Ethnology and folklore have accumulated an enormous amount of information in regard to primitive custom which has yet to be interpreted from the point of view of more recent studies of human nature and social life. The most important collections are Frazer's Golden Bough and his Totemism and Exogamy. Crawley's The Mystic Rose is no such monument of scholarship and learning as Frazer's Golden Bough, but it is suggestive and interesting.
Prestige and taboo represent fundamental human traits whose importance is by no means confined to the life of primitive man where, almost exclusively hitherto, they have been observed and studied.
The existing literature on leadership, while serving to emphasize the importance of the leader as a factor in social organization and social process, is based on too superficial an analysis to be of permanent scientific value. Adequate methods for the investigation of leadership have not been formulated. In general it is clear, however, that leadership must be studied in connection with the social group in which it arises and that every type of group will have a different type of leader. The prophet, the agitator, and the political boss are types of leaders in regard to whom there already are materials available for study and interpretation. A study of leadership should include, however, in addition to the more general types, like the poet, the priest, the tribal chieftain, and the leader of the gang, consideration of leadership in the more specific areas of social life, the precinct captain, the promoter, the banker, the pillar of the church, the football coach, and the society leader.
3. Public Opinion and Social Control
Public opinion, "the fourth estate" as Burke called it, has been appreciated, but not studied. The old Roman adage, Vox populi, vox dei, is a recognition of public opinion as the ultimate seat of authority. Public opinion has been elsewhere identified with the "general will." Rousseau conceived the general will to be best expressed through a plebiscite at which a question was presented without the possibilities of the divisive effects of public discussion. The natural impulses of human nature would make for more uniform and beneficial decisions than the calculated self-interest that would follow discussion and deliberation. English liberals like John Stuart Mill, of the latter half of the nineteenth century, looked upon freedom of discussion and free speech as the breath of life of a free society, and that tradition has come down to us a little shaken by recent experience, but substantially intact.
The development of advertising and of propaganda, particularly during and since the world-war, has aroused a great many misgivings, nevertheless, in regard to the traditional freedom of the press. Walter Lippmann's thoughtful little volume, Liberty and the News, has stated the whole problem in a new form and has directed attention to an entirely new field for observation and study.
De Tocqueville, in his study of the early frontier, Democracy in America, and James Bryce, in his American Commonwealth, have contributed a good deal of shrewd observation to our knowledge of the rôle of political opinion in the United States. The important attempts in English to define public opinion as a social phenomenon and study it objectively are A. V. Dicey's Law and Opinion in England in the Nineteenth Century and A. Lawrence Lowell's Public Opinion and Popular Government. Although Dicey's investigation is confined to England and to the nineteenth century, his analysis of the facts throws new light on the nature of public opinion in general. The intimate relation between the press and parliamentary government in England is revealed in an interesting historical monograph by Michael Macdonagh, The Reporters' Gallery.
4. Legal Institutions and Law
Public law came into existence in an effort of the community to deal with conflict. In achieving this result, however, courts of law invariably have sought to make their decisions first in accordance with precedent, and second in accordance with common sense. The latter insured that the law would be administered equitably; the former that interpretations of the law would be consistent. Post says:
Jural feelings are principally feelings of indignation as when an injustice is experienced by an individual, a feeling of fear as when an individual is affected by an inclination to do wrong, a feeling of penitence as when the individual has committed a wrong. With the feeling of indignation is joined a desire for vengeance, with the feeling of penitence a desire of atonement, the former tending towards an act of vengeance and the latter towards an act of expiation. The jural judgments of individuals are not complete judgments; they are based upon an undefined sense of right and wrong. In the consciousness of the individual there exists no standard of right and wrong under which every single circumstance giving rise to the formation of a jural judgment can be subsumed. A simple instinct impels the individual to declare an action right or wrong.[276]