Conflict is an organizing principle in society. Just as the individual, under the influences of contact and conflict with other individuals, acquires a status and develops a personality, so groups of individuals, in conflict with other groups, achieve unity, organization, group consciousness, and assume the forms characteristic of conflict groups—that is to say, they become parties, sects, and nationalities, etc.
2. Types of Conflict
Simmel, in his study of conflict, distinguished four types—namely, war, feud and faction, litigation, and discussion, i.e., the impersonal struggles of parties and causes. This classification, while discriminating, is certainly not complete. There are, for example, the varied forms of sport, in which conflict assumes the form of rivalry. These are nevertheless organized on a conflict pattern. Particularly interesting in this connection are games of chance, gambling and gambling devices which appeal to human traits so fundamental that no people is without example of them in its folkways.
Gambling is, according to Groos, "a fighting play," and the universal human interest in this sport is due to the fact that "no other form of play displays in so many-sided a fashion the combativeness of human nature."[218]
The history of the duel, either in the form of the judicial combat, the wager of battle of the Middle Ages, or as a form of private vengeance, offers interesting material for psychological or sociological investigation. The transition from private vengeance to public prosecution, of which the passing of the duel is an example, has not been completed. In fact, new forms are in some cases gradually gaining social sanction. We still have our "unwritten laws" for certain offenses. It is proverbially difficult to secure the conviction, in certain parts of the country, Chicago, for example, of a woman who kills her husband or her lover. The practice of lynching Negroes in the southern states, for offenses against women, and for any other form of conduct that is construed as a challenge to the dominant race, is an illustration from a somewhat different field, not merely of the persistence, but the gradual development of the so-called unwritten law. The circumstances under which these and all other unwritten laws arise, in which custom controls in contravention of the formal written code, have not been investigated from the point of view of sociology and in their human-nature aspects.
Several studies of games and gambling, in some respects the most unique objectivations of human interest, have been made from the point of view of the fundamental human traits involved, notably Thomas' article on The Gaming Instinct, Groos's chapter on "Fighting Play," in his Play of Man, and G. T. W. Patrick's Psychology of Relaxation, in which the theory of catharsis, familiar since Aristotle, is employed to explain play, laughter, profanity, the drink habit, and war.
Original materials exist in abundance for the study of feud, litigation, and war. No attempt seems to have been made to study feud and litigation comparatively, as Westermarck has studied marriage institutions. Something has indeed been done in this direction with the subject of war, notably by Letourneau in France and by Frobenius in Germany. Sumner's notable essay on War is likewise an important contribution to the subject. The literature upon war, however, is so voluminous and so important that it will be discussed later, separately, and in greater detail.
Quite as interesting and important as that of war is the natural history of discussion, including under that term political and religious controversy and social agitation, already referred to as impersonal or secondary conflict.
The history of discussion, however, is the history of freedom—freedom, at any rate, of thought and of speech. It is only when peace and freedom have been established that discussion is practicable or possible. A number of histories have been written in recent years describing the rise of rationalism, as it is called, and the rôle of discussion and agitation in social life. Draper's History of the Intellectual Development of Europe and Lecky's History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe are among the earlier works in this field. Robertson's History of Free Thought is mainly a survey of religious skepticism but contains important and suggestive references to the natural processes by which abstract thought has arisen out of the cultural contacts and conflicts among peoples, which conquest and commerce have brought into the same universe of discourse. What we seem to have in these works are materials for the study of the communal processes through which thought is formulated. Once formulated it becomes a permanent factor in the life of the group. The rôle of discussion in the communal process will be considered later in connection with the newspaper, the press agent, propaganda, and the various factors and mechanisms determining the formation of public opinion.