Society, like the human being, or like the engine, is a highly complex mechanism, and like them it cannot function successfully unless its various parts function in harmony. The major problem before a society is therefore the working out of a system of inter-relations between its parts, that will make harmonious functioning possible and easy. Just as the mechanical engineer who builds the automobile puts into it the results of his wisdom in an effort to make it effective, so the social engineer devotes himself to the problem of making society function in the way that will yield the largest results to the individuals composing it.
2. Specialization, Association, Co-operation
Every social group except the horde, which is an aggregation of unspecialized and non-co-operating individuals, is constructed on the principle of:
1. Specialization
2. Association
3. Co-operation
The social group—the family, the school, the factory—takes upon itself the performance of a particular social function—it specializes itself. Each group associates itself with other groups—families with families, schools with schools, factories with mines and stores. Finally, these associated groups work together or co-operate, exchanging the products which their specializations have created, and uniting their efforts in the furtherance of their common interests. These developments take time, and some communities are more highly specialized than others, but all societies which enter intimately into the life of the modern world are thus constituted.
The more advanced the society, the more numerous and the more complex are the relations between its component parts. The agricultural inhabitants of the Ganges Delta have evolved a far more complex society than that of the aborigines of Australia, but the civilization at the mouth of the Ganges is simplicity itself compared with that of Britain, Belgium or Japan. In the Ganges Delta each family group has a homestead. Outside of the homestead, the community life is almost wholly unspecialized. Even where the homesteads are clustered together there are no stores, no recreation centres, and few churches or schools except in the larger towns or in the market towns, of which there are a very few, since only about one per cent of the people live in towns or cities. Practically the entire population is occupied with the work of the homestead, and the work of each homestead is very like the work of every other homestead. ("The Economic Life of a Bengal District." J.C. Jack. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1916. pp. 1 to 40.)
How different is the French, German or Italian village, with its various crafts, trades, professions, industries, recreation centres, schools, churches and the like. Every such European community of three or four thousand persons is in itself a complex society, while the industrial city of fifty thousand people is a hive of related social activity.
The more highly specialized the group, the more complex, intricate and precise are its workings.