Introduction to the Science of Sociology

by Robert Ezra Park; E. W. Burgess

Medieval society rested upon a system of class, approaching castes in the distances it enforced. In all these different situations competition took place only between individuals of the same status.

In contrast with this, modern society is made up of economic and social classes with freedom of economic competition and freedom in passage, therefore, from one class to the other.

b) Subordination and superordination.—Accommodation, in the area of personal relations, tends to take the form of subordination and superordination. Even where accommodation has been imposed, as in the case of slavery, by force, the personal relations of master and slave are invariably supported by appropriate attitudes and sentiments. The selection "Excerpts from the Journal of a West India Slave Owner" is a convincing exhibit of the way in which attitudes of superordination and subordination may find expression in the sentiments of a conscientious and self-complacent paternalism on the part of the master and of an ingratiating and reverential loyalty on the part of the slave. In a like manner the selection from the "Memories of an Old Servant" indicates the natural way in which sentiments of subordination which have grown up in conformity with an accepted situation eventually become the basis of a life-philosophy of the person.

Slavery and caste are manifestly forms of accommodation. The facts of subordination are quite as real, though not as obvious, in other phases of social life. The peculiar intimacy which exists, for example, between lovers, between husband and wife, or between physician and patient, involves relations of subordination and superordination, though not recognized as such. The personal domination which a coach exercises over the members of a ball team, a minister over his congregation, the political leader over his party followers are instances of the same phenomena.

Simmel in his interesting discussion of the subject points out the fact that the relations of subordination and superordination are reciprocal. In order to impose his will upon his slaves it was necessary for the master to retain their respect. No one had a keener appreciation of the aristocracy nor a greater scorn for the "poor white" than the Negro slaves in the South before the war.

The leader of the gang, although he seems to have decisions absolutely in his hand, has a sense of the attitudes of his followers. So the successful political leader, who sometimes appears to be taking risks in his advocacy of new issues, keeps "his ear close to the grass roots of public opinion."

In the selection upon "The Psychology of Subordination and Superordination" Münsterberg interprets suggestion, imitation, and sympathy in terms of domination and submission. Personal influence, prestige, and authority, in whatever form they find expression, are based, to a greater or less extent, on the subtle influences of suggestion.

The natural affections are social bonds which not infrequently assume the form of bondage. Many a mother has been reduced to a condition of abject subjection through her affection for a son or a daughter. The same thing is notoriously true of the relations between the sexes. It is in social complexes of this sort, rather than in the formal procedures of governments, that we must look for the fundamental mechanism of social control.

The conflicts and accommodations of persons with persons and of groups with groups have their prototypes in the conflicts and accommodations of the wishes of the person. The conflicts and accommodations in the mental life of the person have received the name in psychoanalysis of sublimation. The sublimation of a wish means its expression in a form which represents an accommodation with another conflicting wish which had repressed the original response of the first wish. The progressive organization of personality depends upon the successful functioning of this process of sublimation. The wishes of the person at birth are inchoate; with mental development these wishes come into conflict with each other and with the enveloping social milieu. Adolescence is peculiarly the period of "storm and stress." Youth lives in a maze of mental conflicts, of insurgent and aspiring wishes. Conversion is the sudden mutation of life-attitudes through a reorganization or transformation of the wishes.

c) Conflict and accommodation.—The intrinsic relation between conflict and accommodation is stated in the materials by Simmel in his analysis of war and peace and the problems of compromise. "The situations existing in time of peace are precisely the conditions out of which war emerges." War, on the other hand, brings about the adjustments in the relations of competing and conflict groups which make peace possible. The problem, therefore, must find a solution in some method by which the conflicts which are latent in, or develop out of, the conditions of peace may be adjusted without a resort to war. In so far as war is an effect of the mere inhibitions which the conditions of peace impose, substitutes for war must provide, as William James has suggested, for the expression of the expanding energies of individuals and nations in ways that will contribute to the welfare of the community and eventually of mankind as a whole. The intention is to make life more interesting and at the same time more secure.