Civics: as Applied Sociology

by Sir Patrick Geddes

Here were chosen officials, governors of no mean city, absolutely oblivious of these important interests committed to their care, and all for want of having drilled into them these broader views which Professor Geddes puts forward so well.

He has himself done practical work in Edinburgh on the lines he lays down, and I have lately had occasion to note, and call attention to the advantage to the city of much wise conservatism in regard to our older buildings which he and his associates have shown.

In Edinburgh we have the advantage that our older monuments, in which so much of the past life of the city is enshrined, are firm and solid; and it takes some trouble to knock them down. Hence for some time to come we shall preserve here object-lessons in civic development that will be of interest to the country at large.

From MR. WALTER CRANE (President of Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society)

Professor Geddes' very interesting "Study in City Development" is highly suggestive, and shows how great a difference thoughtful and tasteful treatment might make in dealing with such problems. It is sad to think of the opportunities wasted, and of the more ignorant and often too hasty clearances for traffic which have often been apparently the sole motives in city improvement. The conservation of historic buildings, whenever possible, the planting of trees along our streets, the laying out of gardens, the insistence upon a proportional amount of air and open space to new buildings would go a long way towards making our bricks-and-mortar joyless wildernesses into something human and habitable.

Whether, under favourable circumstances and the rare public spirit of private owners, much can be done, or to any wide extent, so long as absolute individual ownership in land and ground values is allowed, seems to me very doubtful. We cannot hope to see great social improvements without great economic changes, but every effort in the direction of improving the beauty of our cities is welcome to all who have the well-being of the community at heart; and such work as Prof. Geddes is doing should arouse the keenest interest and the earnest attention of all who realise its immense social importance.

From MR. J.H. HARLEY, M.A.

If sociology is ever to vindicate itself as an art, it must be able to analyse and explain the present, and to some extent at least to cast the horoscope of the future. It must feel its way through all the tangled labyrinths of city life, and show us where we have arrived and whither we are going. But this is exactly the part of Professor Geddes' Applied Sociology where he becomes most vague and unsatisfactory. "Enough for the present," we are told, "if it be admitted that the practical man in his thought and action in the present is mainly as yet the too unconscious child of the past, and that in the city he is still working within the grasp of natural conditions." Now we must all be willing to admit that the present is the child of the past, and that we cannot adequately understand the present until we have led up to the present by the study of its antecedents more and less remote. But what Professor Geddes fails to bring out is that it is only in the present or the more immediate past that the City has really become a City in the modern sense of the word. The City as City is a product of the Industrial Revolution. Its huge and casual assemblages of human life, its overcrowding, its poverty line, its East End and its West End, its infantile mortality, its trades massed in their own particular districts, it aliens, its criminals and its vices—all these problems of social pathology arise from the fact that the conditions of modern industry have brought people together who have few interests in common, and who were compelled to arrange themselves in some kind of decent order within a limited area, without sufficient time being given to evolve a suitable environment, or to prepare themselves for the environment which they actually found on every side of them. London in the past, therefore, cannot help us so very much to solve the riddles of London in the present, because London in the past had not developed these social growths or offered a mature ground to those social parasites which make us sometimes despair of being able to get much insight into the London of the present.

The fact seems to be that Prof. Geddes conceives sociology too much as a primary and too little as a secondary science. He defines applied sociology as the application of social survey to social science, when social ratiocination or social philosophy are needed before one can be said to have gauged the extent of the influence which this comprehensive science may have in our actual practice or on our Budget of the future. No doubt, "observation, so far from excluding interpretation, is just the very means of preparing for it," but this preparation must be made in the various specialisms which make up the complete or encyclopædic science of sociology. To me it seems an unwarrantable narrowing of the scope or significance of sociology to say that there is no better method available of teaching it "than that of regional survey, historical as well as geographical." Surely "regional survey" Is the appropriate method in the very simplest and most concrete parts of the complete science of sociology, and even when we come to history proper we must do very much more than make a regional survey. It is very interesting, no doubt, to "survey" history in the course of a summer ramble to the ruins of some old monastery, but unless the monks had kept records of what had been done there in bygone days, the mere outward survey will not carry us further than Prof. Geddes is carried in the very general map which he makes of the whole field of history. In other words, history, in any proper sense, demands more than "survey" in Prof. Geddes' sense of the word. It calls to its aid linguistics, criticism, archaeology, jurisprudence, and politics—there must be comparison and criticism as well as "survey." History is the laboratory in which the sociologist sees his social experiments working out their results, and history is to the sociologist what experiment is to the physician, or the comparative method to the biologist.

This being so, the scope of "civics" as "applied sociology" is immensely widened. The present is the child of the past, but we see that it is only in the present that such ancient groups as the colony of Hanseatic merchants in Old London have shown us what has been the ultimate significance of their embryological life. The modern city bristles with sociological problems which demand a knowledge of most of the specialisms included in the complete science of sociology, and almost invite us to cast the horoscope of the future. We see, as Booth and Rowntree saw before us, the poverty line like a fiery portent at every point of our study, and we are led finally to ask ourselves whether M. Arthur Bauer was not right in choosing the title "Les Classes Sociales" as the most characteristic title he could give to his recent and most suggestive analysis of the general characteristics of social life.