Before Darwin, competition had been conceived in terms of freedom and of the natural harmony of interests. His use of the term introduced into competition the notion of struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. This new conception, in which competition appears as a fundamental process in all life, has been a powerful prop to the laissez faire policy and has led to its continuance regardless of the misery and destitution which, if it did not create, it certainly did not remedy. The works of Herbert Spencer, the greatest expounder of the doctrine of evolution, contain a powerful massing of evidence in favor of laissez faire as a conclusion to be drawn from a scientific study of human behavior. "Nothing but the slow modifications of human nature by the discipline of social life," he said, "can produce permanently advantageous changes. A fundamental error pervading the thinking of nearly all parties, political and social, is that evils admit of immediate and radical remedies."[200]
With the growth of large-scale production with the tendency to the formation of combinations and monopolies, as a result of freedom of competition, works began to appear on the subject of unrestricted competition. The expressions "unfair" and "cut-throat" competition, which occur frequently in recent literature, suggest the new point of view. Another euphemism under which other and more far-reaching proposals for the limitation of competition and laissez faire have been proposed is "social justice." In the meantime the trend of legislation in England for a hundred years, as Mr. A. V. Dicey[201] has pointed out, has been, in spite of Herbert Spencer, away from the individualistic and in the direction of a collectivistic social order. This means more legislation, more control, and less individual liberty.
The full meaning of this change in law and opinion can only be fully understood, however, when it is considered in connection with the growth of communication, economic organization, and cities, all of which have so increased the mutual interdependence of all members of society as to render illusory and unreal the old freedoms and liberties which the system of laissez faire was supposed to guarantee.
3. Competition and Human Ecology
The ecological conception of society is that of a society created by competitive co-operation. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was a description of society in so far as it is a product of economic competition. David Ricardo, in his Principles of Political Economy, defined the process of competition more abstractly and states its consequences with more ruthless precision and consistency. "His theory," says Kolthamer in his introduction, "seems to be an everlasting justification of the status quo. As such at least it was used."
But Ricardo's doctrines were both "a prop and a menace to the middle classes," and the errors which they canonized have been the presuppositions of most of the radical and revolutionary programs since that time.
The socialists, adopting his theories of value and wages, interpreted Ricardo's crude expressions to their own advantage. To alter the Ricardian conclusions, they said, alter the social conditions upon which they depend: to improve upon subsistence wage, deprive capital of what it steals from labour—the value which labour creates. The land-taxers similarly used the Ricardian theory of rent: rent is a surplus for the existence of which no single individual is responsible—take it therefore for the benefit of all, whose presence creates it.[202]
The anarchistic, socialistic, and communistic doctrines, to which reference is made in the bibliography, are to be regarded as themselves sociological phenomena, without reference to their value as programs. They are based on ecological and economic conceptions of society in which competition is the fundamental fact and, from the point of view of these doctrines, the fundamental evil of society. What is sociologically important in these doctrines is the wishes that they express. They exhibit among other things, at any rate, the character which the hopes and the wishes of men take in this vast, new, restless world, the Great Society, in which men find themselves but in which they are not yet, and perhaps never will be, at home.
4. Competition and the "Inner Enemies": the Defectives, the Dependents, and the Delinquents