the sort taught by these philosophers. In its practical applications, however, the teaching of natural right is not so absurd and obsolete as is sometimes imagined. If it is true that human nature is developed in primary groups which are everywhere much the same, and that there also springs from these a common idealism which institutions strive to express, we have a ground for somewhat the same conclusions as come from the theory of a natural freedom modified by contract. Natural freedom would correspond roughly to the ideals generated and partly realized in primary association, the social contract to the limitations these ideals encounter in seeking a larger expression.

Indeed, is it not true that the natural rights of this philosophy—the right to personal freedom, the right to labor, the right to property, the right to open competition—are ideals which in reality sprang then as they do now largely from what the philosophers knew of the activities of men in small, face-to-face groups?

The reluctance to give up ideals like those of the Declaration of Independence, without something equally simple and human to take their place, is healthy and need not look far for theoretical justification.

The idea of the germinal character of primary association is one that is fast making its way in education and philanthropy. As we learn that man is altogether social and never seen truly except in connection with his fellows, we fix our attention more and more on group conditions as the source, for better or worse, of personal character, and come to feel that we must work on the individual through the web of relations in which he actually lives.

The school, for instance, must form a whole with the rest of life, using the ideas generated by the latter as the starting-point of its training. The public opinion and traditions of the scholars must be respected and made an ally of discipline. Children’s associations should be fostered and good objects suggested for their activity.

In philanthropy it is essential that the unity of the family be regarded and its natural bonds not weakened for the sake of transient benefit to the individual. Children, especially, must be protected from the destructive kindness which inculcates irresponsibility in the parent. In general the heart of reform is in control of the conditions which act upon the family and neighborhood. When the housing, for example, is of such a character as to make a healthy home life impossible, the boys and girls are driven to the streets, the men into saloons, and thus society is diseased at its source.

Without healthy play, especially group play, human nature cannot rightly develop, and to preserve this, in the midst of the crowding and aggressive commercialism of our cities, is coming to be seen as a special need of the time. Democracy, it is now held, must recognize as one of its essential functions the provision of ample spaces and apparatus for this purpose, with enough judicious supervision to ensure the ascendency of good play traditions. And with this must go the suppression of child labor and other inhumane conditions.

Fruitful attention is being given to boys’ fellowships or “gangs.” It appears—as any one who recalls his own boyhood might have anticipated—that nearly all the juvenile population belong to such fellowships, and put an ardent, though often misdirected, idealism into them. “Almost every boy in the tenement-house quarters of the district,” says Robert A. Woods, speaking of Boston, “is a member of a gang. The boy who does not belong is not only the exception but the very rare exception.”[21] In crowded neighborhoods, where there are no playgrounds and street sports are unlawful, the human nature of these gangs must take a semi-criminal direction; but with better opportunities and guidance it turns quite as naturally to wholesome sport and social service. Accordingly social settlements and similar agencies are converting gangs into clubs, with the best results; and there is also coming to be a regular organization of voluntary clubs in affiliation with the public schools.