I. INTRODUCTION
1. Social Control Defined
Social control has been studied, but, in the wide extension that sociology has given to the term, it has not been defined. All social problems turn out finally to be problems of social control. In the introductory chapter to this volume social problems were divided into three classes: Problems (a) of administration, (b) of policy and polity, (c) of social forces and human nature.[250] Social control may be studied in each one of these categories. It is with social forces and human nature that sociology is mainly concerned. Therefore it is from this point of view that social control will be considered in this chapter.
In the four preceding chapters the process of interaction, in its four typical forms, competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation, has been analyzed and described. The community and the natural order within the limits of the community, it appeared, are an effect of competition. Social control and the mutual subordination of individual members to the community have their origin in conflict, assume definite organized forms in the process of accommodation, and are consolidated and fixed in assimilation.
Through the medium of these processes, a community assumes the form of a society. Incidentally, however, certain definite and quite spontaneous forms of social control are developed. These forms are familiar under various titles: tradition, custom, folkways, mores, ceremonial, myth, religious and political beliefs, dogmas and creeds, and finally public opinion and law. In this chapter it is proposed to define a little more accurately certain of these typical mechanisms through which social groups are enabled to act. In the chapter on "Collective Behavior" which follows, materials will be presented to exhibit the group in action.
It is in action that the mechanisms of control are created, and the materials under the title "Collective Behavior" are intended to illustrate the stages, (a) social unrest, (b) mass movements, (c) institutions in which society is formed and reformed. Finally, in the chapter on "Progress," the relation of social change to social control will be discussed and the rôle of science and collective representations in the direction of social changes indicated.
The most obvious fact about social control is the machinery by which laws are made and enforced, that is, the legislature, the courts, and the police. When we think of social control, therefore, these are the images in which we see it embodied and these are the terms in which we seek to define it.
It is not quite so obvious that legislation and the police must, in the long run, have the support of public opinion. Hume's statement that governments, even the most despotic, have nothing but opinion to support them, cannot be accepted without some definition of terms, but it is essentially correct. Hume included under opinion what we would distinguish from it, namely, the mores. He might have added, using opinion in this broad sense, that the governed, no matter how numerous, are helpless unless they too are united by "opinion."
A king or a political "boss," having an army or apolitical "machine" at his command, can do much. It is possible, also, to confuse or mislead public opinion, but neither the king nor the boss will, if he be wise, challenge the mores and the common sense of the community.