The most significant type of community study has been the social survey, with a history which antedates its recent developments. Yet the survey movement from the Domesday Survey, initiated in 1085 by William the Conqueror, to the recent Study of Methods of Americanization by the Carnegie Corporation, has been based upon an implicit or explicit recognition of the interrelations of the community and its constituent groups. The Domesday Survey, although undertaken for financial and political purposes, gives a picture of the English nation as an organization of isolated local units, which the Norman Conquest first of all forced into closer unity. The surveys of the Russell Sage Foundation have laid insistent emphasis upon the study of social problems and of social institutions in their context within the life of the community. The central theme of the different divisions of the Carnegie Study of Methods of Americanization is the nature and the degree of the participation of the immigrant in our national and cultural life. In short, the survey, wittingly or unwittingly, has tended to penetrate beneath surface observations to discover the interrelations of social groups and institutions and has revealed community life as a constellation of social forces.
2. History of the Concept of Social Forces
The concept of social forces has had a history different from that of interaction. It was in the writings of the historians rather than of the sociologists that the term first gained currency. The historians, in their description and interpretation of persons and events, discerned definite motives or tendencies, which served to give to the mere temporal sequence of the events a significance which they did not otherwise possess. These tendencies historians called "social forces."
From the point of view and for the purposes of reformers social forces were conceived as embodied in institutions. For the purposes of the historian they are merely tendencies which combine to define the general trend of historical change. The logical motive, which has everywhere guided science in formulating its conceptions, is here revealed in its most naïve and elementary form. Natural science invariably seeks to describe change in terms of process, that is to say, in terms of interaction of tendencies. These tendencies are what science calls forces.
For the purposes of an adequate description, however, it is necessary not merely to conceive change in terms of the interplay of forces, but to think of these forces as somehow objectively embodied, as social forces are conceived to be embodied in institutions, organizations, and persons. These objects in which the forces are, or seem to be, resident are not forces in any real or metaphysical sense, as the physicists tell us. They are mere points of reference which enable us to visualize the direction and measure the intensity of change.
Institutions and social organizations may, in any given situation, be regarded as social forces, but they are not ultimate nor elementary forces. One has but to carry the analysis of the community a little farther to discover the fact that institutions and organizations may be further resolved into factors of smaller and smaller denominations until we have arrived at individual men and women. For common sense the individual is quite evidently the ultimate factor in every community or social organization.
Sociologists have carried the analysis a step farther. They have sought to meet the problem raised by two facts: (1) the same individual may be a member of different societies, communities, and social groups at the same time; (2) under certain circumstances his interests as a member of one group may conflict with his interests as a member of another group, so that the conflict between different social groups will be reflected in the mental and moral conflicts of the individual himself. Furthermore, it is evident that the individual is, as we frequently say, "not the same person" at different times and places. The phenomena of moods and of dual personality has sociological significance in just this connection.
From all this it is quite evident that the individual is not elementary in a sociological sense. It is for this reason that sociologists have invariably sought the sociological element, not in the individual but in his appetites, desires, wishes—the human motives which move him to action.
3. Classification of the Materials
The readings in this chapter are arranged in the natural order of the development of the notion of social forces. They were first thought of by historians as tendencies and trends. Then in the popular sociology social forces were identified with significant social objects in which the factors of the situations under consideration were embodied. This was a step in the direction of a definition of the elementary social forces. Later the terms interests, sentiments, and attitudes made their appearance in the literature of economics, social psychology, and sociology. Finally the concept of the wishes, first vaguely apprehended by sociologists under the name "desires," having gained a more adequate description and definition in the use made of it by psychoanalysis, has been reintroduced into sociology by W. I. Thomas under the title of the "four wishes." This brief statement is sufficient to indicate the motives determining the order of the materials included under "Social Forces."