The comparative study of social classes and vocational groups is an unworked field. The differentiation of social types, especially in urban life, and the complexity and subtlety of the social distinctions separating social and vocational classes, opens a fruitful prospect for investigation. Scattered through a wide literature, ranging from official inquiries to works of fiction, there are, in occasional paragraphs, pages, and chapters, observations of value.
In the field of castes the work of research is well under way. The caste system of India has been the subject of careful examination and analysis. Sighele points out that the prohibition of intermarriage observed in its most rigid and absolute form is a fundamental distinction of the caste. If this be regarded as the fundamental criterion, the Negro race in the United States occupies the position of a caste. The prostitute, in America, until recently constituted a separate caste. With the systematic breaking up of the segregated vice districts in our great cities prostitution, as a caste, seems to have disappeared. The place of the prostitute seems to have been occupied by the demimondaine who lives on the outskirts of society but who is not by any means an outcast.
It is difficult to dissociate the materials upon nationalities from those upon nations. The studies, however, of the internal organization of the state, made to promote law and order, would come under the latter head. Here, also, would be included studies of the extension of the police power to promote the national welfare. In international relations studies of international law, of international courts of arbitration, of leagues or associations of nations manifest the increasing interest in the accommodations that would avert or postpone conflicts of militant nationalities.
In the United States there is considerable literature upon church federation and the community church. This literature is one expression of the transition of the Protestant churches from sectarian bodies, engaged in warfare for the support of distinctive doctrines and dogmas, to co-operating denominations organized into the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America.
4. Social Organization
Until recently there has been more interest manifested in elaborating theories of the stages in the evolution of society than in analyzing the structure of different types of societies. Durkheim, however, in De la division du travail social, indicated how the division of labor and the social attitudes, or the mental accommodations to the life-situation, shape social organization. Cooley, on the other hand, in his work Social Organization conceived the structure of society to be "the larger mind," or an outgrowth of human nature and human ideals.
The increasing number of studies of individual primitive communities has furnished data for the comparative study of different kinds of social organization. Schurtz, Vierkandt, Rivers, Lowie, and others in the last twenty years have made important comparative studies in this field. The work of these scholars has led to the abandonment of the earlier notions of uniform evolutionary stages of culture in which all peoples, primitive, ancient, and modern alike, might be classified. New light has been thrown upon the actual accommodations in the small family, in the larger family group, the clan, gens or sib, in the secret society, and in the tribe which determined the patterns of life of primitive peoples under different geographical and historical conditions.
At the present time, the investigations of social organization of current and popular interest have to do with the problems of social work and of community life. "Community organization," "community action," "know your own community" are phrases which express the practical motives behind the attempts at community study. Such investigations as have been made, with a few shining exceptions, the Pittsburgh Survey and the community studies of the Russell Sage Foundation, have been superficial. All, perhaps, have been tentative and experimental. The community has not been studied from a fundamental standpoint. Indeed, there was not available, as a background of method and of orientation, any adequate analysis of social organization.
A penetrating analysis of the social structure of a community must quite naturally be based upon studies of human geography. Plant and animal geography has been studied, but slight attention has been given to human geography, that is, to the local distribution of persons who constitute a community and the accommodations that are made because of the consequent physical distances and social relationships.
Ethnological and historical studies of individual communities furnish valuable comparative materials for a treatise upon human ecology which would serve as a guidebook for studies in community organization. C. J. Galpin's The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community is an example of the recognition of ecological factors as basic in the study of social organization.